Foxy Maugham seems to consider Ben Hunte a reliable source, and a Conservative peer warns him that the record shows he’s not.

The BBC had to remove large parts of Hunte’s article on the Keira Bell puberty blocker ruling after complaints of inaccuracies. Hunte left the BBC to work for Vice.

Foxy threw his weight around.

Not everyone is impressed with Foxy’s approach.

Charles Windsor identifies as a guy with medical expertise, and he doesn’t hesitate to use his notoriety and money to thrust his fake expertise on the world. Edzard Ernst writes:

Yet, his relentless efforts are not appreciated by everyone (another British understatement!). There are those who view his interventions as counter-productive distractions from the important and never-ending task to improve modern healthcare. There are those who warn that integrating SCAM [so-called alternative medicine] into our medical routine will render healthcare less efficient. There are those who claim that the Prince’s preoccupation with matters that he is not qualified to fully comprehend is a disservice to public health. And there are those who insist that the role of the heir to the throne does not include interfering with health politics.

And those who say all of the above.

Charles Windsor could after all have gone to medical school (assuming he’s clever enough to pass the exams) and gotten the appropriate qualifications to instruct the world on medical subjects, but he didn’t do that, so what gives him the right to leverage his fame to meddle in the subject? It makes as much sense as Trump suggesting we inject ourselves with bleach.

I have observed Charles’ efforts around SCAM for the last 30 years. Occasionally, I was involved in some of them. For 19 years, I have headed the world’s most productive team of researchers in SCAM. This background puts me in an unique position to write an account of Charles’ ‘love affair’ with SCAM. My recently published ‘unauthorised biography’ is not just a simple outline of Charles’ views and actions but also a critical analysis of the evidence that does or does not support them.

I want to read that.

There’s a Guardian series: Living in a woman’s body. Of course you know what comes next: they get a man to talk about living in a woman’s body.

For the most part, our bodies are arbitrary. We get the body we get at birth: our eye colour, our hair colour, our skin colour. We have no say in those things at the moment we are born but, talking to my friend, I realised that subsequent changes are within our grasp.

Some are, some aren’t. You can’t make yourself taller or shorter. (There are ways of adjusting height a little bit but they’re horribly drastic. Not recommended.) You can’t make yourself older or younger. You can’t add arms or legs. You can’t swap heads. You can’t change sex.

None of us are beholden to our bodies. That is not to say that our bodies aren’t vital; they are. Being a woman – cisgender or trans – can feel like you are being set up to fail from the start, and our bodies often affect how well we are able to function within society.

No. He’s not a woman, and if he felt as if he was being set up to fail from the start, it’s not because he’s a woman. It’s not a matter of “our bodies” because his is a man’s body.

But I believe in individual bodily autonomy; a refusal to let the system predetermine or limit your choices is one of the ways we attack patriarchal structures.

No. There is no “we” there, because he is not a woman. He accepted a slot in a series about women, and he talked about himself in a piece about women. We are not a “we” with Juno Dawson.

Tony Blair still knows who women are.

When he was leader, there were no arguments about sex and gender, trans rights and toppling statues. Starmer will have to go into battle over the culture wars, he says. “The polls might say voters don’t care but if you dig a little deeper, what they are really saying is we don’t like all this stuff that is being shoved at us.”

I assume he is going to cite the third way again, but Blair comes down firmly on the side of the author JK Rowling. “They [voters] don’t want a situation where women can’t talk about being women. I have this conversation quite often with Labour people and I know their inclination is to walk round this issue, but I am telling you to go right into it and resolve it in a way that makes it absolutely clear where you stand. That is how to shut down the Tories on it.”

He is risking the ire of the trans lobby now. “Of course, we shouldn’t be transphobic and we should have equal rights for trans people. But equal rights doesn’t mean you can’t use the phrase ‘pregnant woman’. If you went to Sedgefield and had that conservation, they would think you were bonkers.” The younger generation, he admits, think differently. “Leo always says to me, ‘Don’t go there, Dad. There are feelings and there are facts, but right now feelings are more important.’ ”

It depends on what the feelings are, and anyway the feelings are about the facts – there is no crisp division between them. Feelings of rage that women will keep insisting on their own rights are not more important than facts about who is and who is not a woman. To put it another way: trans people aren’t the only people with feelings, women have some too, and we have very strong feelings about being disappeared by human rights organizations.

But he would never have therapy, he told me two years ago. “I just think if you’re not careful you get obsessed with introspection and it’s also because, in the work I do now, when I go and visit these countries where kids will be growing up in a family where at least one of the siblings has died of a childhood disease and the parents are scraping money together and living day by day, you kind of think the West’s desire to be endlessly self-absorbed is not very healthy.”

Yes you kind of do. And of course the two are deeply intertwined. The whole idea of being in the “wrong body,” of literally being the sex you’re not, requires a huge substructure of self-obsession to hold it up. There’s a lot to be said for just taking some things as written and doing something else with your life.

No, trans women don’t experience misogyny, because they’re not women. They may experience fear and/or hatred of trans people, but they don’t experience hatred of women, because of not being women.

Men like Montgomerie want to steal everything that’s ours. On principle.

The ACLU is really leaning into this Erase Women campaign. It has a page for Abortion is Essential: Stories of Liberation, which continues the Delete Women program.

The ability to decide whether and when to have children is essential to allowing people to control their own lives and futures. For many, having access to affordable abortion care opens the door to fulfilling educational and career goals, better parenting, staying true to gender identities, and other critical parts of life that everyone should have the ability to choose for themselves.

Freedom to decide whether and when to have children is important to men too of course, but not in the up close inside your body way it is to women. And “staying true to gender identities” is just the usual boring jargon, thrown in to nag us about not forgetting that which we are never allowed to forget.

This month, we’re launching a storytelling series in partnership with We Testify, an organization devoted to uplifting the voices of people who have had abortions.

And ignoring and insulting the half of humanity who needs them.

There are five stories. Of course one of them is by a woman who identifies as a man.

There’s a page on how to talk about abortion at the dinner table. Spoiler: by not mentioning women.

When it comes to discussing abortion access, the focus should remain centered on the people who need, or will need, this critical care — and the direct harm forced pregnancy places on lives.

Women, they mean; women’s lives, they mean.

Is there any other oppressed / disadvantaged / subordinated group being systematically and deliberately erased this way? Hidden among “people” and “lives” instead of being named? I sure as hell don’t know of any. It’s intensely insulting, so human rights groups and the like know better than to do it…except, now, when it comes to women. Suddenly half of humanity, the source of all humanity, doesn’t get to have even a word for itself.

Despite how anti-abortion politicians may frame it, forced pregnancy is not some political talking point: Forced pregnancy is taking away a person’s constitutional and human right to control their body and their future.

A woman’s. It’s not just a person’s in general, it’s a woman’s in particular. This is something that can’t be done to men – it’s an injustice done to women. Name us. I don’t care what Chase Strangio says; name us.

Denying someone abortion care has devastating and lasting consequences for the pregnant person — it can jeopardize their health, economic well-being and ability to determine their own future, for not only themselves but their family.

Six. Six times in that one sentence they erase women from the very role that has made them subordinate.

It goes on and on and on the same way, all down the page. It’s a massive betrayal.

The ACLU has a fundraising ad on Facebook that links to a quiz about abortion rights. You know what happens next.

4. In what ways are states trying to force people to remain pregnant?

What they conceal and deny by doing this is the power aspect, the dominance-submission aspect, the inequality aspect, the systemic arrangements by which men get to tell women what to do but women don’t get to tell men what to do, the centrality of reproduction and pregnancy in the domination of women by men. What they conceal and deny by lying about who gets pregnant is the political aspect of abortion restrictions. The ACLU makes it all look random by telling the lie that people in general are forced to remain pregnant. This idiotic dishonest abusive “activism” is erasing women and feminism from the public discourse entirely, and most of the left is cheering it on.

That’s not the only one, either. Of course it’s not.

Forcing patients to make extra unnecessary trips to the clinic

… examples of other restrictions or policies that also force people to remain pregnant.

Abortion bans disproportionately impact people who are:

Black people and other people of color

And then they confront us head-on:

9. True or False: Forced pregnancy only impacts women.

Of course when you click true they inform you you’re WRONG it’s FALSE.

Trans and nonbinary people can also be forced to continue a pregnancy.

Idiots – and misogynists.

10. How can you fight forced pregnancy and help ensure that people can get an abortion if they need one?

Not by pretending that it’s not a denial of women’s rights, that’s for damn sure. Idiots.

I never got around to this yesterday and that just won’t do.

What we need is more gun battles:

A Republican Senate primary candidate in Arizona has been condemned for a “disgusting” campaign ad in which he shoots at lookalike actors portraying Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and incumbent Arizona senator Mark Kelly.

Jim Lamon, an energy executive, shared the ad on Twitter, saying it would be aired at this year’s Super Bowl.

Lamon would face Kelly in a general election in the autumn should he secure the Republican nomination.

Kelly is the husband of former Democratic congressman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was shot in the head in 2011 while greeting constituents outside of a local grocery store.

It’s Lamon’s pinned tweet.

Hur hur, good old-fashioned showdown, where people shoot each other. If only all of life were like tv westerns from the 1950s.

Criticism towards the ad has been swift, with many people pointing out other recent instances of violent imagery used by members of the Republican Party. Last November, Paul Gosar, Republican representative for Arizona, was officially censured by the House after sharing an animated video depicting him killing the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Biden.

Not to mention that little incident on January 6, 2021.

Stonewall and The Good Law Project are really determined to make sure women have no rights that would trump the invented “rights” of men to invade all our spaces, take all our prizes and jobs, destroy our sports, and bully us into silence.

Britain’s human rights watchdog faces a legal challenge to its status over a row about transgender rights.

A row over “rights” that aren’t “rights” at all.

In documents shared exclusively with the BBC, campaigners say they want the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s status as an independent group revoked. It comes after the EHRC was criticised for asking Scotland to pause its plans to make it easier for people to change their sex on their birth certificate.

But hey guess what: there are problems with forcing everyone to pretend that men are women if they say they are. Quite a few problems.

LGBT charity Stonewall, backed by the Good Law Project, has drawn up a submission to the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, calling for the EHRC to lose its “A rating”.

This would prevent it from being able to make representations at the UN Human Rights Council, or its committees on human rights.

Jolyon Maugham is shockingly determined to destroy women’s rights once and for all.

Jolyon Maugham, of The Good Law Project, told BBC News: “The EHRC is subject to a level of oversight and micro-management from the department which is just not consistent with being a UN Human Rights Institution.”

Jolyon Maugham suffers from a level of misogyny which is just not consistent with labeling himself Good.

Nancy Kelley, CEO of Stonewall, told the BBC she believed there was “credible evidence” that the EHRC no longer met the criteria of a national human rights institution.

Nancy Kelley is happy to see women’s rights ground to powder.

Yup yup yup that’s all fine, this mediocre male swimmer can pretend to be a woman and compete against women so that he won’t be mediocre any more, no problem whatsoever. Nobody will be harmed except women so full speed ahead guys.

Penn swimmer Lia Thomas will be allowed to compete at the 2022 women’s swimming and diving championships as long as she meets the NCAA’s current testosterone thresholds.

This despite the fact that everyone knows testosterone is not like a lamp or a food processor – it doesn’t just stop when you switch it off. Most of the benefits of male puberty are permanent, and women don’t have them. The NCAA knows this, so it’s just saying “Fuck women, we don’t care.”

Ah what a brilliant invention, how odd that no one’s ever thought of it before. A private army which will “apprehend” all the politicians and media people who “have been found to have committed crimes.” This will go very well, there will be no problems at all.

Yet more “blah blah because trans rights” without spelling out what “trans rights” are:

Female hospital patients’ dignity, privacy and safety is being “diminished significantly” by the imposition of transgender rights in the health service, it has been warned at Westminster.

Speaking in Parliament Tory peer Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne argued the provision of single-sex wards, exempted from equality legislation, was being undermined by updated NHS guidance.

That’s even more of a misleading disaster than usual, because Baroness Nicholson is reported saying one thing but the lede cites a quite different thing. The reporter, Nick Lester, seems to have translated exemption from equality legislation to “trans rights,” but is that accurate or fair? Is such exemption a right?

Reporters should be more careful than that on such a contested subject.

Annex B states that trans people should be accommodated “according to their presentation: the way they dress, and the name and pronouns they currently use”, rather than their biological sex at birth.

Is that a “trans right” though? Is it a right, or just an ad hoc solution to a particular problem, one that consulted one set of people affected but not the other. It’s not just obviously a “right” for men who identify as women to invade all women’s spaces. (“Invade” is a tendentious word to use there.)

[Lady Nicholson] said: “Traditionally female patients in the NHS and in private hospitals have been allocated beds in single-sex wards accommodating only women patients.

“Transgenderism, and I speak as a women, has undermined that provision with the 2019 NHS guidance authorising self selection of patient gender on arrival in hospitals, something neither enshrined in law nor backed by public demand, and overriding the exemption for hospital services in the 2010 Equalities Act.

“Yet Parliament and our ministers have consistently declared that women both need and should have privacy dignity and safety in their most vulnerable of situation such as when sick or pregnant.”

Which means that it can’t really be a right for men to override women’s need in that situation. The purported need for validation or recognition shouldn’t be overriding women’s need for safety.

… health minister Lord Kamall said NHS England was currently reviewing the single-sex accommodation guidance “to ensure that it remains focused on privacy, safety and dignity for all patients”.

Yes but you can’t. If some men are insisting on ignoring the privacy, safety and dignity of women then NHS England can’t remain focused on the privacy, safety and dignity of all patients. If men insist on forcing themselves on women in the same old way then that’s an end of women’s privacy, safety and dignity.

Lady Nicholson said: “The rights of another group does not supersede the rights of the group that is already there.”

She added: “My contention is that the dignity, the privacy and the safety of women patients which has been fought over for several decades… is now being diminished significantly and their health undermined, their recovery from illness significantly undermined, by the imposition of new rights of others on top of women’s rights.

“It amuses me that nobody is suggesting they should be on top of men’s rights. This is a matter of great concern to all women.”

I think by “amuses” she means “disgusts.”

No kicking or slapping involved.

It’s Lia Thomas / Laurel Hubbard / Rachel McKinnon all over again.

Eddie Izzard will lead the cast of Joe Stephenson’s UK feature Doctor Jekyll, a modern interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde which places a woman in the lead role.

That is, Joe Stephenson is rethinking Doctor Jekyll as a woman, but then casting a man in the part, so not rethinking it as a woman at all.

Talk about having it both ways. “I’m making Jekyll a woman! And I’m casting a man as that woman! Am I original and quirky or what?!”

A new and more convoluted way to take away one of the few opportunities women have.

“It’s wonderful to be able to reimagine this classic story in a modern way,” said Izzard.

It’s wonderful to take a female part away from a woman, said Izzard.

Some numbers:

Top-grossing 100 films:

• 66% of speaking or named characters were male and 34% were female. This is a gender ratio of 1.9 males to every 1 female.
• Only 28% of all speaking characters in action films were girls and women, which was not meaningfully different. A similar pattern emerged for female characters in animation (33.3%).
• Only 14 of the 100 top movies in 2019 featured a gender-balanced (45%-54.9% of all speaking roles filled with girls/women) cast.

But hey, no doubt Eddie Izzard plays a woman much better than any woman could possibly do it.

Can you imagine the uproar if someone decided to do a new movie version of The Grapes of Wrath in which the Joad family is African-American and then cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Tom Joad?

Actual Vice headline:

Leaked EHRC Guidance Reveals Plans To Exclude Most Trans People From Bathrooms

First of all they don’t mean “bathrooms,” because in the UK that means literal bath rooms; they mean public toilets. But second and more to the point, of course they don’t. There are no plans to exclude people from public toilets.

Subhead:

Under unpublished guidance leaked to VICE World News, Britain’s equalities watchdog wanted to restrict the lives of trans people unless they held a Gender Recognition Certificate – despite only 1% of trans people in the UK having one.

No it didn’t. People don’t live in public toilets. It’s not in any meaningful sense “restricting the lives” of men to tell them they can’t use the women’s toilets. The obverse is not so true: women’s lives are restricted if they can’t safely use public toilets (which they can’t if men are allowed to use them too).

Trans people in Britain would be excluded from single-sex spaces unless they possess a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) under unpublished guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). GRCs are currently held by as little as 1 percent of trans people in the country. 

VICE World News has been leaked sections of an unpublished guidance pack dated from the end of 2021 from Britain’s equalities watchdog, which advised businesses and other organisations such as shops, prisons and gyms to “protect women” by barring most trans people from their single-sex spaces, including toilets, wards and changing rooms. 

They just will not word it honestly. It’s not “trans people,” it’s men who identify as trans. It’s about men.

A trans person looking for legal recognition of their gender identity currently requires medical assessments and psychiatric interviews in order to “prove” their gender and receive a GRC. Non-binary identities are not recognised in UK law.

Well what would recognition of “non-binary identities” have to do with single-sex toilets? Which ones would they use? Which ones does Vice want them to use?

Funny how much lying they have to do to make their case.

Helen Dale explains why so many people need self-help books: because they weren’t taught or didn’t learn enough growing up. The piece as a whole isn’t among her best work, because there’s way too much self-conscious meta, too many clauses commenting on previous clauses, too much performance, but the final full paragraph is unclotted and So True.

If you are emotionally devastated by the leftward lean of science fiction to the point of launching a campaign to “take back” the genre; if the moral struggle that gets you out of bed each morning is purging racism from young adult fantasy novels; if you feel besieged by the political predilections of self-declared gamers (or betrayed by the politics of game reviewers); if you use films about comic-book characters to form your worldview; if you cast about for a metaphor to describe your deepest beliefs and find only Harry Potter . . . you are still a child. You need to step back and work out why your identity is so invested in escapist fancies designed to appeal to confused children halfway through puberty.

Exactly so.

The QC does it again.

It’s considered not just bad form but very dangerous to make claims about suicide like that – dogmatic assertions of a single cause.

One could ask if people like the QC ever stop to think about what they are doing to trans people. What about the ones who get the surgeries and take the blockers and/or cross-sex hormones, and then regret it a year or two or five later? One could ask if it even occurs to him that it’s not a matter of zero possibility of regrets on the one hand and massive inevitable regrets on the other,

Fox News is selling the anti-vax truckers in Ottawa as freedom fighters. Of course it is.

Fox News’ effort to discourage its viewers from vaccinating themselves against COVID-19 has gone international. The network’s stars have in recent weeks fixated on our neighbor to the north, regaling their audiences with fawning coverage of Canadian truckers protesting their country’s COVID-19 vaccine requirements – and encouraging the development of similar activism in the U.S.

It still seems like a very weird flag to fly. Join us, we’re the ones in favor of deadly pandemics! If we’d had our way there would be no polio vax, no measles vax, no smallpox vax, and your kids or your friends or you could get a deadly disease at any time!

Since January 29, a group of truckers and their allies has effectively crippled downtown Ottawa by using vehicles to block traffic, leading the city’s mayor to declare a state of emergency. Similar protests have occurred in cities across the country, and on Monday truckers blocked a major international crossing. 

That’s the one between Detroit and Windsor. I saw some news coverage of it last night, with the bridge packed solid with trucks.

This so-called “Freedom Convoy” originally assembled to oppose a newly implemented rule requiring them to either be vaccinated or quarantine after returning from trips across the U.S. border, but organizers now say they will continue their demonstrations until the national and provincial governments “end all mandates.” 

Again, though, it’s a stupid idea of “freedom.” Getting vaccinated is not slavery or servitude or imprisonment, and not getting one isn’t a form of freedom. Claiming it is is like claiming that stop signs and red lights are barriers to freedom. The freedom to walk into traffic isn’t a freedom worth having.

Fox hosts are extremely excited about the protests, even as they quietly labor under the network’s own stringent vaccine requirements. The network devoted 7 hours and 59 minutes to the story from the first mention of the convoy we found on January 18 through noon on February 9. Prime-time stars Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are among the convoy’s biggest fans at the network, giving it 51 minutes and 47 minutes, respectively. And Fox’s coverage is escalating, with more than 3 hours of trucker coverage coming on Monday and Tuesday this week combined.

Why? I guess because “sticking it to the libs” has become the new freedom, and the libs are foolish enough to think public health measures are preferable to no public health measures. Or, more crudely, it’s just childish “whatever they do we do the opposite because we hates’em.”

I wonder if Fox people lie awake at night fuming at the fact that the right and the left agree on more things than they disagree on. Fox doesn’t want to demolish interstate highways, or hospitals, or schools, or airports, or the military, or the police, or fire departments. Fox people must know just as well as anyone else that a public sector is necessary for a comfortable productive life, so…?

So they pretend they don’t, because that’s their brand. It’s stupid.

Fox’s propagandists have cheered on the truckers as “freedom fighters,” “civil rights hero[es],” and “the face of individualism and rebellion,” while denouncing the purported “totalitarianism” of the Canadian government. 

Like Stalin and Hitler, right? No. Of course not. They know that, and yet they say it. It’s not the tyranny of vaccination mandates we need to worry about, it’s the tyranny of stupidity for ratings.

This focus on Canadian anti-vaccine mandate protests comes amid a spike in U.S. deaths from COVID-19 due to the spread of the omicron variant. Those deaths are largely occurring among the unvaccinated, fueled in part by anti-vaccine coverage from right-wing outlets like Fox.  

In other words they’re encouraging people to do what will kill them. For the ratings.

Those cats are safe from Zouma.

Animal charity the RSPCA has taken West Ham defender Kurt Zouma’s pet cats away after videos emerged on social media of him kicking and slapping one of them.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is liaising with Essex Police about the incident.

“The two cats are now in RSPCA care,” said a charity spokesperson.

The Premier League club say they have fined Zouma “the maximum amount possible” and the fee will be donated to animal welfare charities.

In addition, German sportswear firm Adidas has ended its deal with the 27-year-old.

I hope the cats get a vastly kinder human for their next home.