Originally a comment by Michael Haubrich on Gender is the expected, coerced, and enforced default.

Gender expectations put incredible demands on our behavior, and I don’t find it surprising that the resulting dysphoria has been identified. What dismays me is that most of society has come to accept the idea that bodies must be altered to resolve the issue in place of working with the person to find ways to overcome the problem. With the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse becoming more apparent seemingly every day, it hardly seems surprising that children and teens are trying to find a way to work through it, and here comes social media to tell them there is a “fix” that will align their gender to their bodies – by altering and disfiguring their bodies to look like the other sex.

I was known as a “pussy” in my small midwestern town because I was risk averse and didn’t see the point in scuffling to have fun, and I wasn’t athletic and our family hunted gophers, squirrels, and rabbits rather than big game such as deer and bears. There were a lot of boy skills I just didn’t have, and I got along great with girls as friends. But, I learned how to fake it as I grew up and eventually came to be comfortable with who I am. And, being straight, my experience with making friends with girls as girls rather than objects, certainly helped me in my sexual relationships.

This early intervention in puberty may seem kind in one sense, but I do believe it serves to prevent human development as an adult. Telling kids that they were born wrong and that the solution is to “pause” puberty until they can decide if they are really boys or girls inside deflects some of the pain of being gender non-conforming because it is an answer and for the rest of society it certainly makes things easier. We can forget about addressing the problems that gender stratification causes if all we need to do is medicate our kids to accommodate it.

Plus, there’s always the parents so bored with Indigo Children they have moved onto transing their kids.

And when the kids grow and realize that they still have the pain of having been mistreated, molested, or sexually abused since they never had true help, well, then, that’s not our problem anymore.

We have these bad stats on suicides by teens who don’t get, as Chase so deceptively calls it, “trans healthcare,” but do we have any stats on the suicides of those who want to detransition but find the road so hopeless that they commit suicide?

This guy.

Boris Johnson once again flouted official requests to wear a mask as he watched a performance of Macbeth at a busy theatre in north London on Tuesday night, witnesses say.

The prime minister was in the audience to see the Shakespearean tragedy at the Almeida theatre in Islington, after a torrid few days in which backbench Tories have accused him of losing the plot.

Three fellow audience members said Johnson was not wearing a face covering during the performance, despite the theatre’s requests for visitors to wear one at all times when not eating or drinking. He was photographed in the auditorium with a mask around his chin and again inside a public area of the theatre without a mask on at all, alongside someone believed to be a member of his family.

Those chin people – they drive me crazy. I see them on the buses now and then. “You’re already wearing it, just pull it the hell up already. Your chin is not the problem, it’s your mouth and nose. Pull it UP.”

One audience member sitting near him in the auditorium said Johnson had “coughed and spluttered” during the performance without wearing a face covering and was “talking throughout” which had added to an impression of “arrogance”.

Added to an impression of arrogance AND SPREAD HIS AEROSOLS EVERYWHERE.

Ticket-holders were emailed before the performance, saying: “Remember to wear a face covering at all times throughout the building unless you are exempt.”

The theatre has a message on its website saying it was asking all patrons to wear a mask in the theatre, including during the performance, to protect “all our staff, cast and other audience members from Covid”. Theatre goers were told to wear masks as they went in and there were signs up around the building requesting mask wearing.

But the prime minister couldn’t obey the public health rules for a couple of hours.

A second witness sitting in a different part of the room said most people in the theatre were complying with the rules but the prime minister only slipped his mask back on at the end as the lights went up.

And a third audience member on the other side of the auditorium said she had seen him not wearing a mask through the first half, and while he was in the bar area with his fellow guest. It is believed he had his mask round his chin during the first half, and off completely during the second half.

It’s just so piggy.

Downing Street did not deny that Johnson had not worn a mask at the theatre but said he “follows all Covid rules”.

Well he doesn’t, and everyone can see he doesn’t.

Johnson’s apparent decision not to wear a mask at the Almeida comes after he was previously criticised for not wearing a mask while sitting next to 95-year-old David Attenborough at the Cop26 summit, while with medical staff in a corridor at Hexham hospital, and on a train in Manchester. 

Piggy. Piggy piggy piggy.

Not what you want the police doing at the murder scene.

Two Metropolitan police officers who shared photos of two murdered sisters and referred to them as “dead birds” have been found guilty of gross misconduct.

PC Jamie Lewis, 33, will be instantly dismissed from the force, while former PC Deniz Jaffer, 47, had already resigned.

They were posted to guard the scene where the bodies of Bibaa Henry, 46, and Nicole Smallman, 27, were discovered in June 2020 after they had been stabbed to death by a teenager obsessed with Satan.

To guard the scene; not to treat the scene as a source of jokes and photoshops.

The officers were posted to guard the cordon after the bodies were found in Fryent Country Park in Wembley, north-west London, in the early hours of 8 June. Photos were shared on WhatsApp, with both former officers using the derogatory terms “dead birds”.

The tribunal was told Lewis sent a picture message of the dead women in a police WhatsApp group shortly before 4am, writing: “Unfortunately I’m sat next to two dead birds with stab wounds.”

Jaffer used the offensive term “two dead birds” in a later WhatsApp message group, which included members of the public.

Lewis then sent a “selfie style” photo of himself superimposed, with the victims visible in the background, to Jaffer. Both officers failed to report each others’ criminal conduct.

I’m guessing police have to develop a thick skin to be able to do the job without falling apart, but there has to be a limit.

The criminal case heard Jaffer left the post he had been assigned to and went into bushes where the women had been left by their killer. The officer took out a mobile phone and took pictures of the bodies.

He sent four images to Lewis, who edited one of the photos and superimposed his face on to it with the two murdered women visible in the background. 

That skin had become way too tough.

Originally a comment by Rob on But let’s talk about precarity, replying to iknklast’s “If we didn’t think our body should be A, B, and C, we wouldn’t be disturbed when our body wasn’t A, B, and C.”

That’s certainly how I understand it and feel personally. When I was a young teen in the mid ’70s I wore a lot of homemade and hand-me-down clothes. Nothing was fashionable and some of it was decade old sixties stuff. In the socially staid and conservative town in the (at the time) socially staid and conservative NZ, the heights of young male fashion was a grey, brown, blue or green sweatshirt, worn with blue jeans of just the right leg width and a pair of sneakers or nomads. Anything else much got you branded a poof, weirdo, or both with consequential ostracism, hazing and occasionally beatings. At that age I didn’t understand why this should be so. I knew I wasn’t gay. I also knew I didn’t fit the stereotype, although my god I wanted to just to make the punishment stop. By the time I was at University I’d earned money to be able to afford three changes of acceptable clothing, had become physically imposing enough to deter casual aggressors and removed myself from a good chunk of the social fuckwit circle. I remember lamenting to a female friend that it was unfair that men faced shit in their lives if they wore bright, colourful or flamboyant clothes. Ah well, I soon learned not be oblivious to the shit in women’s lives.

I’ve never had any problem with my biological sex. I briefly, consciously, examined my sexuality and decided I’m into women. I have always hated, and continue to hate, the way gender is the expected, coerced, and enforced default in society. I don’t think the trans movement, if you can call it that, does anything at all to weaken gender stereotypes. On the one hand they actually reinforce the regressive idea that certain modes of dress, makeup and behaviour are innately male and female; and on the other they treat it like a toy or performance to be played with. All the while we observers are told we must accept what they, the brave trans, say about gender in general and their gender identity specifically, while we must shut up about our own views and experiences because we’re not special.

As others have noted more eloquently and with greater intellectual rigour, it’s shit.

Nancy Kelley urges us to read…Chase Strangio. Really?

Strangio’s “brilliant and devastating thread” is unhinged.

“bills to make trans survival harder…banning health care for minors…That we should not get health care. That we should not survive.”

Unhinged…and dishonest. Strangio is talking about surgeries and puberty blockers to change the physical manifestations of a person’s sex, which is not health care but something else, which doesn’t really have a name yet. It’s medical tweaking to try to swap “gender,” and has nothing to do with physical health at all. Psychological or emotional health maybe (but the trouble is it could be bad for mental health, especially long term, instead of good for it), but not physical. The bills are not efforts to make trans people not survive.

Unhinged.

Just activism, right?

femboy has locked Their account, which is shocking, because femboy should have been ejected from Twitter altogether.

It’s impossible not to laugh. Anti-vax doctors get together for a jamboree, get Covid.

Seven anti-vaccine doctors fell sick after gathering earlier this month for a Florida “summit” at which alternative treatments for Covid-19 were discussed.

“I have been on ivermectin for 16 months, my wife and I,” Dr Bruce Boros told the audience at the event held at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, adding: “I have never felt healthier in my life.”

This “alternative” label is interesting. Alternative to what? To the normal, reliable ways of determining which medications prevent or treat and which don’t. What an odd thing to seek an alternative for. Should we have alternative parachutes, the kind that don’t open? Alternative seat belts, the kind that let you smash into the windshield? Alternative fire departments, the kind that don’t show up when your house goes up in flames?

The 71-year-old cardiologist and staunch anti-vaccine advocate contracted Covid-19 two days later, according to the head event organizer, Dr John Littell.

“Staunch” is another word that is only as good as it is. Being staunchly stupid and dangerous is not all that praiseworthy. “Obstinate” would be a better fit.

Littell, an Ocala family physician, also told the Daily Beast six other doctors among 800 to 900 participants at the event also tested positive or developed Covid-19 symptoms “within days of the conference”.

Littell raised the suggestion the conference was therefore a super-spreader event but rejected it, vehemently saying: “No.

“I think they had gotten it from New York or Michigan or wherever they were from,” he told the Beast. “It was really the people who flew in from other places.”

Ah yes, New York or Michigan – you know, where all the [whispers] black people are.

I realize trial lawyers do what they have to do in the adversarial system, but…all the same. I recoiled last night when I saw the clip via Maddow.

The defense attorneys for Gregory and Travis McMichael, who are charged with Arbery’s murder, repeatedly have tried to present Arbery as a criminal. On Monday, Laura Hogue, one of Gregory McMichael’s lawyers, went further.

“Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails,” Hogue told jurors.

ExCUSE me? He went running! Like millions of other people! And those last three words are just…

In that moment, Hogue took the opportunity to portray Arbery as a “runaway slave,” said Charles Coleman Jr., a civil rights attorney and former prosecutor.

“Her word choice was intentional, her descriptions were unnecessary. And the description ultimately is inflammatory,” Coleman told CNN’s Pamela Brown on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

It was an “attempt to sort of really trigger some of the racial tropes and stereotypes that may be deeply embedded in the psyche of some of the jurors,” Coleman told Brown.

I don’t know, I would think there are subtler and less hair stand on end-ing ways to do that.

If only everything were unproblematic…

Well I never. The guy who drove his car into a parade in Waukesha yesterday has gotten a little rough with women before. You don’t say.

The driver who plowed through a Christmas parade in downtown Waukesha, killing five people and injuring nearly 50, did so intentionally and is expected to face first-degree homicide counts and other charges, police said Monday.

The suspect, Darrell Brooks Jr., 39, recently had been released from custody in a strikingly similar case, in which he was accused of driving over a woman during a domestic dispute, sending her to the hospital and leaving tire marks on her pant leg.

The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting that case, said Monday it was launching an internal review of a prosecutor’s “inappropriately low” $1,000 bail recommendation. The bail amount was signed off on by a court commissioner.

I guess women are a cheap commodity.

The people he killed were mostly Dancing Grannies.

The victims named on Monday were:

• Mr Wilhelm Hospel, 81
• Ms Virginia Sorenson, 79
• Ms LeAnna Owen, 71
• Ms Tamara Durand, 52
• Ms Jane Kulich, 52

They include members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies, who are a regular fixture in the city’s parades.

“Our group was doing what they loved, performing in front of crowds in a parade putting smiles on faces of all ages,” the group wrote in a statement on Facebook. “Those who died were extremely passionate Grannies.”

It makes me sad.

Mridul Wadhwa is such an inspiration to ambitious men who claim to be women.

Girl Guide’s U.K outfit has faced its fair share of scrutiny in recent years over its “inclusive” policies allowing males to join the organization, but recent revelations show a biological male has now taken a senior position with the girl’s group.

Monica Sulley, a male who identifies as a woman, became the lead Commissioner for the Southwell division of Girl Guides U.K, known there as Girlguiding, in July of this year.

Sulley’s appointment came on the heels of a female Girlguiding leader being expelled from the organization on the basis of her beliefs that girls should not be forced to shower or share tents with males who identify as women. Helen Watts had been a supporting member of the Guides for over 15 years prior to being sacked due to her views.

So that’s a job that should have gone to a woman, but didn’t.

Women’s rights-concerned users on social media have expressed upset over Sulley’s appointment, with some noting that Sulley was taking a position from an actual woman. But many have also begun to notice some disturbing posts Sulley has made on his social media accounts – including him posing with weapons, and him dressed in bondage gear, calling himself “Mistress.”

A porn-sick Girl Guides official – what a good idea.

And while I’m on the subject of Pink News…just one more –

Why cis men should never, ever play trans women as Eddie Redmayne admits ‘mistake’

But wait though. How do they know anyone is a cis man? Isn’t it a crime to assume people’s gender? How do they know Eddie Redmayne isn’t gender fluid and just hasn’t come out yet? How do they know he isn’t trans and hasn’t come out yet?

The debate on who gets to play what roles has been particularly prominent in recent years as the industry faces up to decades of misrepresentation.

Well…as a handful of activists yell louder and louder and ever louder.

Today, there is a broad consensus that trans roles should go to trans actors.

Is there? Who says? Where are the stats?

Also what does that mean? That trans men should play trans men and trans women, and trans women should play trans women and trans men? Just generic “character is trans so get a trans actor” regardless of which gender is being performed?

Richards goes on to list examples of successful trans actors, like Laverne Cox, Trace Lysette and Angelica Ross, who proudly live their lives as women, just as beautiful and feminine off-screen as they are on-screen.

And that of course is what “as women” means – being maximally beautiful and feminine. Most women are doing the woman-being all wrong, by not being beautiful and feminine enough, and men are here to show us how it’s done.

Richards directly contrasts this with Redmayne in The Danish Girl, admitting that while it’s certainly a convincing trans performance, “it reduces that person… to a performance of transness, a performance of femininity, rather than as a whole person of whom transness is one aspect of.”

But of course being a man pretending to be a woman is not at all a performance of femininity.

As Eddie Redmayne walks the red carpet in suit and tie, the epitome of masculinity and the antithesis of Lili Elbe, he reinforces the harmful and offensive trope that a trans woman’s identity is nothing more than a costume which, when removed, reveals a man beneath.

So harmful and offensive, and let me remind you how beautiful and feminine Laverne Cox is.

There aren’t enough eyes to roll, I swear.

Nailed it.

What Rowling said in response to the three shits who posted her address on Twitter:

No address visible:

It’s fine for the drag queen to mock women, but Rowling is “wading into” a debate that’s none of her business even though it’s all about women’s rights.

The shamelessness of Pink News part 2:

The controversy comes after a turbulent few years for JK Rowling, who has repeatedly positioned herself at the centre of the UK’s toxic debate surrounding trans lives.

Just look at that – from Pink News! She hasn’t “positioned herself” anywhere, she has said what she thinks, as has Pink News. She’s allowed to say what she thinks. Pink News never shuts up about it, so why should she? Why should we? We have rights too, we even have lives. The toxic debate isn’t surrounding or encircling or about “trans lives” anyway, it’s about the claims of the new and ever-expanding trans ideology, especially where the claims conflict with the rights of women (and the futures of adolescents and children).

The writer waded into the so-called “culture war” in 2019 when she stated her support for Maya Forstater, who has fought to have “gender critical” views protected under the Equality Act.

She didn’t “wade into” anything; she said what she thinks. Who the hell is Pink News to accuse other people of positioning themselves at the center of or wading into a controversy that affects everyone? We are allowed to say things.

The unabashed mendacity of Pink News is a sight to behold.

It starts with the headline:

JK Rowling condemns actors who held trans rights protest outside her house

They didn’t just “hold a protest.” They tweeted a photo with her address in it.

Also I wonder how pleased the people of Pink News would be if people “held a protest” where they live.

Comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy staged a demonstration outside the Harry Potter author’s house on Friday (19 November) in protest against her long-condemned views on trans lives.

Long-condemned by whom? Besides Pink News and people incited by Pink News? And her views aren’t on “trans lives,” which is a manipulative and dishonest way to frame the issue. No one wants trans people to have crappy lives, much less to lose them, but that of course is what we’re supposed to gather from reading the Pink News sludge. Rowling’s views are on women, and how new and constantly expanding trans “rights” can violate women’s rights.

A photo was subsequently shared online which showed the trio standing outside JK Rowling’s home

“Was shared” by whom? Evasive manipulative dishonest fucks that they are. The people who went to Rowling’s house to harass her also posted a photo of her house and address on Twitter.

None of this is defensible, and Pink News knows it. It wouldn’t be using such fraudulent evasive language if it didn’t.

Essex Police are angry that members of the public replied to their Facebook post about Trans Day of Remembrance and the threats it contained.

I take it the asterisks are meant to indicate “Update” (so why not just say “update”?). It all looks a bit like entrapment, to be honest. First they post some stupid catastrophizing bullshit about nonexistent violence against trans people, and then they tell us they’ve recorded all our responses and will go all police on our asses if they don’t like them. They’re going to “investigate” if they deem any of the comments “offensive.”

Yes, it looks very much like entrapment. And for what? Not agreeing that men are women if they say they are.

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on So it was reckful?

I admit I have a definite bias against the American gun fetish. I learned to handle firearms from WWII vets, none of whom carried firearms routinely. To this day if someone were to hand me a weapon I would inspect and clear it the way they learned to do it during inspection in the 1940’s.

I was a trauma surgeon for more than 25 years. In that time, I treated wounds made by 22 cal pistols and rifles, 38s, 9mm, 10mm, 45 cal colts, black powder muzzle loaders, 12 gauge shotguns, 30 cal long guns and the 5.56mm favored by many of the assault rifles in civilian hands. Victims from 80 years of age to 7. Not saying my experience was typical, but I never once treated someone shot by someone defending their home. A fair number of police officers shot in the line, but no home defenders. Three mass casualty ‘events’.

Worried far more than once about getting cut on frangible fragments in our victims from ammo banned by the military but allowed for civilians.

Many suicides or attempts, many domestic assaults, many unintentional injuries. Lots of people cleaning guns or handling weapons that were ‘not loaded’. Only a handful of stranger on stranger crimes. Usually the shooter knew the vic. Lots of gang shootings – sometimes repeaters with a history of a prior GSW.

FYI: if home defense is your goal you can’t beat a 12 gauge shotgun. It imparts tremendous energy to the target at the ranges a home defender would face, is a hell of a lot easier to aim than a handgun and won’t travel 8 blocks through 2 houses and kill your neighbor.

The 5.56mm injuries were the stuff of nightmares. Designed for combat use, the wounds were devastating. At least as bad as a 30 cal rifle. Rifles injuries were a whole different level from the handguns. Handguns fire subsonic rounds. So the tissue injury is directly related to the path of the projectile. Rifles fire supersonic missiles. Very little of the actual energy of the projectile is imparted to the victim – that’s why it passes through usually. But while it’s passing through the tissues, it’s accompanied by a supersonic shock wave several times larger than the size of the slug (several inches in some cases). Everything in the path of that shock wave might be damaged or destroyed.

I can’t say that I came away from the experience with a great appreciation for the Second Amendment.

Remember that BBC article by Caroline Lowbridge about the pressure on lesbians to pretend trans women are lesbians too? Jo Bartosch reports (in the Daily Mail because the Quality papers won’t) that Nancy Kelley tried to get the piece spiked.

The BBC won much praise for its investigation, which prompted some lesbians to express their anger at how they felt ostracised for wishing to form relationships only with women.

Campaigner Kat Howard wrote that she was ‘incredibly grateful to Caroline Lowbridge, and the BBC for this article’, adding: ‘We need help protecting young lesbians everywhere from an LGBT community that would rather see them silenced than stand up to the male perpetrators of assault.’

Yet now it has emerged that months before the article appeared Stonewall’s chief executive Nancy Kelley wrote to the editorial director of BBC News to denounce Lowbridge’s work in an apparent attempt to get her piece stopped.

In her email, Kelley suggested that the BBC article would end up being ‘transphobic’ because it represented trans women as ‘sexual predators’, which was a ‘central anti-trans argument’.

Trans women are men. Some men are sexually predatory. We know this. It’s the stuff of drama and history and song and social life. Some men are sexually predatory, so it’s highly likely that some trans women will be sexually predatory. Nancy Kelley herself is being sexually predatory by proxy in arguing, however indirectly, that lesbians can’t refuse to have sex with men who say they are women.

And although she acknowledged that in sexual relationships ‘consent is paramount and we all want who we want’, she added that ‘structural oppression can influence who we want’.

Even if we accept that, you still have to convince us that men who say they are women are subject to “structural oppression” at all. I don’t believe it, myself. I think they’re subject to non-structural disapproval and/or distaste, but that’s a different thing. Their labor is not exploited, their child-bearing capacity is not exploited, their talents are not exploited. Unease with trans people is situational rather than structural, and bullying lesbians into having sex with trans women is not going to fix the situational unease, to put it mildly.

It is understood that it took many months of editorial discussions before the article was published on October 26.

Stonewall has appeared to confirm that changes were made to the original piece, although it remains unclear whether this was as a direct result of the leaked email, sent in September 2020.

I don’t much want Stonewall screening what we’re allowed to learn via the BBC.

Angela Wild, a member of lesbian campaign group Get The L Out who was quoted in the article, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘For years lesbian activists have been trying to get the message out that it is not bigoted to say “no” to sexual pressure from males who identify as women.

‘The fact that Nancy Kelley has framed the reporting of this issue as transphobia is disgusting. Stonewall are a disgrace and no longer represent the interests of lesbians.’

No longer represents them and sometimes sets fire to them and throws them overboard.

Anti-vaxxing has consequences.

Of course, there are people who have their vaccinations but still get sick. These people may be elderly or frail, or have underlying health problems. Those with illnesses affecting the immune system, particularly patients who have had chemotherapy for blood cancers, are especially vulnerable. Some unlucky healthy people will also end up on our general wards with Covid after being vaccinated, usually needing a modest amount of oxygen for a few days.

But the story is different on our intensive care unit. Here, the patient population consists of a few vulnerable people with severe underlying health problems and a majority of fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice. Watching the mix of patients coming in with Covid, it feels to me like hardly anybody has been vaccinated nowadays; of course, this is because the people that have been vaccinated are getting on with their lives at home. If everyone got vaccinated, hospitals would be under much less pressure; this is beyond debate. Your wait for your clinic appointment/operation/diagnostic test/A&E department would be shorter. Your ambulance would arrive sooner. Reports of the pressure on the NHS are not exaggerated, I promise you.

But urging people to get vaccinated is apparently a grotesque and unforgivable intrusion on The Inviolable Self.

On the left it’s the Trans Soul, on the right it’s the Sacred Self. Both are all about the self and to hell with the 7 billion people who are Not Self.

Enshrined in the way we protect patients’ autonomy is the recognition that others may reasonably make decisions we may see as irrational or wrong. We are all products of our upbringing, education and opportunities, and I have been hugely fortunate that in my case these have led me to make decisions I value. Who is to say I wouldn’t have made different choices in someone else’s shoes.

Translating this to the choice not to take the vaccine, however, I find my patience wearing thin. I think this is for a number of reasons. Even if you are not worried about your own risk from Covid, you cannot know the risk of the people into whose faces you may cough; there is a dangerous and selfish element to this that I find hard to stomach.

Some of my frustration is directed upwards, at the flagrant misinformation flourishing in certain places and the utterly woeful example that our leaders continue to set.

The link is to the story on Boris Johnson touring a hospital without a mask, complete with photos of him in a sea of masked people on all sides.

The writer is an NHS respiratory consultant who works across a number of hospitals