Ceri Black (Ceri pronounced like Kerry) spoke at a Belfast protest today.

I’m here to stand against the protection racket that is the diversity champion’s scheme, and to call for employers to join the flood of others who have left it.

But I hope you don’t mind if I take this opportunity to speak about what’s been happening to me over the last 48 hours instead of the speech I originally prepared.

You may know this already, but a man has managed to persuade the police to invite me to an interview, under caution, regarding my twitter account, @femmeloves.

I did know it already. It’s That Man Again.

If it were not prohibited by the twitter terms of service, I would tweet out the plain fact that men cannot be women.

Perhaps naively, when I first joined this fight, I thought that the police would protect every day working families like mine, talking on topics like these. So when I faced a wall of death threats, rape threats, threats of sectarian violence, violent pornographic photographs and videos, homophobic abuse, and calls to “go back where you came from,” on my twitter account, I reported them to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. They took no action.

So death threats are ok. The police have no objection to death threats.

But one phone call from a man who has a history of using the police service as his own personal enforcement arm against women he disagrees with, and the PSNI have threatened me with arrest if I don’t attend voluntarily to be interviewed under caution.

She has a solicitor, who is confident it will never go to court, though the interview will have to happen. Ceri says this isn’t about her.

This is about the dirty tactics of a movement which delights in intimidating and bulling their opponents into silence, using fair means or foul.

Like Owen Jones for instance, saying the LGB Alliance is opposed to trans rights when it isn’t.

Enough.

This has gone far enough now.

The complainant cannot be allowed to continue to weaponize police forces across the country, to silence voices he disagrees with, whilst he capers and gloats and feigns terror because he’s triggered by tweets.

He is a bully. I do not pander to bullies. I do not cower before bullies. I put them on notice, and I employ all legal means to have them stopped.

My solicitor informs me that there are various channels open to me, so the complainant can expect to hear from me in due course.

Oh I look forward to that.

But it isn’t just the complainant I’m putting on notice. It is the police service of Northern Ireland, it’s Stonewall, and it’s the massive fraud they call the Diversity Champions Scheme.

The police have questions for me? Good. I have questions for them.

Questions like, “What influence does being a member of the Stonewall diversity champions scheme have on the way you police this issue?”

Questions like, “When I reported death and rape threats to you, you told me to withdraw from the debate and stop tweeting, so did you offer the same advice to the man who complained against me?”

Questions like “what underpinned your decision to interview me under caution for tweets about child protection, whilst you completely ignored direct threats on my life.”

I have a long list of other questions for the PSNI, and they can expect to hear them from me in the form of Freedom of information requests in the coming days.

My solicitor is helping me explore other possible actions, including a complaint to the ombudsman.

In the meantime, I have a message for the PSNI.

I’m politely declining your invitation to be interviewed voluntarily under caution at the station.

Come and arrest me if you want to ask me your questions. Here I am.

Come and arrest a lesbian woman, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, a campaigner for women and children, for the crime of tweeting about how to protect children from grooming and sexual predation. Put this survivor in handcuffs and put me in a room. Go ahead. Ask your questions. Make yourselves the tools of a man who, with his army of vindictive and spiteful followers, has terrorised women across the nation, all the while making claims about his own victimhood.

Read the whole thing.

She was on the latest Mess We’re In too, and was equally crystal clear there.

Define the rights you’re talking about, OJ.

If this piece were a proper piece of journalism – the counter-factual subjunctive exists for a reason. (Of course, the piece is a proper piece of journalism, but OJ is claiming it isn’t, but doing it badly, because he doesn’t write well.)

But the substantive point here is that the LGB Alliance is not “anti-trans rights” and that OJ is smuggling the claim in by not spelling out what trans rights are. Nobody wants to take human rights away from trans people. What new rights, specific to trans people, does Owen Jones think there are? On what grounds does he think they are rights? Has he given any thought to questions about the effects of such rights on other people’s rights? Especially women’s rights? All that matters, but OJ never discusses it.

Love is not a human right and neither is sex. (Remember when Amnesty International decided it is? I do. How can you make sex a human right without implying a requirement? Who are the people who would be most subject to that requirement?)

This morning the Court of Appeal handed down a long-awaited judgment in the case of Re C, a legal case fraught with tension due to the sensitive and complex nature of what lay at its heart.

In short, C, a learning-disabled man, wished to seek out the “services” of a prostituted woman to pay her for sexual access, but he lacked the mental capacity to make such arrangements for himself.

One of several legal issues at hand was the fact that, if such a care worker was permitted to make such arrangements, they may be committing an offence under s.39 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which prohibits care workers from “causing or inciting sexual activity”.

To cut a long legal story short, the Court of Appeal overturned the original ruling of the Court of Protection, and stated that in this instance C’s care workers were categorically not permitted to facilitate the purchasing of sexual access on behalf of their learning-disabled client.

Access to a vagina is not a human right. It can’t be. If it is treated as a human right, women become tools for other people.

Amnesty UK has a stupid mealy-mouthed blamey “statement” distancing itself from the “suck my dick you cunts”- type activism at the FiLiA event.

We have a long history of campaigning against violence against women and this continues to be a vital part of our work.

But they’ve forgotten who women are, and which people are women.

We are equally committed to campaigning for the rights of transgender people to live freely, authentically, and openly, and to have their gender legally recognised without having to go through a dehumanising, long and costly procedure. 

But the “right” of transgender people to live “authentically” entails requiring everyone to agree with them that they are their new gender in every possible sense, in other words that they have changed their sex along with their gender. This intrudes quite dramatically on the rights of women. That means it’s not a legitimate right at all. Amnesty is trashing women’s rights by leaning so heavily on new and unworkable “rights” for trans people.

We were approached by the organisers of a Fly the Flag event in Portsmouth at the weekend, who requested that we supply materials which reflect Amnesty International UK’s campaigning positions on the LGBTQ human rights.  Two sets of placards were sent.  One set of signs stated the slogan “I AM WHO I SAY I AM: Amnesty International”.  The second set of signs stated the slogan “LOVE IS A HUMAN RIGHT: Amnesty International”.

Both of those slogans are a crock of shit.

As I’ve pointed out what feels like a billion times, it’s not true that people always or necessarily “are who they say they are.” Look at Trump. He claims to be a great many things that he’s not. Look at frauds and cheats and tricksters, look at narcissists and egomaniacs, look at cops who say they are a cop arresting a woman for violating Covid rules when really they’re a cop abducting a woman to rape and murder her.

As I’ve pointed out not quite so many times but still many, of course love is not a human right. Those 5 words are a rapist’s charter.

Photographs of the threatening and aggressive language and images displayed by other protestors present at the Guildhall have been shared with us and we are shocked by it.  We recognise that the FiLiA conference was attended by a number of women who have been the victims of violence and harassment.  Amnesty International UK believes there should have been absolutely no place for the use of any threatening or aggressive language or imagery towards any of the attendees of that conference, or indeed towards any women.

In other words Amnesty wishes it hadn’t been linked to those images, but as for the women at the FiLiA conference, they are bad women and Amnesty hates them.

Updating to add: the photo is probably (or certainly?) a fake. Just look at it as a pretty imagining.

A snapshot from the International Space Station. That’s a little item called South America.

I had no idea the moon looked like that from the ISS.

I hope they lock him up.

 The House voted Thursday to hold Steve Bannon, a longtime ally and aide to former President Donald Trump, in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

…

The House vote sends the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, where it will now be up to prosecutors in that office to decide whether to present the case to a grand jury for possible criminal charges. It’s still uncertain whether they will pursue the case — Attorney General Merrick Garland would only say at a House hearing on Thursday that they plan to “make a decision consistent with the principles of prosecution.”

Lock him up.

“Mr. Bannon’s own public statements make clear he knew what was going to happen before it did, and thus he must have been aware of — and may well have been involved in — the planning of everything that played out on that day,” [Liz] Cheney said ahead of the vote. “The American people deserve to know what he knew and what he did.”

…

The lingering acrimony over the insurrection, and the Bannon subpoena, flared Wednesday at a House Rules Committee hearing held to set the parameters of Thursday’s debate. Under intense questioning from Raskin, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican who defended Trump and opposed the Bannon contempt effort, said he accepted that Biden is the president but would not say that Biden won the election.

Yes the lingering acrimony over that incident where Trump goons were roaming the Capitol looking for Democrats to murder. How odd that there’s still acrimony eight whole months later.

Update on that rape on the train story:

Passengers did not sit around and record cellphone video of a rape aboard a SEPTA train for their own gratification without contacting authorities, Delaware County’s top prosecutor said Thursday.

The revelation from District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer runs counter to the police narrative of the rape on a SEPTA Market-Frankford elevated train at the 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby. Police said in that case that passengers took cellphone video without calling 911 before a SEPTA employee called police.

“There is a narrative out there that people sat there on the El train and watched this transpire and took videos of it for their own gratification,” Stollsteimer said using the nickname for the Market-Frankford line. “That is simply not true. It did not happen. We have security video from SEPTA that shows that is not the true narrative.”

In fact, Stollsteimer said, SEPTA security video shows that a “handful” of people who were getting on and off the train as it traveled from Philadelphia to the 69th Street Terminal had observed different parts of the rape, possibly without knowing what exactly was happening.

…

Two people may have recorded video of the attack on their cellphone, one of whom “probably” alerted SEPTA of the attack, Stollsteimer said.

H/t Screechy Monkey

Gaby Hinsliff on yet another way to keep women down:

Yet reports of so-called “spiking by needle” – young women on a night out allegedly being injected by unseen strangers with something that knocks them out – are being taken seriously by police in cities including Nottingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Heartbreakingly, there have been reports of nervous women going out in thick, needle-proof jeans and leather jackets. However rare these incidents may turn out to be, they fit a pattern of behaviour that for many feels horribly familiar.

Emphasis on the horrible. The pattern is that women aren’t real people, women don’t matter, women have no rights, women are walking cunts who exist to receive men’s penises. Women are something to trick or force into allowing a man to poke them between the legs because he enjoys it. Men are the people in this story, and women are the inconvenient bitches placed in charge of those nice holes the men want to poke. Those holes are for men! Not women! Women have no right to gatekeep the holes, so whether they get punched or drugged, they deserve it.

A stranger’s hand unceremoniously shoved up your skirt on a night out has become almost routine for young women. Street harassment – not just catcalling but crude propositioning and being followed by men who may get aggressive if rejected – is normalised. Young women are sick of being told to stick together, or to watch their drinks, when the problem is male violence, not female vigilance. Why should they tie themselves in ever more anxious knots trying to stay safe, while the perpetrators carry on regardless? What depresses many older women, meanwhile, is that, if anything, this kind of everyday harassment seems to have got worse – creepier and more aggressive – over the years, even as the world opens up for younger women in so many ways.

And closes down in so many others, for instance via being bullied and silenced for not agreeing that men are women if they say they are.

Then there was dancing with our extinct friends.

Get down.

Today in “I wish I could teleport to London” –

Oh, man, look at all that infrastructure. No wonder they’re getting sexual threats.

Finally.

Finally.

H/t J.A.

Ah yes, if the science says fossil fuels are cooking the planet the thing to do is…lobby to change what the science says.

A huge leak of documents seen by BBC News shows how countries are trying to change a crucial scientific report on how to tackle climate change.

The leak reveals [that] Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries asking the UN to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels.

Similarly, if your house is on fire, the thing to do is take the phone away from the damn fool who is calling the fire department and call for pizza instead.

The leaked documents consist of more than 32,000 submissions made by governments, companies and other interested parties to the team of scientists compiling a UN report designed to bring together the best scientific evidence on how to tackle climate change.

“Dear Science Talkers, please say coal and oil are good for us, thank you very much, The Coal and Oil Interests.”

The leak shows a number of countries and organisations arguing that the world does not need to reduce the use of fossil fuels as quickly as the current draft of the report recommends.

An adviser to the Saudi oil ministry demands “phrases like ‘the need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales…’ should be eliminated from the report”.

One senior Australian government official rejects the conclusion that closing coal-fired power plants is necessary, even though ending the use of coal is one of the stated objectives the COP26 conference.

Saudi Arabia is the one of the largest oil producers in the world and Australia is a major coal exporter.

It’s like driving at top speed toward a cliff saying “We’re fine!”

Australia asks IPCC scientists to delete a reference to analysis of the role played by fossil fuel lobbyists in watering down action on climate in Australia and the US.

“Hello, we’re here to lobby you to remove insulting references to lobbying.”

I started re-reading Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye last night and there’s a very resonant passage about girls and puberty in chapter 17. The adult narrator starts with her childhood friend [it’s complicated] Cordelia:

Breasts fascinate Cordelia, and fill her with scorn. Both of her older sisters have them by now. Perdie and Mirrie sit in their room with its twin beds and sprigged-muslin flounces, filing their nails, laughing softly; or they heat brown wax in little pots in the kitchen and take it upstairs to spread on their legs. They look into their mirrors, making sad faces – “I look like Haggis McBaggis! It’s the curse!” Their wastebaskets smell of decaying flowers.

They tell Cordelia there are some things she’s too young to understand, and then they tell these things to her anyway. Cordelia, her voice lowered, her eyes big, passes on the truth: the curse is when blood comes out between your legs. We don’t believe her. She produces evidence: a sanitary pad, filched from Perdie’s wastebasket. On it is a brown crust, like dried gravy. “That’s not blood,” Grace says with disgust, and she’s right, it’s nothing like when you cut your finger. Cordelia is indignant. But she can prove nothing.

I haven’t thought much about grown-up women’s bodies before. But now these bodies are revealed in their true, upsetting light: alien and bizarre, hairy, squashy, monstrous. We hang around outside the room where Perdie and Mirrie are peeling the wax off their legs while they utter yelps of pain, trying to see through the keyhole, giggling: they embarrass us, although we don’t know why. They know they’re being laughed at and come to the door to shoo us away. “Cordelia, why don’t you and your little friends bug off!” They smile a little ominously, as if they know already what is in store for us. “Just wait and see,” they say.

This frightens us. Whatever has happened to them, bulging them, softening them, causing them to walk rather than run, as if there’s some invisible leash around their necks, holding them in check – whatever it is, it may happen to us too. We look surreptitiously at the breasts of women on the street, of our teachers; though not of our mothers, that would be too close for comfort. We examine our legs and underarms for sprouting hairs, our chests for swellings. But nothing is happening: so far we are safe.

That all sounds kind of familiar to me, although I don’t remember that time with anything like the clarity and detail Atwood gives. I don’t remember much but I do remember that it felt alien and strange and sometimes repulsive.

The writing is brilliant, obviously (I think this is perhaps her best novel), and I think it’s relevant to the gender dysphoria issue. The onset of puberty is ook, at least for some (apparently some girls await it impatiently and are delighted when it arrives), but mostly you get used to it. You don’t feel hairy, squashy, monstrous forever.

The quislings emerge.

Her “overarching concern for vulnerable people,” she says, as if women were invulnerable. Men who pretend to be women are not more vulnerable than women. They’re not as vulnerable as women either. If our overarching concern is for vulnerable people then it’s extremely bizarre to choose people brandishing flares and shouting threats from behind masks over one woman being abused and harassed by the masked shouters.

And what is “the harm caused”?

And how are the group in question more “vulnerable and marginalized” than women? Since when do women hold all the cards? Since when are women made of stone while men are made of gauze and smoke?

Miserable sneaking coward.

Sarah Ditum points out what a disaster it is when a lobby group is also providing training to public bodies on the very issue it lobbies for.

And behind the scenes, let’s say this lobby group is influencing the policies of the BBC, so that before the debate can ever take place, one side has already written the terms in which it will happen. If you wanted to complain about that to the ombudsman, don’t bother: the lobby group also has the ear of Ofcom.

Quite an advantage, isn’t it.

It’s already happening. The issue is the introduction of gender identity in law; the lobby group is Stonewall, the LGBT rights group; and the consequence has been one of the worst ever interludes for public debate in this country.

Stonewall wants “people are what they say they are” to become law, and doesn’t care about the effects on women.

You might consider those consequences good, bad or irrelevant. But as a society we never got the chance to discuss them, because rather than wait for parliament to pass a bill, Stonewall simply wrote its own version of the law as it would like it to be, and then disseminated it through the training it provides to various public bodies, which have promptly fallen into line.

The Nolan report goes into this with energy, so that it sticks in the mind. Stonewall claims that “gender identity” is a protected characteristic, and that’s not the law.

Why would organisations comply so carelessly with such radical proposals? Because as well as inviting Stonewall to tell them what to do, they’ve also given it the power to tell them how well they’re doing, via Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme and equality index. Institutions that want to perform well on those (and what institution likes to give the appearance of failing at diversity and equality?) need to show they’re acting in line with Stonewall’s principles.

I still wonder, though, how Stonewall managed to corner the market on diversity and equality. Pink hair on a man isn’t really all that diverse.

Harry Lambert at the New Statesman on Sussex and Stock:

On Saturday 16 October nearly one hundred people took over an open day at the University of Sussex to protest the employment of Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy. “Stock out!” “Get Kathleen off our campus!” “No Terfs here!” rang the chants. “Don’t come to Sussex!” they warned visitors.

They handed out an illiterate leaflet to explain their “reasons.”

When I visited Stock recently, she spoke haltingly of the slow burn of her social isolation at Sussex, punctured as it has been by the discovery of new online attacks and internal emails undermining her in the wake of any publicity she attracts.

Oh that must be nice – knowing her colleagues are abusing her in internal emails.

“This month is just the endgame. Some of my colleagues have been spinning a line against me for a long time,” she told me.

I asked Nehaal Bajwa, the diversity officer at Sussex Students’ Union, how Stock was contributing to the “dire state of unsafety for trans people in this colonial shit-hole”, as the leaflet put it. Stock’s views created “an unsafe atmosphere” for trans students, Bajwa said, as protesters overtook the campus square, setting off pink and blue flares, Stock cancelled her courses and followed police advice to stay off campus and secure her home. I asked a protester whether the demo was designed to be intimidating. “We’re standing still,” they said. “Her presence to us is intimidating.”

No it isn’t. She’s not the one brandishing flares.

But the university did not act to address this culture of harassment, despite one fellow professor regularly hounding Stock online in all but name, and another academic openly tweeting “shame” on Stock and her “fellow transphobic ilk”. Instead, administrators gave Stock’s critics access to the internal email system to send school-wide messages without offering Stock a right of reply. And those in managerial roles supported her critics rather than remaining neutral. Stock became ever more socially isolated.

Emphasis added. Good god.

Three of Stock’s four fellow professors of philosophy at Sussex told me that they supported her academic freedom, but none would say so publicly, despite more than 200 UK academic philosophers signing an open letter supporting Stock’s and others’ “right to raise concerns on this matter”…

The outgoing Sussex vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, declined to speak to me. In a statement, the university said it had spoken out “against bullying and harassment”. Tickell recently made a clear statement in support of Stock on BBC radio. Yet he and his team are acting late, having left the accusation that one of their professors is “transphobic” unaddressed for years. Stock is now likely to leave her post.

They will succeed in bullying her out for the crime of being a feminist who disputes some (not all) claims of current trans dogma. It’s sickening.

This is of course what they all think.

It’s what they all think, but it’s stupid. Which “social justice warriors” are we talking about? Lots of people see themselves as on the side of justice, including social justice in some sense. They don’t all call themselves social justice warriors (but then neither do all “social justice warriors”), but they of course see themselves as on the side of the right and good and true. The passage of time has not shown all such warriors “to be in the right.”

It’s Whig history again: the road always goes in the direction of progress, and we never ultimately fall off it or turn around and go the other way. Except, of course, when we do. There were quite a few years back in the last century when Nazis were quite confident that the passage of time had shown them to be in the right.

I get where the idea comes from, of course. The Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the movement for lesbian and gay rights, were all sharp attacks on a status quo, and they all had considerable (though far from complete) success. The status quo was The Older Generation and attacks on it were the younger one, therefore, trans activism is the younger generation being right while the older one is wrong, again. The kids have found another status quo that needs overturning, and the stupid oldies just can’t see it, because we’re so stupid.

That could be true, but on the other hand, if feminists were right when they changed the status quo, but they’re wrong now, doesn’t that make the pattern too eccentric to follow? If feminists were right then and are wrong now, how do the kids now know they won’t be wrong in forty years? If it’s all just Inevitable Progress why not just kick back and wait?

Anyway, even if there is such a pattern, the particulars matter. We still need to figure out exactly what kind of social justice we’re talking about, and for whom, and whether all relevant parties are being heard. We still need to know what constitutes being “in the right.” We still need to know how “anti-trans” is being defined.

Nope.

Not the first female four-star admiral. The first trans four-star admiral, not the first female. There has been no first female four-star admiral yet.

The Times itself got the headline right but somehow got the tweet wrong? Another case of the social media intern erasing women?

Ellen Pasternack at The Critic tells us of a terf-spotting guide for the imperiled students at Cambridge.

… just last week, Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) published a guide to identifying something called “TERF ideology”, featuring section headings such as Spotting TERFS in the Field and Signs Of A TERF. We learn from this guide that “the language of TERFS is ever changing” and that “the unique danger of TERF rhetoric is that it is styled to sound like feminism”.

Nah it’s not styled to sound like feminism, it is feminism. That’s what the F is for. It’s also not rhetoric, it’s critical thinking.

This eight page guide, intended for incoming students at the Freshers’ Fair, is an expansion of an earlier version published in 2019. It sits on the student union website alongside guides to exams, careers and student finance. There are no guides to spotting racist, sexist, or homophobic ideology: detecting TERFs is apparently a matter of unparalleled urgency.

Why? Why are trans people The Most while everyone else is barely on the radar?

Let’s have a look.

Trans liberation is part of feminism. Fighting for autonomy and freedom must be a fight for everyone, and there should be no room for transphobia or TERFs in feminist organising.

That’s stupid. Trans “liberation” isn’t part of feminism at all, and is in fact intensely hostile to it. Feminism has its own work to do, and helping men pretend to be women is not part of that work. The absurd idea that it is is yet another reason we need feminism.

The core characteristics of TERFs are a conservative, binary, essentialist conception of sex as the be-all-end-all, and a deep hatred for trans women, couched in the language of feminism and feminist theory.

No, stupid, not “the be-all-end-all,” just the reality. Women are women: they have women’s bodies. It’s not a religion, it’s just what the word means. If trans people take it we’ll just have to replace it with one that means the same thing.

The first thing is to try and figure out where they got it from. Did they hear it from a friend, or read a news article? If they’ve read something. and it’s the first thing they’ve heard about trans people or the first time they’ve taken an interest, it may be relatively easy to inform them about where they’re going wrong, and why what they’re backing is harmful. If they’ve heard it from someone they trust and care about, consider how you frame the argument to avoid it becoming about personal relationships, which may make them defensive.

Don’t look them in the eye, that makes them very aggressive. Move calmly and slowly. Always carry treats in your pocket, you may be able to coax them to listen to your lecture if you toss them a few olives or pistachios.

Seriously though, is there anything like the conceit of kids age 20 who think they invented the world?

Worcester News:

A GROUP of men who dress in women’s clothing to raise money claim they have been told their fundraising is potentially offensive by charity bosses.

I bet I know which set of people they were told it’s potentially offensive to, and I bet it’s not women. It’s been seen as perfectly fine for centuries, whether women saw it as offensive or not, but now…well there are more important people who might find it offensive. Women, you see, aren’t important. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

Members and supporters of Upton Rugby Club have dressed in drag for the Leo Sayer All Dayer, and also held other fundraisers for 18 years, to raise more than £40,000 for St Richard’s Hospice.

But times have changed, amirite?

But the group claim they have been told their latest efforts cannot by promoted by the hospice because it might offend the LGBT community.

June Patel, St Richard’s chief executive, said they appreciated the group’s fundraising but were “striving to be mindful of equality, diversity and inclusion.”

When it comes to men, that is. Obviously not women.

I think they look ever so nice, I do reely.

Also, seriously? This is stupid. They’re now looking for fundraise for a different organization.