The lies they tell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aka unsafe for women.

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

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

He must have been a TERF.

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you Councillor Cotton.

How to get a free “prom dress”:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do women get? Charlies in their changing rooms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hell he has. See above.

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

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

Julie Bindel gives us the back story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we realize we can team up and fight back.

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

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

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

Anyone know who that is? I missed it.

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

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

To sum up: They’re Just Jealous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And particularly so in the case of India Willoughby.

H/t latsot

Enough of all this seriousness.

Sweden has made The Big Swerve.

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

And that’s extremely bad news.

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

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

Monitoring the rebellious women 24/7.

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

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

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

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

It’s not fake. Just so you know.

“Veronica Ivy” enters the race. Burnaby Velodrome.

Updating to add, h/t Dave Ricks:

Oh really.

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

The Guardian kept it secret. So interesting.

No, that’s wrong.

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

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

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

Mmmmmm point missed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Uh huh. Radical feminists gonna eat yo mama.

Details on Blunt’s booboo:

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

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

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

His retraction tweet says, idiotically:

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

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

So the three MPs who resigned can return.

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

Well he’s sorry you’re upset.

Now there’s a headline:

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

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

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

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

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

I guess he didn’t want to bias himself.

Back atcha, “sister.”