If only everything were unproblematic…

Well I never. The guy who drove his car into a parade in Waukesha yesterday has gotten a little rough with women before. You don’t say.

The driver who plowed through a Christmas parade in downtown Waukesha, killing five people and injuring nearly 50, did so intentionally and is expected to face first-degree homicide counts and other charges, police said Monday.

The suspect, Darrell Brooks Jr., 39, recently had been released from custody in a strikingly similar case, in which he was accused of driving over a woman during a domestic dispute, sending her to the hospital and leaving tire marks on her pant leg.

The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting that case, said Monday it was launching an internal review of a prosecutor’s “inappropriately low” $1,000 bail recommendation. The bail amount was signed off on by a court commissioner.

I guess women are a cheap commodity.

The people he killed were mostly Dancing Grannies.

The victims named on Monday were:

• Mr Wilhelm Hospel, 81
• Ms Virginia Sorenson, 79
• Ms LeAnna Owen, 71
• Ms Tamara Durand, 52
• Ms Jane Kulich, 52

They include members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies, who are a regular fixture in the city’s parades.

“Our group was doing what they loved, performing in front of crowds in a parade putting smiles on faces of all ages,” the group wrote in a statement on Facebook. “Those who died were extremely passionate Grannies.”

It makes me sad.

Mridul Wadhwa is such an inspiration to ambitious men who claim to be women.

Girl Guide’s U.K outfit has faced its fair share of scrutiny in recent years over its “inclusive” policies allowing males to join the organization, but recent revelations show a biological male has now taken a senior position with the girl’s group.

Monica Sulley, a male who identifies as a woman, became the lead Commissioner for the Southwell division of Girl Guides U.K, known there as Girlguiding, in July of this year.

Sulley’s appointment came on the heels of a female Girlguiding leader being expelled from the organization on the basis of her beliefs that girls should not be forced to shower or share tents with males who identify as women. Helen Watts had been a supporting member of the Guides for over 15 years prior to being sacked due to her views.

So that’s a job that should have gone to a woman, but didn’t.

Women’s rights-concerned users on social media have expressed upset over Sulley’s appointment, with some noting that Sulley was taking a position from an actual woman. But many have also begun to notice some disturbing posts Sulley has made on his social media accounts – including him posing with weapons, and him dressed in bondage gear, calling himself “Mistress.”

A porn-sick Girl Guides official – what a good idea.

And while I’m on the subject of Pink News…just one more –

Why cis men should never, ever play trans women as Eddie Redmayne admits ‘mistake’

But wait though. How do they know anyone is a cis man? Isn’t it a crime to assume people’s gender? How do they know Eddie Redmayne isn’t gender fluid and just hasn’t come out yet? How do they know he isn’t trans and hasn’t come out yet?

The debate on who gets to play what roles has been particularly prominent in recent years as the industry faces up to decades of misrepresentation.

Well…as a handful of activists yell louder and louder and ever louder.

Today, there is a broad consensus that trans roles should go to trans actors.

Is there? Who says? Where are the stats?

Also what does that mean? That trans men should play trans men and trans women, and trans women should play trans women and trans men? Just generic “character is trans so get a trans actor” regardless of which gender is being performed?

Richards goes on to list examples of successful trans actors, like Laverne Cox, Trace Lysette and Angelica Ross, who proudly live their lives as women, just as beautiful and feminine off-screen as they are on-screen.

And that of course is what “as women” means – being maximally beautiful and feminine. Most women are doing the woman-being all wrong, by not being beautiful and feminine enough, and men are here to show us how it’s done.

Richards directly contrasts this with Redmayne in The Danish Girl, admitting that while it’s certainly a convincing trans performance, “it reduces that person… to a performance of transness, a performance of femininity, rather than as a whole person of whom transness is one aspect of.”

But of course being a man pretending to be a woman is not at all a performance of femininity.

As Eddie Redmayne walks the red carpet in suit and tie, the epitome of masculinity and the antithesis of Lili Elbe, he reinforces the harmful and offensive trope that a trans woman’s identity is nothing more than a costume which, when removed, reveals a man beneath.

So harmful and offensive, and let me remind you how beautiful and feminine Laverne Cox is.

There aren’t enough eyes to roll, I swear.

Nailed it.

What Rowling said in response to the three shits who posted her address on Twitter:

No address visible:

It’s fine for the drag queen to mock women, but Rowling is “wading into” a debate that’s none of her business even though it’s all about women’s rights.

The shamelessness of Pink News part 2:

The controversy comes after a turbulent few years for JK Rowling, who has repeatedly positioned herself at the centre of the UK’s toxic debate surrounding trans lives.

Just look at that – from Pink News! She hasn’t “positioned herself” anywhere, she has said what she thinks, as has Pink News. She’s allowed to say what she thinks. Pink News never shuts up about it, so why should she? Why should we? We have rights too, we even have lives. The toxic debate isn’t surrounding or encircling or about “trans lives” anyway, it’s about the claims of the new and ever-expanding trans ideology, especially where the claims conflict with the rights of women (and the futures of adolescents and children).

The writer waded into the so-called “culture war” in 2019 when she stated her support for Maya Forstater, who has fought to have “gender critical” views protected under the Equality Act.

She didn’t “wade into” anything; she said what she thinks. Who the hell is Pink News to accuse other people of positioning themselves at the center of or wading into a controversy that affects everyone? We are allowed to say things.

The unabashed mendacity of Pink News is a sight to behold.

It starts with the headline:

JK Rowling condemns actors who held trans rights protest outside her house

They didn’t just “hold a protest.” They tweeted a photo with her address in it.

Also I wonder how pleased the people of Pink News would be if people “held a protest” where they live.

Comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy staged a demonstration outside the Harry Potter author’s house on Friday (19 November) in protest against her long-condemned views on trans lives.

Long-condemned by whom? Besides Pink News and people incited by Pink News? And her views aren’t on “trans lives,” which is a manipulative and dishonest way to frame the issue. No one wants trans people to have crappy lives, much less to lose them, but that of course is what we’re supposed to gather from reading the Pink News sludge. Rowling’s views are on women, and how new and constantly expanding trans “rights” can violate women’s rights.

A photo was subsequently shared online which showed the trio standing outside JK Rowling’s home

“Was shared” by whom? Evasive manipulative dishonest fucks that they are. The people who went to Rowling’s house to harass her also posted a photo of her house and address on Twitter.

None of this is defensible, and Pink News knows it. It wouldn’t be using such fraudulent evasive language if it didn’t.

Essex Police are angry that members of the public replied to their Facebook post about Trans Day of Remembrance and the threats it contained.

I take it the asterisks are meant to indicate “Update” (so why not just say “update”?). It all looks a bit like entrapment, to be honest. First they post some stupid catastrophizing bullshit about nonexistent violence against trans people, and then they tell us they’ve recorded all our responses and will go all police on our asses if they don’t like them. They’re going to “investigate” if they deem any of the comments “offensive.”

Yes, it looks very much like entrapment. And for what? Not agreeing that men are women if they say they are.

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on So it was reckful?

I admit I have a definite bias against the American gun fetish. I learned to handle firearms from WWII vets, none of whom carried firearms routinely. To this day if someone were to hand me a weapon I would inspect and clear it the way they learned to do it during inspection in the 1940’s.

I was a trauma surgeon for more than 25 years. In that time, I treated wounds made by 22 cal pistols and rifles, 38s, 9mm, 10mm, 45 cal colts, black powder muzzle loaders, 12 gauge shotguns, 30 cal long guns and the 5.56mm favored by many of the assault rifles in civilian hands. Victims from 80 years of age to 7. Not saying my experience was typical, but I never once treated someone shot by someone defending their home. A fair number of police officers shot in the line, but no home defenders. Three mass casualty ‘events’.

Worried far more than once about getting cut on frangible fragments in our victims from ammo banned by the military but allowed for civilians.

Many suicides or attempts, many domestic assaults, many unintentional injuries. Lots of people cleaning guns or handling weapons that were ‘not loaded’. Only a handful of stranger on stranger crimes. Usually the shooter knew the vic. Lots of gang shootings – sometimes repeaters with a history of a prior GSW.

FYI: if home defense is your goal you can’t beat a 12 gauge shotgun. It imparts tremendous energy to the target at the ranges a home defender would face, is a hell of a lot easier to aim than a handgun and won’t travel 8 blocks through 2 houses and kill your neighbor.

The 5.56mm injuries were the stuff of nightmares. Designed for combat use, the wounds were devastating. At least as bad as a 30 cal rifle. Rifles injuries were a whole different level from the handguns. Handguns fire subsonic rounds. So the tissue injury is directly related to the path of the projectile. Rifles fire supersonic missiles. Very little of the actual energy of the projectile is imparted to the victim – that’s why it passes through usually. But while it’s passing through the tissues, it’s accompanied by a supersonic shock wave several times larger than the size of the slug (several inches in some cases). Everything in the path of that shock wave might be damaged or destroyed.

I can’t say that I came away from the experience with a great appreciation for the Second Amendment.

Remember that BBC article by Caroline Lowbridge about the pressure on lesbians to pretend trans women are lesbians too? Jo Bartosch reports (in the Daily Mail because the Quality papers won’t) that Nancy Kelley tried to get the piece spiked.

The BBC won much praise for its investigation, which prompted some lesbians to express their anger at how they felt ostracised for wishing to form relationships only with women.

Campaigner Kat Howard wrote that she was ‘incredibly grateful to Caroline Lowbridge, and the BBC for this article’, adding: ‘We need help protecting young lesbians everywhere from an LGBT community that would rather see them silenced than stand up to the male perpetrators of assault.’

Yet now it has emerged that months before the article appeared Stonewall’s chief executive Nancy Kelley wrote to the editorial director of BBC News to denounce Lowbridge’s work in an apparent attempt to get her piece stopped.

In her email, Kelley suggested that the BBC article would end up being ‘transphobic’ because it represented trans women as ‘sexual predators’, which was a ‘central anti-trans argument’.

Trans women are men. Some men are sexually predatory. We know this. It’s the stuff of drama and history and song and social life. Some men are sexually predatory, so it’s highly likely that some trans women will be sexually predatory. Nancy Kelley herself is being sexually predatory by proxy in arguing, however indirectly, that lesbians can’t refuse to have sex with men who say they are women.

And although she acknowledged that in sexual relationships ‘consent is paramount and we all want who we want’, she added that ‘structural oppression can influence who we want’.

Even if we accept that, you still have to convince us that men who say they are women are subject to “structural oppression” at all. I don’t believe it, myself. I think they’re subject to non-structural disapproval and/or distaste, but that’s a different thing. Their labor is not exploited, their child-bearing capacity is not exploited, their talents are not exploited. Unease with trans people is situational rather than structural, and bullying lesbians into having sex with trans women is not going to fix the situational unease, to put it mildly.

It is understood that it took many months of editorial discussions before the article was published on October 26.

Stonewall has appeared to confirm that changes were made to the original piece, although it remains unclear whether this was as a direct result of the leaked email, sent in September 2020.

I don’t much want Stonewall screening what we’re allowed to learn via the BBC.

Angela Wild, a member of lesbian campaign group Get The L Out who was quoted in the article, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘For years lesbian activists have been trying to get the message out that it is not bigoted to say “no” to sexual pressure from males who identify as women.

‘The fact that Nancy Kelley has framed the reporting of this issue as transphobia is disgusting. Stonewall are a disgrace and no longer represent the interests of lesbians.’

No longer represents them and sometimes sets fire to them and throws them overboard.

Anti-vaxxing has consequences.

Of course, there are people who have their vaccinations but still get sick. These people may be elderly or frail, or have underlying health problems. Those with illnesses affecting the immune system, particularly patients who have had chemotherapy for blood cancers, are especially vulnerable. Some unlucky healthy people will also end up on our general wards with Covid after being vaccinated, usually needing a modest amount of oxygen for a few days.

But the story is different on our intensive care unit. Here, the patient population consists of a few vulnerable people with severe underlying health problems and a majority of fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice. Watching the mix of patients coming in with Covid, it feels to me like hardly anybody has been vaccinated nowadays; of course, this is because the people that have been vaccinated are getting on with their lives at home. If everyone got vaccinated, hospitals would be under much less pressure; this is beyond debate. Your wait for your clinic appointment/operation/diagnostic test/A&E department would be shorter. Your ambulance would arrive sooner. Reports of the pressure on the NHS are not exaggerated, I promise you.

But urging people to get vaccinated is apparently a grotesque and unforgivable intrusion on The Inviolable Self.

On the left it’s the Trans Soul, on the right it’s the Sacred Self. Both are all about the self and to hell with the 7 billion people who are Not Self.

Enshrined in the way we protect patients’ autonomy is the recognition that others may reasonably make decisions we may see as irrational or wrong. We are all products of our upbringing, education and opportunities, and I have been hugely fortunate that in my case these have led me to make decisions I value. Who is to say I wouldn’t have made different choices in someone else’s shoes.

Translating this to the choice not to take the vaccine, however, I find my patience wearing thin. I think this is for a number of reasons. Even if you are not worried about your own risk from Covid, you cannot know the risk of the people into whose faces you may cough; there is a dangerous and selfish element to this that I find hard to stomach.

Some of my frustration is directed upwards, at the flagrant misinformation flourishing in certain places and the utterly woeful example that our leaders continue to set.

The link is to the story on Boris Johnson touring a hospital without a mask, complete with photos of him in a sea of masked people on all sides.

The writer is an NHS respiratory consultant who works across a number of hospitals

March 31 this year, Essex Police were busy marking and commemorating and making aware:

And yesterday was trans day of remembrance, with another round of social media announcing and posing for photos and Raising Awareness.

But women? Bah. Karens, all of them; Essex Police can’t be bothered with them.

Remember: Be Kind.

This is just childish.

No it’s not like that! Of course it’s not!

“This thing that’s not like this other thing is like this other thing.”

Blackface is not comparable to using ordinary pronouns, so debating the two is also not comparable. The two things are just not similar enough to make a useful comparison. “Inclusion” of trans people doesn’t rely on forcing everyone to use mix n match pronouns.

The follow-up is, if possible, even stupider.

That’s not the BBC’s stance. More to the point, what rights? Has Parliament passed a law saying everyone has to use bespoke pronouns on command? Has Parliament passed a law that includes pronouns in a list of must-dos?

I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s any kind of “right” for trans people to be referred to by specialty pronouns. I don’t think any human right has anything to do with pronouns.

Has Parliament passed a law protecting trans people’s “dignities”? I don’t know, but I doubt it, because it doesn’t sound law-ish, it sounds more Twitter activist-ish.

Furthermore – contemporary trans people can’t claim anything resembling the history of systematic exploitation and oppression going back generations that contemporary black people can. It’s belittling and insulting to claim that this new trendy narcissistic form of pseudo-oppression is in any way like the oppression of black and colonized people over the past 5 centuries or so. It’s belittling and insulting to claim that skepticism of the claims of trans dogma are remotely like racism.

It’s “Trans Day of Remembrance.”

But there haven’t been any. Not this year and not last year.

Do the police ever celebrate Women’s Remembrance Day? Do they ever get photos taken of themselves standing up and looking serious about the many murders of women that are committed every year?

Notice they don’t include sex in their “We will continue to act against those who target someone because of their religion, race, sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity.” I guess it’s ok to target women.

There is no Women’s Remembrance Day. It doesn’t exist.

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

Is Stonewall’s face red?! Of course it wouldn’t dream of erasing mothers from the language. It was a typo.

Stonewall has dropped guidance advising groups on its workplace schemes to remove the word “mother” from their policies.

The lobby group said that it would no longer reward higher ranking scores to employers who replaced “mother” with gender-neutral alternatives.

Nancy Kelley, the Stonewall chief executive, denied in an interview that such a policy existed. “We’re not interested in removing or erasing the word ‘mother’,” she said. Kelley, who has two adopted children with her wife, added: “I’m a mum. I’m married to another mum. It’s a deeply emotive term. I would be really upset if my children didn’t call me Mum.”

When presented with its recent advice to Dundee University, which contradicted Kelley’s claims, Stonewall said it would change its guidance.

In other words Nancy Kelley was either mistaken or not telling the truth when she told Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour that “We’re not interested in removing or erasing the word ‘mother’.” It’s not a great look for a CEO either way, especially in light of the fact that gender critical feminists have been objecting to the erasure for months. It makes her look either incompetent or dishonest.

Critics say that organisations are in effect paying a lobby group to promote their [that is, the lobby group’s] policies. Dundee University confirmed yesterday that it had replaced “mother” and “father” with gender-neutral alternatives after feedback from its application for the index.

Explaining why the university scored only five out of 15 points on its policies, Stonewall wrote: “We recommend that you remove the terms mother and father from the body of your policies . . . we’d recommend using gender-neutral language in the body of the policy.”

Oh but that’s outdated now, says Stonewall. No it’s not; it was never indated. It was an idiotic and brutal thing to “recommend” for the sake of this demanding narcissistic never-satisfied “activism.” Funnily enough human beings care about their relationships, and the relationships having to do with mothers and fathers are pretty basic to that caring. Trying to eliminate the words altogether out-Orwells Orwell.

An investigation by The Times earlier this year disclosed how Stonewall told the Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust to “use terms such as ‘pregnant employee’ or ‘birthing parent’ instead of mother”.

“Pregnant employee” suggests the person is pregnant with a work-related item, a broom or a bus or an inventory. “They is having my invoice.”

One or two items from Janice Turner’s conversation with Kathleen Stock:

Although Sussex had a radical history, the philosophy department was an outlier: relatively conservative, less prone to fashionable thinking. Her argumentative father had inadvertently prepared her for “lots of rude, bolshie men who just would sneer at you if you said something stupid”, but who, she adds, “are still the cleverest people I’ve ever met”. The English and gender studies departments thought the philosophers very dull. “We were laughed at because we believed in things like truth and objectivity. Philosophy at Sussex has never been trendy. Thank God – that’s the way I like it.”

Especially that kind of trendy. “Hahaha you believe in truth” – from people who can’t argue their way out of a paper bag.

Meanwhile Stock’s marriage was falling apart. Aged 39, she found herself single for the first time in her adult life. She signed up to dating sites. “And I started half-heartedly seeing men,” says. “But my heart wasn’t in it. I kept dating, on paper, eligible guys and not wanting to do anything. I just thought, ‘Well, I could just change the box.’ So I ticked ‘F’ rather than ‘M’. I thought: why not, might as well see. And that was it! I went on some dates with women and thought, ‘Oh my God!’ I didn’t even particularly like these women! But suddenly everything made sense. It was an epiphany.”

It was, she says, like taking off a mask. “It changed my whole life. The way I walked even. I’d had long hair, wore make-up every day and was really awkward and self-conscious, touching my face and my hair all the time.” Overnight, Stock threw away all her skirts and dresses, sold her size 8 stilettos on eBay and cropped her hair. Kathleen Stock, the androgynous, lesbian academic, happy at last in her own skin, emerged.

“So, yes, I do understand gender identity,” she says. “From the inside. I know what it is to identify as masculine, or with males, more than women.” Referring to the spike in teenage girls identifying as trans she says, “If you could take me back in time, I think I would be very susceptible to a narrative that I was more male than female.”

It’s funny about clothes – how coded they are, and how odd it can feel to wear clothes that don’t feel like the right code. It’s feeling “misgendered” I suppose – but also I think like a fraud or a joke or both.

Over three years, campus life grew ever more toxic. Many times Stock resolved to step back and say nothing. “But I would go to bed and just fume until 4am then get up and write a blog defending myself. I’d press send and feel an enormous catharsis. I had to keep meeting every blow.” Moreover, her Catholic upbringing made her feel this “no debate” trans activism was a form of religion. “It involves special holy days, ceremonies, rituals, mantras and performing acts of ritual self-abnegation. I can see it completely.” Which frames Stock as a heretic.

It also involves firm and indeed coercive belief for no good reason. It’s all about faith in assertion. I don’t like faith in assertion.

As lockdown began, Stock started to write Material Girls, which seeks to analyse gender theory using philosophical tools. It is so unflinching you can see why some are incensed. Stock compares trans identity to an “immersive fiction”. She insists she is not saying a male living as a woman is “deluded or lying or there’s anything wrong with this. You’re participating in an activity that can be really life-enhancing. However, it also has limits. And there is a difference between fiction and truth.”

Enjoy your immersive fiction by all means, but keep the door always in sight.

All counts. Not even reckless endangerment. I’ve seen sober explanations that he had a good case for self-defense, but…not even “but you shouldn’t have been there with an assault rifle in the first place”?

I got nothin’.

Today, like every day, is trans day of something. This one is remembrance. Tomorrow is biceps and the next day is wood lice.

Cllr. Peter Kavanagh, Mayor of South Dublin County Council, paid tribute today to the county’s Transgender community and spoke about how they were disproportionately affected by the global Covid-19 pandemic. Mayor Kavanagh raised the Trans flag at County Hall in Tallaght to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, when the victims of transphobic violence are commemorated.

Trans people are disproportionately affected by the pandemic? Really? More so than mothers of small children, people with no money, homeless people, mothers of slightly bigger children, people who lose jobs because of lockdowns, people with health conditions that make them more vulnerable, teachers, nurses, doctors, migrants, prisoners? What makes trans people disproportionately affected?

“Trans people, especially young trans people, rely on their community for support. Lockdowns and restrictions have meant that accessing these communities hasn’t been as easy, and has disproportionately affected trans people who don’t get to be themselves outside of their community,” Mayor Kavanagh said.

But people who aren’t trans also rely on their community for support.

Is he saying that it’s worse for trans people because they don’t have such a receptive audience for their gender performances? Because if so, that’s an incredibly boutique luxury opulent gold enamel form of being disproportionately affected. It doesn’t stand out compared to having to take children out of school and figure out how to keep them safe while you’re at work, or having a parent or child or spouse die alone in an ICU, or being locked up with hundreds of other prisoners all hoping they won’t infect each other, or being a nurse or doctor worn to a frazzle and seeing patient after patient die gasping for air.

Mayor Kavanagh also cautioned against the rise of transphobia in the media, saying, “I’m old enough to remember the debates around decriminalisation of homosexuality, and it’s upsetting to see the same tired talking points coming to the fore in Irish media today. Since 2015, trans people have had the legal right to be who they really are, and we don’t need to ape other countries and platform discrimination and hate under the guise of concern.”

One, they’re not the same “talking points.” Two, trans people claim to be what they really are not, so it’s stupid to frame the issue as being about “who they really are.” Three, talk to some women. If men can take over everything set aside for women on the grounds that the men “really are” women despite the obvious and salient differences.