Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on If they cannot answer a simple question.

Would Labour expect to go unchallenged if it had screwed over workers rights in favour of bosses, in the process espousing a mistaken and distorted view of relevant law promulgated by the bosses themselves?

That’s… pretty much New Labour though.

I mean, even from people who support that shift, you get the criticism that pre-Blair Labour “was mired in an ossified form of unionism and leftism that refused to recognise that the world had fundamentally changed. A spent political force facing oblivion” to quote Rob.

And there is some merit to that.

The British economy is 80% service sector. Contrast with 1950, when it was an even split between service sector and everything else. Classical “workers rights” approaches that focus on the shop floor, need to have shop floors to be relevant enough to win elections.

So however one may feel about it, Labour hasn’t really been a worker’s party for decades, to the point where suggesting it should be is controversial within the party.

Labour’s problem is that it is a centrist, not leftist, party. Centrism is often the politics of Nimbyism. This is what it means to be economically conservative, and socially liberal – left only so far as it is not your backyard.

I’m a guy, women’s rights aren’t my backyard. Rapists getting into women’s prisons for example, isn’t going to hurt me much, if I went to prison it would be to a men’s prison and having fewer rapists around would be, if anything, to my benefit in that circumstance.

Women’s sports, are sports I don’t compete in. Any concerns around trans inclusion in women’s sports aren’t in my backyard. I don’t go to women’s toilets unless the men’s side is out of order and there’s a pre-arrangement to that effect, so, that’s not really in my backyard either.

I could very easily proclaim TWAW and the costs of saying that, would fall on someone else. I can proclaim “TERFs” deeply “privileged” because it isn’t my prison, it isn’t my sports, and it isn’t my toilet.

At the same time, I’m relatively economically comfortable with a positive bank balance. I’ve got no debt, I’ve got savings. Raising wages, putting in market protections for local businesses and building a strong social welfare system raises economic demand, which also increases production thus reducing unemployment, but at the cost of higher inflation. If I were in debt, higher inflation would mean the bank eating some of that debt, but as I have savings, that’s not personally desirable for me.

If I was British, I would be the target market for New Labour. Being economically leftwing costs me money, whereas being socially leftwing costs me nothing. Centrism has the profound benefit of not being in my backyard.

Labour cannot campaign on economics, because to do so is to tread in the Nimby’s backyard. Pushing identity bullshit thus has to serve as a means of establishing leftwing credibility in its stead.

The current state of disorder within Labour is a natural result of centrist Nimbyism, and not everybody is a Nimby. To break out of that, requires some serious consideration of what Labour is really about – sans identity issues.

Scientists are trying to get people to wake up and smell the smoke.

I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?

On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.

But the planet is heating faster.

Even limiting heating to below 2°C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the press conference on Monday: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And yet, this is precisely what President Biden, most other world leaders, and major banks are doing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Chase and other banks are contributing to murder and neocide through their fossil fuel finance.

Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk. For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the “business as usual” occurring all around me. It’s so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it’s really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it’s really happening.

You’d think that would be clear enough in light of the wildfires and heat domes and desertification and floods that are already happening, but it seems not.

It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics.

The first cruise ship is due to arrive here in Seattle on April 11. They burn 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day.

Navarro and Scavino:

The House voted on Wednesday to hold two of Donald Trump’s top advisers – Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino – in criminal contempt of Congress for their months-long refusal to comply with subpoenas issued by the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack.

The approval of the contempt resolution, by a vote of 220 to 203, sets the two Trump aides on the path toward criminal prosecution by the justice department as the panel escalates its inquiry into whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

…

The contempt citations approved by the House now head to the justice department and the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, who is required by law to weigh a prosecution and present the matter before a federal grand jury.

Should the justice department secure a conviction against the Trump aides, the consequences could mean up to a year in federal prison, $100,000 in fines, or both – though it would not force their compliance, and pursuing the misdemeanor charge could take months.

They tried to invoke “executive privilege” – you know, that thingy in the bottom drawer that makes it ok to steal an election.

At the business meeting last week where the select committee voted unanimously to recommend that the full House find Navarro and Scavino in contempt of Congress, Raskin delivered an emotional rebuke of the supposed executive privilege arguments.

“This is America, and there’s no executive privilege here for presidents, much less trained advisors, to plan coups and organize insurrections against the people’s government in the people’s constitution and then to cover up the evidence of their crimes.

“These two men,” Raskin said of Navarro and Scavino, “are in contempt of Congress and we must say, both for their brazen disregard for their duties and for our laws and our institutions.”

It all makes me rather emotional too, i.e. ragey.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Lost in the fog, with added emphasis.

… political enemies who care much less about the issue than they enjoy watching Labour fall apart.

Maybe a party whose members and leader are unable, or unwilling, to define one of the classes of people whose protected characteristics are enshrined in UK law isn’t really ready to govern. If they don’t know what a woman is, they’re not fit for office. If they know what a woman is but are afraid to say it then they are even less fit for office. Sometimes standing up and saying “no” is more important than being “kind” (or “kind of scared.”)

Many (if not most) of those asking for Labour’s definition of woman are not “political enemies” but are simply trying to wake the party up. They realize that Labour’s position is wrong and misguided but are unwilling to let it slide. The Labour Party is being held to account by those whom it seeks to represent. Is this not the very heart of democracy? Accountability and representation? If they cannot answer a simple question, if they are willing to give away rights that are not theirs to give in order to avoid pissing off a tiny, aggressive minority making unreasonable and unethical demands, how can they be trusted to govern honestly and openly? How is it that women are expected to sacrifice their own political interests in favour of men who are trying to take their places and spaces? Would Labour expect to go unchallenged if it had screwed over workers rights in favour of bosses, in the process espousing a mistaken and distorted view of relevant law promulgated by the bosses themselves? Not bloody likely. Well, this is the same but worse, because they’re helped to screw over half the population in one go, and they’re too stupid or cowardly to acknowledge it.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand where people get the confidence to talk this kind of confused nonsense.

 Why, at this moment of both national and international crisis, has the media decided that the most important question for a party that hasn’t been in government for 12 years, is a hypothetical one about genitals?

One, they haven’t – media questions are not exclusively about genitals, or gender. Two, news flash: women’s rights still matter.

It’s not really about vaginas, it’s a quest for the “gotcha” moment, the inescapable trap of deliberately twisted logic which merits unpicking.

It’s not really about vaginas perhaps, but it is really about women. If white people were furiously agitating to be “validated” as Black I think Zoe Williams would see the problem, but when it’s men, somehow she can’t make it out through the fog.

Labour’s position has not changed since 2019 – it supports both the reform of the GRA and single-sex spaces. This is the next battleground for gender-critical feminists, who would like to see the party drop its support for reform, on the basis that any such move allows for more trans people – generally cast by some as predatory men – to access single sex spaces. When faced with the question of what defines a man or a woman, Labour is not only being implicitly asked to row back on its own policy, but also to backtrack on current legislation which says that trans men are men and trans women are women, regardless of whether they have undergone medical treatments.

Legislation could “say” that airplanes are oak trees, but that wouldn’t make it true. Trans women are men who want to “live as” women; they’re not literally women.

As things stand now, the government has blocked reforms to the GRA and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has provided guidelines extending the circumstances under which trans people can be excluded from single-sex spaces.

But the issue isn’t about “trans people” being excluded from single-sex spaces, it’s about men being excluded from [some] women’s spaces. That’s not a quibble, it’s essential. The men aren’t being excluded because they’re trans, they’re being excluded because they’re men. Williams frames it as cruel irrational exclusion of trans people, and that’s dishonest.

“Legitimate justifications” now include female-only fitness classes and the toilets of places of worship where it may offend people, on religious grounds, to have inclusive spaces.

There it is again. No, not “inclusive spaces”; toilets where men can intrude on women.

I can’t even wrap my head around the person who doesn’t want anybody trans in their aerobics class…

Again – it’s not the “trans” bit, it’s the male bit.

Labour needs to take a stand based on principles of equality with which they are familiar. They could also maybe learn from their history of being wedged – on Brexit, and long before that, on nuclear disarmament – by political enemies who care much less about the issue than they enjoy watching Labour fall apart.

What principles of equality? What does trans dogma have to do with equality?

When the left is mired up to its nostrils in fantasies sometimes even Boris Johnson gets it right.

Boris Johnson has said he does not “think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events”, amid the fallout from his decision not to ban conversion practices for people questioning their gender.

Well, as we have seen, that all depends on what you’re calling “conversion.” I don’t consider it “conversion” to tell a man he’s not a woman.

Johnson also said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which were “dedicated to women”.

Imagine that. Just imagine thinking a woman in prison shouldn’t have to share a cell with a rapist.

He also insisted it was right to exclude people who were questioning their gender from a long-promised ban on so-called conversion “therapy”.

Or, to translate, he also insisted it was right to encourage people who were questioning their gender to think carefully and talk to a therapist before making irreversible changes to their bodies.

It doesn’t sound so malevolent put that way, does it. Why not talk to a therapist first? Why not think seriously about the possibility of regret down the road?

Johnson said: “I suppose I’d just make a few points: I don’t think that it’s reasonable for kids to be deemed so-called Gillick competent to take decisions about their gender or irreversible treatments that they may have. I think there should be parental involvement at the very least. That’s the first thing.

“Second thing, I don’t think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events. And maybe that’s a controversial thing, but it just seems to me to be sensible.”

The prime minister added: “We will have a ban on gay conversion therapy, which to me is utterly abhorrent. But there are complexities and sensitivities when you move from the area of sexuality to the question of gender. There, I’m afraid, there are things that I think still need to be worked out.”

In other words gender and sexuality are not the same thing, so it’s not just self-evident that they should be bundled together.

It’s bizarre to see BJ talking more sense than the other team, but there it is.

More on Fawcett. Check out their staff – most of them were hired in the last six months. It doesn’t say how long the CEO has been there, but other than the CEO the staffer who has been there the longest (hired in 2016) is…

…a man.

ANDREW BAZELEY, POLICY, INSIGHT & PUBLIC AFFAIRS MANAGER

Andrew joined Fawcett in 2016. He works across the breadth of issues Fawcett campaigns on, developing research proposals, formulating policy based on that evidence, and advocating for change in a lead role within our public affairs team. He has led on work including our Local Government Commission, in the development of our Equal Pay Bill, and on our Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood. Before joining Fawcett he worked for three years in Parliament, including as a policy advisor on work and pensions issues, and for four years in local government including a year spent managing a ‘big data’ team. Andrew holds a Masters in Public Policy from Birkbeck College, where he is also studying for a Law degree in his spare time, which there isn’t much of as he’s also a new dad.

I guess he’s there to make sure Fawcett “balances” women’s rights with those of the people who matter.

Pathetic. The Fawcett Society responds to EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers:

The recently published EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers confirms our understanding of the current law. Providers of single-sex services can restrict or modify access for trans people when doing so is necessary to achieve a legitimate aim, and when the action taken is proportionate in balancing impacts on different groups of women.

But (yet again) the issue isn’t “trans people,” it’s men who claim to be trans women.

But much more to the point – “balancing impacts on different groups of women” shouldn’t have anything to do with impacts on men, including men who claim to be trans women. The set “groups of women” doesn’t include men.

Fawcett supports this position and believe there are occasions where services, in particular those for trauma survivors, should be able to make this decision. We welcome the guide for providing that clarity.

Gee, how nice of it. In some circumstances, especially in the wake of brutal violence, services get to exclude men, but mostly, they don’t.

However, we have some concerns with the guidance. We believe some of the examples that are given to wider service providers as they consider their approaches to the inclusion of trans people are confusing and lack detail. In some cases, we believe the examples used suggest a threshold for the exclusion of trans people that is too low. We are worried that this will have a disproportionate impact on trans people. 

There it is again, that shockingly dishonest obfuscation – all the more dishonest coming from an organization that used to be feminist. They’re not talking about “trans people,” they’re talking about trans women, i.e. men. Isn’t it interesting that this obfuscation is so pervasive. Isn’t it interesting how it betrays the fact that these groups and institutions know they’re stabbing women in the back and are trying to hide both the stabbing and their awareness of the stabbing.

Fundamentally, everyone deserves access to high-quality services and to be treated with fairness, dignity and respect.

No shit, but it doesn’t follow that women don’t deserve access to high-quality services for women. Men can be treated with fairness, dignity and respect without being allowed to invade services for women.

Whilst this is a complex discussion and balancing the rights of different groups of women is challenging, acceptance and support should always be the starting point.  

But men aren’t a “different group of women”; men are men. We don’t have to “balance” our rights with men’s rights. We’re not the dominant group in this particular pairing.

And another thing.

Republican legislators who sponsored the bill emphasized that the punishments outlined were for doctors, “not for the woman”, said the Oklahoma state representative Jim Olsen.

Bollocks. Forcing women to gestate and push out babies they don’t want is extreme torture. It’s beside the point that the bill also punishes doctors, because the whole concept of forced pregnancy is punitive.

Notably, the bill was also unusual for being revived from the 2021 legislative session. During hearings in 2021, Olsen said he felt ending abortion was a moral duty and compared terminating a pregnancy to slavery.

Dead wrong. Forcing women to bear children is slavery – literal slavery. It’s hard labor, it’s not paid, it’s against their will, it’s unwanted, it’s coercive, it’s painful – it’s slavery. Olsen doesn’t care because it will never happen to him.

The war on women continues to rage.

Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.

And this doesn’t make forced pregnancy the law in Oklahoma, it also catches Texas women in its trap.

More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas outlawed abortion after six weeks gestation in September 2021.

One way or another they will force women to stay pregnant when they don’t want to.

Before former president Donald Trump took office, federal courts routinely blocked abortion bans. However, Trump was able to confirm three conservative justices, which tipped the balance of the supreme court to the right.

Donald Trump who brags of grabbing women by the pussy, Donald Trump who bragged of never doing anything with his children when they were babies and laughed at the idea of walking them in the park, Donald Trump who has been accused of sexual assault by more than one woman, Donald Trump who leers at his own daughter and brags of how “hot” she is, Donald Trump who tells us which women are too ugly for him to molest, Donald Trump who is apparently never photographed with a grandchild in his arms or on his lap (have you ever seen such a photo?), Donald Trump who insults and ridicules women every chance he gets – he has succeeded in forcing thousands of women to stay pregnant or spend a lot of money and time getting an abortion. No skin off his ass is it.

“These legislators have continued their relentless attacks on our freedoms,” said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, a related reproductive rights advocacy group.

“These restrictions are not about improving the safety of the work that we do. They are about shaming and stigmatizing people who need and deserve abortion access.”

Women, god damn it. It’s women who are forced to stay pregnant, women whose lives are ruined. If it were “people” this wouldn’t be happening.

Trump has been trying to tell historians what to say about him.

As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”

Point missed. He was “not so great.” He hired the not so great people. He was the record-breakingly bad president.

I am the editor of a scholarly history of Trump’s term in the White House, the third book in a series about the most recent presidents. A few days after The New York Times reported on the project, Trump’s then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and me—something that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama had done. For someone who claimed indifference about how people in our world viewed him, Trump was spending an inordinate amount of time—more than any other ex-president that we know of—trying to influence the narratives being written about him. My co-authors and I weren’t the only people he reached out to. According to Axios, Trump conducted conversations with more than 22 authors, primarily journalists, who were working on books chronicling his presidency.

Of course he did. He’s a narcissist, and he’s clueless. Put the two together and you get this absurdity.

But if anything, our conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his dealmaking prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical. He demonstrated a limited historical worldview: When praising the virtues of press releases over tweets—because the former are more elegant and lengthier—he sounded as if he himself had discovered that old form of presidential communication. He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.

He’s both evil and stupid. There’s nothing covert about it.

He seemed to measure American politicians primarily by how they treated him. Even many of those elected officials who criticized him in public sang a different tune, he insisted, when the television cameras were off. Trump vented about governors who continually expressed during private meetings how impressed they were with his COVID policies (“I hope you can get the tapes,” Trump said) yet proceeded to “knock the hell out of me” in public: “So unfair.”

It occurs to me to wonder how this plays out in real life. I’ve known some vain self-centered people, as we all have, but I can’t say I’ve ever experienced anyone who carried on as grotesquely as Trump does as a matter of course. It’s just so odd. It’s as if he has the tiniest amount of awareness of other minds of anyone in human history – just no idea that everybody doesn’t love him the way he loves himself. Person woman man camera tv.

The current issue of Free Inquiry arrived yesterday. One of the esteemed editors found the perfect illustration for a column I wrote.

But “conversion therapy” is the wrong label. Why does the BBC keep using it?

More than 100 organisations have pulled out of the UK’s first ever global LGBT+ conference over the government’s stance on conversion therapy.

The UK government had promised to ban conversion therapy but last week decided to exclude conversion therapy for transgender people in the ban.

Probably because it’s not conversion therapy. Sexual orientation is not the same as “gender identity.” The two are different. The most noticeable and consequential difference is that sexual orientation entails no surgical or pharmaceutical interventions at all. This discrepancy is why medical professionals need to be very cautious about agreeing with the self-diagnoses of adolescents who say they are trans: agreeing could be the first step to drugs or surgery or both that will cause irreversible changes to the teenage bodies that get them. Being lesbian or gay? Not so much. Literally speaking, not at all. No drugs, no surgery, no nothing, just live your life.

This is why the BBC really needs to report on the subject truthfully.

But who are the reporters on this story? Josh Parry, LGBT producer, and Lauren Moss, LGBT correspondent. Is it the LG part or the T part? Here again, the two need to be uncoupled. T isn’t the same as LG, and it isn’t much like it, either.

According to NHS England, conversion therapy tries to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

Then NHS England is wrong, because that’s apples and oranges.

But the LGBT+ Consortium, an umbrella body for LGBT+ community organisations, has issued a statement branding the government’s U-turn on conversion therapy “abhorrent”.

Eighty-two member organisations of the consortium have signed an open letter, which is written by LGBT+ charity and campaign group Stonewall, pulling out of the conference.

Stonewall is not the solution here, Stonewall is the problem. Mashing the T together with the LG is a mistake.

A Terrence Higgins Trust spokesperson said: “Trans rights are human rights – progress without or at the expense of trans people is not progress. We stand together and will not be divided.”

But it’s not at the expense of. Not rushing to provide surgeries or puberty blockers is not an injury to trans people and people who think they’re trans but change their minds. It’s first do no harm.

Boris Johnson has previously called the practice of conversion therapy “repulsive and abhorrent” and had promised plans to outlaw it on a number of separate occasions. However the plans to do so have since changed; meaning the legislation will mean conversion therapy to attempt to change people’s sexuality will be outlawed, but those practices carried out to try to change people’s gender identity will not.

But what if there’s no such thing as “people’s gender identity”? What if there’s just a spectrum of feelings about one’s sex or gender or both? What if some or most or even all such feelings are highly malleable and temporary? What if they’re social and cultural rather than physical? What if they’re not actually a good reason to make drastic irreversible changes to one’s body? What if it really is better to be slow and cautious rather than speedy and reckless?

Responding to the legislation on Friday, Nikki da Costa, a former director of legislative affairs at No 10, said elements of the law would have had “profound consequences for children struggling with gender dysphoria”.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Doctors, therapists and parents would be deterred from exploring with a child any feelings of what else may be going on for fear of being told they’re trying to change a child’s identity”, adding that it was “deeply concerning”.

And she’s not wrong. Even if she’s one of Boris Johnson’s very best friends, she’s not wrong.

So now let’s read the Equality and Human Rights Commission guide.

Who this guide is for

This guide is for service providers (anyone who provides goods, facilities or services to the public) who are looking to establish and operate a separate or single-sex service.

There was a time when that mostly meant service providers who excluded women from men’s clubs and bars and gyms, which was not only sexist in itself but also an extreme barrier to women working in various professions and businesses where a lot of the networking and jockeying for position took place in…clubs and bars and gyms.

Now it doesn’t mean that any more, now it means service providers who exclude men from women’s toilets ffs. There’s precious little executive networking that happens in toilets; the only reason men want to invade women’s toilets is in aid of some form of spying or assault or both. It’s beyond maddening that we’re having to fight for the right to say no to men peering over the partitions at us.

Summary

The Equality Act allows for the provision of separate or single sex services in certain circumstances under ‘exceptions’ relating to sex.

To establish a separate or single-sex service, you must show that you meet at least one of a number of statutory conditions (set out in this section of the guide) and that limiting the service on the basis of sex is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. For example, a legitimate aim could be for reasons of privacy, decency, to prevent trauma or to ensure health and safety. You must then be able to show that your action is a proportionate way of achieving that aim.

There are circumstances where a lawfully-established separate or single-sex service provider can prevent, limit or modify trans people’s access to the service. This is allowed under the Act. However, limiting or modifying access to, or excluding a trans person from, the separate or single-sex service of the gender in which they present might be unlawful if you cannot show such action is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. This applies whether the person has a Gender Recognition Certificate or not.

It just makes me tired. We shouldn’t have to defend it. We shouldn’t be required to “show such action is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.” Excluding men should just go on being the default. I don’t care how they “identify.” I just don’t. I can’t. They don’t care about how we prefer to pee away from men, so why should I care how they identify? They care only about themselves, so why should I care about them?

When considering how your service is provided to trans people, you must balance the impact on all service users and show that there is a sufficiently good reason for excluding trans people or limiting or modifying their access to the service.

In other words, women have to “balance” our rights with the purported rights of men who say they are women. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

Updating to add a very on the mark observation from Sastra.

Trans Twitter urges veto on…well, on following the law.

Likely to be found unlawful on judicial review…according to some people on Twitter.

Well but this one Twitter account says it’s likely to be found unlawful on judicial review, so surely that’s safe enough, isn’t it?

Lotta fans, at least.

Succinct, maybe, but is it true?

Yes ask Jolyon Maugham first, he knows everything.

On pronouns:

If it’s all well-intentioned then why should we not adopt the pronoun game as a universal custom? There are several reasons why I believe we should not: because it undermines self-confidence and resilience by asserting that one’s self-concept is rightly dependent upon external-validation, it endorses and encourages narcissistic behavior, and it creates a world of bizarre and unnecessary confusion for children around the topics of sex and gender. Put simply: it does more harm than good both to those it seeks to aid and everyone else.

Especially everyone else, and there are a lot more of us, and we’re not the ones making bizarre demands to change the language in order to “center” us.

Why are we not asking deeper questions about what is happening here? If some individuals are unhappy enough with their secondary sexual characteristics that they engage in a radical form of self-rejection through a spectrum of cosmetic and medical interventions, and require consistent affirmation from others in order to complete the illusion that their mental health will suffer… is pretending to see what they want us to see really helping them to become healthier and happier or is it merely an act of codependency which enables dysfunction and fosters fragility?

Good question. I suppose that’s why the issue has been (forcibly) made so political as opposed to psychological. If it’s political it’s about what everyone else does, and it can be enforced via bullying and expelling and firing. If it’s psychological it’s about what the “trans” person does, and there’s nothing to enforce on everyone else. Telling everyone else what to do is fun.

By teaching people to dictate how others speak about them in the third person, we are also coaching them to adopt narcissistic traits such as interpersonally exploitative behavior (I am using you as a mirror to reflect the image of myself I wish to see), entitlement (you owe it to me to affirm what I say), lack of empathy (I don’t care what you really think/feel), and arrogance (I demand that you bend to my will or I will say you are harming me).

Truth. I wish more people would point that out. This is where much of the confusion about “transphobia” comes in, I think. It’s not phobia of the trans part, it’s phobia of the narcissism and entitlement and arrogance.

The BBC puts it more sharply.

After a contentious approval session where scientists and government officials went through the report line by line, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published its guidance on what the world can do to avoid an extremely dangerous future.

First, the bad news – even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.

This finding has drawn the ire of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

I find it pretty annoying myself. I won’t be here for the worst of it, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it, oldies remaining cheerful because it won’t bite us in the ass, at least not as hard as it will bite people who will still be alive in 2040, 2060, 2080. The people who could do something are the ones who won’t still be here, and the people who can’t do anything are the ones who will pay the price. It’s grossly unfair.

The good news is that this latest IPCC summary shows that [keeping temperatures down] can be done, in what Mr Guterres calls a “viable and financially sound manner”.

But keeping temperatures down will require massive changes to energy production, industry, transport, our consumption patterns and the way we treat nature.

And we’re not making those changes. We’re making some small ones around the edges, but we’re not even giving up luxuries like gigantic cruise ships.

There was Oradour-sur-Glane, there was My Lai, there was Srebrenica, there was Amritsar, and now there’s Bucha.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that Russia’s public image is now one of torture and execution after the retreat of Russian forces in the town of Bucha led to the discovery of the killing of hundreds of civilians.
…

Ukrainian officials said the bodies of 410 civilians have been found in Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces. Satellite images taken late last week show a 14-metre (45ft) mass grave in Bucha near the Church of St Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints. Maxar, the company that took the pictures, said the first signs of excavation for a mass grave there were seen on 10 March, several weeks into the invasion.

Witnesses of alleged atrocities in Bucha told the Guardian that Russian soldiers had fired on men fleeing the town, and had killed civilians at will. Taras Schevchenko, 43, said Russian soldiers had refused to allow men to leave through a humanitarian corridor, instead shooting at them as they fled across an open field. Bodies, he said, were scattered on the pavements, with some of those killed having been “squashed by tanks … like animal skin rugs”.

…

Russia denied responsibility for the killing of civilians. Its defence ministry described the photos and videos from towns such as Bucha as “another staged performance by the Kyiv regime”, echoing a similar claim made after the bombing of a children’s and maternity hospital in Mariupol.

That’s what they all say.

As always, the word is that we can do it if we really get serious and hurry up, and the obvious problem is that we’re not going to.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, warns that unless countries drastically accelerate efforts over the next few years to slash their emissions from coal, oil and natural gas, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, will likely be out of reach by the end of this decade.

That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse — grow considerably. 

And what goes along with worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse? Mass migrations, and resistance to mass migrations, and wars and genocides. In a world that’s already broken. It will be horrible. It will be Mariupol everywhere and Treblinka everywhere.

But the task is daunting: Holding warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius would require nations to collectively reduce their planet-warming emissions roughly 43 percent by 2030 and to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s, the report found.

Yeah. Do we look as if we’re doing that? Do we look as if we’re going to be doing that starting today?

By contrast, current policies by governments are only expected to reduce global emissions by a few percentage points this decade. Last year, fossil fuel emissions worldwide rebounded to near-record highs after a brief dip as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Governments probably can’t do anything about it without being overthrown and replaced by governments that will undo any doing.

The report, which was approved by 195 governments and lays out strategies that countries could pursue to halt global warming, comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused oil and gas prices to skyrocket, diverting political attention from climate change. In the United States and Europe, leaders are focused on shoring up domestic fossil fuel supplies to avoid painful price spikes and energy shortages, even if that means increasing emissions in the short term.

But of course there is no “short term.” There’s no short term in the sense that “we can keep on with the fossil fuels for just this one short term and then we’ll immediately slash them by 43 percent and the planet will be saved.” How long would that short term be exactly? How would we know? What would be different such that an immediate switch to using roughly half of what we’ve been using would be quick and painless? Don’t make us laugh. It’s not possible. Animals don’t evolve to take the long view, not even as long as the next eight years. When heating costs double from one month to the next it’s game over.

But even if that goal becomes unattainable, scientists said, it will still be worthwhile for countries to slash emissions as quickly as possible to prevent as much warming as they can. Every additional rise in global temperatures increases the perils that people face around the world, such as water scarcity, malnutrition and life-threatening heat waves, the U.N. panel has found.

And what goes with them: mass migrations, wars, genocides. I think the panels and journalists should include that part, even though it’s not as trackable as water scarcity and the rest.

Joan Smith on Twitter v Rowling:

One of the biggest lies about the conflict between feminists and trans activists is that ‘the debate is toxic on both sides’. It’s trotted out in just about every article that takes a supposedly neutral position, even though the authors never produce any evidence for this slur on women who’ve never threatened anyone.

OR called anyone the equivalent of “cunt” and the rest of it.

Team Trans on the other hand is not so reasonable.

JK Rowling is a favourite target and now a music video has emerged in which trans campaigner Faye ‘Trust Fund Ozu’ addresses the author with the chilling words ‘hope you fit in a hearse’. The video also features vocals about ‘killing TERFS’.

JKR tweeted about it in a jokey vein, but the rest of us get to skip the jokey part.

When the actor James Dreyfus reported the post to Twitter, the social media platform failed to uphold his complaint. Even more bizarrely, it claimed that the alleged death threat hadn’t ‘broken its safety policies’. It’s a colossal piece of cheek from a platform that regularly hands out suspensions to women who state facts, such as saying trans women are not biological women, or ‘misgender’ trans athletes like Lia Thomas. 

Dreyfus made exactly this point in his response: ‘So, death threats = Good. Saying “women are women” = Bad. Congratulations, Twitter Support. You’ve hit rock bottom. Seek help.’ He’s right, of course, and it’s clear that platforms like Twitter are penalising gender-critical women for what is, since Maya Forstater’s successful appeal, protected speech.

I can add a piece to the puzzle here, because I too reported that tweet and in my case Twitter agreed.

I don’t know why I got a different response – maybe we ticked different boxes. At any rate there’s still a pattern of turning a blind eye to threats and verbal abuse for This One Set of Special People.

What this episode tells us, however, is not just that we are dealing with entitled, narcissistic individuals. We already knew that. It’s becoming clear that there has been a collective decision that trans people are the most vulnerable group in society, regardless of what the statistics tell us, and anyone who speaks for them (or claims to do so) is endowed with the same mantle of victimhood. 

Hence they’re given a free pass even if they are gloating about the imagined death of a children’s author or clutching a baseball bat and threatening to murder feminists. I’ve seen it so often that I’m more shocked by the widespread refusal to acknowledge the hateful reality than the threats, which have been documented on many occasions.

Same. People I used to consider friends not only buy into the absurd dogma but also shrug off threats and insults that used to infuriate them when aimed at women or atheists or argumentative bloggers.