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.

Next up: get rid of everyone who says the earth is not flat.

Scottish Greens expel gender rebels

Rebel members have been kicked out of the Scottish Green Party for declaring that “sex is a biological reality”.

Signatories to the Scottish Green Declaration for Women’s Sex-Based Rights were accused of making the party less safe for trans and non-binary members in an official complaint.

Did anyone point out that the obsession with “trans and non-binary members” is making the party less safe for women? And that there are far more women than “trans and non-binary” people? That in fact half of all people are women and girls? Did anyone ask why it’s better to make the party “less safe” for women?

Did anyone point out that sex is a biological reality and it’s bizarre to expel people for uttering a basic and significant and non-pejorative truth of that kind?

In documents seen by Holyrood, a total of 13 Scottish Green Party members were accused of breaching its code of conduct by signing the declaration, which was published online in November last year.

The eight-point statement stated that “sex is a biological reality”, asserted that women have a right to maintain the sex-based protections enshrined in the Equality Act, said lesbians are same-sex attracted and declared that “women and girls have the right to discuss policies which affect them without being abused, harassed or intimidated”.

It stated: “We know that globally women, as a sex, are disproportionately affected by climate change and environmental degradation, and that their empowerment is essential to our work as environmentalists.”

The declaration was signed by current and former Scottish Green Party members and supporters.

13 people who signed it were reported to the CCC.

Complainants, including the then-co-convenors of LGBTQI+ group the Rainbow Greens and a co-convenor of its Women’s Network, said the signatories had failed to “maintain political discipline” and broken rules that prohibit the undermining of party policy, bullying, “behaviours that constitute prejudice based on sexual orientation or gender identity” and “behaviours that constitute a threat to others”.

Bullying?? Prejudice?? Threat to others??

Now officials of the party, which since 2018 has had a rule which states that “trans-exclusionary individuals of any kind are not welcome as members”, have issued letters of expulsion.

All of the group have been expelled.

These people are insane. (Can you imagine trying to work with them?) Just plain bonkers loony nuts. Half of humanity is a bit of trivia while a tiny almost-invisible minority matters more than anyone else on the planet.

The document, in which MSP Ross Greer is cited as a witness, states that: “Given the serious nature of this complaint and the serious breaches of the SGP CoC [Code of Conduct], the only appropriate action to be taken on this occasion is that all current members who are signatories on the ‘declaration’ MUST be removed from the party with immediate effect, to ensure the safety of all trans and non-binary members of the SGP.”

Why? Is the idea that the signatories are going to murder all trans and non-binary members of the SGP? Or beat them all to a pulp? Or confine them to a tiny cell and there torture them?

A spokesperson for the Scottish Green Party said: “We can confirm disciplinary action was taken against 13 individuals over a breach of our membership policy, which has resulted in their immediate expulsion from the party. The welfare of all our members is our primary concern. The CCC process found that the members were in breach of our code of conduct. 

“Next month is Pride month and we hope this decisive action will send a clear message that we stand in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community now and forever.”

No, it sends a message that you stand in hyperbolic excessive “solidarity” with people who claim to be trans, and that you will ditch everyone else in a heartbeat merely for saying women have rights. That’s not a message a reasonable political party would want to send.

Republicans are the party of liberty liberty liberty.

The North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public for health reasons, following an emotional debate about the wisdom of the proposal.

So people with compromised immune systems just have to stay home or die. Peak liberty!

The proposal faced strong opposition from Democratic lawmakers, community activists, and advocates for people with health issues — who are concerned about the consequences of the proposal.

House Bill 237 would ban everyone, not just protesters, from wearing masks in public for medical reasons if it becomes law. It passed 30-15, with every Republican in favor and every Democrat opposed.

“It’s unconscionable,” said Sen. Lisa Grafstein, D-Wake.

Nah nah nah, it’s liberty. People’s faces are public property, and we get to control them.

Democratic lawmakers proposed different ways to amend the anti-mask bill to protect people who want to wear masks for health concerns. Republicans shot each of those proposals down, without explaining their opposition.

Oh come on, what is there to explain? Everyone knows masks are a communist plot to steal our faces and make us eat granola.

As Republicans have shrugged off Democrats’ concerns, they’ve said they trust police officers not to abuse the power to arrest anyone for wearing a surgical mask out in public. Newton said Tuesday that it wasn’t intended to “prosecute granny for wearing a mask in the Walmart.”

You have got to be kidding. Republicans said that? Republicans said oh just past a law restricting what people can wear and trust that the cops won’t enforce it?

Ayn Rand would not approve.

A tiny step back at last.

Schools in England should not teach about gender identity, according to new draft guidance from the government. Government sources told BBC News about plans to ban sex education for under-nines, as well as teaching about gender identity, on Wednesday.

…

Under the plans, secondary-school pupils will learn about protected characteristics, such as sexual orientation and gender reassignment. But the updated guidance makes clear schools “should not teach about the concept of gender identity“, the government says.

There’s a problem already: what is “gender reassignment”? How will these pupils learn about it minus the concept of “gender idenniny”? In short why not delete “gender reassignment” from the curriculum too?

It said it was right to take a “cautious approach”, adding teaching materials that “present contested views as fact – including the view that gender is a spectrum” should be avoided.

But then what does “gender reassignment” mean?

The pathetic truth is that “gender reassignment” should be kicked out too, but it can’t be, because a bunch of damn fools made it a “protected characteristic” so schools are stuck with it.

Ms Keegan said the new guidance had been motivated by a request from teachers “to provide more clarity” on age-appropriate sex education, but she had also seen reports of “campaign groups’ or lobby groups’ materials” being used in classrooms. She said she had received evidence of lesson slides including “things like choosing lots of different genders and identities and saying which ones of these are gender identities – the spectrum. The sort of, ‘it can be a spectrum, it’s fluid, you can have different genders on different days’ or ‘there’s 72 of them’. That kind of thing”.

Quite so, but unfortunately you’re still stuck with gender reassignment, which is as bullshit as the rest of it.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Just going with what a lot of other people have said.

The purpose of the thought experiment, indeed any thought experiment, is to force you to confront the intersection of your intuition and your reason. It is not to stack the deck and make one choice seem absurd.

It is exactly the thing that we do when we work in idealized frictionless environments of perfect elasticity. If you, as a physics student, refuse to answer the exam question because the real world is messy and not frictionless, you’re missing the point. We idealize the situation in full knowledge that it’s unrealistic. Why? Because it allows us to focus on the interactions and consequences of specific theoretical frameworks. Extracting value from the idealization requires playing along with it.

We construct idealized philosophical thought experiments the same way, in full knowledge that they’re unrealistic and that there are many interesting, relevant things left not captured. The question posed by the Trolley Problem is not, “What ought you do when there’s a trolley hurtling toward civilians?” If that’s how you approach it, you’re doing it wrong. Rather, the experiment asks, “Consequentialist, how far does your imperative to maximize aggregate good go? Are numbers really sufficient to decide? Deontologist, how far does your injunction against treating people as ends go? Can you really never take numbers into account? Virtuist, what happens when there’s no Aristotelian mean? Is one extreme preferable to another? All of you, how does this square with your intuition? If it doesn’t, how so, and what would need to change to make it jibe?” Refusal to engage with the problem is a refusal to engage with these questions. If you, as an ethics student, instead object that the fat man is too massive for you to move, you’re missing the point. Extracting value from the idealization requires paying along with it.

We use imaginative thought experiments rather than just asking the questions directly (even though we often do that, too) because imagination elicits more of our intuition. Things we’re fine with saying in the abstract (e.g., never ever lie!) suddenly collide with sentiments we might not have expected (e.g., a Nazi knocks on your door asking about Jews, and you have a Jewish family hiding in your attic.) This confrontation between conviction and intuition, between conviction and conviction, or between intuition and intuition forces us to see their limits.

This is in the Guardian?? Oooooh she gonna be in TRUBble.

I have some inspiring news for heterosexuals who may be struggling with their lifestyle choices: Dannii Minogue has bravely come out as straight.

She has a long-term boyfriend, see, but she was doing a presser and was asked if she fancies women.

Minogue replied: “You girls are hot. You know it. I love it. I’m here for it. Is that an answer?” Not really, to be honest. Still, she also helpfully clarified that she identifies “as queer in a weird way”.

Whoops, the Australian singer obviously thought, when she looked at the papers the next day and saw a million headlines along the lines of “Dannii Minogue ‘fights back tears’ as she announces she identifies as queer”. She quickly explained that she didn’t mean queer queer, she meant queer as in straight but spicy.

Which in turn means…well…nothing.

It’s probably fair to say that Minogue’s awkward expression of LGBTQ+ allyship was overblown by the media. But you know what? It’s also fair to think that if someone says they’re queer, that means they’re not a zero on the Kinsey scale.

Why is it fair? Because that’s one of the meanings of the word right now, hence the Q in LGBTQ.

In recent years the word queer, always an amorphous term, has become essentially meaningless. Can Straight People Be Queer? Vice asked in a 2016 article, capturing the general vibe. The answer to that seems to be: “Yes, if they’ve done their homework.” Last month, for example, Glee star Darren Criss, who is straight but played a character in a gay relationship on the show, said he’s “culturally queer”. He went on to elaborate: “The things in my life that I have tried to emulate, learn from and be inspired by are 100% queer as fuck.” So for the avoidance of future Minogue-like embarrassments, let’s all agree on this new definition, shall we? Queer now means a heterosexual who has read Oscar Wilde.

Good punchline! And to think it’s in the Graun of all places…is the giant ship beginning to turn?

Amsterdam is tired of being a tourist spot for disgusting people.

The local politician Sofyan Mbarki believes the major problem is Amsterdam’s image as a place where anything goes. With the quiz, he hopes to change the way visitors think about the city. But the truth is that a problematic image can’t be changed overnight. You will actually have to adjust reality too.

The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is aware of this. Five years ago, she boldly proposed closing the window brothels in the red light district – an audacious move considering that many local people still considered window prostitution an integral part of the city’s folklore. Gradually, more people are realising that what goes on in the red light district has nothing to do with folklore.

Isn’t that fascinating? Pause for a second to think about it. Many local people think that women sitting in windows offering paid fucks are a charming bit of local folklore. How about carving the women up and putting them on platters in the windows along with a nice Chianti? Would that be delightfully folkloric too?

Halsema has often faced fierce opposition. Interestingly, it was leftwing parties (including her own GreenLeft party) that resisted her plans.

Interestingly? It’s not a bit interesting. It’s typical of leftwing parties these days; they love to blither about “sex workers” and “sex positivity” and how awesome it is for other people to be prostitutes.