James Beal sounds as if he’d have liked to be there.

Over bottles of wine at an Italian restaurant, they put their arms around each other and hugged like old friends.

But the Sunday lunch in west London was in fact the first time JK Rowling had met Maya Forstater, whose legal battle has had a profound effect on them both.

Friendships can form in advance of [and even without] meeting though. They can, and they make first meetings much easier than the cold open kind.

Rowling organised the lunch, at The River Café, Hammersmith, for campaigners, including the Labour MP Rosie Duffield and the philosopher Kathleen Stock, who have been targeted by the trans lobby.

As have so many people. The trans lobby is more belligerent than it is…well, anything else.

After pictures of the lunch started emerging online, trans activists began criticising the group as “evil”. They also highlighted that guests from a lesbian feminist activist group, Get the L Out UK, had attended. Rowling was pictured hugging one of them, Lianne Timmermann.

Hugging a lesbian??? Will she stop at nothing?

The Times includes a photo with a key. Even the Times doesn’t know who the amiga in the top left corner is. Maybe River Café staff or owner or the like?

NPR has a “book review” that in a surprise twist turns out to be a polemic attacking feminist women.

In an apocalypse where a virus turns anyone with enough testosterone into a feral, cannibalistic beast, who survives?

In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s electric debut novel Manhunt, the book’s nightmare world is populated with everyone left –

That’s a confusing half-sentence. I guess it means the survivors are the ones who populate the nightmare world, unless it means everyone left wing. Anyway…

the book’s nightmare world is populated with everyone left — mostly cisgender women, but there are also plenty of non-binary people, transgender men, and transgender women.

Oh, that kind of nightmare world – where we no longer have women and men, girls and boys, but various Specialty Brands.

Oh, plus a faction of authoritarian trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) slowly taking over the Eastern seaboard, killing trans people just as quickly as the infected beasts will. Told from a trans perspective, Manhunt is a fresh, stomach-turning take on gendered apocalypse.

Ahhhhhh of course – the monster in this book is feminist woman.

To be upfront, Manhunt is not for everyone. It is gory, and brutal, and sickened me more than any other horror novel I’ve read in recent memory. I am sure it will challenge many trans readers (like myself) as much as it will challenge cis readers.

So trans readers pretend to read and cis readers actually read?

The book begins with Beth and Fran, two trans women on the hunt for feral men. In this reality, trans women, some non-binary people, and cis women who have polycystic ovarian syndrome — a condition that can increase testosterone levels — have few options for keeping their estrogen up. Synthesizing it from the estrogen-laden testicles of the beasts is one of these options.

…

The three of them return to Boston (with harvested testicles in tow) to Indiresh, a cis woman fertility specialist that processes their estrogen, only to find that a militia of TERFs has rolled into the city. Afraid for their lives, Beth, Fran, Robbie, and Indi skip town when Indi is hired as a doctor at an underground bunker.

Uh huh. Radical feminists gonna eat yo mama.

Details on Blunt’s booboo:

The Conservative MP Crispin Blunt has resigned as chair of the LGBTQ+ parliamentary group and withdrawn comments that a fellow MP found guilty of sexual assault was a victim of a “miscarriage of justice”.

After an outcry from MPs across the political spectrum, Blunt deleted the tweet defending convicted MP Imran Ahmad Khan and removed the comment from his website after an intervention from Tory whips overnight.

I’m picturing them taking turns to scold him all night long. No sleep for him!

His retraction tweet says, idiotically:

I am sorry that my defence of him has been a cause of significant upset and concern not least to victims of sexual offences.

Like saying “I’m sorry my punching you in the face has been a cause of significant bruising, not least a broken nose.”

So the three MPs who resigned can return.

Blunt’s comments triggered the resignation of three MPs from the APPG that he chaired – the Scottish National party MPs Stewart McDonald and Joanna Cherry, and Labour’s Chris Bryant….Bryant had earlier told Sky News he had called for Blunt’s resignation. “It is completely inappropriate for a member of parliament to start attacking the judicial process like this,’” he said.

Well he’s sorry you’re upset.

Now there’s a headline:

Crispin Blunt’s defence of sex offender MP revives stench of impunity

The attempt by Crispin Blunt to taint a court’s verdict of sexual assault against the former Tory MP Imran Ahmad Khan will put the apparent culture of impunity at the Palace of Westminster in the spotlight again.

While the #MeToo scandal led to major reforms to try to protect staff members and parliamentary aides from bullying and abuse, there have been multiple attempts over the past few years to cast aspersions on those seeking justice.

Three Conservative MPs in recent years have been found by courts to have committed sexual assault or rape, two of them with character references provided by fellow Conservatives. Throughout the trial, Ahmad Khan sought to block reporting of the case in which a jury found he had plied a teenager with alcohol and assaulted him.

Blunt, a former justice minister, said he had been prepared to give evidence to defend Ahmad Khan, but according to reporters who covered the trial, he had not attended for the prosecution’s case, where the victim’s parents were said to have been reduced to tears describing the effect of the assault on their teenage boy. Blunt attended only for the defence and summing up.

I guess he didn’t want to bias himself.

Back atcha, “sister.”

Crispin Blunt’s statement on a colleague convicted of sexually assaulting a minor has angered a lot of MPs (including Joanna Cherry).

The Tory MP Crispin Blunt is facing calls to quit as chair of a Parliamentary Group on LGBT+ rights after he defended a colleague found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy.

Mr Blunt, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Global LGBT+ Rights, made a public intervention on Monday after Conservative MP Imran Ahmad Khan was found guilty of sexual assault.

Khan, who has been expelled from the Conservative Party, continues to deny wrongdoing and does not intend to stand down as an MP but is likely to face removal from office after he is sentenced.

In his statement, Mr Blunt said he was “appalled and distraught at the dreadful miscarriage of justice that has befallen my friend and colleague Imran Ahmad Khan.”

Any appallment or distraughtitude for the victim? No?

The Conservative Party rejected Mr Blunt’s intervention. A spokesperson said: “A jury of Mr Khan’s peers has found him guilty of a criminal offence. We completely reject any allegations of impropriety against our independent judiciary, the jury or Mr Khan’s victim.”

The statement also spurred a stream of resignations from other LGBT+ MPs who are members of the APPG.

The SNP’s Stewart McDonald wrote: “I have resigned as a vice-chair of the @APPGLGBT following Crispin Blunt’s statement.

“This was the first APPG I joined as an MP and it meant a lot to me. Parliament needs a respected and robust LGBT group and Crispin can no longer provide that leadership. He should stand down.”

Remember, Crispin is the guy who bullied and then reported Lisa Townsend for saying men don’t belong in women’s prisons.

Remember Crispin Blunt MP? I wrote about him last August, in a post about the pressure being put on Lisa Townsend, Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner, who was being accused of “transphobia” for saying men shouldn’t be in women’s prisons. A Surrey news outlet reported:

Marc Jones, chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), came to her defence, saying: “Some services quite simply can’t function in a gender neutral way”, which Reigate MP Crispin Blunt said was an “evidence-free panicked response”.

Never mind about women, they don’t matter.

More last month.

Today:

Oh really.

Can’t have LGB without the T. Not allowed.

More from Willoughby.

And there is a difference between the two. Imagine!

Dominic Lawson in the Mail part 2:

…the Today programme interviewed Veronica Ivy, born male, but who as Rachel McKinnon (I know, it’s confusing) became the first transgender world track cycling champion in 2018, at an event for women in the 35 to 44 age bracket.

Wait a second, let’s talk about why it’s confusing. It’s confusing because Rhys McKinnon changed his first name to Rachel because he Became a Woomonn, but then he changed the whole thing to Veronica Ivy because ?????? I don’t think he ever said why – it appears to be just another bit of attention-getting weirdness.

Armed with the knowledge that peer-reviewed scientific papers demonstrate that, even after the testosterone reduction sporting bodies have demanded of trans women entering female competition, those born male have unique physical advantages, Nick Robinson put it to Ivy: ‘You can’t undo male puberty…do you accept that?’

Peer-reviewed scientific papers along with what we all know because we live in the world.

Ivy responded, astonishingly: ‘People have claimed that, but the scientific evidence does not support that.’ Or perhaps not so astonishing, as Ivy has advocated that ‘in some special contexts, we can lie’.

But when Robinson asked the obvious consequential question, ‘Why don’t we just abolish women’s sport, if that’s the case?’, Ivy repeatedly refused to answer.

Because what would he say?

Dominic Lawson writes (in the Daily Mail, usual apologies apply) about not getting abuse for writing about the mismatch between trans demands and women’s rights:

As it turned out, I encountered no abuse at all, just a lot of mail from female readers of this newspaper to the effect that they were delighted I was speaking up for them. 

Yet I am sure that if I were a woman and had written such a column in the issue of April 8, 2019, I would indeed have been monstered on social media, especially Twitter.

Look at what has happened to J.K. Rowling, who has endured death threats and the foulest of personal abuse after she defended Maya Forstater.

And what happened to Maya, and what happened to Kathleen Stock, and what happened to Julie Bindel, and on and on.

Whatever the reasons, it is an observable fact that women, regardless of the issues under discussion, receive much more toxic abuse on social media, and generally, than men. We call this misogyny, and it is a real thing.

It’s a real thing, and like trans activism, and gender critical feminism, and other ideas and trends and movements, it gains fuel and momentum and recruits via social media. That doesn’t explain the discrepancy between the abuse women get and that “thanks for talking about this” that Lawson got though.

But I had another explanation, which is that women, such as Dr Stock and Maya Forstater, who say, ‘You can’t change biological sex’ are telling those who are born male but feel viscerally that they are ‘in the wrong body’: sorry, but we won’t let you into our club.

For many trans women (though by no means all), this is an appalling insult, and actively cruel. Whereas I, as a man, am entirely irrelevant to this and possess nothing that they want.

That’s not an explanation though, it’s just the same question restated. Why isn’t it every bit as much an appalling insult and actively cruel when men say it to trans men? Why is it appalling and cruel coming from women but not coming from men?

Setting that aside, this idea that it’s an appalling insult and actively cruel to say a man is not a woman is a new and silly belief that ought to fade away. (Sudden vanishing would be even better, but we have to deal with realities.) Men are by definition adults, and adults are generally expected to leave their fantasies and pretendings at home. There’s a very broad exception carved out for religion, but then that’s why workplaces generally don’t encourage proselytizing. Most of the time in most situations we’re really not expected to endorse and believe other people’s fictions. It’s too much to ask, and it’s silly. Imagine Charlie from down the block comes bouncing up to you in a Superman costume and expects you to pretend he is Superman. Come on. Life isn’t like that. So how did it suddenly become like that on this one particular brand of pretending? Here comes Charlie in a skirt and tottery shoes, so we have to pretend he’s a laydee? Give me a break.

India Willoughby doesn’t get it.

And there’s more. Lots more.

Not jealous, no no, not at all.

Soooooooo let’s just start over from the beginning as if nobody had ever said anything over the past 5 or 10 years, that should be fun and productive.

In comes a flood of replies and quote tweets saying “You know where: everywhere except women-only spaces.”

This I think is partly the fault of all those Guardian and BBC and Independent pieces talking about trans people and transgender activists when what they mean is trans women. The media carefully obfuscate the issue, so it’s not entirely surprising that LP loses track. The media have trained her, and others, to lose track.

It’s still annoying though.

Ev. Ree. Where.

Yes but where though?

The riddle is “how are feminists like racists and anti-Semites?” and the answer is they’re not.

Feminists who fear [that] a radical overhaul of transgender laws in Scotland will threaten their rights and safety have been compared to racists and anti-Semites by a minister in Nicola Sturgeon’s government.

A woman, at that.

Lorna Slater, who was handed a ministerial post last year under the SNP’s coalition pact with the Greens, was accused of making “grossly offensive” remarks as she appeared to demand that media organisations censor critics of the Scottish Government plans.

In remarks about the trans rights debate published on Sunday, she said the BBC had “only recently stopped putting on climate deniers because they required balance”. She added: “We wouldn’t put balance on the question of racism or anti-Semitism, but we allow this fictional notion of balance when it comes to anti-trans [views]. The whole thing is disgusting.”

The views are not “anti-trans.” Gender critical feminists don’t want to harm trans people. We dispute the ideology about sex and gender that tells people how to think about people who say they are the opposite sex.

The SNP/Green Government at Holyrood recently published legislation that would allow anyone aged 16 or over born or resident in Scotland to change their legal sex by self-identification, removing the need for a medical diagnosis or doctor’s approval.

It seems to me if you think about it really hard for 30 seconds or so you can see how that arrangement could damage some rights of women.

Ms Slater’s comments, to The Herald on Sunday, came after Shona Robison, the SNP minister steering the legislation through Holyrood, called for a “respectful” debate without “offensive or abusive” comments on either side.

However, Ms Slater, who is entitled to a salary of £98,000 in her role as biodiversity minister, said a perceived backlash against the trans community was “hideous” and that she feared for the safety of trans women standing as Green candidates in the council elections.

“These gentle, hardworking women are being portrayed as if they’re inherently dangerous,” she said. “It couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Interesting choice of words. “Gentle.” I guess that’s supposed to cancel our awareness that they’re men? But that’s the problem, see – we don’t want that awareness canceled. Our safety depends on it, and so do some of our rights. I understand that that’s painful to some men who identify as trans, but I still think we get to defend our safety and rights all the same.

Meanwhile of course this is fine.

Do what we tell you or we will kill you.

The pink blue and white flag is sacred.

The University of Melbourne said they have counselled one of their academics over a ‘transphobic’ post on social media on Transgender Day of Visibility.

And the next thing we see is a trigger warning – not a warning about misogyny or anti-feminism but a warning about, of course, “transphobia.” I wonder if stories about violence against women include trigger warnings after the first paragraph.

Trigger Warning: This story has details of a transphobic post, which might be distressing to some readers. For 24-hour crisis support and suicide prevention call Lifeline on 13 11 14. For Australia-wide LGBTQI peer support call QLife on 1800 184 527 or webchat.

Any numbers for women to call? No? Sorry, stupid and selfish of me to ask.

Faculty of Arts Associate professor Holly Lawford-Smith on March 31, had posted a photo of a trans pride flag painted on the premises of the University in a Facebook group. The post said, “every entrance to unimelb today” and was accompanied by vomit emojis.

I wonder if there are feminist flags at every entrance to unimelb on any day of the year.

Australian drag performer Pauline Pantsdown was the first to call out the post. “Amazed that The University of Melbourne is fine with an Assoc. Prof posting vomit emojis about the existence of some students. Her research focused on climate ethics when hired; in 2018 became radicalised into anti-transgender activism & took over a feminism course. Zero priority for student safety.” 

Man who calls himself Pantsdown seeks to silence feminist woman. Naturally.

Unless they’re feminist women, of course.

Last week Grace Lavery, this week Veronica Ivy.

Now, maybe the idea is to give these creepy misogynist men the rope to hang themselves with, but is it worth it? And maybe that isn’t the idea, maybe the idea is just provocative, name recognition, noise. Rhys McKinnon is a loathsome, sadistic individual who relishes cheating women out of opportunities to race and medals. It’s not really cute to reward him with a chance to preen himself on Woman’s Hour.