Speaking of the BBC…

Ceri Dupree’s decades of divas, frocks and cabaret

At the bottom of a back garden in south Wales lies something quite unexpected – a treasure trove of more than 600 dazzling stage costumes.

Weird. There’s some back garden in South Wales that has a pile of stage costumes lying there getting mildewed? Why is that more unexpected than literally anything that’s not grass or plants?

This is the home of Ceri Dupree, who for the past 42 years has been making a living impersonating some of the world’s most iconic women. His repertoire features everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Tina Turner and Queen Camilla to Shirley Bassey, with some colourful costumes costing more than £6,000.

What exactly are “iconic” women? I guess the reporter means familiar or recognizable? Because celebrity entertainer? Man dresses up as famous female entertainer; how very fascinating and not at all familiar or over-reported.

Oh goody, another schism. You’re far right no you’re far right.

I’m definitely not far right nor am I a fan of Tommy Robinson, but I’m not going to pretend that Islam is good for women and/or that Islam can’t be criticized lest we encourage Tommy Robinson.

I’ve been to this rodeo before. I heard a whole lot about it when Does God Hate Women? was published. I even got to defend it in a BBC Radio 4 panel discussion this one time. No, Muslims should not be persecuted; yes, Islam is hostile to women. Both those claims can be true or reasonable or fair or all those.

Which end of the egg do you crack open?

Hatred of women chapter 11 billion:

Holding candles, hundreds of thousands of women marched through the night in cities across India, to protest the brutal rape and murder of a young female doctor in a hospital that has fueled anger over a lack of safety for women despite tough new laws.

A 31-year old trainee doctor was raped and murdered inside the medical college in Kolkata where she worked on Friday, triggering nationwide protests among doctors and drawing parallels to the notorious gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi in 2012.

She’d gone to sleep in a seminar room after working 36 hours straight.

She was found dead on Friday. Police said she had been raped and murdered and a police volunteer was subsequently arrested in connection with the crime.

…

The victim was found bleeding from her eyes and mouth, with injuries to her legs, stomach, ankles, her right hand and finger, a doctor’s inquest report Aug. 9 and accessed by Reuters said.

Yes but what about trans women? Why aren’t we talking about how this affects trans women?

In protests called “Reclaim the Night”, women marched across several Indian cities from midnight on Wednesday, on the eve of the country’s 78th Independence Day, to protest against the lack of safety for women in India, especially at night.

“As a society, we have to think about the atrocities being committed against our mothers, daughters and sisters. There is outrage against this in the country. I can feel this outrage,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in an Independence Day address to the nation on Thursday.

Brilliant, Modi. “We” of course are one and all men, who have to “think about” those weird unreal creatures called “women.” People are men, and they have relatives who are called “women” and are sort of like insects, and sort of like bacteria. We men should think about them sometimes.

H/t maddog

Sometimes Human Rights Watch does know what a woman is.

Under the Taliban, Afghanistan is the only country where girls are banned from education beyond the sixth grade. The Taliban have also violated women’s right to freedom of movement, banned them from many forms of employment, dismantled protections for women and girls experiencing gender-based violence, created barriers to them accessing health care, and barred them from playing sports and even visiting parks. The United Nations special rapporteur on Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, has described the situation as “an institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity, and exclusion of women and girls.”

Actual women and girls, here – the kind the Taliban knows to bully and limit and confine.

Since January 2024, the Taliban have detained women and girls in Kabul and other provinces for what they call “bad hijab” – that is, for not abiding by the prescribed dress code. UN experts have reported that some of those detained have been held incommunicado for days and subjected to “physical violence, threats and intimidation.”

What is the prescribed dress code? A sack. A vast enveloping sack that makes women look like parcels or vertical furniture rather than people. What is the goal? To make women look like walking tents rather than human beings. Otherwise, you know, they’ll be rutting in the streets and no men will know who their children are.

Taliban restrictions on women and girls have impeded access to health care, jeopardizing their right to health. The Taliban’s education bans guarantee future shortages of female health workers, Human Rights Watch said. Donor countries need to find ways to mitigate the ongoing humanitarian crisis without reinforcing the Taliban’s repressive policies against women and girls.

Look at HRW knowing that women and girls need health care and education and that female health workers are needed. Look at them not pausing to tell us that trans female health workers will do just as well if not better. Look at them knowing which people are female when the chips are down.

Also there’s this guy.

Trump’s people seem to be confusing him with someone else.

Allies of Trump see his conspiratorial messages and insults based on race as anything but productive. They want him to focus his attacks on policy issues, such as immigration and the economy, rather than personal attacks against Harris.

But personal attacks are the fun part for him. Talking about policy issues is work, and talking smack about people is sheer play. He’s not a spinach before dessert kind of guy.

This by Mireia Garcés de Marcilla in the LRB is what used to be known as “too clever by half”:

All the same, those of us who are concerned about the reactionary weaponisation of gender might do better to rethink rather than cement our commitment to the category of womanhood. We should ask what being a woman means, how womanhood is defined, and against what (and whom) womanhood is ‘defended’. Instead of insisting that Khelif is a ‘real’ woman, we should ask how dichotomous ideas of gender have been solidified in the discourse that is being mobilised against her. We should interrogate the colonial roots of medical accounts of female and male embodiment, and the construction of femininity through (and conflation with) whiteness. We should listen to athletes whose womanhood is doubted not only because of their outstanding athletic performance, but because their bodies are at odds with Western notions of femininity. In 2009, when Semenya was banned from competing for eleven months after winning the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin, the head of South African athletics asked: ‘Who are white people to question the make-up of an African girl?’

Puhleeze. As if we haven’t been ordered to do all that a billion times already. As if we haven’t been doing that for decades.

Without a “commitment to the category of womanhood” – i.e. knowing that women are not men and that men are not women – we can’t defend or argue for women’s rights. Without a “commitment to the category of womanhood” we can’t effectively campaign for our rights, we can’t challenge misogyny and sex-based exclusion, contempt, indifference, hostility. Without a “commitment to the category of womanhood” we can’t say what’s so fucking horrible about the Taliban. Without a “commitment to the category of womanhood” we can’t have feminism.

A serious commitment to fairness and equality has to resist the drive to read bodies along racialised gendered lines.

Oh shut up. No one is doing that. Women don’t have biceps like Khelif’s or necks like Khelif’s or shoulders like Khelif’s. Male puberty is real, and pretending otherwise is the opposite of a serious commitment to fairness and equality.

An obsessive focus on physical traits that can been read as proxies for gender overlooks the extent to which being a competitive athlete is not only a matter of anatomy but also of resources and access. In order to become Olympians, athletes need a healthy diet, the time and space to train, opportunities to compete and financial support.

No shit, Sherlock, but it does not follow that the physical traits don’t matter.

U.C.L.A. Can’t Let Protesters Block Jewish Students From Campus, Judge Says

What is this, Nazi Germany? Of course it can’t.

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily barred the University of California, Los Angeles, from allowing protesters to block Jewish students from having access to the campus and facilities such as libraries, classrooms and gathering places.

You mean like…

Judge Mark C. Scarsi’s preliminary injunction order came after three Jewish students sued the university over protests in the spring concerning Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The demonstrations roiled the campus, and more than 200 people were arrested after pro-Palestinian protests and pro-Israel counterprotests turned violent.

During those demonstrations, pro-Palestinian protesters set up an encampment with plywood and metal barricades in Royce Quad, a major thoroughfare. The judge said they had “established checkpoints and required passers-by to wear a specific wristband to cross them,” blocking “people who supported the existence of the state of Israel” from entering the encampment and other areas of the campus.

Sometimes it’s a wristband, other times it’s a yellow star. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

Trump has become boring.

(Of course, he’s been boring all along, but also morbidly interesting the way a fire or an earthquake is interesting.)

It began with 40 minutes of technical difficulties and only got worse. In more than two hours of aimless ranting and ego-stroking with Elon Musk, former President Donald Trump garbled through the greatest hits of his grievances, praised strongmen like Vladimir Putin, and painted his opponent Kamala Harris as an existential threat to America: “If she’s going to be our president, very quickly, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said to Musk—whose X campaign launch for Ron DeSantis last year was beset by similar technical issues. Absent from the proceedings? Anything coherent or compelling. “Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself,” the Harris campaign said in a statement afterward. “Self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”

The Trump Show has, indeed, grown old and stale, and lately, the Republican presidential nominee finds himself desperate to regain any of the momentum he lost once Harris became the Democrats’ new star.

…

He had hoped to regain his footing Monday night with Musk, who has become one of his most prominent backers. Instead, he underscored the personal “weirdness” Harris’s campaign has sought to highlight—and the extremism of his agenda, as seen in his praise of Musk firing striking workers, his vow to shutter the Department of Education, and his comments in support of climate change because, he said, global warming will mean “more oceanfront property.”

Billions of people dead, but more oceanfront property. Good tradeoff.

Musk said Monday that his goal with this livestream was to help people “understand how [Trump] talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview.” “Nobody is quite themselves in an interview,” Musk posted, “so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like.” Turns out, though, that Trump is always like this—and after eight years of the same old bullshit, perhaps Americans are finally ready to move on.

Surely we already knew that Trump is always like this. We saw him being always like this for four horrible years, so it’s no surprise that he’s still like it.

The workers retort.

U.A.W. Files Labor Charges Against Trump and Musk Over Interview

It won’t succeed, but it’s a good poke in the eye.

The United Automobile Workers union filed charges with federal labor regulators on Tuesday accusing former President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk of threatening workers during a livestreamed conversation a day earlier.

The union, which has backed Vice President Kamala Harris, accused Mr. Trump of violating the law by voicing support for the practice of firing workers when they go on strike, an approach the former president suggested Mr. Musk had embraced.

In the glitch-delayed conversation on X, Mr. Trump described Mr. Musk as the “greatest cutter” of workers. He claimed Mr. Musk has responded to striking workers by saying, “That’s OK — you’re all gone.” Mr. Musk, the billionaire leader of Tesla and SpaceX, laughed in response, but did not directly address Mr. Trump’s remark before the former president changed the topic.

They mean, before the former president lurched into a totally different subject because he has the attention span of roadkill.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign, Brian Hughes, called the complaint against Mr. Trump a “shameless political stunt intended to erode” the former president’s support from American workers.

It’s fascinating that he doesn’t call Trump’s “Hahaha you’ll just fire them all hahaha” a shameless political remark but does call a reaction to it a shameless political stunt. Which of the two is the more shameless? For real?

Refugee Olympic Team’s historic first medalist Cindy Ngamba hopes to inspire millions

The story of Cindy Winner Djankeu Ngamba is one of resilience. Living up to her middle name, she became the first-ever athlete to win a medal for the Refugee Olympic Team, claiming bronze in the women’s boxing 75kg class at the Summer Olympics in Paris.

Born in Cameroon, Ngamba faced many challenges growing up. At the age of 11, she moved to the United Kingdom in search of a better future. After arriving, she struggled to gain citizenship and was sent to a detention camp over paperwork issues.

Around the age of 15, she discovered her passion for boxing. “Every day is a learning day in boxing. You have your ups and downs, just like in life in general,” Ngamba told CNN Sport’s Amanda Davies.

Discovering a passion for something can be a lifeline.

The Refugee Olympic Team gives forcibly displaced athletes an opportunity to participate on the highest sporting stage. Made up of 37 athletes at this year’s Games, the team wants to demonstrate to the world that refugees are an enrichment to society.

Being a refugee is not as much fun as you think.

H/t Blood Knight

Brilliant news.

All sympathy must always be for the male. No exceptions.

Nobody should be “it”. Pet owners are offended if a beloved dog or cat is called “it”. Yet that’s how Khelif would have returned to Algeria, had a significant number of public voices had their way. As an “it”. Dehumanised, dispossessed.

Except that nobody advocated for Khelif to be called “it”.

Yet no thought appears to have been given to Khelif’s existence outside the boxing ring. No discussion of how a person might conceivably exist going forward has been inspired by this story.

A person? No. You mean a man. Your empathy is all for the man; the women who were battered and cheated by the man don’t intrude on your attention for a second.

We heard a lot about mortal danger in Paris, yet nobody dallied greatly on the mental wellbeing of a competitor arriving a woman and denounced as a man. A punch hurts, but it is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to a boxer if sport does not handle this issue with care. 

Says the man cheerfully, on account of how it’s not his face that would take that punch, it’s just some bitch’s face. The punch will hurt her but who cares, because she’s just some bitch.

The Guardian July 12:

The Teamsters International president, Sean O’Brien, has been accused by senior members of the union of disgracing it by agreeing to an unprecedented appearance at next week’s Republican national convention.

Wtf. Trump is not a friend to the workers. The Republican party is not a friend to the workers.

O’Brien’s decision was branded “unconscionable” by John Palmer, vice-president at large at the Teamsters, who accused him of lending support to the “most anti-union party and president” in a generation.

Or perhaps in our entire history.

Earlier this year James Curbeam, national chairman of the Teamsters National Black caucus, warned members that Trump was a “scab masquerading as a pro-union advocate” in a letter, reported by the New York Times, responding to O’Brien’s meeting with the former president.

As O’Brien prepares to speak in Milwaukee, Palmer sounded the alarm.

“A speaking engagement at the Republican national convention by Teamster president Sean O’Brien, regardless of the message, only normalizes and makes the most anti-union party and president I’ve seen in my lifetime seem palatable,” he wrote in his letter, outlining anti-union policies being pushed by Trump and the Republican party.

Palmer pointed to the recent supreme court decision overturning the Chevron decision which paves the way for corporate challenges to rules meant to protect workers, and cited the open opposition to union drives from Republican leaders.

“It is unconscionable for any labor leader to lend an air of legitimacy to a candidate and a political party, neither of which can be said to have done, or can be expected to do, anything to improve the lives of the workers we are pledged to represent,” he added.

Class treason.

H/t Helicam

“Get the tits out” has a whole new meaning.

A report from the Manhattan Institute this week revealed that “gender-affirming” mastectomies for patients under 18 are more common than previously believed.

While cross-sex genital surgeries are rare in the US for both adults and minors, mastectomies — also known as “top surgery” in the context of transgender medicine — are widely available to minors and are the most common transgender surgery for this population. Around 5,000 to 6,000 girls underwent “gender affirming” double mastectomies in the US from 2017 to 2023, according to the Manhattan Institute, and at least 50 of those patients were younger than 12-and-a-half years old.

…

The actual prevalence of these surgeries is likely considerably higher than the latest estimate, since it relies on health insurance data and therefore does not include procedures obtained without using insurance.

“First do no harm” is so last millennium, ya know?

Trump’s brilliant new wheeze is to talk about firing workers who go on strike.

The hours-long live-streamed conversation between Trump and Mr Musk featured a wide array of topics, including the attempted assassination attempt against the former president, government regulations and worker strikes.

Trump praised Mr Musk for firing workers who went on strike. Trump said that if workers strike, “you say ‘that’s okay, you’re all gone. You’re all gone.’ So everyone is gone.”

Spoken like a boss.

But federal law says companies cannot fire striking employees.

On Tuesday, the UAW filed Unfair Labor Practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board. “When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement.

President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Sean O’Brien echoed those sentiments. “Firing workers for organizing, striking, and exercising their rights as Americans is economic terrorism,” O’Brien said on Tuesday.

It’s class warfare, it’s the plutocracy grinding the faces of the workers, it’s privilege making war on the underlings.

Take deep breaths before reading.

Autism school signed up to LGBT charter pushing ‘pseudoscientific’ trans ideology

The commas are in the wrong place. Headline should be:

Autism “school” signed up to “LGBT” charter pushing pseudoscientific trans ideology

A school for severely autistic children has signed up to a controversial LGBT charter pushing “pseudoscientific” transgender ideology.

Experts accused Kaimes School in Edinburgh, which takes children from age five, of “breathtaking” recklessness over how it teaches concepts of biological sex and gender to vulnerable pupils.

The pupils are vulnerable specifically in the sense that autistic children don’t do skepticism. They’re sitting ducks.

Studies suggest “transgender and gender-diverse individuals” are up to six times more likely to be autistic, as reported in the Cass Review. Documents show that Kaimes School has overhauled its curriculum to become “trans inclusive” in a bid to win “charter status” from activist charity LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS).

There shouldn’t even be such a charity, because the T is not the same thing, and mashing them together is nothing but a ploy to sneak the T in without due diligence.

Messages on school notice boards dedicated exclusively to LGBT issues tell pupils to “come out for LGBT”. Other slogans include: “LGBT+ matters, be a part of us”. Statements such as “trans women are real women” have also been put on display.

It seems dubious for a school for severely autistic children to put any political messages on school notice boards, because surely severe autism plus childhood means they’re not equipped to evaluate them for themselves. Am I wrong?

Reading materials in the school include a book titled Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl? written by the trans activists Sarah Fisher and Fox Fisher and endorsed by LGBTYS and Stonewall.

Carolyn Brown, a retired former educational psychologist who helped the Scottish Government draw up a national autism strategy, described the approach taken by the school as grossly irresponsible.

“This is the opposite of what a specialist school in autism should be doing,” she said. “These youngsters will interpret things very literally and see the world in black and white.”

That’s what I was thinking, so ok, I’ll conclude I’m not wrong. The more literal-minded the children are, the less the school should be indoctrinating them, especially in the bullshit of Magic Gender.

“You would expect schools, especially ones that specialise in autism, to respond very cautiously and with great care in this area. Instead, youngsters are being fed pseudoscience, presented as fact, and so are the staff. It is shocking and breathtaking.”

While experts say they do not yet understand the link between autism and gender distress, materials produced by Kaimes School suggest it is explained as autistic people are “willing to examine social constructs”. It cites its source as an American YouTuber.

I apologize for my people and their YouTubers.

J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk Named in Cyberbullying Lawsuit Filed by Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif After Olympic Win

J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk have both been named in a criminal complaint filed to French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment” against Algerian boxer and newly crowned Olympic champion Imane Khelif.

Is it harassment to point out that a man is cheating by competing against women and/or that he is putting women in danger by competing against them? What are we supposed to do, just silently watch him do it?

Khelif — who on Saturday won the Olympic gold medal in the women’s 66 kilogram boxing competition — spent much of the 2024 Olympics in Paris at the center of a noisy and unpleasant dispute about her gender eligibility that reverberated around the world. Despite being born female and not identifying as transgender or intersex — and being backed by the International Olympic Committee, who asserted “scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman” — Khelif faced a torrent of accusations and abuse over her gender. 

So here’s Variety buying into the absurd claim that Khelif is a woman, and trying to convince us that he is.

Most of the attacks came via social media, particularly on X/Twitter, and the controversy was escalated when high-profile figures stepped into the fray. In one message to her 14.2 million followers, Rowling posted a picture from Khelif’s fight with Italian boxer Angela Carini, accusing the former of being a man who was “enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.”

So here’s Variety expressing disapproval that Rowling pointed out a man enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, rather than expressing disapproval of a man enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head. Why is Variety doing that? Why would anyone do that? Why are so many people delighted to see a man punching a woman in the head?

Variety exults:

J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk Named in Cyberbullying Lawsuit Filed by Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif After Olympic Win

Bullying is it? But it’s not bullying for Imane Khelif to punch women? Why is that exactly?

Khelif — who on Saturday won the Olympic gold medal in the women’s 66 kilogram boxing competition — spent much of the 2024 Olympics in Paris at the center of a noisy and unpleasant dispute about her gender eligibility that reverberated around the world.

Unpleasant was it? Imagine how unpleasant it was for women to be punched by Khelif, and to lose to Khelif.

The BBC dashes up panting with more news about The Trans Communniny:

Trans rapper praises safe space university

So the trans rapper is what? An opera singer? Someone who can neither rhyme nor rhythm? A sheep farmer?

A transgender rapper has written a song that praises his university for being a safe space during his transition.

Why is the BBC telling us this? How is this news?

In the song, Mr Ethan-Watson, who is from the city, said he questioned how he would make it through his degree. “My whole identity was about to change, including my name,” he explains in the recording. “I thought I’d find it hard to try and explain, but everyone was accepting and showed me kindness.

“I knew this was a place I could be free to express the real me. Uni helped me find my tribe, a safe space to be who you want to be.”

Again: why is the BBC telling us this?

Can the adults please return?