Turns out Trump stole a bunch of federal property when he skulked back to Mar a Lago.

The National Archives and Records Administration last month retrieved 15 boxes of documents and other items from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence because the material should have been turned over to the agency when he left the White House, Archives officials said Monday.

That is, because the material wasn’t his to take, that is, he stole it.

Trump advisers deny any nefarious intent and said the boxes contained mementos, gifts, letters from world leaders and other correspondence. The items included correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which Trump once described as “love letters,” as well as a letter left for Trump by President Barack Obama, according to two people familiar with the contents.

Interesting but does not touch the point that it was all government property. Those people weren’t writing to him because they like him, they were writing to the office.

Two former advisers described a frenzied packing process in the final days of the administration because Trump did not want to pack or accept defeat for much of the transition.

Which being translated means Trump is so stupid he thought he could just yell “I don’t want to!” and stay there indefinitely.

The National Archives and Records Administration said in a statement that “these records should have been transferred to NARA from the White House at the end of the Trump Administration in January 2021,” and that Trump representatives are “continuing to search” for additional records.

“The Presidential Records Act is critical to our democracy, in which the government is held accountable by the people,” Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero said in the statement. “Whether through the creation of adequate and proper documentation, sound records management practices, the preservation of records, or the timely transfer of them to the National Archives at the end of an Administration, there should be no question as to need for both diligence and vigilance. Records matter.”

Especially records of a criminal pretending to be president.

“I don’t think he did this out of malicious intent to avoid complying with the Presidential Records Act,” one former Trump White House official said. “As long as he’s been in business, he’s been very transactional and it was probably his longtime practice and I don’t think his habits changed when he got to the White House.”

See that’s a pretty pathetic defense. It’s not that he meant to steal them, it’s just that he’s so stupid he can’t grasp that being president is not the same as being a real estate tycoon.

A rebuke:

The Today programme presenter Justin Webb has been partially rebuked by the BBC after he suggested students were lying when they accused a university professor of transphobia.

Introducing Radio 4’s newspaper review last October, Webb said: “And quite a lot of coverage still of Kathleen Stock, the academic from Sussex University who’s been abused by students who accuse her, falsely, of transphobia. She says her union has now effectively ended her career. It’s published a statement of support, not for her but for those who are abusing her.”

Four listeners complained to the BBC that Webb’s use of “falsely” was inaccurate and betrayed a personal opinion. Three also complained of inaccuracy and apparent bias in describing the students who had been protesting against Stock as “abusing her”.

But here’s the problem: saying “students who accuse her of transphobia” would also be inaccurate, in the sense that “transphobia” is a highly loaded and slippery and contentious label. It’s a newish word, and it’s a very convenient weapon against anyone who resists any item in the List of Trans Ideology Rules, no matter how politely and minimally. The word itself reeks of malice and dishonesty, so a good presenter can’t just use it as if it were normal vocabulary.

The BBC’s editorial complaints unit ruled that Webb was not sufficiently accurate when he suggested the accusation of transphobia against Stock had been disproved. This was because the “validity or otherwise of the accusation of transphobia are the heart of the controversy”.

Yes, but so is the validity and meaning of “transphobia.” What is called transphobia is almost always not hatred of trans people at all, but skepticism of the wild truth claims of trans ideology. It’s not phobia to say that Gwyneth Paltrow markets woo, and for the same reasons it’s not phobia to say that trans ideology is yet more woo.

It’s all about the dress. Literally all.

“Science News” is kidding about the “Science” part.

The coronavirus is a danger to babies and pregnant people, and the vaccines are safe, data show

Good science communication is as clear and unambiguous as possible. Pregnancy is not a universal human experience.

We get a story about a pregnant she who got the vax and then

Others who’ve been pregnant during the pandemic haven’t been so sure. Cumulatively, only 42.6 percent of pregnant people ages 18 to 49 have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in the United States as of January 15, before or during their pregnancies.

The campaign to erase women from public discourse continues even in science journalism.

Yet unlike when Yohay rolled up her sleeve almost a year ago, there is now a great deal of data attesting to the safety of COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant individuals and their newborns.

Elegant variation – in one paragraph it’s “people,” in the next it’s “individuals.” There are many ways to avoid saying “women.”

But there’s a slip-up.

The risks from developing COVID-19 when pregnant and unvaccinated were demonstrated again in a recent study from Scotland. From December 2020 until the end of October 2021, a period when vaccines were available, there were 4,950 confirmed coronavirus infections among pregnant women.

Ooops ooops ooops!

All of the babies who died over the course of the study were born to women who weren’t vaccinated when they got COVID-19, the researchers found.

Could the writer be a secret agent?

The highest numbers of U.S. deaths for pregnant individuals, 40 in August and 35 in September, occurred during the delta surge.

There aren’t details yet on how pregnant people fare after becoming ill with the now-dominant omicron variant.

Following orders again, whew.

5 more people, individuals, or those, followed by 5 women. 5 women!! It’s outright rebellion.

There are 21 “women” total in the piece, 19 “people,” and 11 “individuals.” 21 v 30 (and I didn’t count instances of “those” or “others”) so the Correct Term clearly dominated but the Incorrect one put up a fierce struggle. Go wims.

H/t Jim Baerg

Trump may have put himself in worse jeopardy.

Donald Trump’s incendiary call at a Texas rally for his backers to ready massive protests against “radical, vicious, racist prosecutors” could constitute obstruction of justice or other crimes and backfire legally on Trump, say former federal prosecutors.

…

Trump’s rant that his followers should launch the “biggest protests” ever in three cities should prosecutors “do anything wrong or illegal” by criminally charging him for his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, or for business tax fraud, came at a 30 January rally in Texas where he repeated falsehoods that the election was rigged.

Legal experts were astonished at Trump’s strong hints that if he runs and wins a second term in 2024, he would pardon many of those charged for attacking the Capitol on 6 January last year in hopes of thwarting Biden’s certification by Congress.

John Dean said it was the stuff of dictators, which of course applies to a lot of what Trump has said and done, in and out of office.

Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor who is of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy, told the Guardian Trump “may have shot himself in the foot” with the comments. “Criminal intent can be hard to prove, but when a potential defendant says something easily seen as intimidating or threatening to those investigating the case it becomes easier,” Aftergut said.

Aftergut added that having proclaimed “his support for the insurrectionists, Trump added evidence of his corrupt intent on January 6 should the DOJ prosecute him for aiding the seditious conspiracy, or for impeding an official proceeding of Congress”.

Other than that he should be ok.

Ex-prosecutors say that Trump’s Texas comments are dangerous and could legally boomerang as the prosecutors appear to have new momentum.

“Our criminal laws seek to hold people accountable for their purposeful actions,” Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the fraud section at DOJ, said. “Trump’s history of inciting people to violence demonstrates that his recent remarks are likely to cause a disruption of the pending investigations against him and family members.”

Pelletier added: “Should his conduct actually impede any of these investigations, federal and state obstruction statutes could easily compound Mr Trump’s criminal exposure.”

Also, he’s pissing off the prosecutors, which is probably not a brilliant idea either.

Trump’s remarks resonated especially in Georgia, where former prosecutors say he may now face new legal problems. Former prosecutor Aftergut noted that [Georgia DA Fani] Willis understood the threat when she quickly asked the FBI to provide protection at the courthouse, and he predicted that the immediate effect on the deputy DAs working on the case would be “to energize them in pursuing the case”.

“You’re threatening us, Goldilocks? Ok, game on.”

In a similar vein, ex-ambassador Norm Eisen and States United Democracy Center co-chair said Trump’s call for protests in Atlanta, New York and Washington if prosecutors there charge him “certainly sounds like a barely veiled call for violence. That’s particularly true when you combine it with his other statements at the Texas rally about how the last crowd of insurrectionists are being mistreated and did no wrong”.

In other words he’s openly calling for a repeat of January 6 only worse. Let’s hope that backfires on him as opposed to succeeding.

This garbage again. Boys are to be ambitious and strong, girls are to be humble and kind. It might as well be shirts marketed to slave-owners and slaves respectively.

A bestselling author has criticised Primark over a “sexist” children’s clothing line that encourages girls to be “grateful”, “humble” and “always perfect” while telling boys to be more assertive.

Kate Long, a teacher and novelist, condemned the “hugely sexist messaging” she found emblazoned on many of the retailer’s clothes for children. On a visit to a Primark in Chester, Long found tops for girls that had printed on them phrases such as: “Be kind”, “Kindness always wins”, “Grateful, humble and optimistic” and “Be good, do good”.

The messages displayed on boys’ clothing encouraged them to be more ambitious and self-assured. One read: “Change the game. Rewrite the rules. Go for it. Born to win.” Another read: “Explore. Nothing holding you back,” and a third said: “You are limitless.”

It could hardly be more unabashedly sexist if it sat down and worked out a plan.

No doubt the people who design this shit and the people who sell it will say it’s what parents want, but I don’t believe that. It’s not written in the stars that shirts have to have Messages written on them in the first place, and if you’re going to insist on putting Messages on shirts there are surely plenty of exhortations that are gender-neutral. Boys should be kind too after all, and girls should reach for the stars.

This is good.

The discussion is lively.

Yes, and when Woman’s Hour discusses rape do they make sure to include plenty of rapists? When Woman’s Hour looks at harassment and abuse of women do they invite enough abusers for balance?

This should be interesting.

I’ll listen later. The first thought that occurs to me is that the consequences aren’t all that unintended. Some of the intention may not be fully conscious – we’re good at lying to ourselves about why we’re being shits – but some of it has to be, especially now, when the consequences have been so thoroughly and emphatically explained.

Because men are the real people while women are the afterthought.

The language game – tricks all the way down.

One, “minority.” Montgomerie is a white man, but he’s pretending to be part of an oppressed minority (which is what “minority” is shorthand for in these contexts). White men as such are not an oppressed minority. It could be that he’s homeless or disabled or an immigrant but I don’t think he is any of those things.

Two, “healthcare.” The medical experimentation done on trans people isn’t healthcare; it’s more like malpractice.

Rachel Cooke reviews Laurie Penny’s new “feminist” book:

If the tone of this book is almost comically relentless – if Penny, whose pronouns are they/them, says something once, they say it 54 times – it’s also oddly reminiscent of a superannuated self-help manual, its assumptions seemingly based mostly on the experiences of its author and their friends, a focus group to whom every possible Bad Thing has happened at least once (so handy).

…

For the reader, especially the reader who has never read a book or a newspaper, never watched any television or seen a film, Penny has all sorts of revelations.

Ouch! That does sound so exactly like LP – forever pointing out the obvious as if she’d only just noticed it.

But don’t be disheartened. Penny has good news, too. Like them, we may eventually be able to overcome our addiction to “predators with pretty eyes and a vacancy for a secret side-piece”. We may even wind up loving ourselves instead of just waiting around “for a man” to find us lovable (for someone who identifies as gender-queer, and who therefore has some trouble with the word woman, which does not reflect her “lived experience”, Penny uses “man” with an abandon that is quite dizzying).

Well you see men don’t have cis privilege, so it’s fine to talk about them, but women oppress trans women just by existing, so they have to be deleted from the discourse at all times.

Most crucially of all, something is now – out in the world, I mean – fighting to break out, as if from a shell: something “wet and angry”, with “claws”. By this, I think Penny is referring to the ongoing activism that was stirred by #MeToo, but I suppose it is possible – I’m troubled by the word “wet” – that I’ve got this entirely wrong.

If only Laurie Penny could write as well as Rachel Cooke.

(For a second I thought “But she would still be Laurie Penny,” but then I realized no, she wouldn’t. You have to be able to think well in order to write well, and a Laurie Penny who could think well would be a very different Laurie Penny indeed.)

But the reader waits in vain for Penny to offer solutions to the injustice she describes, for serious analysis of any kind. The best they can do is to suggest that affordable childcare might be of help. No shit, Sherlock.

The chapter devoted to sex work is utterly enraging, and not only because Penny clearly knows so little about it (where are the interviews, the statistics, the thoughts of experts in this field?). Having painstakingly explained that many women enjoy sex – that they do not, contrary to the old myths, only endure it, the better to keep their men happy – Penny then accuses those women, feminists and others, who are critical of the sex industry of, yes, a sort of twisted envy, because why should some women get paid for what others have to do for free? I’m afraid I clutched my own pearls (inherited, I should say, from a grandmother who left school at 13) at this point.

Having spent half of my life hoping for feminism’s revival – for it to be, if not fashionable, then proudly worn and meaningfully directed – it is lowering beyond words to see a serious publisher describe this ill-edited, ill-considered drivel as a manifesto for the cause. This isn’t feminism. This is a swizz.

But if it identifies as feminism…?

Sarah Ditum reviews Grace Lavery’s book for the Times:

And there is so much penis here. Not just in the title (if there’s a better literary pun this year than A Heartbreaking of Work of Staggering Penis, I’ll be highly surprised), but all the way through. On the first page, Lavery is having penis trouble. Since starting on hormones, she’s been experiencing semi-erections: her penis (a phrase I pray I never get used to writing) feels “as though I were laying my own miscarried foetus across my hand”.

Ah yes that’s very Lavery. He knows it will infuriate, and that’s why he does it. He loves to taunt women that way.

While trans-inclusive feminist writers speak delicately about identity, Lavery goes on a taboo-trashing rampage. She doesn’t quite ascend to the outrageous heights of fellow trans author Andrea Long Chu (whose 2020 book Females: A Concern defined the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”), but Lavery seems to have a good time trying to match them.

Life would be so dreary and empty if men like Chu and Lavery couldn’t taunt women and get applauded for it by people who consider themselves feminists.

… this is a relentlessly non-standard memoir. Chronology is smashed up, genres are rifled, truth is very rarely the point. “I’m not trying to be clever,” she says at one point, before adding, “obviously the book in general is an attempt to be clever”. But the fourth-wall breaking and self-referentiality gets tired fast: BS Johnson, but with narcissism instead of mordant self-loathing.

I suspect Lavery is too busy loathing women to have time to loathe himself. Besides…would he ever?

Yeah no.

“People are more than their sex organs. People are more than their sex organs, you cannot reduce a human being down to their sex organs. I’m a woman, it does not matter what is in my pants.”

Yeah it does. Knowing which is which isn’t “reducing people down to” anything, it’s just knowing which is which. We need to know which is which, for a whole slew of reasons, including safety. Vehement guy with curly hair telling us otherwise is just wrong.

“It is not about physicality, woman is something far deeper and far more complex than that.”

Yes, physicality is so crude and simple and of the earth earthy, we Platonists and spiritualists know that is all dross and what matters is the soul.

Adults who work at a university?

Lecturers at a leading university are being given guidance on neopronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender, where someone identifies as a feline.

There are no “neopronouns.” There is slang, argot, jargon, dialect, in-group code, and so on – but no neopronouns. Nobody needs lectures on how to make discourse more muddled and laborious and full of traps.

The University of Bristol has provided guidance for its staff on “using pronouns at work”, urging them to declare in verbal introductions and email signatures whether they use he/him, she/her or they/them, to support transgender students.

Even the Telegraph can’t get it right. We don’t “use” the pronouns other people refer to us – it’s the other people who use them, and it’s nonsense to talk about “using” the pronouns other people call us. Also, this nonsense does nothing to “support transgender students.”

But unlike myriad pronoun manuals on other campuses, Bristol lecturers are also directed to neopronouns which include “emojiself pronouns”, where colourful digital icons – commonplace on social media – are used to represent gender in written and spoken conversation.

Naturally. Thin end of the wedge, innit – unless it’s mockery. How, by the way, does one use a colorful digital icon to represent gender in spoken conversation? Does one keep little digital icons in one’s pocket to whip out on these occasions?

Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments”. The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.”

Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline”. The word nyan is Japanese for “meow”.

This may all be very meaningful for small groups of intense post-adolescents who haven’t grown up enough yet, but for actual functioning adults working in universities it’s an insult.

The Telegraph understands that a University of Bristol staff member was invited to a meeting with a senior diversity manager after objecting to being encouraged to add pronouns to emails, fearing that it undermined the concept of binary biological sex.

Ah a senior diversity manager was it. There’s your problem right there.

Speaking of oversharing and related issues…poor old Hazza is becoming such a joke. It’s a funny joke though, so I’m not complaining.

I see from his latest video that Prince Harry, living in California, is now fluent in Peloton, or at least some kind of Yoga-with-Adrienne-style “mental toolbox” iterative blah. Speaking from beneath a sprig of newly farmed carrot hair with a panel of sculpted execs, the prince explained in an interview on Thursday for his wellness app how he dealt with the extreme mental burden of living in a $14 million mansion with 16 loos.

Every day he strives for “mental fitness”. He will try to find a “slate of white space” after the school run. “I now put in half an hour or 45 minutes in the morning when one of the kids has gone to school and the other is taking a nap,” he said.

Ah yes, he “puts in” that 30 to 45 minutes – sweating at the coal face.

How does he think it looks to claim he has suffered from “burnout” when the most stressful thing he now experiences is probably the occasional subpar morning affirmation and not-quite-right American-style grass? Burnout from what, anyway? From taking four private jets a week? From his wife? Everything he says assumes poor mental health is the default, which is, in itself, mad.

Burnout from being absurd, maybe?

I wonder what the Kween herself is thinking as she watches Harry’s latest attempt to dress up navel-gazing as “boldly committing to inner work”. Today is the beginning of her Platinum Jubilee — or, as one run of souvenir crockery hilariously misspelt it, her “Platinum Jubbly”.

As a woman who specialises in sincere, short and savagely to-the-point haikus — “recollections may vary” — she must look at Harry with his sprawling, meaningless bromides and wonder what has gone wrong in the past 70 years.

To be fair, that’s the other end of the spectrum as opposed to a happy or sensible or compromise middle. There’s excessive navel gazing on the one hand and there’s not looking behind the curtains at all ever on the other hand.

Harry claims he is now so mentally fragile that he needs to surround himself with “people who I would happily have washing the [mental] windscreen”. Charles, of course, calls such people “valets”. I find it interesting that nearly everything Harry speaks about involves not what he can do for others but what others can do for him.

That’s the thing. So many people confuse “thinking” with “thinking about the self.” There’s an infinite supply of things to think about that are not the self. Bonus: doing that tends to put the self in perspective, at least a little. You get your “the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world” from directing your attention out instead of in, and that’s a good thing.

The Metropolitan Police is looking worse by the day.

Back in 2011 –

Kristina O’Connor, now 33, called 101 after being attacked by a group of men who tried to steal her phone. When she was interviewed about the mugging by Detective Chief Inspector James Mason, who later became a right-hand man to Cressida Dick, the Met commissioner, he instead turned the conversation towards her love life and asked her out for dinner.

In emails sent from his official account, Mason, 43, then a detective sergeant, told her he was as “determined in my pursuit of criminals as I am of beautiful women”. Describing her as “amazingly hot”, he said that rejection of an officer’s advances was “frowned upon”.

What an interesting concept. It means that reporting a crime, for women, entails a risk of rape, and not just rape but rape you can’t report to the police because it’s a police who raped you. If the victim is not allowed to “reject an officer’s advances” then that officer is free to rape the victim. I had no idea this was official Met policy.

After her complaint, Mason, who received a commendation for resilience and professionalism in his handling of the response to the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack, was found guilty at a hearing last year of gross misconduct that was sexually motivated. He kept his job and rank and still serves in the Met.

And that’s why she’s now suing them.

The force has faced heavy criticism since PC Wayne Couzens abducted, raped and murdered Sarah Everard, 33, last March. Last month the academic Dr Koshka Duff was paid compensation after she was strip-searched by Met officers, with others laughing as they said: “What’s that smell? Oh, it’s her knickers.” Last week the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found that officers at the Met’s Charing Cross branch had joked in messages about rape, domestic violence and killing black children.

Hur hur, smelly knickers, you’re not allowed to say no to the police, hur hur.

Interesting plot twist:

Her legal case, supported by the Good Law Project, which has taken on the Met for its initial failure to investigate the No 10 parties, also names Mason and the IOPC as interested parties.

So Jolyon can get something right.

Marie Le Conte writes for the New Statesman and has the Approved Views. She’s sad about those people who have the Unapproved Views – they’re so obsessed.

Her thoughts on this were prompted by a Mumsnet discussion with MPs Stella Creasy and Caroline Nokes on what women should care about.

Though some questions focused on childcare for politicians and media attacks on the appearance of female MPs, the vast majority concerned one topic. “Should males be included in women-only shortlists?” was one. “Would you be happy if Labour’s first woman leader were a transwoman? (Biological male)” was another.

Le Conte found it “odd” that so many women asked questions about that one topic. She tweeted about it and got more replies than she wanted.

I am not here to complain about it or to make a case for transgender rights. I am not going to convince anyone to change their mind in a handful of sentences, and see no point in attempting to do so. Instead, I would like to point to two worrying developments in online feminism, which I believe were made depressingly clear by this incident.

The first is the obsessiveness of the “gender critical” movement.

We think about it and talk about it way too much. She, the normal one, doesn’t think about it that much, and neither do her trans friends. Normal people just get on with life. If only gender critical feminists were normal like her.

This leads us to the second point. By deciding to centre their online persona and their feminism around gender issues, these women now refuse to recognise the legitimacy of those with opposing views. It does not matter that feminism has always had strands and internal disagreements; if you support transgender people, you cannot be a feminist.

What would a feminism that doesn’t focus on gender issues look like? Like a big box with nothing in it, right? Like zero. Like empty space. Like nothing. She might as well rebuke BLM for focusing on racial issues.

As for opposing views and internal disagreements – as with everything, there are minor disagreements that needn’t lead to a split and then there are fundamental ones that can’t be ignored or accommodated. If you think men who say they are women are literally women, and that feminism is for them too, and not just “too” but “instead” and “more,” then your feminism is no longer feminism. It’s all in the “fem” part.

I have been called a handmaiden, a “pick me” girl, and been accused of vying for male attention. It does not matter that I have been a feminist all my life and have the receipts to prove it; my views on gender apparently mean I have taken the side of sexist men.

If your “views on gender” include the view that men are women if they say they are, then I don’t know what to tell you. You are in fact in solidarity with men in a disagreement over what feminism is, so yes, it’s true that you’re not a feminist, despite the receipts.

Ok now all you aspiring tv writers – I have just the thing for you. Vulnerable lawyers. Comedy, not drama. I owe the idea to Sarah Phillimore and Dennis Kavanagh.

“Bringing your whole self to work” is the very last thing people should be doing. No no no no no that’s all wrong: leave most of your self at home. Nobody wants to see that. Nobody wants the moods, the hidden injuries, the regrets, the resentments, the obsessions – none of it. Do not bring it to work.

That’s it! The new Fawlty Towers crossed with Boston Legal: vulnerable lawyers.

I’m not even kidding. It could be stomach-hurtingly funny.

Lily Maynard takes an in-depth look at Sidhbh Gallagher, a woman who is making a lot of money cutting girls’ breasts off.

Between 2015 and 2018 she reports that she performed more than 200 surgeries on trans-identified people, removing and reconstructing body parts and tissue in what she calls ‘gender affirmation surgery’.

…

Her practice specialises in performing elective double mastectomies on gender dysphoric young women at a cost of around $9-12,000. ‘Top surgery’ is her signature dish, but there are plenty of other strings to Gallagher’s bow- and she offers something for the lads as well.

She’ll cut their testicles off for a price.

It’s Spring 2018. “Summer is coming!” Gallagher reminds her followers, retweeting photos of a selection of the young women whose healthy breasts she has removed. Once you’ve had your breasts cut off, of course, there’s no need for the T shirt or bikini top that society expects women to ‘cover up’ with.  Let the fun times begin!

Hm. Which is more irksome – wearing a T shirt or having your breasts cut off? I think I’m going to go with door number 2.

Lily provides screenshots of a bunch of tweets showing post-mastectomy women enjoying the luxury of being outside with no shirt on, and a string of frivolous remarks by Gallagher about the awesomeness of the surgically-altered chest. Such as:

‘Monday morning masculoplasty motivation! Let’s make shirtless fall pictures a thing!’

That’s not creepy at all.

What about the ones with regrets?

In 2021 Gallagher recorded a short video for LGBTQ and ALL, on the importance of mental health.

She spoke of how some patients experience feelings of guilt or regret – or even become clinically depressed – after surgery. This could happen after any surgery, she hastens to add, but feelings of guilt and regret surrounding elective surgery can make it worse.  It’s important it is to encourage patients to plan in advance ‘while they’re in their right mind’ how they will deal with post-op depression, for example by booking an appointment with their therapist in advance.

Or they could avoid the post-op depression by not getting their tits cut off at all, but Gallagher doesn’t suggest that.

The darker side of ‘top surgery’, the physical and mental health issues that it may cause- or fail to resolve- is not one that young women tend to talk about on social media. Instagram is full of teenage girls who are convinced this surgery will be an answer to all their problems. Expressing regret is a great way to get yourself ostracised from the online community that lovebombs you before your own surgery; from the other girls who would do almost anything to fulfil their own ‘top surgery’ dream.

It sounds like any other cult. Most cults don’t cut women’s breasts off though.

Having your breasts removed with Dr Gallagher costs $9-$12,000. It’s hard to get all, if any of it covered on insurance. Many of Gallagher’s patients have worked two jobs, their parents have remortgaged their houses; some have crowdfunded for their surgery.

But it’s worth it, because you can go outside without a T shirt.

Gallagher has a startling social media presence and an attitude towards her potential clients like no other surgeon I’ve come across. The best word I can think of to describe it is frivolous. Nothing is serious. Everything will be fine! She is the cool, quirky big sister. 

Who will happily cut your breasts off, and tweet about it afterwards.

Gallagher’s TikTok account, where she has 191.1k followers and over 4 million ‘likes’, is if anything more surreal, featuring a variety of videos where she skips around like an excited, wide-eyed gazelle, erasing potential problems and complications from your ‘top surgery’ with a swish of the gender fairy’s wand and the occassional  swing from a jaunty ponytail.

It’s all just such fun.

Read the whole thing. It’s a long, detailed, horror-filled post, much more than the sample I’ve quoted. Read it all. You’ll regret it but it’s necessary. Not medically necessary, as Gallagher grotesquely insists breast-removal is, but necessary for the sake of resistance to this appalling reckless profit-making slicing and dicing of confused teenagers.

Shahrar Ali’s account:

Ok why is his view highly controversial and bad while the opposing view is…what? Wholly uncontroversial and benign? Is it as simple as: “genocide: yes or no?”?

He’s suing.