An editorial by swimming champion Nancy Hogshead-Makar:

As an Olympic champion and as a civil rights lawyer, I can assure you that there is nothing fair about transgender woman Lia Thomas competing for the University of Pennsylvania in NCAA swimming.

…

I swam on the U.S. National Team for nine years, from 1976–1984, the same years that East German swimmers dominated women’s competitions by cheating with anabolic steroids.

I was able to win three Olympic gold medals and a silver medal because the East Germans boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

We all knew they were cheating. The boycott announcement was a relief; I knew I’d have a fair shot at winning.

And she did win, and the Olympic gold medals changed her life.

Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination, permits sex-segregation in sport – which means that, for the most part, men compete against men, and women compete against women.

Title IX gave me a fair opportunity to win and set records, as well as access to money, accolades, and leadership opportunities.

If Congress and courts had forbidden sex-segregated sports, the way race and religious segregation is prohibited, I would have qualified for my high school team, but I’d never have been the Hall of Famer that I became.

Because women are smaller than men, the way domestic cats are smaller than tigers. They’re not inferior, they’re smaller. That’s why sex segregation in sport is both fair and necessary.

As a civil rights lawyer, I run Champion Women, a non-profit that provides legal advocacy for girls and women in sports. We produce data — for athletes, families, alumni and donors – which demonstrates just how badly 90% of colleges and universities are discriminating against women.

In total, women are denied over 183,000 opportunities to play collegiate sports, they’re denied over a billion dollars in athletic scholarships, and hundreds and millions of dollars in treatment, meaning women aren’t being given equal facilities, locker rooms, medical care, publicity, travel, and so forth.

I’ve never met a single female athlete that couldn’t list the ways they’re getting second-class treatment as compared to their male football or basketball players.

In those 38 years, I’ve never heard a single man say, ‘Oh you women face such overwhelming sex discrimination throughout society, particularly in sexual harassment and violence. Here, take our athletic facilities and scholarships.’

Quite the opposite.

The unwritten rule is that women’s sports can exist, so long as not a single male is harmed by women’s inclusion.

But when it’s a whole bunch of women pfffffffffffff who cares.

And yet, notice that women are expected to graciously move over and let trans athlete-inclusion change the meaning of the ‘women’s sports’ category.

Expected to and bullied to and forced to. Thomas’s team-mates are being forced to by their university. It’s disgusting.

It is sexist; we’d never allow the meaning of NCAA ‘men’s sports’ category to change so that current NFL and NBA teams could be included.

We’d never allow 25-year-old men to compete in boy’s high school events. And we would never tell those boys to just ‘work harder’ if they wanted to win.

Unfair, isn’t it.

There’s a bit of a glitch though. Amnesty US said it four days before Moyet did, and I don’t see any pile-on.

Very odd. I guess maybe organizations are allowed to say it, but women are not? I guess women are not allowed to say we have human rights because that doesn’t center people who aren’t women?

Apparently it’s now verboten to say woman’s rights are human rights.

Who was the target of the ugly and abusive pile-on? I gather it was Alison Moyet, who deleted the verboten tweet.

The struggle continues.

Ho yus, the Vikings were very up to date on their gender identity beliefs as any fule kno.

Transgender warriors were among the Vikings who ransacked Scotland more than 1,000 years ago, a leading historian believes.

Definitely. There were lots of trans women among the ransackers, staying in camp to make soup and knit woolly hats.

Sacha Coward, who specialises in gender and sexuality, said it would be “a mistake” to believe that Viking society subscribed to traditional gender roles, after recent discoveries suggested that some celebrated warriors were female.

“The stories you hear are of fierce hotblooded warrior men, of violence and pillage,” said Coward. “This notion can make it hard for us to look at the 8th to 11th centuries in Scotland without a strong cisgender and heterosexual bias. It can be a challenge to see the roles of gender non-conforming people, to pull apart the understanding of gender, sex and identity as they really were for the people who we now call Vikings.”

What’s a strong cisgender bias? Is it a “bias” to be aware that humans, like all primates, are sexually dimorphic?

“At the very least, men and women in Viking society could break from traditional constructs of male and female roles and it is possible that we are talking about people who would today identify as transgender or nonbinary.”

Ohhh that’s how he got there. How very stupid. There appear to have been women warriors, therefore Vikings didn’t have rules barring women from fighting…therefore the women warriors were “transgender.” By all means translate different customs among people 12 centuries ago into the idiotic jargon of contemporary pretend-activists. Please, draw up the Viking gingerbread person without delay.

“We know that the gender identity of a person in the Norse period was often tied to their role in Viking society, not just the biology they were born with,” said Coward. “Queer theory is an important part of archaeology and can help us understand the complexity and diversity of past societies.”

Having different rules about what the two sexes are allowed to do does not rely on anything called “queer theory.” How the rules did and didn’t vary is a fascinating subject, but the word “queer” doesn’t need to be ritually invoked to make sense of it.

Also, who says Sacha Coward is a “leading” historian? Not anything I can find via Google, that’s for sure. He calls himself a freelance museum professional, which doesn’t sound like leading historian at all.

What do words mean – it’s such a puzzle. We have to start anew every morning, figuring out their meanings for ourselves.

The first tweet in the series says they include men in their for women feminism. It’s so important to make clear and underline that their feminism is for men that they say that before they say anything else. The way they say it has a bullying note, too – it’s clearly stated that by “women” they mean anyone who says “Yep I’m a woman,” so don’t you go pretending you didn’t realize, Karen. In short it’s pre-emptively hostile, which wouldn’t make me want to join them if I were in Scotland.

Anyway, they’re telling the truth – it is right there in their constitution.

D. Membership

Membership is open to all self-identified women who agree with the aims of the Association.

Imagine an organization for workers. membership in which is open to all self-identified workers. Imagine such an organization filling up with rich bosses who swiftly outnumber the workers and prevent the organization from doing anything in solidarity with workers. Imagine the same switcheroo with LGB people, or immigrants, or people of color, or atheists, or people with disabilities. Imagine all political organizing being sabotaged by this “all who identify as” nonsense – it wouldn’t take long at all.

It’s a brilliant wheeze; it’s just too bad the suckers haven’t seen the trick yet.

So anyway, at least it’s an excellent way to wring money out of people.

Last month Trump got dressed up and went to a party in Naples, Florida.

There, a long red carpet marked the pathway into a Christmas-decorated hangar filled with supporters of Mr. Trump who had paid $10,000 to $30,000 for the privilege of attending a party and taking a photo with him.

…

But the money raised did not go to Mr. Trump’s political operation. Instead, Mr. Trump’s share of the evening’s proceeds went straight into his pocket, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

Well, yeah. If you know there are people willing to pay 30 grand to take a photo with you, what are you supposed to do, just throw away that whole opportunity? Get real.

Multiple attendees said they bought their tickets from a private company, Whip Fundraising, whose founder, Brad Keltner, has asserted that “the lion’s share” went to charity. But the website advertising the event listed no charitable cause. And Mr. Keltner, reached by phone, declined to discuss how money was distributed.

Charitable cause charitable shmause. Never mind that, the money WENT TO CHARITY. You know, those big buckets on every street corner labeled CHARITY. This Keltner guy drove from corner to corner dropping it in himself personally. Charity was very happy about the whole thing.

In the year since Mr. Trump has left the White House, he has undertaken a wide-ranging set of moneymaking ventures, trading repeatedly on his political fame and fan base in pursuit of profit.

What else is he going to do? Read?

He has gone on an arena tour with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, where a backstage “V.I.P. package” sold for more than $7,500. He has published a $75 coffee-table book, after being paid a multimillion-dollar advance by a new publishing company co-founded by his eldest son. He has turned an online Trump store into a MAGA merchandiser, with his company sending marketing missives to people on his 2020 campaign’s email list.

That store is now selling red “Make America Great Again” hats for $50 each — a $20 markup from the price currently offered by his political action committee — with all proceeds going to a Trump-owned company.

It’s all so dignified, isn’t it?

His wife, Melania, has gotten into the act, too, auctioning off online collectibles and scheduling her own big-ticket event in Naples this April, a “tulips and topiaries high tea,” with V.I.P. packages reaching $50,000 and an undisclosed portion going to charity.

.001%?

Other past presidents have cashed in financially after leaving the White House. Barack and Michelle Obama reportedly sold a joint book deal for $65 million. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s speechmaking after leaving the White House was estimated to have netted them $153 million by the spring of 2015, when Mrs. Clinton announced her own run for president. George W. Bush has been a mainstay on the speaking circuit, too.

The Obamas wrote the books though. Trump is just selling is divine presence.

Mrs. Trump is now selling tickets to the April “high tea,” with organizers saying that some of the profits will benefit an initiative of her “Be Best” endeavor called “Fostering the Future,” meant to provide computer-science scholarships to young people who have been in foster care.

There was no indication of how much of the proceeds Mrs. Trump herself intended to pocket. Florida requires any organization that raises charitable contributions in the state to register. No charity with the name “Fostering the Future” or “Be Best” is registered in Florida.

Asked about the solicitation, officials at the Florida agency that oversees charitable fund-raising said they also could not find evidence of the required state registration and had opened an inquiry as a result.

“Consumer Services Division is currently investigating whether this event involves an entity operating in violation of Chapter 496, Florida Statutes,” Erin M. Moffet, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement, referring to the state law requiring charities to register before soliciting money.

Ok ok ok so there’s no such charity but she’ll set one up just as soon as she gets the time.

Remember that time Trump stole money from a cancer charity? Had to pay it back and pay a fine? But this time will be different, for sure.

Trevor Phillips on Stonewall’s attacks on the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, starting with wondering what has happened to what used to be the gay rights movement.

Today, that gay rights movement seems a shadow of itself, preoccupied by the intricacies of a language despotism that has emerged from the faculty lounges of minor North American universities. The latest step, a call for the UN to revoke the status of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, of which I was the founding chair, is baffling. Who could have imagined that LGBTQ+ campaigners would so contort themselves that they are petitioning a body which is advised on human rights by countries that stone women and imprison gay men?

As we know, it’s about gender recognition and access to women’s spaces.

When we created the EHRC we insisted on its independence, not just from government but from sectional interests and powerful lobby groups too. I know that this infuriated some racial and religious groups, who never stopped trying to get me sacked. The problem is that for these sectional interests, independence meant doing what they wanted. They regarded any consideration of the needs of others as a betrayal of their right to shape the world exactly to their desires, and anyone who did not do their bidding as a ‘phobe’.

That’s trans activism right there – it’s peculiarly bad at considering the needs of others. Since in this instance “others” are about 99% of humanity, it’s odd that the activism has such passionate fans and allies.

The trans extremists threaten not only the standing of the LGBTQ+ movement, but the hard-won gains of the anti-discrimination movement of the past 50 years. To start with, the point at issue is not compassion for people in pain, nor the rights of trans women and trans men, which are clearly laid out in law. What is being sought by a small minority is the eradication of the very notion that women exist. What the small minority of largely ‘natal men’ campaigners actually want is for sex to be declared a matter of the imagination – specifically their own.

If these fantasists got their way any individual could declare themselves any sex – or none – at any time. Unfortunately for this group, the basis of discrimination law is that people have characteristics which lead to others unjustifiably depriving them of opportunities. Remove this capacity to claim discrimination and any remedy against injustice becomes impossible to enforce. So much for pay gap reporting or claims for equal pay.

But what does that matter compared to the thrill of Validation?

Funny, or no?

Critics may have raved about This Is Going to Hurt, the television adaptation based on Adam Kay’s memoir about life as a junior doctor at the sharp end of maternity healthcare.

The response has been less rapturous among mothers, however. Many viewers praised the series, starring Ben Whishaw, for its dark humour and unflinching portrayal of NHS maternity services. But midwives and women said that the male doctor’s wisecracks as his patients faced life-or-death situations were “misogynistic” and “unfunny”.

The director, a woman, said she wanted to keep it real, but many women chose different terms.

They claimed that the “condescending” attitude of the lead protagonist reminded them of the traumatic experiences of childbirth. Anita Singh, a critic for The Daily Telegraph, said that anyone who had had a traumatic birth should “avoid it like the plague”.

…

Milli Hill, an author and founder of the Positive Birth Movement, said that the lead character’s attitude towards women in his care was “nasty”. She said: “Kay doesn’t realise that what he is exposing is that paternalistic, misogynistic attitude where women are objects in the background and the doctors are the celebrity lifesavers. It is trauma and I don’t find it funny. In his defence, the system does dehumanise people and people who are working in it are going to begin to use humour to deflect from their difficult feelings.

“I’ve spoken to a lot of midwives over the past ten years, and they say it’s very difficult to carry on being caring when you’re under all that pressure, you’re overstretched, overworked and you can see people suffering and can’t help. It would be progress if this were a programme saying, ‘This is wrong, what can we do to change it?’, but it’s celebrating it as a joke.”

Well, you know – women. They’re funny, aren’t they.

Foxy Maugham seems to consider Ben Hunte a reliable source, and a Conservative peer warns him that the record shows he’s not.

The BBC had to remove large parts of Hunte’s article on the Keira Bell puberty blocker ruling after complaints of inaccuracies. Hunte left the BBC to work for Vice.

Foxy threw his weight around.

Not everyone is impressed with Foxy’s approach.

Charles Windsor identifies as a guy with medical expertise, and he doesn’t hesitate to use his notoriety and money to thrust his fake expertise on the world. Edzard Ernst writes:

Yet, his relentless efforts are not appreciated by everyone (another British understatement!). There are those who view his interventions as counter-productive distractions from the important and never-ending task to improve modern healthcare. There are those who warn that integrating SCAM [so-called alternative medicine] into our medical routine will render healthcare less efficient. There are those who claim that the Prince’s preoccupation with matters that he is not qualified to fully comprehend is a disservice to public health. And there are those who insist that the role of the heir to the throne does not include interfering with health politics.

And those who say all of the above.

Charles Windsor could after all have gone to medical school (assuming he’s clever enough to pass the exams) and gotten the appropriate qualifications to instruct the world on medical subjects, but he didn’t do that, so what gives him the right to leverage his fame to meddle in the subject? It makes as much sense as Trump suggesting we inject ourselves with bleach.

I have observed Charles’ efforts around SCAM for the last 30 years. Occasionally, I was involved in some of them. For 19 years, I have headed the world’s most productive team of researchers in SCAM. This background puts me in an unique position to write an account of Charles’ ‘love affair’ with SCAM. My recently published ‘unauthorised biography’ is not just a simple outline of Charles’ views and actions but also a critical analysis of the evidence that does or does not support them.

I want to read that.

There’s a Guardian series: Living in a woman’s body. Of course you know what comes next: they get a man to talk about living in a woman’s body.

For the most part, our bodies are arbitrary. We get the body we get at birth: our eye colour, our hair colour, our skin colour. We have no say in those things at the moment we are born but, talking to my friend, I realised that subsequent changes are within our grasp.

Some are, some aren’t. You can’t make yourself taller or shorter. (There are ways of adjusting height a little bit but they’re horribly drastic. Not recommended.) You can’t make yourself older or younger. You can’t add arms or legs. You can’t swap heads. You can’t change sex.

None of us are beholden to our bodies. That is not to say that our bodies aren’t vital; they are. Being a woman – cisgender or trans – can feel like you are being set up to fail from the start, and our bodies often affect how well we are able to function within society.

No. He’s not a woman, and if he felt as if he was being set up to fail from the start, it’s not because he’s a woman. It’s not a matter of “our bodies” because his is a man’s body.

But I believe in individual bodily autonomy; a refusal to let the system predetermine or limit your choices is one of the ways we attack patriarchal structures.

No. There is no “we” there, because he is not a woman. He accepted a slot in a series about women, and he talked about himself in a piece about women. We are not a “we” with Juno Dawson.

Tony Blair still knows who women are.

When he was leader, there were no arguments about sex and gender, trans rights and toppling statues. Starmer will have to go into battle over the culture wars, he says. “The polls might say voters don’t care but if you dig a little deeper, what they are really saying is we don’t like all this stuff that is being shoved at us.”

I assume he is going to cite the third way again, but Blair comes down firmly on the side of the author JK Rowling. “They [voters] don’t want a situation where women can’t talk about being women. I have this conversation quite often with Labour people and I know their inclination is to walk round this issue, but I am telling you to go right into it and resolve it in a way that makes it absolutely clear where you stand. That is how to shut down the Tories on it.”

He is risking the ire of the trans lobby now. “Of course, we shouldn’t be transphobic and we should have equal rights for trans people. But equal rights doesn’t mean you can’t use the phrase ‘pregnant woman’. If you went to Sedgefield and had that conservation, they would think you were bonkers.” The younger generation, he admits, think differently. “Leo always says to me, ‘Don’t go there, Dad. There are feelings and there are facts, but right now feelings are more important.’ ”

It depends on what the feelings are, and anyway the feelings are about the facts – there is no crisp division between them. Feelings of rage that women will keep insisting on their own rights are not more important than facts about who is and who is not a woman. To put it another way: trans people aren’t the only people with feelings, women have some too, and we have very strong feelings about being disappeared by human rights organizations.

But he would never have therapy, he told me two years ago. “I just think if you’re not careful you get obsessed with introspection and it’s also because, in the work I do now, when I go and visit these countries where kids will be growing up in a family where at least one of the siblings has died of a childhood disease and the parents are scraping money together and living day by day, you kind of think the West’s desire to be endlessly self-absorbed is not very healthy.”

Yes you kind of do. And of course the two are deeply intertwined. The whole idea of being in the “wrong body,” of literally being the sex you’re not, requires a huge substructure of self-obsession to hold it up. There’s a lot to be said for just taking some things as written and doing something else with your life.

No, trans women don’t experience misogyny, because they’re not women. They may experience fear and/or hatred of trans people, but they don’t experience hatred of women, because of not being women.

Men like Montgomerie want to steal everything that’s ours. On principle.

The ACLU is really leaning into this Erase Women campaign. It has a page for Abortion is Essential: Stories of Liberation, which continues the Delete Women program.

The ability to decide whether and when to have children is essential to allowing people to control their own lives and futures. For many, having access to affordable abortion care opens the door to fulfilling educational and career goals, better parenting, staying true to gender identities, and other critical parts of life that everyone should have the ability to choose for themselves.

Freedom to decide whether and when to have children is important to men too of course, but not in the up close inside your body way it is to women. And “staying true to gender identities” is just the usual boring jargon, thrown in to nag us about not forgetting that which we are never allowed to forget.

This month, we’re launching a storytelling series in partnership with We Testify, an organization devoted to uplifting the voices of people who have had abortions.

And ignoring and insulting the half of humanity who needs them.

There are five stories. Of course one of them is by a woman who identifies as a man.

There’s a page on how to talk about abortion at the dinner table. Spoiler: by not mentioning women.

When it comes to discussing abortion access, the focus should remain centered on the people who need, or will need, this critical care — and the direct harm forced pregnancy places on lives.

Women, they mean; women’s lives, they mean.

Is there any other oppressed / disadvantaged / subordinated group being systematically and deliberately erased this way? Hidden among “people” and “lives” instead of being named? I sure as hell don’t know of any. It’s intensely insulting, so human rights groups and the like know better than to do it…except, now, when it comes to women. Suddenly half of humanity, the source of all humanity, doesn’t get to have even a word for itself.

Despite how anti-abortion politicians may frame it, forced pregnancy is not some political talking point: Forced pregnancy is taking away a person’s constitutional and human right to control their body and their future.

A woman’s. It’s not just a person’s in general, it’s a woman’s in particular. This is something that can’t be done to men – it’s an injustice done to women. Name us. I don’t care what Chase Strangio says; name us.

Denying someone abortion care has devastating and lasting consequences for the pregnant person — it can jeopardize their health, economic well-being and ability to determine their own future, for not only themselves but their family.

Six. Six times in that one sentence they erase women from the very role that has made them subordinate.

It goes on and on and on the same way, all down the page. It’s a massive betrayal.

The ACLU has a fundraising ad on Facebook that links to a quiz about abortion rights. You know what happens next.

4. In what ways are states trying to force people to remain pregnant?

What they conceal and deny by doing this is the power aspect, the dominance-submission aspect, the inequality aspect, the systemic arrangements by which men get to tell women what to do but women don’t get to tell men what to do, the centrality of reproduction and pregnancy in the domination of women by men. What they conceal and deny by lying about who gets pregnant is the political aspect of abortion restrictions. The ACLU makes it all look random by telling the lie that people in general are forced to remain pregnant. This idiotic dishonest abusive “activism” is erasing women and feminism from the public discourse entirely, and most of the left is cheering it on.

That’s not the only one, either. Of course it’s not.

Forcing patients to make extra unnecessary trips to the clinic

… examples of other restrictions or policies that also force people to remain pregnant.

Abortion bans disproportionately impact people who are:

Black people and other people of color

And then they confront us head-on:

9. True or False: Forced pregnancy only impacts women.

Of course when you click true they inform you you’re WRONG it’s FALSE.

Trans and nonbinary people can also be forced to continue a pregnancy.

Idiots – and misogynists.

10. How can you fight forced pregnancy and help ensure that people can get an abortion if they need one?

Not by pretending that it’s not a denial of women’s rights, that’s for damn sure. Idiots.

I never got around to this yesterday and that just won’t do.

What we need is more gun battles:

A Republican Senate primary candidate in Arizona has been condemned for a “disgusting” campaign ad in which he shoots at lookalike actors portraying Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and incumbent Arizona senator Mark Kelly.

Jim Lamon, an energy executive, shared the ad on Twitter, saying it would be aired at this year’s Super Bowl.

Lamon would face Kelly in a general election in the autumn should he secure the Republican nomination.

Kelly is the husband of former Democratic congressman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was shot in the head in 2011 while greeting constituents outside of a local grocery store.

It’s Lamon’s pinned tweet.

Hur hur, good old-fashioned showdown, where people shoot each other. If only all of life were like tv westerns from the 1950s.

Criticism towards the ad has been swift, with many people pointing out other recent instances of violent imagery used by members of the Republican Party. Last November, Paul Gosar, Republican representative for Arizona, was officially censured by the House after sharing an animated video depicting him killing the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Biden.

Not to mention that little incident on January 6, 2021.

Stonewall and The Good Law Project are really determined to make sure women have no rights that would trump the invented “rights” of men to invade all our spaces, take all our prizes and jobs, destroy our sports, and bully us into silence.

Britain’s human rights watchdog faces a legal challenge to its status over a row about transgender rights.

A row over “rights” that aren’t “rights” at all.

In documents shared exclusively with the BBC, campaigners say they want the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s status as an independent group revoked. It comes after the EHRC was criticised for asking Scotland to pause its plans to make it easier for people to change their sex on their birth certificate.

But hey guess what: there are problems with forcing everyone to pretend that men are women if they say they are. Quite a few problems.

LGBT charity Stonewall, backed by the Good Law Project, has drawn up a submission to the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, calling for the EHRC to lose its “A rating”.

This would prevent it from being able to make representations at the UN Human Rights Council, or its committees on human rights.

Jolyon Maugham is shockingly determined to destroy women’s rights once and for all.

Jolyon Maugham, of The Good Law Project, told BBC News: “The EHRC is subject to a level of oversight and micro-management from the department which is just not consistent with being a UN Human Rights Institution.”

Jolyon Maugham suffers from a level of misogyny which is just not consistent with labeling himself Good.

Nancy Kelley, CEO of Stonewall, told the BBC she believed there was “credible evidence” that the EHRC no longer met the criteria of a national human rights institution.

Nancy Kelley is happy to see women’s rights ground to powder.

Yup yup yup that’s all fine, this mediocre male swimmer can pretend to be a woman and compete against women so that he won’t be mediocre any more, no problem whatsoever. Nobody will be harmed except women so full speed ahead guys.

Penn swimmer Lia Thomas will be allowed to compete at the 2022 women’s swimming and diving championships as long as she meets the NCAA’s current testosterone thresholds.

This despite the fact that everyone knows testosterone is not like a lamp or a food processor – it doesn’t just stop when you switch it off. Most of the benefits of male puberty are permanent, and women don’t have them. The NCAA knows this, so it’s just saying “Fuck women, we don’t care.”

Ah what a brilliant invention, how odd that no one’s ever thought of it before. A private army which will “apprehend” all the politicians and media people who “have been found to have committed crimes.” This will go very well, there will be no problems at all.