Terry Gross talked to Masha Gessen about Putin’s war on Ukraine last Thursday.

My guest, Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist who reported in late January and February from Ukraine, then went to Moscow after the invasion. On the night Putin shut down the last remaining independent source of TV news, Gessen was at that studio. Gessen’s dispatches are being published in The New Yorker, where Gessen is a staff writer. Gessen left Moscow on Thursday and is speaking to us from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.

For 20 years, Gessen was a journalist in Moscow and had been the chief correspondent for Russia’s leading news magazine until it became impossible to report the real news. After that, Gessen moved to a popular science magazine. In 2013, when it became too dangerous to remain in Russia because of Putin’s anti-gay laws, Gessen moved to New York with their partner and their adopted son and their two other children. Gessen uses the pronouns they/them. They have written extensively about Putin, including in their book “The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin.” Gessen warned about Trump’s authoritarian style of leadership and its parallels to Putin in the book “Surviving Autocracy.”

The interview is not great (which is unusual for Fresh Air); Gessen talks very slowly and as if with difficulty, which is entirely understandable in the circumstances but just not ideal for radio. It’s good that there’s a transcript.

That said…I find it pretty jarring to go from what’s happening in Ukraine and Moscow to luxury pronouns. Using “they/them” is really not ideal for a journalist doing an interview for the simple and non-political reason that it’s confusing. Ordinarily in such an interview “they” and “them” would mean Russians or Ukrainians or refugees or soldiers, not one of the people doing the interview. Also the interview is about Ukraine, not Gessen (and I’m sure Gessen would agree), so making room for the specialty pronouns is just not very appropriate in this context. It’s a bit like pausing to ask “What are you wearing?” It’s extra, it’s non-essential, and therefore in this context it’s frivolous and a bit obnoxious. For all I know Gessen would have preferred to leave it out, and it was NPR or Gross or both who decided to say it. At any rate, I wish they’d left it out.

Another they does an interview.

Kae Tempest is perched at a table outside a station-side cafe, playing with a cigarette. Murphy, Tempest’s alaskan malamute, stirs as I approach, and on clocking me, Tempest returns the cigarette – still unlit – to their chest pocket. For years, Tempest’s long curly barnet was a trademark look. Today, though, wearing white trainers, upturned jeans and a turquoise jacket, their hair is short, a neat fade that, Tempest says, they still occasionally catch themselves admiring.

Got it? Tempest is special. Tempest is a they, Tempest perches and plays and has a malamute, Tempest has short hair.

In August 2020, in an Instagram post, Tempest came out as non-binary. They announced their name is now Kae (pronounced like the letter K), and explained that, going forward, they would be using they/them pronouns. “I have tried,” they wrote at the time, “to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection. This hiding from myself has led to all kinds of difficulties in my life. And this is a first step towards knowing and respecting myself better.” Beyond this statement, however, today is one of the first times they have publicly spoken about their experiences.

So what? Do we have to hear about such experiences from everyone on the planet? We couldn’t even if we wanted to, due to time constraints, but fortunately, we don’t want to.

Tempest dreamed of cutting their hair. “I wanted to, so much,” they say, “that every time I saw somebody with short hair or a fresh haircut, it would physically hurt me.” For years, Tempest felt trapped in their longer locks: everyone said cutting those long curls would be a travesty. It became symbolic: a shield Tempest hid behind, yes, but also representing their ever-present discomfort with expectations of femininity. “I convinced myself I could never risk cutting it,” they say. “I’d think: ‘If I do, will I still be able to go on stage? People will stop listening.’ It’s wild what dysphoria does to you.

“I was resigned to living the life I was in,” they say, “and then maybe at 50 when I stopped having this career I thought I might be able to finally transition. But increasingly I couldn’t bear it.” In January 2020, they chopped their hair short. Their eyes light up when recalling the sense of liberation. And then, the pandemic hit. For the first time in what felt like for ever, Tempest was forced to take a beat. A few months later, they came out publicly.

They chopped their hair short, and then the pandemic hit. Bit of a disjunction there. There’s really no need for that much angst over a woman cutting her hair short. Ever seen photos of Audrey Hepburn? Jean Seberg? Shirley MacLaine? It’s not unknown for women to cut their hair short. I get that it’s more fraught for some than others, and maybe extra fraught for a performer, but still – it’s not really that significant. Encouraging this kind of navel-gazing is a mistake. One might even say it’s Not Helping.

Arbeit macht frei, prostitution is empowering.

A clinic which receives NHS funding has been promoting prostitution as a way for transgender people to pay for their transition treatment, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Being a sex worker ‘can be useful and sometimes empowering’, according to a guide produced by CliniQ, a sexual counselling service for transgender people at King’s College Hospital in London. It adds: ‘It can help us pay for parts of our transition.’

Well of course it can; money is money. It can help pay for, or just pay for, anything; that’s how money works. Robbing banks can help pay for stuff too, unless you get caught.

Entitled Cruising: A Trans Guy’s Guide To The Gay Sex Scene, it advises readers to circumvent men-only restrictions at gay saunas by only performing sex acts ‘without others seeing your genitals’. Experts warned doing so would be committing the crime of sex by deception.

The pamphlet, which features crude sexual language including 22 uses of the words ‘f***’ and ‘f******’ in its 44 pages, focuses extensively on extreme sex acts, including sadomasochism and bondage.

What about the words f* and f**************? If you’re going to be coy about it just don’t mention the word.

‘Sex in public spaces is legal, so long as other members of the public cannot see you,’ it states. ‘Or so long as it is unlikely someone will come across you having sex. For example, having sex in a quiet woodland, away from the road or path, late at night.’

This pamphlet is for “trans guys,” so here it is telling women it’s a good idea to sell yourself in quiet woodlands away from roads late at night.

Kate Barker, managing director of the LGB Alliance, said: ‘We are astonished that a leaflet encouraging vulnerable girls to undertake criminally deceptive and breathtakingly risky sexual acts in gay men’s saunas and quiet woodlands is being endorsed by the NHS.

‘The fact that this ugly and demeaning guide wraps itself in the rainbow flag is an insult to all the same-sex attracted people who are as horrified as we are by the casual homophobia of CliniQ. Encouraging young women to believe they are really gay men is cruel, dangerous and deeply wrong.’

No no no it’s sex-positive and empowring.

Not helping what?

First, to repeat myself, I hate this use of “hit” and “hit out at” and “attack” for argument and disagreement. It frames dissent as physical violence, and that’s not a useful or intelligent way to frame it. Nobody hit anybody, Rowling was not hit, she was not hit out at, she didn’t attack the Scottish government. There’s way too much talk of violence in this discussion already, and newspapers shouldn’t be adding to it via stupid metaphors.

Second, nonsense. Women have rights too and we are allowed to remind everyone of that, and insist on keeping them, and resist efforts to take them away.

Third, yes she is “helping.” Who put Slater and Harvie in charge of who is helping and who isn’t? I’ve just been reading in the archives here from way back in 2010 when science journalist Chris Mooney spent many weeks telling the world that vocal atheists were “not helping” and we vocal atheists spent the same many weeks asking why he was in charge of who was helping and why we couldn’t just decide for ourselves what we wanted to help without being slandered by Chris Mooney for weeks n weeks n weeks. This seems like that all over again. We are “helping”: we’re helping what we want to help instead of what other people want us to help. Sometimes people get to do that. We’re helping each other defend women’s rights. Funnily enough we think we have every right to do that.

Yeeeaaahhhhh not his call.

What gay men do amongst each other is wholly irrelevant to whether or not they get to call women they’re trying to bully on Twitter “babe”. If the woman you’re trying to bully says no, you don’t get to push back because gay men call each other it. Sexism is sexism even when gay men do it.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Incomplete picture.

There are many awareness days related to trans issues, but today’s is very important. Detransition Awareness Day is vital because there are so many people in positions of power being led to believe that something so life-changing as gender identity is a fixed awareness that one is “born in a body that doesn’t match their identity.”

I was at the Seattle Public Library Event sponsored by WoLF in February 2020. After exiting, thanks to police guard we were safe from the frothing crowd who were chanting “No hate, no fear, all genders welcome here” with what I perceived as hatred for the women who spoke and attended.

I met up with a few women who told me that there was a small meeting of people who had been affected by children and teenagers being transitioned early. One of them was a young woman, early twenties, who was a desister. She hadn’t medically transitioned, but she was clawing her way back from believing since she was an early teen that she was a transman. So, at the meeting, there was pizza, and people shared their stories. Some were grandparents of children who were transed very young, and cut off from seeing them because they didn’t want their grandchildren pushed into a process that would alter them irreversibly. Others were parents who had been cut off by their children, their children rejecting them because the children believed they were trans and the parent wanted them to get counseling. Many were detransitioners or desisters who had been rushed into transitioning, with very little thought towards the reasons that they many believe they were transgender.

There’s so much of this “Believe the children, they know who they are.” This was among the stories that were told that night, and we really didn’t learn much from the Satanic Panic, did we? There we were admonished to believe the children, but children are spending so much of their pre-adolescence trying to figure out who they really are and can be easily misled.

When Aaron Rabinowitz talks about Moral Panic in the bathroom bills, he is performing a DARVO trick. There is a moral panic, that if we don’t rush our gender curious kids to trans medically now then they will try to kill themselves. And if the teachers think the parents won’t do this, they must take it on themselves to do the right thing and hide it from the parents.

Gender dysphoria is obviously a real thing. But latching onto the first perceived cure and denying any others (such as working with people to live in a gendered society while also working to break the gender expectations down,) is damaging to so many young people.

And when this moral panic subsides, those who have been medically damaged will not be able to be restored. Breasts can’t be regrown, nor can penises and testes.

Tavris’ article is important and needs to be shared far and wide, to overcome the BS that people like PZ are spreading as “skeptics.”

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Actually the law.

“The process that people have to go through does need to be looked at,” he told The Times. “If you talk to anybody who’s been through the process there’s a real issue about respect and dignity.”

So I wonder if he’s read the Cass report? How long before the continuing scandal and disaster will force him (and others) to moderate and walk back their unqualified support for genderist demands?

He called for a “more considered, respectful, tolerant debate about these issues”. Starmer added: “I don’t think it furthers the interests of anybody to continue the debate in the way that it’s been going on now for some time.”

“Both siderism” strikes again. But only one side has been bullying, threatening, and desperately trying to silence their critics and questioners. Up to now, there has been no “debate” because one side has been demanding (and being given) so-called “rights” at the direct expense of women’s health, safety and dignity, with any resistance and critique being denounced as genocidal bigotry. Women have had to force the issue because so many institutions and authorities have been coopted by genderism. They have forced through trans activist demands behind the scenes, in backroom deals that bypassed the normal processes of discussion, examination and evaluation. What truly “powerless”, “oppressed” or “marginalized” group has ever managed that? What does that say about the actual amount of power and influence these poor, downtrodden snowflakes are capable of wielding? Since when have the powers of patriarchy been so willing to go along with something that wasn’t in their interest? Since when have any movements that threatened the established order of things been handed eveything they’ve asked for, with the protection and power of the police to boot? Please. They’re not a threat to patrirchy, they’re its realization.

Starmer, among others, has been on the side of those trying to force their way past women’s boundaries, and joined in with the vilification of women trying to defend their rights. In decrying the current state of things, he is blandly, and unironically standing with the one side which has dedicated itself to continued vitriol and intimidation against women standing up for women saying, in effect, “LOOK WHAT YOU MADE THEM DO!!”

Another MP saying no. (Usual apologies for linking to Mail but if Guardian won’t report…)

For a woman who, only this week, was reprimanded for wading into the increasingly febrile transgender debate, you’ve got to applaud Tory police and crime commissioner Lisa Townsend for her sheer chutzpah.

…

‘It is not a “niche” issue, it is not “hysterical” for women to be taking to the street about it,’ Lisa wrote. ‘We will not accept this gaslighting from men who keep telling us they are women or from those who enable them,’ she added to her retweet and posted it without a second thought.

Three men, including local Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, complained. The Surrey police and crime panel’s complaints sub-committee found that Lisa had not been ‘dignified or respectful’ to trans people. It demanded that she explain herself to the men who reported her over the tweet.

We don’t have to believe that men can be women, and we don’t have to say it, either.

‘Saying that my words as a woman are disrespectful because I’ve chosen to stand up for women who have been raped and telling me I have to explain myself to three men, particularly a male MP from my own party, who’ve complained about my language, is ridiculous.’

…

According to Lisa, an overwhelming number of her female constituents are genuinely frightened. She says it was the single biggest issue in her inbox when she campaigned to be Surrey’s police and crime commissioner ten months ago.

That’s good to know.

‘It seems perfectly OK, in some quarters, to put up signs saying “Die TERFs” and all the awful, awful things you see, but it’s not acceptable for a woman to say: “I don’t believe transwomen are women. I do believe there’s a difference between sex and gender and that females not just deserve, but have a right, to have our own safety and protected spaces where males should not be allowed.”

‘What many would think is a mainstream view has become something we can’t say without facing this ridiculous process.’

Blunt phoned her to try to get her to stop talking and she explained why no, and she thought they had agreed to disagree.

Mr Blunt, who as well as being MP for Reigate is chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global LBGT+ Rights, called her again shortly after she retweeted J. K. Rowling’s message in December.

Quoting from George Orwell’s 1984, the author had tweeted: ‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength,’ before adding: ‘The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.’

After Lisa’s retweet, which included the hashtag #IStand WithJKRowling, she says Mr Blunt ‘essentially said: “I would like you to stop.” He didn’t reference that tweet. He said: “I’m disappointed you’re still talking about this issue. Please stop.”

No you stop. Stop telling women what they can say.

‘I was frustrated. I said: “Crispin, I’m going to be honest. I’m getting a little bit fed up with middle-aged men telling me I can’t speak about what, for me, is a women’s rights issue and is something constituents are writing to me about.”

‘He said: “In which case, I’m sorry for what I’m about to do,” and ended the call.

‘Nearly a week later, I discovered the “what I’m about to do” was to put an official complaint to the police and crime panel.’

Lisa was in Edinburgh on International Women’s Day when she received the panel’s decision. ‘I wasn’t angry. I just thought it was ridiculous,’ she says, rolling her eyes.

Mr Blunt is one of three men she must write to. A second complainant simply said ‘Lisa Townsend is transphobic’ and the other took issue with Ms Rowling’s tweet.

‘The particular point that Crispin made to the panel was that he’d “counselled me” but I’d done it anyway, therefore he’d had to complain.’

Because men always get to tell women what we can’t say, and punish us if we go ahead and say it.

No, Waterstones. That’s not correct.

Not period. Not end of story. Not true. Being a woman isn’t subjective – note that “identifying as” something is entirely subjective and self-reported and thus not something that anyone else can confirm or deny. Being a woman isn’t like that. Vladimir Putin could identify as a woman; it wouldn’t make him one.

And that arrogant bullying claim not only has nothing to do with feminism, it’s an insult to feminism – so what’s it doing on a table with a “Feminism” sign at Waterstones Norwich? Besides insulting women, that is.

A judge has put a hold on Texas’s “investigate the parents” bill.

A Texas judge on Friday issued an injunction against enforcement of the governor’s order to investigate gender-affirming care as child abuse, handing opponents of the policy a temporary victory.

I don’t know what I think about the Texas bill, but I do know that that first paragraph is already on one side as opposed to neutral. It’s a new and questionable idea that there even is such a thing as “gender-affirming care.” If children started saying they were snakes would it be species-confirming care to cut off all four limbs?

The state Legislature last year failed to pass a bill that would have made it a felony alongside physical and sexual abuse to provide gender-affirming care to minors.

There again – what if it’s not care at all, but reckless and irresponsible at best? What if it’s really not a good idea to encourage children to take puberty blockers? What if it’s better to watch and wait?

The American Civil Liberties Union, which was among those that challenged the Feb. 22 directive, hailed Friday’s court ruling.

“The judge recognized the governor and DFPS’ actions for what they were — unauthorized and unconstitutional exercises of power that causes severe, immediate and devastating harms to transgender youth and their families across Texas,” Chase Strangio, deputy director for Trans Justice with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

Yes but Chase Strangio is a deluded fanatic, so that statement is of questionable value.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who in a non-binding opinion said providing gender-affirming medical care to minors was child abuse, immediately vowed to appeal the injunction.

I don’t exactly think it’s child abuse, because the pressure to adopt these warped beliefs is intense, but I don’t think it’s child help, either.

New sexist pig exactly like old sexist pig.

Don’t you “babe” us you patronizing git.

Does the law actually say trans women are women?

No.

This is a relief to me, because really, who gave the law authority to determine ontology? That would just be weird. The law can define categories for the purpose of a law, but it can’t just bang a gavel and say strawberries are luxury automobiles.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist spelled it out a couple of years ago:

The Gender Recognition Act 2004 does change some people’s legal sex. Obviously the law can’t change anyone’s biological sex. The fact that the law can’t mess with material reality is the point Canute was making when he forbade the tide to come in. But section 9 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 has the effect that some trans women (i.e. the very small number who hold a GRC – only a few thousand to date) are deemed for most legal purposes to be women, although exceptions apply.

Mind you, seeing how it’s been playing out, I think that’s too much too. I think the Gender Recognition Act was a mistake. At any rate the point is the law doesn’t magically change the ontology.

Keir Starmer throws women overboard.

Asked to define a woman, Starmer replied: “A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law. It has been the law through the combined effects of the 2004 [Gender Recognition] Act and the 2010 [Equality] Act. So that’s my view. It also happens to be the law in the United Kingdom.”

It doesn’t “happen to be” the law, it’s a law because people have lost their fucking minds.

You can’t turn men into women by passing laws. You can change definitions under law, but you can’t change the underlying reality. If you want to pass laws that say whales are goldfish, knock your socks off, but whales and goldfish will still be what they are. Some bad laws have been passed, but men are still not women.

The Labour leader called for reforms of the Gender Recognition Act, under which people diagnosed with gender dysphoria who have lived in their acquired gender for at least two years can apply to be legally recognised.

“The process that people have to go through does need to be looked at,” he told The Times. “If you talk to anybody who’s been through the process there’s a real issue about respect and dignity.”

Noted. Now talk to women who have been raped and gone to a rape crisis center only to find that its CEO is a man. Notice that there’s a real issue about their dignity and respect for them.

He called for a “more considered, respectful, tolerant debate about these issues”. Starmer added: “I don’t think it furthers the interests of anybody to continue the debate in the way that it’s been going on now for some time.”

He wants a more considered, respectful, tolerant debate about this in the same breath in which he tells us that men are women. How about some consideration and respect and tolerance for us? Women? Half the population? The half of the population that keeps the whole population going?

Comments have been turned off. Of course they have.

Rowling is more involved by the day.

We. are. organizing.

Sarah Ditum on Labour’s inability to say what the word “woman” means:

Clearly, asking a Labour MP to define “woman” is a reliable way to get them to look silly. And so interviewers are going to keep on doing it. Which means that Labour should, at some point in the past two years, have come up with a one-line answer, if only to get them through media appearances.

…

Because, despite Cooper’s dismissive attitude, the definition of “woman” does matter. It matters for single-sex spaces. It matters for sport. It matters for the language we use to talk about female health. It matters for measuring the income gap, and for monitoring who’s doing more than their fair share of unpaid work in the home. It matters for understanding violence against women. It matters because the law depends on language, and people who pretend to strategic idiocy about the natural and ordinary meanings of words really have no business being lawmakers.

Especially when the word in question names more than half the population those lawmakers are supposed to be making laws for and about. It’s as if MPs and Members of Congress couldn’t say what “people” are.

The Cass report, published this week, vindicated whistleblowers from the Tavistock clinic in London who believed that NHS gender services were offering treatment dominated by dogma about gender identity, and that this was failing children and young people. Cooper is not a stupid woman. (If, indeed, anyone can say what a woman is.) She cannot have missed these stories in the news. She has surely noticed the monstering her colleague Rosie Duffield received for daring to take a different line from trans activists.

That monstering is probably why Cooper was so evasive, but the thing is, it ought to work the other way around. These monsterings should outrage everyone, and prompt a renewed and fierce determination to defend women’s rights in defiance of all monsterings.

Carol Tavris wrote a few weeks ago about the fad for transing and the failure of much of journalism to report on it fully.

An August 6, 2021 episode of WNYC’s “On the Media” illustrates the problem: the hosts focused on efforts “to block access to medical care for trans kids,” the “politics and propaganda behind the recent wave of anti-trans legislation,” and “what the science tells us about gender affirming care in adolescence.” But “On the Media” did not tell the full story. The usually thorough reporters did not invite a cultural historian to wonder why “gender affirming” clinics have proliferated, from only one in 2010 to more than 400 today, offering puberty blockers and hormones to facilitate the change, including helping teenage girls have “top surgery” to remove offending breasts; or why the sex ratio of transgender claims has changed so dramatically. “On the Media,” of all programs, did not even consider the role of the media in generating and perpetuating social contagion effects.

Maybe because they were doing it themselves.

In its most glaring omission, “On the Media” said not a word about the “desisters,” a term often used for those who make a social transition (changing their names and pronouns) but do not persist in having surgery and hormones or changing their gender identity, and often change back; or about the many (possibly thousands of) “detransitioners” who now regret that they had medical procedures. Many of them are bitter and angry that they have had irreversible voice and hair growth changes, underwent surgical procedures that cannot be corrected, and have become infertile. Elie Vendenbussche, in the Faculty of Society and Economics, Rhine- Waal University of Applied Sciences, Kleve, Germany, did an international on-line survey of 237 male and female detransitioners, who reported “a major lack of support” from the medical and mental-health systems and from the LGBT+ community.

The results were illuminating. Fully 45 percent of them said they had not been fully informed about the “health implications of the accessed treatments and interventions before undergoing them.” (An additional one-third felt “partly informed.”)

So only 22% felt fully informed. That’s not good.

They also suffered serious psychological problems — “gender dysphoria, comorbid conditions, feelings of regret and internalized homophobic and sexist prejudices.”¹ “On the Media” did not contact any of the support and advocacy groups that have proliferated — Detrans Voices, Post Trans, and the Detransition Advocacy Network among them. (I had no idea how many of these groups now exist; our leading news media don’t report on them.) But the available research on the harms of premature life-long medical interventions is why Finland and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have stopped routine hormonal treatment of youth under age 18, and put psychological interventions and social support ahead of medical interventions, particularly for adolescents who have no childhood history of gender dysphoria.

The medical interventions should be called something else, really, because they’re medical in the sense of using medical skills and pharmaceuticals but not in the sense of curing or healing or repairing. They’re more like mutilation. FGM is not a medical procedure in the second sense even if it’s done in a brand new OR with all the best equipment.

The fundamental problem, a sure sign that we are in the midst of a social contagion based on pseudoscience and not the emergence of a science-driven medical advance, is that researchers and professionals who want to raise any questions or concerns have been silenced with vehement and often ugly accusations of transphobia and bigotry, their work shut down, some of them fired. Many gender professionals have marginalized, bullied, and tormented their colleagues who disagree. Politically organized “transactivists” protest that any research on, say, factors contributing to the rise of cases of gender transition, the potentially negative consequences of transitioning, or the importance of counseling and treatment before transitioning are indications of the unacceptable idea that gender transition is a pathological problem or disorder. Their second silencing tactic is to conflate psychological interventions with “conversion therapy,” a long-discredited effort to “cure” gay people and turn them straight. Conversion therapy for gay people is cruel and it doesn’t work, which is why it is illegal in many states. But providing psychological counseling before providing irreversible medical procedures for adolescents who are questioning their gender identity is not remotely comparable, especially when the vulnerable young person is also suffering from comorbid conditions, as the vast majority are, including depression, anxiety, and, evidence is now suggesting, autism.

That’s all heresy though.

Julie Burchill holds Laurie Penny’s whiny self-indulgence up for laughter:

Penny also squeals about Western sexism while giving Islamism a hall pass. They once wore a hijab and gushed about how great it felt, while Their opinion on the 2015 Paris massacre was, ‘Racist trolling is not heroism. Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie.’

You’d think the war in Ukraine might have given such alleged empaths a moment’s pause in their navel-gazing and belly-aching, but it’s business as usual. I’ve been suspended from Twitter after saying that unarmed Ukrainians facing down Russian tanks are braver than men who dress up as women. However, I will scatter my pearls before the whiny non-binary and warn Them that the reviews can only get worse.

You would think that, wouldn’t you. If only from motives of self-protection you’d think she’d put the self-drama on hold for a few weeks.

Last year, Penny caused revulsion among actual feminists when commenting on an incident in a California spa, when a woman complained that her young daughter shouldn’t have to share the female-only section of the spa with naked men who identified as women. Penny said that the child should not ‘stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude’. So that’s my advice to Them, on how to deal with negative critical reaction to Their ever-deteriorating work: ‘If you don’t like it, don’t look.’

That’ll be an episode of Even More Complex PTSD.

James Kirkup at the Spectator says it’s a difficult time to be a girl:

In 2019, the Lancet published research showing girls’ rates of self-harm had tripled since 2000. Other studies show girls are much more likely to be depressed or anxious than boys.

I would hate to be a girl in this climate. Porn, “sex work,” giant testosterone-filled “girls” taking all the good parts – no thank you.

On the surface things look pretty encouraging.

They’re more likely than boys to go to university. They have better economic prospects than any generation of females that went before them. Empowered female role models are more visible than ever before, in culture, sport, media, science, business, even politics.

Yet at the same time, girls are growing up in the digital age, where images of what women and girls can (or perhaps should, depending on your view) be are everywhere. From the earliest age, many of those images are strongly sex-based, assigning roles and characteristics to girls because they are girls. You can tell a story here that starts with pink unicorns for toddlers and ends with Instagram and YouTube influencers who can make millions selling an image of apparently perfect, glossy femininity.

Not to mention an image of apparently perfect glossy fucakbility.

Across western societies, the last decade or so has seen a sharp rise in the number of girls presenting with gender-related conditions, sometimes receiving treatment from gender clinics.

Or not so much treatment as “treatment” – interventions that can’t be fully reversed if the girl changes her mind a year or two down the road.

The use of such treatments is controversial and contested. As a result, NHS England in 2019 launched an independent review of those treatments for children and young people, a review later expanded to take in the services that deal with children and gender, mainly GIDS. That independent review is led by Hilary Cass, a retired consultant and former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

An interim report came out this week.

To me, the truly disturbing message that emerges from the interim report is confirmation of just how little is known about the female-born children who are now most of the gender-clinic caseload, and about their treatment and its consequences.

And that is because most of the patchy evidence base on gender issues and treatment is based on people who were born male. And to state a fact that shouldn’t need to be stated, male humans and female humans are different, physically and developmentally. The interim report notes:

Much of the existing literature about natural history and treatment outcomes for gender dysphoria in childhood is based on a case-mix of predominantly birth-registered males presenting in early childhood. There is much less data on the more recent case-mix of predominantly birth-registered females presenting in early teens, particularly in relation to treatment and outcomes.

What could go wrong?