What he said.

Never mind that privileged cis girl who got raped, worry about the trans girls instead!

It’s funny, because I don’t remember the mainstream media ever being this attentive to feminist concerns.

Finally, a non-Fox-adjacent source: Newsweek:

Several parents have demanded that Loudoun County school board’s superintendent resign over allegations that the school district covered up two sexual assaults alleged to have occurred on school grounds.

…

In an interview with The Daily Wire, Scott Smith—a father who was arrested at a previous Loudoun County School Board meeting on June 22 after a debate over a draft policy on transgender and nonbinary students’ rights escalated— alleged that his daughter was sexually assaulted at Stone Bridge High School by a student allegedly dressed with a skirt on May 28.

During the June 22 meeting in which Smith was arrested after being dragged out, superintendent Scott Ziegler dismissed any concerns about assaults on school grounds allegedly committed by transgender students.

That’s not necessarily what the allegation is. The point is not that the alleged rapist is trans, the point is that a policy that allows male people to use the toilets meant for female people is a gift to rapists. The point is that the female people who need those segregated toilets don’t know who is trans and who isn’t, and that they shouldn’t have to risk it or worry about it.

“To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” he said.

Which was a big honking lie.

“I think it’s important to keep our perspective on this, we’ve heard it several times tonight from our public speakers, but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”

Again: not the point. The predator student doesn’t need to be trans, the problem is the freedom to bounce into the girls toilets because skirt.

Five months later, another alleged sexual assault by the same teenager took place at Broad Run High School in October.

…

During Tuesday’s meeting, a number of parents expressed their concerns over the alleged assaults while calling for superintendent Scott Ziegler to stand down.

“How do you expect parents across this county to drop off their kids and entrust you all to keep them safe when you’ve shown on more than one occasion you are not up for the job,” Monica Sadeghi said, via 7News On Your Side.

“When the Catholic Church passed predator priest from parish to parish the walls came eventually crashing down on them. And they were finally held accountable for the abuse. When is doctor Ziegler and this board going to be held accountable?” added Theresa Lieberman.

It’s the Catholic church all over again.

Smith told The Daily Wire that the suspect raped his daughter in the girl’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn.

He alleges the student took advantage of the school’s Policy 8040, which was passed in August to allow students to use their name and gender pronouns, and permit “gender-expansive and transgender students” to use school facilities such as locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond to their “consistently asserted gender identity.”

That can’t be right. The (alleged) Stone Bridge rape happened in May, which is before August, when the school’s policy was passed. The student can’t have taken advantage of a policy passed in August to commit a rape in May. It’s part of the horror of this story that the school board passed the policy after the rape. Months after it.

At the Glinner update, ripx4nutmeg tells us of a story that the left-of-Fox news media so far refuse to touch.

First, a little history. In August, the Loudoun County School Board, a group of nine people who manage 94 public schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, passed a gender identity policy to allow boys to use facilities for girls, such as restrooms, if they identify as girls, and for sex-based protections for girls in sports to be removed. Seven of the nine members of the board voted for the policy.

Team Fox reported on it, Team Left of Fox ignored it. Lefty feminists have nowhere to go these days. The last 50 years might as well not have happened.

Now go back to the distant past a couple of months before the Loudoun County school board told boys to feel free to invade girls’ toilets and locker rooms, when there were news stories about an angry man being dragged away by police from a Loudoun County school board meeting. This is before the “go ahead and use the girls toilets, boys” decision.

We now know that the man in the picture is Scott Smith, and he was dragged away from a meeting this June, just days after his daughter was allegedly brutally raped by a boy wearing a skirt in a girls’ school toilet, in late May.

This happened BEFORE the board voted to make it even easier for boys to access girls’ spaces.

I didn’t know that until reading nutmeg’s piece. Breathtaking. “Oh, a boy raped a girl in the girls’ toilets? Well let’s make that easier for the boys, shall we? Fabulous.”

Meanwhile they’d tried to bury the whole “he raped her in the toilets” story.

According to the report, other parents were told an incident had occoured but there was no mention of sexual assault. Smith was told his daughter had been physically assaulted, not sexually, and staff told him it would be handled internally, without the need for police involvement. 

He was enraged by that decision and challenged them in person on it, which led to the school board – which had refused to call the police when a pupil had been raped – calling the police because the father of the victim had made a scene. This, however, led to his daughter being taken to hospital where it was confirmed that she had been sexually assaulted.

A few weeks later at the school board meeting, Loudoun County School Superintendent Scott Ziegler said: “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms … the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”

During the same meeting, Smith allegedly revealed what had happened, only for a well known ‘activist’ to tell him his daughter was lying and that she would destroy his business. Enraged, he began to swear at her, which led to the police very publicly dragging him away and charging him with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The county prosecutor, who knew about the allegations surrounding Smith’s daughter, then allegedly pushed for him to be jailed.

I can’t fathom this. Just cannot get a grip on it, any more than if it were a greased pig. The school board wants to make schoolgirls vulnerable to boys in the girls’ toilets. It wants to so eagerly, so almost lustfully, that it lies about a rape that has already happened in the girls’ toilets.

The boy, who’s been described as someone who occasionally wears dresses, has since been charged with two counts of forcible sodomy; one of anal sodomy and one of forcible fellatio, and the court hearing was due to take place this month.

A few days ago the boy was arrested again – for sexual battery and abduction on another girl at another public school, just 2.5 miles away, in an incident that allegedly took place earlier this month. It’s no longer clear if the court case will go ahead this month, and the latest arrest appears to be the reason why the whole story has come to light in the last few days.

Breathtaking.

Susanna Rustin at the Guardian was thinking the feminism-transism standoff was starting to ease a little, but now she isn’t. The mainstream types are too close to the loonies for that to be the case.

Starmer’s recent comments on the Andrew Marr Show, along with remarks by the new Green party co-leader Carla Denyer, make it clear that they too believe that gender-critical feminists’ ideas are beyond the pale. Asked by Marr whether it is transphobic to say that only women have a cervix, a reference to a comment made by Labour MP Rosie Duffield last year, Starmer replied: “It is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.” Not only does Starmer disagree with Duffield’s use of the word “woman” to refer to biological sex rather than gender identity; he thinks women who hold such views should keep quiet. Denyer, meanwhile, called the gender-critical gay and lesbian rights charity LGB Alliance a “hate group”.

Quite. They’ve turned their backs on women in favor of cossetting gender-fanatics. Half the population, the half that ensures there is a population, meh, but men in lipstick taking women’s places at the Olympics, stunning and brave.

In common with others, including the philosopher Jane Clare Jones, I also see a connection with the environment. I think there are parallels between the failure to address the implications of our planet’s finite resources and our dependence upon it, and the idea that human potential is boundless. While I want people to be free to live as they choose, I also believe that human bodies have limits. And I am concerned about the influence on young people of the idea that, with the aid of medical technology, these can be transcended.

That, yes, and along with that there’s the disproportion – the urgency of our predicament on this cooking planet compared to the triviality of any one person’s idenniny. Gender dogma is intensely annoying because of this conceited “we can do anything” grandiosity, and also because of its adolescent selfishness and Look At Me-ism. I have looked at you, over and over, and all there is to see is self-centered dramatics. The longer this goes on and the more it escalates, the less possible it is to respect anything about the belief system.

Continuing with Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review of David Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe:

Pius XI – formerly Achille Ratti, librarian, mountain-climber and admirer of Mark Twain – was elected Pope in February 1922, eight months before Mussolini bullied his way to the Italian premiership. For 17 years the two men held sway over their separate spheres in Rome.

They met only once, but there was a huge amount of back-channel communication.

Mussolini saw that he could use the church to legitimise his power, so he set about wooing the clergy. He had his wife and children baptised. He gave money for the restoration of churches. After two generations of secularism, there were once again to be crucifixes in Italy’s courts and classrooms. Warily, slowly, the Pope became persuaded that with Mussolini’s help Italy might become, once more, a “confessional state”.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. Trump isn’t really a believer, of course, but he was happy to pretend when it served his purposes.

Kertzer demonstrates that the Pope’s failure to protest effectively against the fascist racial laws arose not simply from weakness, but because antisemitism pervaded his church. Mussolini scored a painful hit when he assured Pius that he would do nothing to Italy’s Jews that had not already been done under papal rule. Roberto Farinacci, most brutal of the fascist leaders, came close to the truth when he announced: “It is impossible for the Catholic fascist to renounce that antisemitic conscience which the church had formed through the millennia.” And Catholic antisemitism was thriving. Among Pius’s most valued advisers were several who – as Kertzer amply demonstrates – saw themselves as battling against a diabolical alliance of communists, Protestants, freemasons and Jews.

To put it another way, Catholics and fascists had and have a lot in common.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett at the Guardian in 2014 reviews a book on the pope’s sinister pact with Mussolini.

In 1938, Pope Pius XI addressed a group of visitors to the Vatican. There were some people, he said, who argued that the state should be all-powerful – “totalitarian”. Such an idea, he went on, was absurd, not because individual liberty was too precious to be surrendered, but because “if there is a totalitarian regime – in fact and by right – it is the regime of the church, because man belongs totally to the church”.

Attaboy, that’s putting it out there.

The Pope told Mussolini that the church had long seen the need to “rein in the children of Israel” and to take “protective measures against their evil-doing”. The Vatican and the fascist regime had many differences, but this they had in common.

Naturally. I doubt that Mussolini came to the idea entirely independently – the Catholic church has been steeped in anti-semitism all along.

Kertzer describes something more fundamental than a church leader’s strategic decision to protect his own flock rather than to speak up in defence of others. His argument, presented not as polemic but as gripping storytelling, is that much of fascist ideology was inspired by Catholic tradition – the authoritarianism, the intolerance of opposition and the profound suspicion of the Jews.

Quite so.

To be continued.

Much proud of TheySelf.

Oh good, wot’s it say?

Introduction

Trans liberation is part of feminism.

Ooh bad start. No it isn’t. Feminism is about fem – i.e. women. Trans liberation is a completely different issue, and in practice vehemently hostile to women, especially feminist women.

Fighting for autonomy and freedom must be a fight for everyone, and there should be no room for transphobia or TERFs in feminist organising.

Bad second sentence, in fact lousy rotten second sentence. Fighting for women’s autonomy and freedom is women’s fight, and we’re not required to staple other fights onto ours. Also, autonomy and freedom in this context need to be carefully defined. It’s not a legitimate “freedom” to pretend to be a woman and force your way into women’s spaces and jobs and feminism. Get out. Feminism is ours and trans people don’t get to help themselves to it.

The “guide” doesn’t get any less stupid after that.

I remember when I liked Feminist Philosophers.

How fabulous of them.

Abigail Shrier’s article on the two doctors of transgender medicine who aren’t so sure any more has been getting attention, and in light of the WPATH and USPATH announcement that only doctors should be talking about the subject, the article is helpful. (H/t Sackbut)

For nearly a decade, the vanguard of the transgender-rights movement — doctors, activists, celebrities and transgender influencers  — has defined the boundaries of the new orthodoxy surrounding transgender medical care: What’s true, what’s false, which questions can and cannot be asked. 

They said it was perfectly safe to give children as young as nine puberty blockers and insisted that the effects of those blockers were “fully reversible.” They said that it was the job of medical professionals to help minors to transition. They said it was not their job to question the wisdom of transitioning, and that anyone who did — including parents — was probably transphobic.

And “probably transphobic” generally means also “deserving of swift and ferocious punishment.” This vanguard has done its best to make it impossible to question the wisdom of transitioning, and to treat people who do question it as murderous, sadistic, deliberately cruel, monstrous. This framing that people who question the wisdom of transing are the worst people has not receded or weakened in the slightest.

But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic. 

In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women.

Anderson wanted to write about it in the NY Times, but the Times told her it wasn’t interested. Cool cool, it’s just a matter of the futures of thousands of adolescents, so who cares.

On some issues, including their stance on puberty blockers, they raised concerns that appear to question the current health guidelines set by WPATH — which Bowers is slated to lead starting in 2022. 

WPATH, for instance, recommends that for many gender dysphoric and gender non-conforming kids, hormonal puberty suppression begin at the early stages of puberty. WPATH has also insisted since 2012 that puberty blockers are “fully reversible interventions.” 

Anderson and Bowers both have some doubts about that now.

For decades, psychologists treated [gender dysphoria] with “watchful waiting” — that is, a method of psychotherapy that seeks to understand the source of a child’s gender dysphoria, lessen its intensity, and ultimately help a child grow more comfortable in her own body. 

Since nearly seven in 10 children initially diagnosed with gender dysphoria eventually outgrew it — many go on to be lesbian or gay adults — the conventional wisdom held that, with a little patience, most kids would come to accept their bodies. The underlying assumption was children didn’t always know best.

But in the last decade, watchful waiting has been supplanted by “affirmative care,” which assumes children do know what’s best. Affirmative care proponents urge doctors to corroborate their patients’ belief that they are trapped in the wrong body. The family is pressured to help the child transition to a new gender identity — sometimes having been told by doctors or activists that, if they don’t, their child may eventually commit suicide.

No pressure though.

How very convenient.

The Vatican has sovereign immunity that protects it from being sued in local courts over sexual abuse cases, the European Court of Human Rights said in a chamber ruling on Tuesday.

Why? Why does the Vatican have sovereign immunity?

It dismissed a case brought by 24 French, Belgian and Dutch nationals, who said they were sexually abused by Catholic priests when they were children.

The class-action suit sought €10,000 compensation for each victim but the Ghent Court of First Instance said in 2013 that it did not have jurisdiction over the Holy See. The applicants had argued that they had been deprived of access to a court.

The European court agreed with the Belgian court that the Holy see enjoyed “diplomatic immunity” and “state privileges under international law”.

Sure, a small neighborhood of Rome has “diplomatic immunity” and “state privileges” because Mister God said so, it’s written down right here. Because of this immunity it gets to rape kids whenever it feels like it.

It’s not the final word though.

The European court’s judgement is not final, a press statement explained. Any party to the case can request that it be referred to the Grand Chamber of the Court within three months.

Do that.

This is a medical issue, a scientific issue, all these outsider non-medical people shouldn’t be talking about it because they don’t have the expertise. WPATH says so.

The United States Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH) and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) stand behind the appropriate care of transgender and gender diverse youth, which includes, when indicated, the use of “puberty blockers” such as gonadotropin releasing hormone analogs and other medications to delay puberty, and, when indicated, the use of gender- affirming hormones such as estrogen or testosterone. Guidelines for the assessment of transgender and gender diverse youth, as well as for the use of pubertal delay and gender affirming hormone medications have been published by reputable professional bodies, including the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and the American Psychiatric Association.

USPATH and WPATH support scientific discussions on the use of pubertal delay and hormone therapy for transgender and gender diverse youth. We believe that such discussions should occur among experts and stakeholders in this area, based on scientific evidence, and in fora such as peer-reviewed journals or scientific conferences, and among colleagues and experts in the assessment and care of transgender and gender diverse youth. USPATH and WPATH oppose the use of the lay press, either impartial or of any political slant or viewpoint, as a forum for the scientific debate of these issues, or the politicization of these issues in any way

But wait. Yes we need medical expertise on medical issues – Anthony Fauci rather than Tucker Carlson, for instance. But there’s a step prior to that – a step where people decide what should be done about a psychological state currently called gender dysphoria. That step is not solely about medical expertise. Medical expertise can tell us what “pubertal delay” and “hormone therapy” will do, but it’s a much broader discussion that figures out whether anything should be done about gender dysphoria and whether or not the anything done should be medical as opposed to therapeutic or cognitive or social or an array of other approaches.

It’s not a purely medical judgement to say that puberty blockers will fix or alleviate the symptoms of gender dysphoria, because the category is broad and expansive and subjective.

In short the two groups with a vested interest in “treatment” of trans people have…a vested interest. They have a bias toward medical intervention, and there are other people and groups that have serious questions about whether medical intervention is always necessary, is ever necessary, does more good than harm, and so on. Those questions are not purely medical and cannot be closed to “the lay press” or the lay anyone else.

What’s awesome about that?

Foundation Beyond Belief on Facebook:

Volunteer network team Atheists United just shared these awesome pics with us of their members participating in the October Women’s March for Reproductive Rights!

Awesome? Men demanding “inclusion” in women’s marches for reproductive rights, yet again?

Really not seeing the awesome.

H/t Sackbut

Kathleen has closed her Twitter, I hope temporarily, and the Sussex UCU has deleted its statement, but Kiri Tunks hasn’t.

Let’s look at that first sentence in the third paragraph again.

Public discourses regularly devalue the lives of trans and nonbinary people and appeals to both employment rights and academic freedom are often instrumentalised in this context

That’s a very remarkable thing for a union to say. It has that whiff of “white women’s tears” contempt that we’ve become so accustomed to lately. Employment rights and academic freedom are supposed to be “instrumentalised” i.e. used to protect the academic worker; that’s what they’re for. It’s so revealing that these pathetic quislings frame that as illegitimate and Karenish.

The Guardian has a weaselly piece on the Sussex snafu.

Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor targeted by activists for her views on gender identification, has said she fears her career at Sussex University has been “effectively ended” by a union’s call for an investigation into transphobia.

No, she hasn’t, that’s not what she said. If you can’t even get the lede right, take a sick day so that someone else can do it. The “she fears” part is sheer invention.

Sussex’s chapter of the University and College Union (UCU) has urged the university’s management to “take a clear and strong stance against transphobia at Sussex”, and undertake an investigation into “institutional transphobia”.

Yes but it said a lot more than that, and that particular summary makes the Sussex UCU statement sound much more reasonable and even-handed than it is.

However, the university said it would not agree to the union’s call for an investigation.

A University of Sussex spokesperson said: “We have acted – and will continue to act – firmly and promptly to tackle bullying and harassment, to defend the fundamental principle of academic freedom, to support our community and continue to progress our work on equality, diversity and inclusion. We care deeply about getting this balance right.”

The bullying and harassment were done to Stock, not by her. The Guardian probably knows this, but didn’t spell it out in the article. This is why I call it weaselly.

After last week’s protest, Adam Tickell, Sussex’s vice-chancellor, gave public support to Stock, saying: “We cannot and will not tolerate threats to cherished academic freedoms and will take any action necessary to protect the rights of our community.”

But the Sussex UCU statement, signed by the branch’s executive, said the university’s leaders had failed to “uphold the institution’s stated values by ensuring that the dignity and respect of trans and non-binary staff and students, and their allies, are enshrined at the core of the university’s culture”.

The Guardian doesn’t pause to ask why the dignity and respect of trans and non-binary staff and students and their allies should be enshrined at the core of the university’s culture. It doesn’t pause to ask why trans people should be treated as the most urgent social and political issue of the time, and the most deserving of exaggerated respect and coddling and worship.

It added: “We do not endorse the call for any worker to be summarily sacked and we oppose all forms of bullying, harassment, and intimidation of staff and students.”

Says the Guardian, as if that were a generous concession. The Guardian can’t be so stupid that it doesn’t spot the obvious trap. It would spot it in a heartbeat if it were Boris Johnson saying it about someone else. The UCU doesn’t endorse summary firing but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t endorse non-summary firing. That one word “summarily” is their escape clause. The Guardian has to know that perfectly well. Fucking weasels.

The University and College Union has issued a statement endorsing the Sussex UCU statement, which UCU General Secretary Jo Grady has (of course) retweeted. (I think it’s safe to assume she approved it or wrote it in the first place.) It too is a disgusting, backstabbing, crawling, scab-embracing statement.

The statement (the Sussex one) is of course emphatically NOT “clear that UCU is not calling for any staff to be dismissed from their post.” On the contrary it’s clear that they are, in a passive-aggressive semi-deniable way. The word “summarily” is doing all the heavy lifting here – Sussex UCU frowns on staff being summarily fired. Slowly fired is quite all right, like for instance once it becomes clear that the union washes its hands of the member of staff.

All this for the sake of men who claim to be women.

Originally a comment by Djolaman on All on the rainbow.

It’s remarkable, isn’t it? If you’re under 16 then there are hardly any consequential decisions which you can make you yourself in the uk. You can’t sign a contract of any kind, get a loan, own property, leave school, consent to sexual activity, work more than 12 hours a week, get a tattoo, get a piercing, drink alcohol, get married, be tried as an adult in a criminal case, be sent to an adult prison, live alone, drive any kind of vehicle except a pushbike, receive any inheritance that isn’t managed by a trustee, view or appear in sexually explicit material, open a bank account, act as legal guardian for a child or undergo elective cosmetic surgery.

Some of these things, (bank accounts, piercings,) you can do with parental consent, others (driving, inheritance, pornography) have higher age limits of 17 or 18, which parental consent can’t overrule. The common thread linking all of them is that they’re decisions which can go badly wrong. Taking out a loan you can’t repay is a huge problem, and it’s rightly felt that children need to be protected from the consequences of making those kinds of decisions.

Yet looking at that list there are only one or two items where the potential downside is as stark and unavoidable as the decision to remove or mutilate your genitals or breasts, making yourself infertile and developing a lifelong dependence on continuous medical interventions. But as we all know that is the one enormously significant, irreversible, life altering decision that there is a strong push to have handed over to children, ideally without parental oversight or indeed knowledge. This is at an age where the most important long term decision most people have made is whether to continue with history or geography for GCSE. Utterly incredible.

Breaking news. Bad breaking news. Disgusting breaking news.

Sex advice for lesbians! From an expert!

Defining “lesbian sex” is no easy feat. Most commonly, the phrase is used as a porn search term to help people find content featuring two (or more) cisgender women.

But this is not an accurate conceptualization of lesbian sex. Why? Well, for starters, it suggests that only cis-gendered women get to participate in lesbian sex, which is untrue. Lesbian is not defined as cisgender women interested in cisgender women, but as non-man who loves, dates, and fuck other non-man.

Really??? I did not know that. I love learning new things. All this time I thought lesbian was defined as women attracted to women. I feel so stupid for not realizing it means non-men rather than women.

So any non-binary person, transwoman, agender, and a gender-expansive person who claims the label “lesbian” can have lesbian sex—not just cisgender women.

So there, cisgender bitch Karens, you evil greedy bitches trying to hog lesbian-being just for your bitch selves. Men can be lesbians!!!

Second, it implies that everyone engaging in certain sex acts or with certain bodies or gender(s) is a lesbian, which is inaccurate. Because again: The only thing that makes someone a lesbian is that they self-identify as lesbian.

Literally the only thing. 6’5″ Joe who weighs 300 pounds and cuts down trees for a living is a lesbian if he says he is.

Someone who is bisexual, omnisexual, heterosexual, asexual, or of any other sexuality, could enjoy, in theory, sex acts labeled “lesbian sex acts.”

If an asexual person enjoys sex acts, how is that person asexual? I want to believe, but some of this is a little confusing.

For the purposes of this article, we are defining “lesbian sex” as sex between two (or more) non-men of any sexual orientation exploring their bodies together for the sake of pleasure.

Why non-men as opposed to women?

I wonder if the author, Gabrielle Kassel, has any sex advice for non-women.

Owen Jones quote-tweeted a woman who is worried about her 16 year old daughter, whose friends are encouraging her to think she’s trans.

I’m not sharing his tweet but here’s what he said:

Some of those anti-trans activists you see online inevitably end up having trans children.

And when they fail to affirm their children for who they are, they risk causing them massive lifelong damage in the form of mental distress and all of its often terrible consequences.

Not a decent thing to do to a woman worried about her kid. The comments underline why.

Let’s talk about toys.

Lego has announced it will work to remove gender stereotypes from its toys after a global survey the company commissioned found attitudes to play and future careers remain unequal and restrictive.

Researchers found that while girls were becoming more confident and keen to engage in a wide range of activities, the same was not true of boys.

Yes we know how that works. Girls don’t get called “wimps” for playing with boys’ toys. To put it another way, girls playing with toys coded “boy” are leveling up, while boys going the other direction are of course leveling down.

Seventy-one per cent of boys surveyed feared they would be made fun of if they played with what they described as “girls’ toys” – a fear shared by their parents.

Sissy. Sissy sissy sissy; nobody wants that.

“There’s asymmetry,” said Prof Gina Rippon, a neurobiologist and author of The Gendered Brain. “We encourage girls to play with ‘boys’ stuff’ but not the other way around.”

This was a problem since toys offered “training opportunities”, she said. “So if girls aren’t playing with Lego or other construction toys, they aren’t developing the spatial skills that will help them in later life. If dolls are being pushed on girls but not boys, then boys are missing out on nurturing skills.”

I don’t think I’d really thought of that before. It’s sad. It’s tragic. You want people to have nurturing skills – all people. If boys grow up avoiding such skills and thinking they’re contemptible and for sissies…well, that’s terrible.

The Let Toys Be Toys campaign was launched in 2012 in the UK to put pressure on children’s brands to expand their marketing and include both genders, so that no boy or girl thinks they are playing with “the wrong toy”. But progress is slow. A 2020 report by the Fawcett Society showed how “lazy stereotyping” and the segregation of toys by gender was fuelling a mental health crisis among young people and limiting perceived career choices.

And what else might it be fuelling? Eh? Eh? Can we think of any other form of preoccupation with gender rules that’s been making the news lately? Any at all?