The Times reports:

An employment judge has condemned a support service for rape victims and found that its chief executive was behind a “heresy hunt” against a ­female worker who held “gender-critical” beliefs.

Roz Adams won her claim of constructive dismissal against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, which is funded by the Scottish government, with the ­tribunal finding that she had been ­harassed and discriminated against. Supporters of Adams condemned the “abusive management” she was forced to endure.

When she joined the rape crisis centre, Adams, 52, had at first welcomed its trans-inclusive policies, believing that everyone who had ­“suffered sexual assault is entitled to support”, the tribunal heard.

Support, yes. Support in a rape crisis centre for women, no.

However, in December 2020 she went for a walk with Maggie Chapman, a Green MSP, then the centre’s chief operating officer. The judgment states: “This was the first time that [Adams] heard what she described … as the ‘mantra’ that ‘trans women are women’. She felt concerned that there was no real definition or clarification associated with this statement. She felt it was odd.

Things became, as she put it, “eggshelly.”

Ian McFatridge, the employment judge, identified Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman who is ERCC chief executive, as a key figure in an internal investigation that “should not have been launched in the first place”.

I hope Wadhwa will soon be out the door.

Helen Joyce, of the campaign group Sex Matters, said: “Sex-based boundaries matter for everyone, but most especially women who have experienced male violence and sexual assault. By standing up against the abusive management, Roz Adams has helped women across the UK.”

And beyond, probably.

Adams now works at Beira’s Place, a centre funded by the author JK Rowling, which ­offers a “sexual violence support ­service for women run by women”.

This happened:

It’s appropriate that there’s a banner saying DICK right next to the cheater’s midsection.

News!!

Yet another reason not to be captive on a giant ship with more than 4200 people.

Problems with a stomach bug spreading on a cruise ship have been going on for weeks, passengers have told the BBC. The P&O Cruises vessel Ventura left Southampton on 11 May for a two-week cruise around the Canary Islands. On Saturday, the company confirmed that “enhanced” sanitation protocols had been put in place following reports of passengers with “gastrointestinal symptoms”. However, people who travelled on Ventura in previous weeks said the illness had also been present during their cruises. 

What’s worse than being on a giant cruise ship? Being on a giant cruise ship with GI problems.

One passenger developed acute gastroenteritis, was hospitalized, and nearly died.

Marie spent six days in hospital on antibiotics before flying home on 3 May. She said she believed she had “definitely” picked up the bug on the ship but that P&O would not acknowledge it.

There are two giant cruise ships about half a mile west of me right now, soon to back out and chug away toward Alaska. I hope the wind isn’t blowing this way.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on That’s easy for you to say.

JKR: Please explain how a man, who by definition can’t know what it feels like to be a woman, knows he’s a woman, without recourse to regressive sex stereotypes.

This is exactly the crux of it. We’re only ever given our one, single, lonely perspective on what it is to be human. The only skin we inhabit is our own, the brain/mind we use to sense, filter, and reconstruct the world is the one inside our own head. We can’t shop around to try different existences on for size, to take test drives in other peoples’ minds or bodies. Autobiography and fiction offer imaginative sketches of others’ subjectivities, but not the experience. We don’t get blisters on our feet or suffer from dehydration from reading someone’s account of their desperate trek across the Sahara. A map is not the territory. To put it trivially, does it make any sense to express a preference for a flavour of ice cream you can never taste? How could one claim to like it “better” than the one and only flavour you will ever have? All you can see is the apparent satisfaction of those eating it (each of whom is, like you, limited to a single flavour of their own). You can’t swap your tastebuds for theirs to declare a “winner”, to say that theirs is indeed, a better flavour than your own.

Without any possibility of a standard of comparison, there is no way that anyone can declare a stronger preference for, or affinity to, a different form of being, an existence other than the one they have always had and will always have. Within limits we can change our circumstances and our attitudes towards them, but we cannot step outside our own particular subjectivity and into anyone else’s. I can only ever know what it’s like to be me. I happen to be male, but I have no way of knowing how much of my “meness” is due to my maleness. Nor can I winnow out the effects of my heredity, or the effects of my upbringing in the time and place into which I was born. Would I still be “me” if I’d been born 700 years ago on an island in the Pacific? Probably not, but I can never know. I can never say that this “other, Pacific island, female me” is more the real me than current Canadian, male me. The arbitrary inclusion of different time, place, and sex are for effect only. I’m equally incapable of choosing a “preference” for the subjective existence of the person sitting next to me on the bus, whoever they are. We are each limited to who we are; you can learn, grow, and change, but you can’t step outside of yourself. You can only imagine doing so, but to live in a fantasy is not healthy, and ultimately, not really possible. You are inevitably bound to engage with reality at some times, at some level, even if it’s no more than what is required to meet the material needs of life and metabolism.

Every day on my way to work I see any number of people who seem to be bound to reality by little more than the needs of their physical bodies. Whether they are afflicted by mental illness, or the effects of drugs, they seem to be in a world only they can see or hear. I cannot imagine what it must be like, but from my own singular perspective, I can in this instance say I have a preference to stay where and who I am. But this is based solely on my perception of the external appearance of their behaviour and circumstances. As unlikely as it may seem to me, they may be experiencing ecstatic euphoria that makes them, for all intents and purposes, happier than I presently am. But I have no way of knowing this, not for certain. Their own circumstances are as unique to the forging of their experience of and response to the world as my own. This is not an attempt to romanticize or glamourize mental illness or drug addiction, it’s simply a matter of offering an additional perspective on the impossibility of expressing an innate preference for other states of being from which one is forever barred.

That’s not to say there’s nothing going on inside the head of someone who feels they are trapped in “the wrong body” , it’s just something other than what they are claiming, which is simply impossible. The person suffering from anorexia is suffering from something, but it has nothing to do with obesity. There’s something else going on. The distress is real, but the cause cited by the sufferer is incorrect. There is already some kind of disconnect between the body and the person’s body image; attempts to change the body to bring it into conformity with this distorted self-perception are doomed to failure. Trying to bend reality to match a mistaken impression of it is a losing proposition. Better to correct the mistake. Easier said than done, of course, but it’s easier than trying to correct reality (and forcing everyone else around you to go along for the ride).

One phenomenon that I believe is better captured better by the answer “Because I’ve known my whole life”? Sexual orientation.

Canada is on fire early again.

Thousands of people in western Canada are facing the wrath of wildfires this week amid severe drought. Some six thousand people were told to evacuate Fort McMurray, Alberta, where 90,000 residents were forced to flee during the 2016 wildfires. More than 3,000 others were ordered to leave Fort Nelson, British Columbia, where a fire is burning 2.5km (1.5 miles) from the town.

Evacuation alerts were also issued in the provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. Smoke from the fires has triggered air quality alerts in Canada and the US.

It’s only May. That’s early.

There are two common sources of wildfires in Canada: lightning and human beings, Gordon McBean, a geography and environment professor at Western University, told the BBC. Paul Kovacs, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at Western University, noted that if a large storm is moving across Canada, the storm can cause lightning in one place that starts a fire and then in another place that starts a separate fire. But Canada’s vast land and warming temperatures because of climate change are also playing a part, Prof McBean said.

…

For years, Canadian wildfire season started in July or August, but in the past 20 years the wildfire season has been starting earlier and earlier in the year, Mr Kovacs told the BBC.

This year’s wildfire season comes as the country reels from its worst fire season on record in 2023, when roughly 18.5m hectares of land had burned – an area about the size of North Dakota. On average, just 2.5m hectares typically burn in Canada each year.

On course to set another record then.

Excellent: we’re having the conversation about difficulty/complexity versus truth. It’s an important conversation.

JK Rowling:

I wouldn’t mind, but the people telling me I don’t appreciate the complexity of the issue are the same ones saying ‘a man is a woman if he says he’s one. This isn’t difficult. How can you not grasp it?’

It’s complex when they want it to be complex and easy when they want it to be easy.

But more to the point, it doesn’t matter that it “isn’t difficult.” Of course it isn’t difficult; making stupid flat nonsensical assertions is laughably easy; so what? The point is, it isn’t true.

Eyes on the prize, people.

This one is exceptionally hard to read without head explosions.

Women’s Liberation Front aka WoLF:

This week, WoLF received the disappointing news that the district court dismissed Chandler v. CDCR on procedural grounds. We are reviewing the decision and considering our options for the next steps in this case. 

Background:

In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 132 (SB 132) into law. This legislation, which went into effect in January of 2021 as the “Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act”, allows incarcerated men to be housed in women’s correctional facilities based on self-declared “gender identity.” This law allows men to “self-identify” as women or non-binary, and be housed in women’s facilities.

Something in this paragraph leaps right out at me, clamoring for explanation.

Why why why why WHY did the California Senate pass a law to bolster the respect, agency, and dignity of men at the expense of the respect, agency, and dignity of women?

Why did that question not stop them before they started?

Why were they not nauseated at the idea of forcing men on women in prisons for the sake of the “dignity” of the men at the expense of the dignity of the women?

I’ll never be able to understand this. Never. I can’t get it to make any kind of sense.

Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) filed a lawsuit on behalf of four incarcerated women challenging SB132. WoLF asked the court to overturn this law and declare it unconstitutional.

But it was dismissed.

Coincidentally, as the judge in the Eastern District Court was dismissing the case, WoLF held a press conference on the steps of the California Superior Court in Madera County. Tremaine Carroll, an incarcerated male intervenor in the Chandler case, is now facing two counts of forcible rape and one count of attempting to dissuade a witness from testifying. The Madera District Attorney feels they have a very provable case. WoLF and WomanIIWoman held a press conference on the courthouse steps Friday, before the preliminary hearing, to raise awareness that rapes are indeed occurring within women’s custody facilities, committed by men who leveraged SB 132 to transfer in, despite having committed prior sexual assaults.

Rapes are occurring, but the dignity of the men doing the raping matters while the dignity of the women being raped does not.

Why?

I have no idea. It is in every way impossible to understand.

WoLF is not giving up.

We have already seen the devastating result of these policies in the two years it took to get a response from the court: rape, pregnancy, and repeated violation of women’s constitutional rights. This is not the end of our fight. 

We will continue pursuing every avenue of justice for Janine, Tomiekia, Krystal, Nadia, and all incarcerated women in California. 

Onward.

The ACLU is ecstatic. Women, not so much.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by an anti-transgender group against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) challenging SB132, the groundbreaking law protecting transgender people incarcerated in California.  

The law protecting men incarcerated in California at the expense of women incarcerated with them. Men are protected and women are endangered, and the ACLU is just thrilled.

Lambda Legal, Transgender Law Center (TLC), the ACLU Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal), and O’Melveny & Myers had joined California’s request to dismiss the case on behalf of the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGI Justice Project) and four currently incarcerated trans women who won the right to intervene in the lawsuit in August 2023.

Four currently incarcerated men who want to be housed with the women, regardless of what the women want (and need).

“We are relieved that the court saw through this legally flawed challenge, and rejected its distorted arguments,” said Lambda Legal Staff Attorney Nora Huppert. “In dismissing this challenge, the court recognized that California has an obligation to protect the safety of incarcerated transgender people.”

And the court ignored that California has an obligation to protect the safety of incarcerated women. And the ACLU rejoices.

The lawsuit, Chandler v. CDCR, was filed by the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), an anti-trans organization based in Washington, DC, on behalf of three incarcerated cisgender women, and Woman II Woman, a California-based nonprofit. Woman II Woman was later dismissed from the lawsuit.

WoLF is of course a feminist organization, as the ACLU and Chase Strangio know perfectly well.

There was a recruiter for the ACLU doing his thing next to KEXP and the bus stop this afternoon. I wished I could push beans up his nose.

In yesterday’s decision, the court dismissed all of the remaining plaintiffs’ purported constitutional claims. The court noted that many of their alleged harms were speculative and it refuted their bizarre attempt to characterize transgender status as a religion.

It’s not all that bizarre. I call it an ideology rather than a religion, but the commonality is that it rests on absurd religiousy claims that require faith as opposed to clarity of thought.

“Californians of all backgrounds, races, and genders know that everyone deserves respect, dignity and to live free from discrimination.” said Shawn Thomas Meerkamper (they/them), Managing Attorney at Transgender Law Center.

Everyone except women.

“The court saw this lawsuit for what it was and understood that SB 132 simply requires CDCR to live up to its independent obligation to keep all people safe and free from harm.”

All male people. Not the other kind.

This doesn’t seem very judicialish. It doesn’t even seem moderately adult.

An upside-down American flag – a symbol used by some supporters of former President Donald Trump who challenged the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory – hung outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito after the election, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Well why didn’t he just go on Fox News and show us his ass on camera? If you’re gonna go, go big.

The revelation is almost certain to prompt calls for Alito, a member of the court’s conservative wing, to recuse himself from several high-profile cases pending before the court this year involving the election and subsequent attack on the US Capitol, including the blockbuster question of whether Trump may claim immunity from federal election subversion charges.

Why? Because justices are supposed to be impartial. I know that’s a fiction, and became a whole lot more fictitious under Trump’s reign of barforama, but still.

The upside-down flag became a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement in the weeks and months following the election, in which Trump’s supporters falsely claimed that Biden’s win was illegitimate due to widespread fraud. The inverted flag was widely seen during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

It’s a symbol not just of Trumpism but of violent sedition and massive contempt for the law.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Certificates determine reality.

They have to work backward to the justification on the spot, which isn’t easy when there’s no valid argument that can get you there from sound premises.

Having failed to think very long or hard about trans “rights” when they took them on board means they’re having to defend claims that are impossible and extreme.

Humans have gender identities.

Humans can be “born in the wrong body.”

Gender identity over-rides sex.

In humans, sex is a spectrum.

Humans can change sex.

Each of these claims about the nature of material reality requires evidence and proof on its own, yet they’re usually sold together as a package, and discussed as if they were self-evidently true and necessarily connected. It’s not a single claim, but a whole mess of them, all of which are bullshit. Even if there were such things as “gender identities” none of the other claims would follow from that fact. There is nothing about the existence of putative “gender identity” that overturns the immutable, binary nature of human sexes. Even if being “born in the wrong body” was a thing, the brute fact of two, unchangeable and unchanging human sexes stands. Why wouldn’t it? Genderists still have all their work ahead of them. As an analogy, proving the existence of a god or gods would not prove the existence of Jesus. It could be that the gods are the Olympian or Hindu pantheons, or some other yet to be (or no longer) worshipped deity. Christians would still have to demonstrate the existence of their particular god before they could claim victory/hegemony/whatever.

The University of Reading (or, perhaps, just its Twitter jockey) does not believe in women’s rights. Trans rights yes, of course, but women’s, no. If you want to talk about women’s rights you can’t, you have to call them people’s rights.

Clash of the monotheisms:

French police have killed a man after a synagogue was set on fire in the north-western city of Rouen. The man was armed with a knife and a metallic tool and was shot after he threatened officers, the Rouen prosecutor said…French reports say the suspect was Algerian and was appealing against an order to leave France.

You could also call it clash of the colonizers and the colonized, but then colonization itself is often entangled with monotheistic rivalry. Christian countries get to colonize Muslim countries because they have The Correct God™ – and vice versa. It’s basically the same god, but it doesn’t do to say so.

Earlier this week a memorial in Paris that honours 3,900 men and women who helped rescue Jews during the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two was daubed with red-painted hands.

Yeah that’s nice. That’s a lovely sentiment. Let’s bring back ol’ Adolf while we at it, yeah?

Coup plotters signal each other in broad daylight:

Matt Gaetz echoed Donald Trump’s infamous remarks about the far-right Proud Boys on Thursday, as the Florida Republican congressman and other rightwing supporters of the former US president attended his criminal trial in Manhattan.

“Standing back, and standing by, Mr President,” Gaetz wrote on social media, with a photo of his group of supporters standing behind Trump outside the court where Trump is on trial…

Standing by to overthrow the government is it?

The Proud Boys, a “western chauvinist” group, were involved in street violence during Trump’s years in power, clashing with leftwing protesters.

Identifiable by their black and yellow colors, they participated in the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, when Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to block certification of his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, in service of Trump’s voter fraud lie.

Fight like hell to overthrow the government, in other words.

Gaetz offered a form of a famous Trump utterance. In a debate with Biden in September 2020, the then president was asked if he would condemn white supremacist and militia groups who clashed with social justice protesters that summer, following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Trump said: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa [anti-fascist groups] and the left.”

…

In the current campaign, Proud Boys have shown up at Trump rallies. At some rallies, Trump has played a chorus of January 6 prisoners singing the national anthem. Vowing to pardon January 6 rioters, he has called such prisoners “hostages”.

All totally normal and acceptable.

Pathetic.

Gillian Keegan has said men who undergo gender reassignment are women.

Last month, the Education Secretary told The Telegraph that she would no longer say that trans women were women, saying her understanding of the issue had “evolved”.

But in an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme, she said it depended whether the person was self-identifying as the opposite sex or whether they had actually obtained a gender reassignment certificate from a doctor.

That’s so idiotic. You might as well say it depended whether the person was self-identifying as an airplane or whether they had actually obtained an object reassignment certificate from a doctor.

A doctor issuing a “certificate” doesn’t and can’t make a man into a woman. That’s something that can’t be done. Changing appearance just changes appearance, it doesn’t change the underlying reality. Sometimes appearance is all there is, but being a woman or a man is not one of those times.

To gain a gender recognition certificate, a person must have a signed report from a specialist doctor showing they have “gender dysphoria”, which means they are distressed because of the mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity.

Being unhappy about being X does not make you not X. You could be unhappy about not being a plant or a house or a sandwich, but that wouldn’t make you a plant or a house or a sandwich. Issue all the certificates you like, but it won’t change that.

Grilled on the subject by new Today presenter Emma Barnett, Ms Keegan said she had “always known that trans women aren’t women”.

She said there was a “huge difference between self-identification, people who want to identify but still have a male body, biologically are male: and then there are a very, very small number of people … who do have and have had gender reassignment and reassignment surgery”.

Which still doesn’t make them women.

Asked if she would say that people who had gone through gender reassignment were women, she said: “Well, this is what we should say. I personally believe if you have gone to that level of, you have got the gender recognition, you have got the reassignment, then you are legally and medically allowed to say that you are a woman.”

But that’s a different thing. Being allowed to say you’re a woman is not the same as being a woman.

Labour’s shadow education minister Catherine McKinnell said: “Teaching children about the facts of the world in which they grow up must include an understanding that there are people who are transgender, that people can go through a process of change of their gender, and that the law provides for that.”

No, it mustn’t. That’s a stupid fantasy and there’s nothing educational about it.

It turns out Daniel Perry isn’t a very nice fella.

So Greg Abbott pardoned him.

In Texas news…

Daniel Perry, a former US Army sergeant who was convicted of murdering a protester at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020, was released from prison Thursday after he was pardoned by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Abbott’s decision comes after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously Thursday to recommend a full pardon and the restoration of firearm rights for Perry, who was sentenced last year to 25 years in prison. Shortly after he was pardoned, Perry was released from Texas Department of Criminal Justice custody, a spokesperson for the agency told CNN.

…

Perry faced between five and 99 years in prison for fatally shooting 28-year-old Air Force veteran Garrett Foster at an Austin, Texas, racial justice rally two months after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

…

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney. I thank the Board for its thorough investigation, and I approve their pardon recommendation,” Abbott said.

…

Prosecutors said Perry, who was stationed at Fort Hood, initiated the fatal encounter when he ran a red light and drove his vehicle into a crowd gathered at the protest. Foster was openly carrying an assault-style rifle – legal in Texas – and approached Perry’s car and motioned for him to lower his window, at which point Perry fatally shot him with a handgun, prosecutors said.

“Today, a convicted murderer will walk the streets of Texas. Texas Republicans have once again proven that they cannot keep the public safe, they are not the party of ‘tough on crime,’ and they are not the party of ‘law and order,’” Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement responding to the pardon.

He added: “Make no mistake: Daniel Perry is a murderer who was on a mission to commit violence against Texans, and today our justice system was hijacked for political gain.”

In a statement on Thursday, Foster’s former fiancée, Whitney Mitchell, said she is “heartbroken by this lawlessness,” adding Abbott has shown that “only certain lives matter.”

“He has made us all less safe. Daniel Perry texted his friends about plans to murder a protestor he disagreed with,” she said. “After a lengthy trial, with an abundance of evidence, 12 impartial Texans determined he that he carried out that plan, and murdered the love of my life.”

“With this pardon, the Governor has desecrated the life of a murdered Texan, impugned that jury’s just verdict, and declared that citizens can be killed with impunity as long as they hold political views that are different from those in power,” Mitchell said.

Do we think Abbott would have done this if the races had been reversed? If Foster had shot Perry instead of the other way around?

No we do not.

Mister Menno!

“But then trans comes along and says [air quotes] ‘We are going to identify into what you are, objectively, because of how we feel, subjectively.’ And that is not a human right. That is a colonizer’s privilege.”

Yet another one of these.

Nonsense. Of course a Sex Matters event couldn’t “compromise the safety” of students and staff. They just say that because they want to shut Sex Matters and Jo Phoenix up, and they don’t have a good reason so they offer a bad and dishonest one.

As for “extremist,” look in the mirror, ya punks.

Finally: a win.

Opposition Leader John Pesutto has settled defamation actions launched against him by two women who joined a controversial rally on the steps of state parliament that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis last year.

The private settlements – with UK anti-trans rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen and Melbourne woman Angela Jones – leave Pesutto to fight just one defamation action in the Federal Court, brought by exiled Liberal MP Moira Deeming.

…

Keen and Jones alleged Pesutto defamed them in an effort to have Deeming removed from the Liberal party room, after the three women helped organise the Let Women Speak rally that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis outside parliament in March last year.

The women all alleged Pesutto defamed them by suggesting they were associated with far-right extremists, which Pesutto has denied. He has always said he would defend the claims.

Deeming had initially survived a motion to expel her from the parliamentary Liberal Party in the days after the Let Women Speak rally. She was suspended from the party room in a compromise deal but was ultimately expelled in the fallout in May last year.

For the crime of defending women’s rights.

Keen told radio station 3AW in March that she was ultimately seeking an apology.

“Whilst he said these things about me, what he’s actually doing is trying to tell all women that they really do have to shut up,” she said while preparing to launch the court action. “That is what is happening everywhere. And so I would like a full and frank apology.”

And here she is saying she got one.