Oh gosh look what have we here, why it’s an article at the ACLU about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s role as the founding director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. The WOMEN’S Rights Project. Not the People’s Rights Project, not the Everybody’s Rights Project, not the I Don’t See Color Or Sex Project, but the WOMEN’S Rights Project. But fast forward a year (the article is only a year old) and we get some moronic “activist” actually deleting her words and replacing them with words that pretend women don’t exist.

The article is by Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of the ACLU, and it’s about RBG as head of the new Women’s Rights Project. WOMEN’S.

Half a century ago, in October 1970, I became the executive director of the ACLU. I had a wish list, and foremost on the list was the establishment of a Women’s Rights Project.

I had been involved in a few women’s rights cases in my previous post as director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. My wife, who was a young corporate executive at a time when not many women held such posts, encountered discrimination against women on a regular basis. Most importantly, a feminist movement had been reborn in the late 1960s, and I wanted the ACLU to be part of it and to contribute expertise in litigation.

Fast forward 50 years and the ACLU is determinedly removing the word “women” from its press statements. They should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

I heard that the New Jersey ACLU had secured the volunteer assistance of a professor at Rutgers Law School who had done excellent work. Her name was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I called her to arrange an interview.

Ruth impressed me when I met her, but what really captivated me was the quality of her written work. Her legal pleadings and briefs were powerfully argued and beautifully written, and the dominant theme that emerged from them was that women and men should not be limited by sexual stereotypes. Men could be nurturing parents and caregivers, women could be breadwinners, and both were entitled to equal treatment.

Without the ACLU job maybe she wouldn’t have been in the running for the Supreme Court, maybe Bill Clinton wouldn’t have thought of her. Yet now they’re removing the word “women” when they quote her.

This is fucking outrageous.

You see what they did there? They rewrote her words!

The words are from her testimony to the Judiciary Committee when she was nominated to the Supreme Court. They’re her words, not the ACLU’s words, and the fact that she’s talking about women in them is very very central to their meaning and importance and role in history. The ACLU has some fucking gall “correcting” them. I feel like sending them an invoice on behalf of every woman who ever donated to them – pay it all back you fucks.

Also – check it out: the Georgia ACLU managed to quote her own words in April 2019, without feeling entitled to remove the words “women” and “her” and “she” from them.

I wish I could throw a bunch of rotting potatoes at whatever twerp at the ACLU did this. If it’s Chase Strangio I hope he gets fired.

The familiar story…

Mecklenburg County [North Carolina] District Attorney Spencer Merriweather said he will not order an outside review of reported rapes and sexual assaults at Myers Park High School by the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation.

Merriweather, through a spokeswoman, refused to answer questions about whether he had confidence that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department appropriately investigated six reported cases of rape and sexual assault that have been detailed in WBTV investigations.

The six women who reported their cases to both police and administrators said they had little or no follow-up from police. In one case, WBTV has confirmed, a CMPD school resource officer assigned to Myers Park didn’t even fill out a police report detailing the reported rape.

Maybe the police had good reasons in all six cases…but the statistics on rape prosecutions are horrifying. Only a tiny percent go to trial and only a tiny percent of those result in convictions. Do we think they’re all just a little misunderstanding?

[O]ne former local prosecutor, who now works in private practice as a criminal defense attorney, questioned why CMPD didn’t take basic steps to investigate the reported rapes and sexual assaults, including having the students participate in a forensic interview.

“There’s trained social workers. There are trained interviewers that are meant not to lead the alleged victims down a path of saying certain things happened but, at the same time, acknowledging the complications with talking to a sexual assault victim, or somebody that’s reporting that,” Jeremy Smith, the former local prosecutor said.

Yes but rape is hard to prosecute so…we don’t.

Smith said that, in his time as a prosecutor, sexual assault cases were among the toughest cases to charge and required extensive investigation by police.

“It sounds like, here, it never got past step one,” he said.

Oh well, it’s only girls.

H/t Rob

Helen Dale reviews Helen Joyce’s Trans:

Trans people are, after all, a small proportion of the population, whose individual cases are riddled with complexities. And yet we’re currently being offered striking and simplistic narratives that must be upheld if one is to be considered among the morally meritorious. It’s why I don’t want to write about trans issues with the same enthusiasm I did about Brexit. If you’re interested in intellectual history, constitutional law, and parliamentary procedure, then Brexit was like Christmas morning. Apart from certain Continuity Remain conspiracists and Leaverish swear-bears – both easily avoided – the arguments for and against were finely balanced. 

Trans isn’t like that. One ‘side’ is clearly right; the other ‘side’ is clearly wrong. Yet it’s the side that punches through wrong and comes out near Young Earth Creationism that, until recently, held the upper hand in local controversies and still does in the United States.

…

Like Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, and Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, Trans brings out what happens when people gain social approbation by endorsing ‘high status’ narratives. Much of this status enhancement turns on believing a mental illness requiring treatment (gender dysphoria) and the behaviour attaching to it (gender non-conformity and bodily discomfort) amount to a human rights claim requiring public and legal affirmation.

Affirmation and, more intensely, validation. We have to “validate” the delusion, on pain of shunning and punishment.

The desire to make certain views unchallengeable means disagreements – especially those covered widely in the press – must be pathologised. Misrepresentation is rife, with criticism and debate offered by dissentients given implications that weren’t there and weren’t intended. This moves to catastrophising, whereby expressing any doubt is characterised in ways that invoke extinction. Stop Trans Genocide MMA fighter McLaughlan’s shirt read last Saturday. The classic catastrophising in trans activism is ‘you are erasing my/our/their existence’. 

Helen notes that the four books have different appeals, which she spells out for us so that we can pick just one. Murray and Stock both have a dry wit, she tells us.

If, however, you look to grasp the extent to which gender identity ideology, both academic and popular, bears comparison with the worst sort of pseudoscience, then Joyce is your pick. I suspect Richard Dawkins endorsed Trans because, as is his wont, he spotted a quasi-religious movement whose ultimate target is not Labour’s all-women shortlists or women’s sports or even feminism as a political ideology, but Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology and beyond that the scientific method itself.

I think it’s simpler and more basic than that. I think Dawkins, like so many of us, does not like being ordered to “validate” a lie. I’ve always liked this about him, though the liking was a bit occluded during the Elevatorgate era. I think it’s not limited to evolution or even science but to the much broader category of bullshit. We (those of us who do) think it’s bullshit, and shouting won’t make us stop thinking so.

This is gorgeous to watch.

Identifying details:

It’s all so grudging.

Trans women can be excluded from some “women-only spaces” in some circumstances, Keir Starmer says, as the controversy threatens to open a bitter row in the party.

That is, women won’t be forced to have men in all women-only spaces, Starmer says, only some of them. The Independent of course simply has to put it in terms of “exclusion,” and has to put scare-quotes on the very bizarre unfamiliar shocking idea that women get to pee in a room without men in it.

The law “rightly assumes the inclusion of trans women, except in specific circumstances”, the spokesman said, normally thought to include prisons and refuges.

But everywhere else we’re required to pretend that men really are women.

A prosperous barrister sounding like an agitated teenager.

He blathers as if puberty blockers are an entirely established, uncontroversial, unquestioned health-improver with zero harms and even zero risk of harms.

But that’s not the case, and he’s in a position to know perfectly well that’s not the case, unless he systematically shoves his thumbs into his ears whenever anyone tries to tell him so. But he’s an adult, and a powerful adult at that, so he has no right to shove his thumbs in his ears and go right on promoting puberty blockers, given how drastic and life-altering the results of taking them are.

Shorter: there’s no such thing as “the wrong body.”

Sullen racist guy sues New York Times, niece, for telling the truth about sullen racist guy.

Former President Donald J. Trump filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Mary L. Trump, The New York Times and three of its reporters of conspiring in an “insidious plot” to improperly obtain his confidential tax records and exploit their use in news articles and a book.

He’s a crook. He was president of the US. The public has a right to know. I don’t care if Mary Trump signed a billion NDAs, we had a right to know.

Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Dutchess County, N.Y., accuses the newspaper, its reporters and Ms. Trump of being motivated “by a personal vendetta and their desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall and were further intended to advance their political agenda.”

A personal vendetta? He was president. And a crook. It was vital information. Nobody needed any fucking personal vendetta.

The Times report cast doubt on Mr. Trump’s claim that he was a self-made billionaire who rose to wealth and fame with little help from his father, a real estate developer. Instead, the investigation found, Mr. Trump inherited the equivalent of at least $413 million, much of it through “dubious tax schemes.”

A rich kid from birth, and a crook, and the offspring of a crook. And he was president.

In a statement on Tuesday evening, The Times defended the news organization’s reporting on Mr. Trump’s taxes and said it planned to fight the lawsuit. “The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes helped inform the public through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest,” the statement read. “This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”

I’ll just repeat that – a subject of overriding public interest. Undeniably true.

Who was Sabina Nessa?

A south-east London primary school has been left “devastated” by the suspected murder of one of its teachers after her body was found near a community centre on Saturday.

The Metropolitan police named the victim as Sabina Nessa, 28, from Kidbrooke, and said her death was being treated as murder. A man in his 40s who was arrested on suspicion of killing her has been released under further investigation.

Lisa Williams, the head of Rushey Green primary school in Lewisham, where Nessa worked, said she was a brilliant teacher.

“We are devastated by Sabina’s tragic death. She was kind, caring and absolutely dedicated to her pupils,” Williams added.

But apparently not kind and caring enough to be trending on Twitter.

I saw this yesterday, and had been thinking similar things for two or three days.

I kept wondering during those two or three days why Gabby Petito was trending so insistently on Twitter. She can’t be the only missing person in the country, I thought, so why is she trending in particular? I suppose the answer is depressingly obvious and stupid. She’s young, she’s pretty, she’s white, she’s blonde. Give her another 20 years and she wouldn’t have been trending.

So, today –

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on The manly men.

The Republicans are the party of male fragility.

You can see it in their strutting attempts to equate gun ownership with machismo and their constant braggadocio about their willingness to engage in violence (the coup/civil war fantasies, the declarations of “here are my guns, just try to come take them!”).

You can see it in their attempts to fetishize Donald Trump, of all people, as a pillar of masculinity: those bizarre Ben Garrison cartoons depicting Trump as some muscular Adonis exist for a reason. There’s really nothing wrong with having a president who is elderly and overweight and not a prime physical specimen, but they can’t accept the possibility that they might respect and even worship anyone who isn’t a paragon of manhood, lest it reflect on their own masculinity, so they like to reimagine Trump as just such a paragon.

You can see it in their sneering attempts to dismiss Democrats or left-leaning men as not being wholly men: they’re “soy boys” or “metrosexuals,” or they eat arugula or don’t know the right way to order a cheesesteak or whatever.

So yeah, on any given issue, people like Tucker Carlson will attempt to frame the Republican position as the “manly” one, whether it makes any sense or not. Being afraid of getting a potentially deadly virus? That’s for losers and cucks. Being afraid that 75 Afghan refugees will overwhelm Montana, or of going to a coffee shop in broad daylight without packing an AR-15? That’s manly man stuff.

Ergo, soldiers who refuse vaccination must be the manliest soldiers of them all. The ones who get vaccinated aren’t REAL soldiers. Probably more of those wimpy “woke” soldiers who lost Afghanistan.

Back to school in Afghanistan – no not you.

The Taliban have excluded girls from Afghan secondary schools, with only boys and male teachers allowed back into classrooms.

Naturally. Girls are for pumping out babies, not for learning.

Schoolgirls and their parents on Saturday said prospects were bleak.

“I am so worried about my future,” said one Afghan schoolgirl, who had hoped to be a lawyer.

“Everything looks very dark. Every day I wake up and ask myself why I am alive? Should I stay at home and wait for someone to knock on the door and ask me to marry him? Is this the purpose of being a woman?”

Her father said: “My mother was illiterate, and my father constantly bullied her and called her an idiot. I didn’t want my daughter to become like my mum.”

Taliban men want all women to become like that.

The IOC can’t decide what to think.

The International Olympic Committee’s new transgender guidelines for sports have been delayed again because of “very conflicting opinions” and are now unlikely to be published until after next February’s Beijing Winter Olympics, three years later than originally planned.

The news was revealed by the IOC’s science and medical director, Dr Richard Budgett, who said the forthcoming advice for international sports federations would “prioritise inclusion” and “avoidance of harm”.

They can’t do both. If they prioritize “inclusion” (by which they mean “inclusion” of men in women’s events) then they can’t also prioritize avoidance of harm. “Including” men in women’s sports is harm, and more harm will flow from it.

The Olympics aren’t “inclusive” anyway. They exclude all but a few hundred people out of the 7 billion on the planet. It’s ridiculous that the one area where they want to play at being inclusive is the one that will harm women. Not everyone, not all Olympians, just women. Women only.

“We’re very aware that sex, of course, is not binary. It’s a continuum. The sectors overlap. And so the solutions are not essentially going to be binary.”

Nonsense. What they claim to be “very aware of” is nonsense.

“Transgender women are women,” Budgett said. “But we also have to separate gender from eligibility. And eligibility needs to be sport-specific in order to have this fair and meaningful competition at all levels, but especially at the elite level where the stakes are that much higher.”

Transgender women are not women though, they’re men who identify as women.

“There’s going to be different criteria for different sports. If you compare archery to hockey to rowing, they require very different skills. And an elite athlete from one is unlikely to be an elite athlete in another. And we have to determine what really is a disproportionate or insurmountable advantage.”

No, actually, they should be reminding themselves that men have huge physical advantages over women end of story. They shouldn’t be deciding to their own satisfaction how much advantage is too much, they should be declining to permit that advantage at all.

Hmm.

There’s a lot to wonder about in that passage, but I’m wondering what he means by “men with high testosterone levels.”

I guess he means particularly aggressive, violent, unthinking men?

I can see where men like that might tend to be hostile to vaccinations once they were alerted to The Resistance, but I don’t see where free thinkers come in.

No I guess I do, really – they come in through the door marked “Flatter Yourself.” They’ve opted to think it’s top-notch skepticism and independence of mind to decide vaccination is bad based on what they saw on Facebook the other day.

Christians though? What does religion have to do with it? Is that just because of the fuss about temporarily closing churches to stop the spread?

Probably. It’s all as feeble as a kitten on Zolpidem. It’s What Our Tribe thinks as opposed to what that stupid tribe that seeks out expert advice thinks. Go team.

One of those “everybody’s talking about” items –

I’ll quote the rest so that no one gets Twittersick.

Owen is also a gay man quite stunningly oblivious to just how alarmed many gay men and lesbians are to the direction this is all heading in. And they’re damn right to be alarmed – because people on here who are attracted to the same sex are also told they’re ‘hateful bigots’.

Most political commentators, even the best ones, have their blind spots on certain things. Owen has two. This one… and a pretty bizarre tendency to constantly overlook the hideous, shameful record of Arab and Muslim despots on human rights, women’s rights and gay rights.

And it’s been giving all sorts of organisations wildly, offensively incorrect guidance around the Equality Act. Its behaviour is disgusting and disgraceful. Simple.

See also: Edinburgh Rape Crisis, whose CEO has described rape victims as ‘privileged’ and ‘bigoted’.

As I see it, the views of Jones, Mridul Wadhwa and far too much of the left on this are based on an extraordinarily simplistic, frequently stupid view of the world. In which all groups are placed in a hierarchy, a pecking order, of privilege.

That these groups aren’t just individuals, but in most cases, couldn’t help being born into one or another of them is treated as irrelevant. Most privileged on the list are, of course, rich white men. Then, according to this hideously simplistic prism, come rich white women.

The whole discussion has become so completely unhinged that middle class white women are routinely viewed as much more privileged than white working class men (even though in practice, no-one really knows what ‘middle class’ or ‘working class’ mean any longer).

Then we move further down this stupid list and reach gay and lesbian people, ethnic minorities, refugees… and right at the very bottom, we reach trans people. Who face horrendous levels of discrimination and hate. So, the viewpoint becomes very simple.

“These are the least privileged people in society, so we must automatically support them at all costs. Anyone who disagrees is clearly a hater who want them to suffer”. Any nuances around the issue – the removal of women’s spaces chief among them – are flat out ignored.

Also any pointed questions about how we know trans people are at the very bottom of the stupid list, along with any pointed questions about all trans people, including for instance Caitlyn Jenner? With all the medals, and money, and getting away with killing a woman by rear-ending her car on the PCH?

This isn’t the minor issue some may still view it as. This is completely fundamental. Because women make up half the entire population. If you are a man who goes around telling women what they are allowed to think or say about being a woman, you should be given very short shrift.

Of course, political campaigns conducting their own polls with questions designed to give the answers they want is nothing new. But when Jones claims that most women agree with him, he comes awfully close to outright lying.

He should account for why he routinely ignores the detail contained in the above survey. He essentially pretends it doesn’t exist. Just as he pretends that the rampant misogyny, homophobia and racism among many of the more militant pro-trans voices on here doesn’t exist either.

But it does. And it’s seen on here all the time. Then look at the parallel he and others draw between what’s happening now and what happened to gay and lesbian people in the past. It’s the same thing, right? Wrong. Completely, utterly wrong. In fact, it’s the flat out reverse.

When you’re bullying lesbians who decline to pair up with men who say they are lesbians, you’re doing it wrong.

I think the idea that women have been oppressed, persecuted, harassed, raped, murdered since the dawn of humanity because of their gender, not their sex, is quite barking mad. Here’s a helpful hint: it’s mostly because men are much more physically powerful than women.

That plus the reproductive role.

And throughout history, men have used their much greater physical power to coerce, enslave, attack, assault and rape women: by penetrating their sexual organs against their will. That’s a large part of why so many women will always be wary when meeting a man.

…

It’s also why allowing trans women to compete in elite sport is flat out wrong – and to do so in physical sports based largely on power, quite lunatic in how dangerous it is. I’m waiting until the first woman is killed as a result of this madness – and how it’ll be ignored.

The idea that anyone who disagrees with trans women being allowed to compete with biological women in elite sport is a ‘transphobe’ or a ‘bigot’ for trying to stop women coming to actual physical harm isn’t just disgusting. It shows where this madness has led.

The idea that anyone who disagrees with people with male genitals being allowed inside rape crisis centres is a ‘transphobe’ or a ‘bigot’ – when the women who need those centres are traumatised, terrified and looking for somewhere safe – also shows where this madness has led.

But then, when Rosie Duffield receives constant rape and death threats for holding an opinion based on science and JK Rowling does likewise even when bravely telling her own life story – in which she herself was raped – that again shows where this madness has led.

It’s led to a place of hatred. Of demagoguery. Of extremist ideology trumping all reason. Of language being forced down the throats of half the bloody population because it’s ‘inclusive’ (no: it’s the very opposite).

Well said.

Sequoias burning…

California wildfires have burned into at least four groves of gigantic ancient sequoias in national parks and forests, though cooler weather on Friday helped crews trying to keep the flames away from a famous cluster containing the world’s largest tree.

The fires lapped into the groves with trees that can be up to 200 feet (61 meters) tall and 2,000 years old, including Oriole Lake Grove in Sequoia National Park and Peyrone North and South groves in the neighboring Sequoia National Forest.

…

Flames were still about a mile (1.5 kilometers) from the famed Giant Forest, where some 2,000 massive sequoias grow on a plateau high in the mountains of the national park.

Firefighters have placed special aluminum wrapping around the base of the General Sherman Tree, the world’s largest by volume at 52,508 cubic feet (1,487 cubic meters), as well as some other sequoias and buildings.

…

A historic drought tied to climate change is making wildfires harder to fight. Scientists say climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.

Meanwhile the cruise ships trundle in and out of Puget Sound, each burning its 80 thousand gallons of fuel per day.

They tried.

A conservative lawyer working with then-President Donald Trump’s legal team tried to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence that he could overturn the election results on January 6 when Congress counted the Electoral College votes by throwing out electors from seven states, according to the new book “Peril” from Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

Just throw them out, yeah? Simple.

The scheme put forward by controversial lawyer John Eastman was outlined in a two-page memo obtained by the authors for “Peril,” and which was subsequently obtained by CNN. The memo, which has not previously been made public, provides new detail showing how Trump and his team tried to persuade Pence to subvert the Constitution and throw out the election results on January 6.

And how stupid it was, and how many even of Trump allies said so, and how unenthusiastic controversial lawyer John Eastman’s employer was.

“You might as well make your case to Queen Elizabeth II. Congress can’t do this. You’re wasting your time,” [Republican Senator Mike] Lee said to Trump’s lawyers trying to overturn the results in Georgia, according to the book.

…

Under Eastman’s scheme, Pence would have declared Trump the winner with more Electoral College votes after the seven states were thrown out, at 232 votes to 222. Anticipating “howls” from Democrats protesting the overturning of the election, the memo proposes, Pence would instead say that no candidate had reached 270 votes in the Electoral College. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote. Since Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, a majority could vote for Trump to win the election.

Totally fair! Except for the seven states part, where they just made shit up about how they could “throw out” some of the electors.

In the end, Pence didn’t go along with Eastman’s scheme, concluding that the Constitution did not give him any power beyond counting the Electoral College votes. He did his own consultations before January 6, according to the book, reaching out to former Vice President Dan Quayle and the Senate parliamentarian, who were both clear in telling him he had no authority beyond counting the votes.

When Pence refused to intervene, Trump turned on his vice president, attacking him on Twitter even as the insurrection at the Capitol was unfolding on January 6.

Funnily enough, Eastman resigned from his university a week later.

Giuliani and Graham went back and forth on the scheme, with Graham telling Giuliani to give him some substance instead of just because I say so.

Giuliani then sent Graham several memos and affidavits claiming fraud. But when Graham’s chief Judiciary Committee counsel Lee Holmes went over the claims, he found they were sloppy, overbearing and “added up to nothing,” Woodward and Costa write. “Holmes reported to Graham that the data in the memos were a concoction, with a bullying tone and eighth grade writing.”

“Third grade,” Graham responded, according to the book. “I can get an affidavit tomorrow saying the world is flat.”

Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.

Too busy tucking his shirt in.

Let’s get them even younger says “charity.”

A leading charity for young people has called on the SNP to allow children as young as 12 to legally change their gender without their parents’ consent.

Let’s also allow them to drive, fly planes, perform surgery, cut down trees, fight fires, join the military. What could go wrong?

Children in Scotland, which receives more than £1 million a year in public money, said allowing pre-teens to obtain gender recognition certificates could prove “extremely beneficial” and would help “normalise trans identities”.

Ah there it is – it’s not about benefiting the children at all, it’s about normalizing the ludicrous claim that men become women by saying “I’m a woman.”

Under current Scottish Government plans, the legal age at which someone can change gender is to be reduced from 18 to 16.

How alarming this is depends on whether they really mean gender or in fact mean sex. Changing gender needn’t be irrevocable, but trying to change sex causes physical changes that can’t be entirely reversed. Journalists apparently haven’t learned to be clear on this point.

“Lowering the age at which people have the opportunity to apply for a gender recognition certificate to 12 would ensure that far more children and young people are able to undergo this process, should they wish to,” the Edinburgh-based organisation said.

Yes, obviously it would, but it would also ensure that far more children who are way too young to know how to question claims about gender and sex and identity and all the rest of the ideology will be able to “undergo this process,” which is not necessarily a good outcome. There is such a thing as social contagion, even though the ideology furiously denies that social contagion plays any role in the surge of children and adolescents claiming to be trans. If social contagion plays no part then what is this “charity” even for? Get real: the “charity” is all about promoting the trans ideology, in other words, it’s all about social contagion.

“Parents provide a vital support to children and have a key role to play in this process for their children. However, we do not believe they should have a final say on whether their child can apply to have their lived gender legally recognised.”

But children age 12 should. Cool. Again: bring on the 12-year-old pilots and bus drivers and surgeons. We can’t wait for the new utopia.

Advocates of the changes, including Nicola Sturgeon, say the moves are intended to support a marginalised minority group in which mental health problems are rife.

Great, and people with mental health problems are definitely always able to tell what’s best for them, because that’s what mental health problem means: superior wisdom and insight on complicated subjects.

Here’s that clip of Rosie Duffield talking to Justin Webb on Today. It’s good.

The Express reports:

Nicola Sturgeon has come under fire after saying some women’s concerns were “not valid” in a debate about reforming the Gender Recognition Act (GRA).

The First Minister made the comments in regards to plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act which is currently in place in Scotland. In an interview with the BBC, Ms Sturgeon had suggested people should focus instead on the “real threats” to the safety of women.

…

A number of critics have pointed out that there could be an increased risk of harm to girls or women from predatory men [if the GRA is changed to make “gender recognition” easier] as they may be able to take advantage of the lack of checks which would normally restrict access to single-sex spaces like women’s toilets or hospital wards.

In other words men would be able to invade women’s spaces more easily.

Speaking about the plans to reform the Act, Ms Sturgeon said: “Gender recognition reform is about changing an existing process to make it less degrading, intrusive and traumatic for one of the most stigmatised minorities in our society.”

Who says they’re one of the most stigmatised? People say that over and over and over and over but what reason is there to think it’s true? At this point it’s more of a very stale advertising slogan than a truth-claim.

And maybe they’re stigmatised partly because of this determination to do what they want regardless of women’s safety. Maybe some of them should be stigmatised, for being selfish narcissistic bullies.

Also women can be quite stigmatised, for being women. I thought that had gone out of fashion decades ago, until having an opinion on the internet taught me otherwise. There are plenty of people (mostly men) ready to let fly with the “cunt!!” and “bitch!!” the instant they find themselves feeling irritable at some opinion-having cunt-haver.

“We should focus on the real threats to women, not the threats that, while I appreciate that some of these views are very sincerely held, in my view, are not valid.”

Concerns about a man in the hospital bed next to you are not valid, but concerns about the stigmatisation of trans people are. Why? Why isn’t physical risk a valid concern?

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, trans philosopher professor Sophie-Grace Chappell said: “There’s going to be a crimewave of dreadful homosexual murders…

“It’s going to be awful if we do that.”

He also said it doesn’t matter if there’s a surge in violence against women. Why didn’t the Express mention that part?