I think I’m pretty conformist and orthodox on the whole Covid precautions issue, including the parts that are about not infecting other people as opposed to avoiding being infected myself. But I don’t know…

This aft I was walking down a side street and a woman pulling a grocery cart hove into view at the corner, and stopped to put a mask on. I kind of wondered “Mask?” because I was the only person in sight, but oh well – but then as the distance between us shrank she snarled at me: “I’d cross the street but my house is right there” – pointing ahead. For a second I thought she was joking but then I realized – cross the street?? Because one person is on the same side as she is, with plenty of room for us to avoid each other? So I turned to watch her as she passed me, and she snarled again “Whatever” and then some steps later “Idiot.”

??? There is no general outdoor mask mandate now. Crowded outdoor events, yes, but just being outside, no. As I say, there was NO ONE else in sight – it wasn’t crowded. Also I’m vaxxed and she almost certainly is too.

I kind of felt like running after her and smacking her on the back of the head, but I didn’t.

There was a terf gathering in Edinburgh today.

In the evening they went to a pub.

The police were summoned.

Good one.

Alabama is having a big Covid surge so NATURALLY failed president Donald Trump is having a “rally” there. Make Pandemic Great Again.

Donald Trump was due to stage a rally in Alabama on Saturday night, in a city that has declared a Covid emergency and in support of a congressman who both backed Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and this week sympathised with a man who threatened to blow up the US Capitol.

The former president will speak in Cullman, Alabama, in part in support of Mo Brooks’ bid for a US Senate seat.

Like other southern, Republican-run states, Alabama is struggling with a surge in cases of Covid-19 fueled by the contagious Delta variant. On Thursday, the city of Cullman declared a state of emergency.

So along comes Trump to make the situation worse. It’s what he does.

In a statement on Saturday, Trump said he expected a “huge crowd and tremendous enthusiasm” as there was “much to discuss, mostly having to do with bringing our country back”. Local media reported that organisers expected about 40,000 to attend at York Farms. The former president was set to take the stage at 7pm local time.

Dr William Smith, chief medical officer for Cullman Regional, told CBS42: “We view this as a potential ‘super-spreader’ event, just like last week’s Rock the South that was [at the same location]. We’ve seen an increase in patients since that event last weekend and we’re concerned we could see the same impact.”

That’s the wrong attitude altogether. What’s a few hundred or thousand lives compared to an opportunity for Trump to shout at clouds?

This is so profoundly contemptuous of women: pretend woman goes to Brazil to get a “womb transplant” so that he can have a baybee.

I wonder how many pregnant women in favelas could use better health care. I wonder how much pretend-woman’s “transplant” and ensuing care is going to cost.

Jessica Alves has revealed she has travelled to Brazil in her bid to become the first known transgender woman to have a womb transplant.

The Celebrity Big Brother star, 38, shared her hope that she would be able to get pregnant after undergoing the £30,000 transplant.

It is possible that Jessica could fall pregnant through IVF if she decided to go through with the transplant.

Millions languish in poverty and the planet is heating up like a pot of soup on a stove, but do let’s pay attention to men trying to get pregnant.

Jessica told The MailOnline: “There are some very good doctors here that could hopefully do it. The surgery is do-able, the same way that surgery is done on a biological woman. To a transgender woman is is exactly the same thing.”

Wut?

If he means trans women can have surgery just as women can, then duh, sure, but if he means his planned surgery to make a male body pregnant, then duh, of course it’s not the same thing. I guess he’s stupid as well as self-obsessed?

Jessica rose to fame as Human Ken Doll due to spending more than £600,000 on altering her looks with plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures.

She had spent a fortune “trying to become the man she thought she should be” before coming out as transgender.

Earlier this year she spent a further £13,700 to undergo gender confirmation surgery in Bangkok in Thailand.

In other words he’s a fucking lunatic. No doctor should enable this revolting role play.

As the news was pouring in from Kabul, the Biden administration saw fit to make a big fuss about that most oppressed group in the universe – people who think their sex isn’t their sex.

“that would keep you from playing on the sports field” is the usual lie. You’d think government officials would manage to avoid blatant lies like that, but it seems not. The “obstacles” would be to boys and men taking places for girls and women. That’s all. They boys and men can still play, just not on the other teams. “Oh but they’re on estrogen, which puts them at a disadvantage.” Ok, but it doesn’t follow that they get to transfer that disadvantage to girls or women. If somebody has to be at a disadvantage in this scenario, it shouldn’t be girls and women. Why? Because they’re already at a disadvantage in multiple ways. How is this not obvious??

Good health is one thing and cross-sex hormones are another.

Judith Wright tells us:

My local Labour party voted through a motion for the online women’s conference which took place at the end of June. The motion (that I drafted) asked Labour to re-endorse its manifesto commitment to sex-based rights. It also called on Party leaders to condemn the abuse received by women. It stated that the misogyny that women face for speaking out  “would not be tolerated were it directed at a person/people with any other protected characteristic.”

Predictably, our perfectly reasonable motion was rejected by the conference arrangements committee because they claimed “it diminish(es) the experiences” of these other groups of people.

Meaning…what? That it diminishes those experiences because in fact women’s experiences of abuse really are more trivial than anyone else’s? That’s what they went with?

I appealed against the decision and forwarded this to Marsha deCordova, Labour’s Shadow Women and Equalities Minister and Charlotte Gerada, the National Women’s Officer amongst others.

Aaand none of them replied. Soz, women too last century.

Labour’s approach to concerns about the threat to single sex spaces and services is to stick their fingers very firmly in their ears. Clearly proving that they aren’t bothered about the treatment of women when we campaign to defend our rights. Can you imagine that a complaint like this would be ignored if it were about racism or disability or, God forbid, “gender reassignment”? 

Women had their chance. There was a little window in the late 20th century, and that window has now closed. Take it up with Complaints, which has an office in Ulan Bator, open one day a year. Next!

The women’s conference was the predictable farce that many of us knew it would be. The chair kept telling delegates that we must include men who say they’re women in anything and everything we do. I managed to speak about the spurious reason for rejecting my motion and the urgent need for sex-based rights to be discussed. I was constantly interrupted and eventually cut off. I was the only speaker at the conference to be shut down in this way.

Apart from my brief contribution there was no mention of the huge elephant in the room.

In fact there was no debate on anything. It was more like a motivational event where we all had to applaud everything that toed the official party line, part of which seemed to be, men can take part in the women’s conference if they simply self-identify into womanhood. One such man was granted the privilege of speaking during a “discussion” on Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) despite the fact that I know of at least one woman who was prevented from speaking even though her local party had submitted a motion on this issue.

Complaints office. Ulan Bator. Sunday May 47 next year. Goodbye.

Biden seems to have overpromised to European allies.

President Joe Biden told key allies in June that he would maintain enough of a security presence in Afghanistan to ensure they could continue to operate in the capital following the main U.S. withdrawal, a vow made before the Taliban’s rapid final push across the country, according to a British diplomatic memo seen by Bloomberg. 

Biden promised U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, England, that “critical U.S. enablers” would remain in place to keep Kabul safe following the drawdown of NATO forces, the note said. British officials determined the U.S. would provide enough personnel to ensure that the U.K. embassy in Kabul could continue operating. 

Sooooo they’re now pretty pissed off at him.

The British document also showed that the U.S. was privately briefing  allies that they should be prepared for a Taliban offensive before any settlement that might have allowed former President Ashraf Ghani to remain in power. U.S. diplomats said that the Taliban would “test the Afghan government militarily” before they started taking seriously peace talks that were taking place in Doha, the note said.

Ah test it, is that what they were doing – so they “tested” it and next thing you know they had taken over every inch of it.

Trans dogma as professional requirement:

[A] social worker who was critical of aspects of transgender ideology has been sanctioned by Social Work England (SWE), the regulatory body for social workers. In July this year, a female social worker was given a one-year ‘warning order’, following a complaint from a member of the public that she ‘used social media unethically’. Case examiners at SWE agreed that she made a number of posts on Facebook that were ‘discriminatory in nature’. According to the disciplinary report, she shared links ‘to fundraising pages for people and / or organisations which appear to hold and / or have publicised discriminatory views’. She also ‘shared and signed petitions that pursue a discriminatory goal’. Because of this, Social Work England ruled that her ‘fitness to practise is impaired by way of misconduct’.

The social worker’s posts expressed ‘gender critical’ views in relation to the increasingly toxic and polarised transgender debate. Case examiners at Social Work England say explicitly in their report that ‘no evidence has been offered that would suggest that the social worker acted in a transphobic manner while at work’. Similarly, examiners heard testimony from her line manager that she ‘has never practised in a discriminatory way’. In other words, the whole basis of the case against her was that she expressed the ‘wrong’ views about trans issues on social media.

And the ‘wrong’ views aren’t that X people are inferior or naturally subordinate or both, they are simply that people are the sex they are and not the other one. The ‘wrong’ views are views that were universal until a few years ago. The ‘wrong’ views are about a matter of fact, on which the ‘right’ views are more eccentric and fantasy-based and hard to believe than the ‘right’ views – in other words a professional body is making it a disciplinary matter to believe obvious facts instead of non-obvious fictions. Apparently you have to believe (or at least pretend to believe) that people are whatever sex they say they are if you want to be a social worker.

So if a woman is married to an abusive man, and they have kids and no money and are struggling, if the man says he’s a woman any social worker who takes their case has to agree with him, including if the woman married to the man doesn’t agree that he’s a man.

How’s that going to work out?

Chapter 572 of the Infantilization Chronicles:

Romeo and Juliet audiences have been given an entire page of warnings about suicide, fake blood and stage fighting for a new prodution at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Oh gosh, really? Suicide? Fighting? I had no idea, I thought it was about a couple of kittens who find a ball of yarn and hilarity ensues.

The double suicide of the star-crossed lovers has been deemed a mental health issue in a guide reminding viewers that the actors playing Romeo and Juliet do not really die at the end of the play.

They don’t??? Who knew?

This “sensitivity” is all the more bizarre given the movies and tv shows and video games everyone is steeped in. I could see Cousin Joe from deep in the country who’s never seen a play or a tv show or a movie and has never read a book and never talked to any humans needing to be told that the actors aren’t really dead, but other than that…

More seriously…I think people who are so fragile that they can’t deal with onstage violence probably don’t go to the theater. I also don’t think this is a left-right thing particularly, it’s more a…what…therapy culture versus get a grip culture. There’s a kind of cult of fragility going on, which we’re all too familiar with in relation to the people who keep yelling that trans people are the most oppressed ever. Encouraging people to think they’re so weak and excitable that they think stage murder is real is not doing them a favor. Most people are not made of crystal and don’t shatter at a touch.

Dennis Kavanagh has some questions.

It’s “capricious” to say that same sex attraction is not the same as being trans and that the former doesn’t have to be lumped with the latter at all times? It’s the other way around, isn’t it – it’s “capricious” to treat them as the same or closely related enough to be inextricably bound together for all purposes.

Labour Women’s Declaration addresses Sadiq Khan:

Sadiq – “Do you support the single-sex exceptions in the 2010 Equality Act or do you wish to repeal them?” This is the question which Joan Smith asked you in private letters last year, but you failed to respond, in spite of her position as the independent Chair of your VAWG Board, in which role she was charged with leading independent scrutiny of your performance towards ending VAWG.

We are now publishing our own letters to you so that it cannot be said that you were not aware of our safeguarding concerns. As Labour Peer Philip Hunt warned in July 2020 “When the eventual public enquiry happens, as inevitably it will, there will be many organisations and leaders who will have to face up to the consequences  of their inaction.”

Thousands of Labour party members who have signed our Declaration are also waiting for your answers to our letters to you and your Deputy Mayors, dating back over 2 years. We believe you are publicly promoting views which will have a chilling effect on women, and on lesbians in particular. We have repeatedly asked to meet you and your colleagues so that you can at least understand our concerns. We are not asking you to agree with us, but to hear us.

I’d like him to do both. I’m fed up with seeing women’s concerns brushed off and ignored.

The letters make interesting reading.

Even with Trump gone, they still flop around in the sewer.

Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to US president Joe Biden, has been labelled a “snivelling little twit” by a Republican congressman. Matt Gaetz, who represents Florida, made the remarks during an America First rally in Iowa on Thursday. During his speech, Gaetz told the crowd. “Speaking of government bureaucrats, I have heard enough of that snivelling little twit, Dr Anthony Fauci.”

Gaetz is the latest Republican to take aim at Fauci, after Representative Madison Cawthorn said last month that the doctor would be ‘prosecuted’ if the GOP takes control of the House in the midterms next year.

Because…? He’s doing his best to deal with a viral pandemic. How is that a reason to call him names and threaten to prosecute him?

Joan Smith wonders aloud why Sadiq Khan’s office fired her:

Back in 2013, when Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, I was surprised to get a message from City Hall. One of Johnson’s deputies, Stephen Greenhalgh, wanted to know if I would be willing to join him as Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Board — the body that draws up policy to tackle domestic and sexual violence in London. Johnson and Greenhalgh wanted to bring in an independent expert and decided to invite me on the advice of a number of women’s organisations.

I jumped at the chance, even though I am a member of the Labour party, and we worked amicably together for the next three years. Fast forward to 2021: Johnson is prime minister, Lord Greenhalgh (as he now is) is a government minister and I am out. Now I am in a peculiar situation: I have voted Labour all my life, yet was brought into City Hall by a Conservative administration — and sacked by its Labour successor.

Peculiar but all too familiar – the left is now the party of magical thinking while the right is the party of obvious facts when it comes to sex n gender. Usually it’s the other way around.

After eight years of unpaid work on behalf of women and girls in London, it seems reasonable to expect that Sadiq Khan or Sophie Linden, the deputy mayor who replaced Greenhalgh, would have wanted to tell me themselves. But I have not heard a word from Khan and I only had a call from Linden yesterday after the Times published a story about the incident. Before that, all I had received was a series of diary notifications from her office, cancelling all the meetings I was supposed to have with her over the next twelve months.

Which seems quite staggeringly rude and offhand. Or rather – “Seems, madam? I know not seems; nay, it is.”

The news was delivered in an email from Diana Luchford, a former civil servant at the Home Office, who is now CEO of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. I had to read it twice before the meaning sank in: I am out, thus removing independent scrutiny at a moment when the behaviour of the Metropolitan police towards women has been fiercely criticised.

Free expertise unceremoniously thrown away, apparently without so much as a thank you.

As Co-Chair, I was able to make sure that vital issues raised by recent events were discussed. For example, I argued that we needed to know what the Metropolitan Police intend to do to improve the way they identify sexual predators in their own ranks, and to make sure that complaints of domestic abuse against serving officers are handled properly. I also expressed my concern, privately, that the Mayor’s focus on issues such as knife crime risked diverting attention from crimes against women, including black women in London who suffer disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual assault.

…

“Trans women are women, trans men are men,” Khan declared in February, repeating the mantra of trans activists.

The mantra that is a mantra because it is untrue. If it were true and obvious there would be no need to keep repeating it.

I discussed the Mayor’s tweets with Karen Ingala Smith, indomitable CEO of nia, the organisation that provides services to victims of sexual and domestic violence in east London. We decided to write to Linden, warning her about the impact Khan’s statements were having on organisations that depend on City Hall for funding: “How can it have anything other than a chilling effect when the Mayor publicly takes sides with a group of activists on such a contentious issue?” we asked.

We received an equivocating reply, repeating the Mayor’s view that “trans women are women” and making the dubious claim that the “basic human rights [of trans people] remain unmet”. Linden told us that the Mayor’s approach to providing services “is led by the needs of victims and survivors on a clear principle of non-discrimination”, a puzzling statement since women’s organisations are highly unlikely to discriminate on grounds of age, race, religion or disability.

But we bitches “discriminate” on grounds of reality. That can’t be allowed. Either we repeat the mantra or we get the hose get summarily fired from an unpaid position without even a polite thanks for your service.

Sarkie.

The thing about this is that the “all of our boards are being restructured” retort is completely worthless, because what does restructuring have to do with getting rid of a well known highly informed UNPAID expert on violence against women? Restructure to your hearts’ content, fine, but don’t throw out your genius unpaid experts! Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel, instead!

Which, of course, hints that “restructuring” isn’t really the reason they did it at all, but they can’t admit the real reason, because it’s so contemptible and disgusting.

Originally a comment by Sastra on The toxic meaning attached to “woman.”

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Sloppy Analogy is one of the major players in turning otherwise reasonable people unreasonable. I’ve long noticed this when it comes to religion and believing in God. A direct examination of the god concept requires too much light on a blurry idea based primarily on emotion. Enter then the popular apologetic of Sloppy Analogies.

“Remember how your mother would put something out for you to find and do something she wanted? God works like that. Think of your mother. God is like that. Think of your mother in another room so you can’t see her. Now you’re starting to understand. God’s like that. Now think of quantum physics. Hard to wrap your mind around, huh? God’s like that, too ….”

Once they start playing Sloppy Analogy, they can go on and on. The game is for them, as much as it is for you. And it seems to me that TRAs play it all the time.

“Think of knowing something true about yourself and not being believed. Being trans is like that. Think of black women not being able to use a bathroom reserved for whites. “Sex-based” spaces for women is like that. Think of religious conservatives disgusted over homosexuality. Opposition to trans folks living according to their Gender Identity is like that. Think of Jews hiding from the Nazis. That’s how trans people feel when Gender Identity is treated like a theory…”

And on and on. Sloppy Analogies are intuition pumps.

“Asking me to define ‘God’/define ‘woman’ is like asking me to reduce someone I love to a math equation. It just can’t be done. You’re making a category error.”

Ha.

Joan Smith on erasing women:

The Labour MP Rosie Duffield has been relentlessly bullied for liking a tweet that queried the language of an American cancer charity which referred to women as “cervix-havers”, but she is absolutely right. Cancer prevention is about identifying a possibly fatal disease, not affirming someone’s gender identity. If a charity wants to add that women who identify as men should also get checks, that’s absolutely fine. But replacing “woman” with a clumsy neologism risks failing to reach natal females who aren’t familiar with their bodies and don’t know they have a cervix. Nor have I seen equivalent demands to erase the word “men” from medical advice. “Men, we are with you,” begins a message from Prostate Cancer UK. “Penis-havers”, surely?

Now, to top it all, I discover I’ve been ejected from high-level discussions at City Hall about domestic and sexual violence. Eight years ago, I was asked to become Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, after a group of women’s organisations voted unanimously in my favour. Women wanted me there, to provide an expert independent voice, but now I’ve been sacked. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the scale of violence against women in London has reduced in the meantime. (Spoiler alert: it hasn’t.) Women’s organisations in London weren’t consulted before it happened.

Maybe the thinking is “Now we know that if women don’t like being hated and assaulted they can just identify as men, there’s no need for a Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board.”

The toxic meaning attached to “woman” is misogyny in its purest form. Dressed up as “progressive”, as though we have finally reached the stage of recognising an historic injustice, it is actually quite the opposite — an attempt to shame women into accepting erasure from public discourse. This is something that centuries of patriarchy never quite achieved, perhaps because it didn’t feel the need as long as women were firmly in their place. But once the category of “women” has been demolished, everything is up for grabs and literally anyone can claim to be whatever they feel like. How can we fight for our rights if we’re not even allowed to name ourselves? 

And we’re not even allowed to name the others, either, not if they “identify as”…us.

People really should stop saying this. They’d be better off just drooling.

“It is wrong for the governor to force caring, experienced, and dedicated educators to get a vaccination, or have their jobs, livelihoods, and dreams ripped away from them,” said Rep. Alex Ybarra, R-Quincy, in a statement. “It was my choice to get vaccinated. That’s the way it should be — a personal health-care choice.”

Of course that’s not the way it should be, and of course it’s not simply a personal health-care choice. It’s not simply a personal vehicular choice to drive 90 miles an hour down a residential street, it’s not a personal business choice to sell contaminated food, it’s not a personal marketing choice to say that smoking is good for you. There are such things as personal health-care choices but vaccination isn’t one of them.

It certainly does.

Amnesty Ireland is getting a pasting.

Women’s rights are human rights? Is that so?