Women Are Human last November on that Brighton “women-only” refuge that’s not women only:

A woman who survived multiple incidents of sexual violence sought female-only group support from a charity, only to be driven away in panic when a tall man with a “deep voice” and “men’s clothes” became a member. The charity, which is funded by the Government, local authorities and the NHS, told the woman it does not “police gender,” and the male individual has every right to be present at the sessions.

If it doesn’t “police gender” i.e. offer women-only spaces for rape victims then what good is it?

“When I first went, it was all women and we all had similar experiences so I was reassured and it was really positive,” the survivor told the press. “Some women had been abused as children so obviously we had that shared experience of being a girl and abused by a man. … We talked a lot about male entitlement, about how men feel entitled to women’s bodies. Quite often we just said how we didn’t trust men and it felt like a safe space to say that.”

The sense of sanctuary was shattered during the sixth session. The facilitator announced to the group: “Everyone is welcome here.” The rape survivor noticed “there was someone there who I presume identified as a woman, but to me they just seemed like a man.” The individual, who was two seats away from her in the circle, was “6ft tall, had a deep voice, wore casual trousers and a sweatshirt and had no obvious female attributes,” nor visible signs of “transitioning” to a feminine appearance.

Due to the trauma of having been “tricked” by male abusers in the past, “I immediately wanted to walk out. I thought, ‘I don’t want to be in this space.’”

The feelings intensified when the new member did not share any personal experiences of surviving sexual abuse.

“My paranoid side makes me think they were there for voyeuristic reasons. My rational side thinks they were probably there because they need help,” she said.

No, I don’t think it is particularly rational to think the man was there because he needed help, and I don’t think it’s even slightly paranoid to think he’s there for voyeuristic reasons. I also think the women running that shelter are abusing the women who need it.

The quality of the group immediately degraded, she added. “It felt like the priority of the group was not to talk about male entitlement any more or our shared experiences, but about making sure this person who was born male felt comfortable.”

Contemporary “feminism” in a nutshell. Stop talking about male entitlement and any other aspect of sexist hierarchies, and instead focus on making men feel welcome.

She wrote a letter, the service rebuffed her and told her to find a different service. But there’s a catch!

The rape survivor sought to follow this advice. However, attempts to find a female-only support network in Brighton proved fruitless, as she found that they all welcome “self-identifying females.”

She requested the Survivors’ Network set up a service for only women, but the suggestion was rejected.

…

Jay Breslaw, CEO at the Survivors’ Network, the Rape Crisis Centre for Sussex, submitted a letter to a Parliament Commons select committee last year which expressed strong opposition to the placement of stricter regulations on single-sex spaces:

We are deeply concerned about the possibility of tightening of access to single-sex spaces and we strongly feel that the use of women only spaces by trans women should be actively encouraged and we would urge reviewing the law around single-sex space exemptions. There is no safe or survivor-centred way to police the anatomy of someone accessing a service or using a bathroom/changing room.

Utterly disgusting.

I see we’ve heard about this women-only refuge that inclooods men before – I wrote about it just last November. All-female including men:

It’s all “shut up and take it, bitch” at the rape therapy support group.

A rape victim who thought she had found a safe all-female space to help her come to terms with the sexual violence she endured has told how she was left deeply troubled by the arrival of a biologically male trans woman ‘with no obvious female attributes’.

Jay Breslaw of the pious whispery voice made an appearance:

Brighton. They’re not fond of women in Brighton. Just ask Kathleen Stock.

In written evidence to a Commons select committee last year, [Survivors’ Network’s] chief executive Jay Breslaw opposed tightening rules on single-sex spaces, adding that her charity ‘strongly feel that the use of women-only spaces by trans women should be actively encouraged’.

The rot goes deep.

“Women need women-only spaces, therefore we’re including men.”

I should warn you, the clip is horrible to listen to, even apart from the content. I think the content is the reason for the horribleness of the listen: the woman reading the statement finds it necessary to use the most sanctimonious soporific voice in her repertoire, the kind of voice that always makes me want to scratch my armpits and make fart noises. She speaks very s l o w l y and clearly, in a very Soft and Warm and Soothing and Condescending voice, as if we’d all just been pulled from the rubble of a collapsed apartment block.

Women-only spaces are uplifting and empowering. They offer a place for women to come together to create a shared journey of recovery and healing to lean on each other in times of difficulty and celebrate together in times of joy. The purpose and value of women-only spaces is to empower and strengthen women. To suggest that the value of women-only spaces lies solely or primarily in the exclusion of men significantly undervalues the inception, the purpose, and the continuation of women-only spaces.

At that point she’s almost whispering, and then there’s a long pause before the last two sentences, spoken not in a whisper but with stern emphasis.

Trans women are welcome in these spaces. They add amazing value to these spaces and we need them in these spaces.

A pious little lecture on how awesome women-only spaces are that finishes triumphantly by saying men are women if they say they are and you may not disagree, let alone insist on actual women-only spaces.

York Vision, one of two student papers at the university of same, has a think piece on Julie Bindel and student censorship. It’s not very good.

An event with Julie Bindel hosted by Uni of York’s Free Speech Society was postponed at the last minute amid safety concerns and outrage from staff and students at the University.

What “safety concerns”? Did someone – anyone – think Julie was going to throw a bomb or pull out a handgun or poison the refreshments? As for “outrage” – pull your fucking pants up and stop whining.

Inviting Julie Bindel to a free speech event was always going to end with protest and uprisal. 

“Uprisal”? Anyway, the only reason it’s true that it was predictable that whining pants-falling-down students would make a big stink about the privilege of a talk by Julie Bindel at their uni is because they’ve developed a very peculiar and warped idea of what is acceptable in public discourse and what is not. Threats and fake “outrage” are fine if they come from the right kind of “allies” while saying that men are not women should be dealt with by the police.

Bindel is known as a self-proclaimed “political lesbian”, promoting the kind of feminism that excludes several of its members.

Learn to write ffs. You don’t need “known as” and “self-proclaimed” in the same sentence. It’s both overkill and contradictory (if she’s known as why does she bother to self-proclaim?). We get it: you think she has no right to call herself a political lesbian, and you’re too thick and uninformed to see what’s wrong with that idiotic sneer. And what does “several of its members” mean? Members of what? Feminism? How would being a political lesbian exclude several “members” of feminism? Bindel is a political lesbian, and you children don’t even understand what the words mean.

They claim she “gained prominence” by writing a particular article for the Guardian, which is just pig-ignorant. She’s well-known because she’s written many articles and books and they’re high quality.

Bindel wrote an article for Unherd, entitled “Why York University de-platformed me”. By stating that she has been ‘deplatformed’, Bindel is alluding to cancel culture. This simply is not the case. Bindel has been blocked from an event at the University for fears of student safety and security. The concern is for the students, not for taking away Bindel’s platform.

Jesus god. How did these children get into any university at all? “It is simply not the case that Bindel was de-platformed, she was de-platformed.”

The issue here is that instead of promoting healthy debate, inviting Julie Bindel to the University puts a marginalised group of individuals in a situation that is likely to be hugely triggering.

And if those marginalised individuals are not triggered we will do our very best (which is pretty bad) to make them triggered.

In response to the event, the University of York’s feminist society released a statement on the event, stating that:

“The views shared by both Free Speech and Julie Bindel do not reflect the views at FemSoc. [We] believe that by giving this individual a platform to speak at the University, it is extremely damaging to the growing trans community at York.”

Yet more illiteracy. Use your words.

Bindel goes on to claim that “the fact that [she] is a woman of working-class origin, an out lesbian, and a lifelong feminist is obviously irrelevant to these privileged kids who think being pansexual or non-binary is an oppression.”

As a white cisgender woman, Bindel needs to recognise her own privilege before she calls out students for theirs.

Telling feminists that being a “cisgender woman” is a form of privilege is telling them that women have privilege over men, that men are the oppressed class, that feminism=sexism. The last thing women “need to recognize” is that women as a class oppress men as a class.

Feminism should encompass everybody, regardless of their background. Feminism is not feminism when trans women are excluded.

No it shouldn’t. The reason is the “fem” bit. Feminism is about and for women. Feminism gets to be about its own thing just as other social justice movements do.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The harm suffered.

This isn’t super-complicated stuff. One wonders why it’s so hard for people to see.

It’s willful blindness in this one claim particularly. If it were just the blindness, that would be one thing. It’s the coercion to collude that takes it that much further. It’s not usually suggested, as a matter of course, that society at large affirms and goes along with people’s mistaken beliefs about themselves. We don’t agree with dangerously underweight anorexics that they are in fact horribly obese. We do not humour people, suffering from very particular brain injuries, by going along with their sincerely held (but mistaken) belief that one of their own limbs is actually a robotic or alien replacements that have somehow been grafted onto their bodies. The vehemence and sincerity of these strongly held beliefs does not enter into the picture. The incorrectness of the self image overrides the firmness of the patient’s conviction. There is no demand made that we share, and reinforce, the delusions of these people, or a socially enforced, professionally sanctioned belief that doing so is actually good for the people trapped within these delusions.

We’ve noted on a number of occasions here on B&W that Donald Trump’s self image as a “stable genius” is a claim of the same sort. It is a laughably inaccurate self-image, but enough went along with him that he was elected to the highest office in the United States. Going along with delusions, or denying that they are delusions at all, can have serious ramifications. These are still being played out with the American body politic around the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. But there are delusions on both sides of the aisle.

People who would balk or laugh at “validating” Trump’s self assessment happily put pronouns in their bios, and will unquestioningly believe, repeat, and enforce the claim that TWAW. There are medical associations proclaiming that children can “know themselves” perfectly well, and that they should be allowed to make decisions about a future that they are, in reality, ill-equipped to imagine because they are still, you know, children. Puberty, a normal, healthy (if sometimes fraught) stage through which humans pass, is compared to “an approaching asteroid” to be paused, delayed or avoided. It is insisted that this can be done safely and reversibly. “Watchfull waiting” is branded as “conversion therapy,” while the euphemistically named “affirmation” approach is nothing but a fast-track to a path of mutilation, debilitation, and lifelong medical dependency that will likely fail to address issues that it leaves, by design, unacknowledged and unexplored. All for the child’s “mental health”.

The lies they tell.

I don’t know who O’Hanlon is, but Rowling doesn’t “normalise hatred of queer people” or “legitimise extremists who want trans people to stop existing,” nor are the women who joined Rowling for that lunch the “extremists” he points out. They don’t want trans people dead. If we accused him of libel for saying they do he would “explain” that by “stop existing” he meant “stop existing as what they say they are” or some such formula – but that’s a dishonest tricksy dodge. The obvious meaning is “these evil witches want trans people dead,” and the denial might as well be made wearing a clown mask.

And saying that kind of thing is far more likely to whip up hatred of gender skeptical feminists than anything gender skeptical feminists say is. They accuse us of whipping up lethal hatred as a way of whipping up lethal hatred against us.

This guy is an editor (or maybe the editor) of the student paper Trinity News.

Oh just shove them in with the women. Again. Always.

WOMEN who want to use a public toilet in Camden Town have been asked to share the underground conveniences with men – leading to protests that they feel unsafe.

It’s not just that they feel unsafe, it’s that they are unsafe.

A campaign has now been launched to try and persuade the Town Hall to provide women with their own set of toilets, but the council says it needs to find funds to repair broken men’s facilities close to the Tube station – meaning the “ladies” is now gender-neutral.

Aka unsafe for women.

Ironically, these very women’s toilets at the end of Parkway, now designated as gender-neutral while the men’s loos are closed, were the result of a historic campaign to provide a separate convenience space for females.

Pygmalion author and dramatist George Bernard Shaw, during his time as a St Pancras vestryman in the 1890s, had championed the successful cause of providing women with toilets for the first time in Camden Town.

He must have been a TERF.

Camden Town councillor Richard Cotton said he first raised the issue a year ago and was told the men’s had to shut for social distancing reasons due to the Covid pandemic.

But he said when he asked a few weeks ago why they were still closed, he was told urgent repairs were needed and the council was looking for money in the budget to pay for them.

He said: “I think it’s very worrying that this is subject to budgeting. If there is money for other things, there should be money for this. It’s crucial that women have their own toilets.

“Those loos were campaigned for and opened by none other than George Bernard Shaw. We were the first borough to have women-only loos, it would be pretty crazy if we were then the first borough to do away with them.”

He added: “I’m going to keep the pressure on about this. It’s a matter of safety and privacy. I’m not sure how I would feel about one of my nieces having to have her first period in a toilet with men or boys.”

Thank you Councillor Cotton.

How to get a free “prom dress”:

Non-binary teen turned away from Monsoon’s female changing rooms offered free prom dress as shop ‘committed to inclusivity’

Charlie Moore, who identifies as non-binary, was shopping for a prom dress with their friend.

It seems he’s male “non-binary” as opposed to female “non-binary.”

Monsoon has insisted the shop is “committed to inclusivity” and issued an apology after a non-binary teenager was stopped from using the female changing rooms while shopping for a prom dress.

What does Monsoon mean by “inclusivity”? That anyone and everyone should be “included” in their female changing rooms? But that would exclude most women.

Charlie Moore, 18, said they were left “humiliated” after being instructed to leave the retailer’s changing rooms while on a shopping trip in Birmingham with a friend.

I don’t suppose Charlie spent a single minute thinking about how the women in the changing rooms might be feeling. It’s all about Charlie, not at all about anyone else.

They said they were told by managers that “males aren’t allowed to try our clothes on” and that they had received complaints about their presence from women and children.

The store later issued an apology to the student, opened an investigation into the incident and offered to help Charlie find the “perfect prom dress” free of charge in a post on Twitter.

What do women get? Charlies in their changing rooms.

The incident comes after fresh guidance was released from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that states organisations can legally prevent, limit or modify trans people’s access to such a single-sex service, such as changing rooms, gyms and refuges in certain scenarios.

The EHRC said this could be to enable privacy or decency, to prevent trauma or to ensure health and safety.

But Charlies will make a stink so never mind all that. Women and girls will just have to put up with the trauma and the absence of safety.

Charlie said to MailOnline that the incident left them feeling “like I wasn’t welcome or wanted”.

Why should Charlie feel welcome or wanted in women’s changing rooms? He doesn’t need to “feel welcome” everywhere on the planet. Nobody gets to feel that. We can’t bounce into people’s living rooms and demand the occupants make us feel welcome and wanted. There are limits.

In a statement, Monsoon said: “Monsoon is committed to diversity and inclusivity and we want as many people as possible to enjoy our clothes and designs.

“At the same time, we also want to ensure that all our customers feel relaxed and comfortable when visiting our stores and trying on our outfits.

“The majority of our stores are small with limited changing facilities and as such we endeavour to work with all our customers; considering each of their individual requirements, with the aim of accommodating their needs and wishes.”

I bet Monsoons all over the country are hunkering down waiting for the torrent of “non-binary” males bouncing in to use the [women’s] changing rooms. (Monsoon sells clothes for women and children, so it has no use for men’s changing rooms.)

So now I’m exploring further the dimness and hostility to women of this Craig Murray fella and it’s astonishing. He comes across as weirdly clueless, even childish. He’s a former ambassador? To where, his local park?

Like that, for instance. It’s childishly stupid. (No offense to children intended. We’re all stupid as children, because of being children.) Even if all the women at that lunch have expensive phones, that doesn’t make it ok to abuse them on social media. He seems to be saying that women who have expensive phones should be abused on social media, because they deserve it.

There again – he sounds like an angry teenager. Puddle of piss yourself ya big bully.

The hell he has. See above.

Oh, well then. He doesn’t like these two women to be lionised therefore it’s fine for him to join the chorus hurling abuse at them. What is he, six? Even Owen Jones isn’t this childish, and Owen Jones isn’t a former ambassador. (To his local Tesco was it?)

What a complete goon. Ambassador to his favorite pub it must have been.

Julie Bindel gives us the back story:

It was late August 2019 when a message popped up in my Twitter inbox from J.K. Rowling. I had noticed that she had begun to follow me on Twitter a few months earlier, along with a number of feminists, and I was delighted to hear from her.

“I’ve just seen that you’re in contact with Magdelen Berns,” she wrote. Berns was a young lesbian who, after being silenced at her university, made YouTube videos tackling the absurdity of transgender ideology. She was popular, hilarious and informative. I say was; Berns, in her 30s, was dying of a brain tumour. I planned to visit her at a hospice in Edinburgh and had put a call out on Twitter to any women who wished to send her a message.

I knew that she would be delighted to hear from Rowling. A few weeks beforehand, during an excitable telephone conversation, she had already told me that “JK is following me!” Berns was thrilled to have her work recognised by one of the most famous and successful women on the planet, and I was thrilled to carry her message.

Julie and JKR stayed in contact, bonded by feminism and their “simply not having it” attitude.

Then, three months later, Maya Forstater lost her job for stating that sex is real. Rowling was furious, and her tweet to that effect has become the stuff of legend. #IStandWithMaya, she said, and all hell broke loose.

For some reason I’ve thought of JKR all this time as acting on her own. Of course she was in contact with Julie and others; why wouldn’t she be?

Under fire from extreme trans rights activists, a core group of us formed a bond. It was, however, not formed in defiance of them, but around the beating heart of our movement; for women, for girls, for our rights and our protections, and against misogyny and male violence, whatever form that eternal chimera is currently taking.

Here’s the rub. The kind of threats and abuse sent to Rowling, to me and to others are designed to make us feel isolated, afraid, alone. Patriarchy is all about dividing women and ensuring we don’t share our experiences. Why? Because when women talk, we realise our experiences are quite similar when it comes to male violence and abuse. We realise that all the gaslighting, all the lies told to us, have a common thread. We realise that the guilt, blame and shame of what happened should not belong to us, but to the perpetrators.

And we realize we can team up and fight back.

So the lunch happened, therefore the reaction to the lunch happened.

I’d had enough experience of these things to know, beforehand, that there would be some sort of reaction, but I was genuinely surprised by the scale of it. Several national newspapers, radio programmes and talkshows covered it as some fascinating event rather than just ladies who luncheon. I was not surprised, however, by the sheer warmth of many feminists, and even a few men, who lit up social media with their good wishes for us. Nor was I surprised by the fact that there was a backlash from the blue-fringed brigade; the anger and pure spite was palpable, and once word got out that we witches had got together and had some fun, the pile on began.

First, were the handmaidens. One woman, a well-known author with pronouns in her biography, suggested that we were “patting ourselves on the back for solving feminism because of the mutual dislike of trans people”.

Anyone know who that is? I missed it.

Then the boys joined in. Craig Murray, who describes himself as a historian and human rights activist, seemed to think that our event was disrespectful to a man accused of the rape and sexual assault of two women. “While [Suzanne] Moore was knocking back expensive wine in a shit venue with fellow “victim” J. K. Rowling, Assange was entering his fourth year locked in a tiny cell amongst convicted terrorists.” One wonders whether it is only feminists who should refrain from eating until Assange is free?

I missed that one, too. What an extraordinary thing to say. Has Craig Murray been refusing food and frivolity throughout Assange’s incarceration? I seriously doubt it.

To sum up: They’re Just Jealous.

Jean Hatchet on the misogyny in some of the reactions to that lunch in Hammersmith:

These women are very well aware that simply gathering in this way is a political act which will cause trans activists to seek to punish them for their audacity, for daring to show openly their love for other women. Predictably the backlash from trans activists to these photos was swift and it was vicious. Deep misogyny dripped through the internet like poison.

In the photos posted JK Rowling, in a flowery tea dress with a low-cut neck, looks stunning — elegant and graceful. She wears her 56 years happily, with pride. The tweets focused on her body and her looks, however. One user @effingfaded wrote, “This is what hate does to your titties #JKRowling”.

Stupid, aren’t they. You’d think they’d have the minimal common sense to avoid the most vulgar kind of Nyah nyah ya ugleee taunting if they want everyone to think they’re good decent progressive friends and allies, but nah.

The relentlessly facile trans activist India Willoughby went further and tweeted about one of the photos featuring a well-known and well-loved lesbian woman named Liane: “Here’s JK Rowling meeting fellow members of the GC movement today. Not being funny, but how come I’d be banned because my presence would ‘traumatise’ women — but not the woman on the right?”

Lianne is head of security for Filia and posed for an iconic photograph outside the Woman’s Place UK conference in January 2020. She is an effortlessly cool woman who many of us would love to sit at a table with. India Willoughby obviously fails to see that a trans-identified man performing a female stereotype in lipstick and heels, will never lead women to place a male body above a butch lesbian woman’s, in some strange hierarchy of Willoughby’s imagining. The inherent lesbophobia of the comment is striking and shocking but we know that this hatred and envy of women lies at the heart of the trans activist movement.

And particularly so in the case of India Willoughby.

H/t latsot

Enough of all this seriousness.

Sweden has made The Big Swerve.

The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare released new recommendations that effectively halt “gender-affirming” medical interventions in minors and prioritize psychotherapy for the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth. This is confirms the direction taken by the leading children’s hospital in Sweden last year, after a series of investigative reports exposed the harm suffered by children and young people who were medically “transitioned” using hormones and surgery.

The link is dated February 2022 (and is in Swedish). I suppose now the “activists” will be accusing Sweden of embracing “conversion therapy.” One person’s “refraining from extreme surgeries and/or drugs for dysphoric children” is another person’s “extreme cruelty via conversion therapy.”

NOVA did an episode last year on coral reef bleaching and attempts to speed up the evolution of heat-resistant corals.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been hit by widespread coral bleaching repeatedly in recent years, where marine heat waves have turned large parts of the reef a ghostly white.

…

Back-to-back bleaching events are expected to become more common as the climate gets hotter, but it’s happening sooner than expected in Australia – a worrying sign that the vast majority of the world’s coral reefs are at risk of disappearing.

“Climate change is a whole host of bad things for corals,” says Emily Darling, director of coral reef conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “If they’re getting bleached and dying off every year or two years, there’s simply not enough time in between these massive bleaching events for coral reefs to have any chance at meaningful recovery.”

And that’s extremely bad news.

A quarter of marine species depend on coral reefs at some point in their lives, as do millions of people who depend on reefs for food, jobs and shoreline protection from storm surges.

This isn’t down the road a piece, this is now. Yet we continue to shrug and drive around in our SUVs.

Monitoring the rebellious women 24/7.

What?! How dare she! How dare she talk back to a man that way!

Well when he says “your constituents” immediately followed by “we” he of course doesn’t mean he is one of her constituents, he means [ explanation goes here ].

This sensible and discerning fella at the blog Learning From Dogs got permission from Free Inquiry to republish my think-piece in the current issue titled Cruising Over the Edge.

The fine editors at FI found the perfect photo to illustrate it. [Updating: but this illustration isn’t that one.]

It’s not fake. Just so you know.

“Veronica Ivy” enters the race. Burnaby Velodrome.

Updating to add, h/t Dave Ricks:

Oh really.

The source is Private Eye News, she says in a followup tweet.

The Guardian kept it secret. So interesting.

No, that’s wrong.

No, feminists are not “whipping up fear about ‘manly’ looking folk in toilets.” We’re defending our right to have some spaces away from men, toilets being one such space. Not ‘manly’ looking folk, but men. It’s not about the appearance, it’s about the reality. Has Willoughby never heard the old saw that Appearances Can Be Deceiving? More seriously, is he genuinely unaware that such a distinction exists?

He keeps reminding us that some men are good at appearing like women. We know. It’s unfortunate that some men are able to use that talent to gain the trust of women in order to rape or kill them, or both. Willoughby however seems to be arguing that because some men can fake it, therefore it’s impossible to have any rules about women’s spaces. That’s a stupid argument.

Another stupid argument of Willoughby’s goes like this: “I’m hot.”

Mmmmmm point missed.

Craig Murray is a historian and human rights activist and a former ambassador – yet he gets such a clear statement so thoroughly wrong. It’s not about the restaurant or the wines or the phones. It’s about the solidarity among women.

Weird of him to decide to sneer at Onjali Rauf, too.