Jesus, Scotland, get a grip.

On Monday 17th May we received a report of controversial stickers having been placed on lampposts within the Viewforth Avenue area of Kirkcaldy.

Should you come across stickers of this nature, please contact ourselves or @FifeCouncil so that their removal can be arranged.— Kirkcaldy Police (@KirkcaldyPolice) May 21, 2021

Of what nature? The people of Kirkcaldy are supposed to let them know if they (the people) see any stickers “of this nature” but they (the police) forgot to say what “this nature” IS. The word “controversial” doesn’t narrow it down enough to be useful.

Maybe all the phones are ringing off the hooks with people reporting every single sticker on every single lamppost in not just the Viewforth Avenue area but in all of Kirkcaldy. Just to be sure, you know.

Updating to add: They’ve deleted the tweet now (feeling stupid?) so we’ll be needing a screenshot.

“Stickers of this nature” – that too is very Hyacinth Bucket. The rest of us just say “stickers like this.” An advantage of this lazy way of wording is that it leaves us time to notice that we never said what “this nature” was.

One of those times when your eyes bug out because you just cannot believe what you’re reading.

wheesht.

FOR TWEETS. For tweets that some damn fool of a cop considers “homophobic” or “transphobic” (and why do I suspect that “homophobic” is tossed in there to shield the “transphobic” bit when it’s really the “transphobic” they’re in a lather about?). Are all the cops in Scotland hunched over their phones reading all the tweets in the universe to find people to interrogate and charge?

It’s their damn fool “hate crimes” law.

MSPs have passed Scotland’s controversial new hate crime law.

The legislation consolidates existing law and extends protection for vulnerable groups with a new offence of “stirring up hatred”.

And what does “stirring up hatred” include? Why, skepticism about magic gender, of course, if you have the bad taste to air such skepticism on Twitter.

Under the bill, offences are considered “aggravated” – which could influence sentencing – if they involve prejudice on the basis of age, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or variations in sex characteristics (sometimes described as “intersex” physical or biological characteristics).

But not sex itself, so threatening women with rape and dismemberment is fine, but say a man can’t be a woman and bam, you’re in a cell.

Matthew Parris on Stonewall:

You hear talk of “identities” but your gay identity overlaps with so many others you feel that it needn’t define you. Nevertheless, as “a member of the gay community” (a fiction that can make you grind your teeth) you may feel there’s still a need for an organisation to speak up for gay men and lesbian women’s rights and needs: to do “outreach” work in British schools and workplaces, and maybe abroad where your fellowgays still face the gallows. You might join and pay your subs to such an organisation.

I did — until last year. I was one of that organisation’s fourteen founders. Stonewall, formed on May 24, 1989, was set up during the furore over Section 28 of the local government act, engineered by a Tory government to ban the “promotion” of homosexuality…

I remember, too, the sense of solidarity between stalwarts such as Ian McKellen (kindly, conciliatory and shrewd) and Lisa Power (punchy, motherly and fun). I remember Michael Cashman (he of the first gay kiss in EastEnders): thoughtful, civil, and empathetic. We didn’t always agree on aims (I was for reducing the age of male homosexual consent from 21 to 18; the majority were for full equality at 16, so 16 it was) but the big thing we wanted — for gay men and lesbian women to come out of the shadows and into the sun — was so clear and strong that our differences melted in its glare. We rented a little office, engaged a CEO, and Stonewall was launched.

Monday marks the 32nd anniversary of that Wednesday in 1989. But Stonewall has lost its way. The sun we all thought we saw has gone behind clouds of anger, intolerance and partisanship. The organisation is tangled up in the trans issue, cornered into an extremist stance on a debate that a charity formed to help gay men, lesbian women and bisexual people should never have got itself into.

Oh but it’s the LGBTQ+ community, you see, so you’re not allowed to say no. (This is why the LGB Alliance is so necessary.)

What is the charity I helped to found doing, getting entangled in attempts to deny free speech at a university? This column should avoid getting into the trans debate itself. My single, tight focus is on this question: why Stonewall?

There’s something perversely 20th-century about linking gays to trans. Gay men do not want to be women. We like being men. I doubt that being a lesbian is about not wanting to be a woman. Our issues have nothing to do with identification or changing our bodies: we know what we are and nobody disputes it. Most gay men would strongly resist the suggestion we’re boys who want to be girls. I can’t think of anything I’d like less. The whole history of the gay liberation movement is inseparable from what people do rather than what they are. Central to trans concerns is being, not doing.

Also central is not being. It’s about magic. It’s about pretending that pretending changes reality. It’s about insisting, and even mandating, that pretending to be something actually makes you that something. It’s about insisting that you are what you are not, and that everyone else has to agree.

Perhaps the truth is that, after success in our great 20th-century drive for equality, Stonewall was left with bricks and mortar, an admirable staff, a CEO and a fund-raising team and, unconsciously, craved another big, newsworthy cause. 

That. I think that’s a big part of it, and not just for Stonewall. I think people got bored with the old familiar causes, and younger ones wanted their own new cause, and trans is it.

The Times on how Essex University got it so wrong:

Forster’s apologies came as Essex University published the damning report of an 18-month independent inquiry by barrister Akua Reindorf. It found that Essex had failed to uphold free speech, labelled Phoenix and Freedman transphobes, and subjected them to mass complaints in what Phoenix has described as a “mob atmosphere”. The two professors believe that men cannot become women by surgery and that it is important to protect women-only spaces in institutions such as prisons and refuges, views which are anathema to some trans activists.

That puts it the wrong way around though. It’s not that they “believe” that men cannot become women by surgery so much as it is that they don’t believe that men can become women via surgery (or anything else). People don’t have affirmative beliefs about all the impossible things, because there are too many and we don’t have time. We take the simpler path of just not believing impossible things. A bunch of very confused people have started insisting that men can become women via surgery or by merely saying so, but the rest of us just don’t share their peculiar and incoherent belief. It’s theirs, it’s not ours, that’s all. There’s no need for us to expend extra energy believing that men can’t turn into women, we just don’t believe they can.

The pair were this week sent unredacted copies of Reindorf’s report and were shocked at the detail in it. Phoenix discovered that a flyer was circulated with “violent and profane” imagery, including the image of a gun, and the words Shut the F*** Up TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), a pejorative term for someone considered transphobic.

And apparently the people in charge at Essex just thought that was ok, deserved, appropriate?

Freedman, who is Jewish and an adviser to the UN, was “disinvited” from speaking on a panel on antisemitism at Essex to mark Holocaust Memorial Week because of her views on transgender issues. A member of the university staff later tweeted comparing her to a Holocaust denier. “Essex [University] did nothing about the academic who compared me to a Holocaust denier,” she said. “When I read the unredacted report it confirmed to me what I already knew — which is that there were complaints about me being interviewed for a job at Essex. The undercurrent of vindictiveness and nastiness made me feel I was going a bit mad. It has had an impact on family life and mental wellbeing.”

All this because we can’t believe something we consider impossible.

Wait a second.

Its reputation is that of an idyll for cyclists, a city freed from the torment of cars. But while Amsterdam remains a model to most of the world, there are signs of trouble in paradise.

A series of developments have led the Amsterdam branch of the Fietsersbond, the Dutch cyclists’ union, to claim the municipality has turned on them, unfairly prioritising pedestrians in the city’s historic centre.

……………………..Unfairly prioritising pedestrians? But pedestrians are more vulnerable to cyclists than cyclists are to pedestrians.

Where once the cyclist was king, free to weave around the small roads of the centrum with abandon, it is claimed there has been a discernible change of attitude. At best cyclists are being treated as “guests” in the heart of the city, at worst as intruders to be expelled to outer lanes, it is suggested.

Meaning cyclists used to be allowed to zip around without paying attention to pedestrians? If so that’s not a particularly good situation.

“Amsterdam is still a cyclists’ paradise but it is getting more and more difficult to move through the centre,” said Jan Pieter Nepveu, a spokesperson for the Amsterdam branch of the cyclists’ union. “It starts with the proclamation of a pedestrian zone and before you know it, cycling is discouraged with kerbs and then fences. The centre becomes the domain of pedestrians. The municipality will have to defend cyclists against an increase in walkers, tourists and the catering industry.”

Or maybe cyclists will just have to go around the centre. Making cities the domain of pedestrians is a good thing.

Over 2019 and 2020, a trial was launched by the municipality to see if it could encourage cyclists to take “alternative routes” rather than travel directly on the Damstraatjes and Haarlemmerstraat, two central areas.

The “stress” caused by overcrowding and fast-moving bikes was said to have moved local residents and entrepreneurs to demand action. “The cyclist’s behaviour is the most important point in this issue,” a report on the experiment noted.

That’s just it, you see – fast-moving bikes are dangerous to pedestrians. People shouldn’t be biking fast through crowded areas full of pedestrians. (They also shouldn’t be riding motorized scooters on the sidewalks in Seattle. Ahem.)

[C]hoices are also being made that are clearly designed to constrain the free-wheeling spirit of the past, it is claimed. The most recent flash point has been the redevelopment of the Binnengasthuis site in Amsterdam’s university quarter, a complex of buildings that used to be a hospital.

What was once an important cycle lane running through the site is to be submerged into “a pedestrian area where bicycles are guests”, as a recent council agenda described it. The move drew about 50 protesters a week ago, including Saar Muller, 68, a a retired clinical physicist.

“The university intends to give pedestrians priority and divert the cycling through traffic through an unsafe road – narrow, many cars, loading and unloading,” she said. “This development seems to us to be part of a broader tendency to create ‘pedestrians first’ space…

But, again, why not? Why should cyclists be first instead? Pedestrians are the least intrusive and the safest so why shouldn’t they be put first?

A petition to Parliament:

Make non-binary a legally recognised gender identity in the UK

Have non binary be included as an option under the GRP (Gender Recognition Panel)/ GRC (Gender Recognition Certificate), in order to allow those identifying as non binary to be legally seen as their true gender identity. As well as having ‘Non-binary’ be seen as a valid transgender identity.

What does it mean to be “legally seen as”? What does the government have to do with how people are “seen” or what people are “seen as”? What is the point of petitioning the government to make it possible for you to be “seen as” some meaningless category?

Why not just simplify this whole thing and petition the government to make it that everybody pays ALL ATTENTION to me me me me me me me all the time from here on out? The me me me me me of course is generic and universal: everybody would be paying all attention to all the me me me me mes under this arrangement. That way all the ravenous egos would be satisfied at last and we could go back to normal life. Except for the part about having to pay all our attention to everyone all the time.

There is no option of ‘Non-binary’ on legal forms, ignoring members of the population. This requires the government to pass a law that publicly recognises ‘Non-binary’ as a part of the GRP under the Gender Recognition Act, a.k.a a legal and valid gender identity option. By recognising Non-binary as a valid gender identity, it would aid in the protection of Non-binary individuals against transphobic hate crimes, and would ease Gender Dysphoria experienced by Non-binary people.

Are “non-binary” people especially subject to hate crimes? Does anyone even notice, or care? And how do “non-binary” people manage to experience Gender Dysphoria (which apparently gets capital letters now, to look more official)?

Can self-obsession get any more baroque and absurd?

The commandment of the age – don’t mention women. Just don’t, ok?

Smear test invitations should not refer to women as it is discouraging trans men from accessing cancer screenings, a new study has suggested.

Researchers said that gender neutral invitations should be used instead to encourage uptake from trans men to get screened.

While at the same time discouraging uptake from women.

Current NHS guidance means that anyone with a cervix between 25 and 64 is eligible for cervical screening, including trans men and non-binary people.

In other words women are eligible for cervical screening, of course including the ones who call themselves trans men or non-binary.

The new study, published in the British Journal of General Practice, polled trans men and non-binary people on their experiences.

Individuals told researchers that “most of the negative points of the experience came from the very women focused design and language” in leaflets.

Another person said that “documents I have seen… are very feminine and woman/she/her-centred, which would make me uncomfortable if I received them”. 

Oh grow up ffs. It’s just a bit of paper or an email. You’re not marrying it, you’re not living with it, it’s just some words about a preventive medical screening. Medical screenings are not yet another opportunity for identity-massaging. Get over yourself.

It depends what “are” means. NBC News reports:

The number of young people who are gender-diverse — including transgender, nonbinary and genderqueer — may be significantly higher than previously thought, according to a new study.

That makes it sound as if “gender-diverse” refers to something real, solid, empirical, testable, when in fact “gender-diverse” is just a trendy way of labeling people who don’t follow every single convention about how female people and male people are supposed to behave differently from each other. Young John wears makeup? Young Susan has a buzzcut? Add them to the list!

Researchers in Pittsburgh found that nearly 1 in 10 students in over a dozen public high schools identified as gender-diverse — five times the current national estimates. Gender diversity refers to people whose gender identities or gender expressions differ from the sexes they were assigned at birth, according to the American Psychological Association.

Whoopdeedoo, I’m surprised it’s not 9 in 10. Note the “identified as” – this isn’t an item like carrying the sickle cell gene or having red hair, it’s an item about social roles and cultural norms and fads. 1 out 10 Pittsburgh high school students are nonconformist around gender – it doesn’t sound all that astonishing that way, does it.

In a report published this week in the journal Pediatrics, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Seattle Children’s Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the UCLA School of Medicine analyzed 3,168 student surveys culled from 13 Pittsburgh high schools. 

Why? What’s it got to do with public health or pediatrics or medicine? Not liking the conventions of gender isn’t a medical issue.

In all, 291 participants, or 9.2 percent, reported incongruities between their sexes assigned at birth and their experienced gender identities. Of those gender-diverse youths, about 30 percent expressed transmasculine identities and about 39 percent expressed transfeminine identities. People with nonbinary identities were about 31 percent of the total.

Cue more heavy breathing.

They tweaked the survey, see.

The 2017 edition, given to 118,803 students ages 14 to 18 from 10 states and nine large urban school districts, was the first and only one to date to include a question about gender identity, but it simply asked, “Do you identify as transgender?” and gave respondents the option to reply “yes,” “no” or “I’m not sure.”

Well that won’t do! It’s not nearly leading enough. You have to lead the witness if you want to get the desired answer.

Kidd and her colleagues added a two-part gender identity question in their survey: (1) “What is your sex (the sex you were assigned at birth, on your birth certificate)?” with options for “female” and “male,” and (2) “Which of the following best describes you (select all that apply)?” with the options “girl,” “boy,” “trans girl,” “trans boy,” “genderqueer,” “nonbinary” and “another identity.” 

There you go. Give the kids a bunch of ways to sound more interesting. The numbers will rocket up.

Although the data come from a single school district, the authors write, “the findings may approximate a less biased estimate of the prevalence of youth with gender-diverse identities.” 

Why is it of interest to medical people how gender-conforming high school students are?

The study was published as lawmakers across the U.S. are introducing a raft of measures to ban or limit gender-affirming care [off-label hormones and puberty blockers] for minors and restrict transgender students’ participation in school sports [restrict males from invading women’s sports].

…

Numerous leading medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommend access to comprehensive, gender-affirming and developmentally appropriate care for trans and gender-diverse young people. 

But what if it’s not “care”? What if that’s the wrong word? What if it’s harm? Damage? Mutilation?

Michael Cohen says Trump will flip on his own children.

Former Trump Organization Vice President Michael Cohen, upon learning of the now-criminal probe, said of the Trump children, “I think Trump is going to flip on them.” While we have no idea what the future will hold, we do know that what this all means is that — if they haven’t already — it’s time for members of the Trump family who served as organization employees to each retain experienced criminal defense lawyers.

Each. Each get her or his own. That means you too, Jared. They have to get their own because they’re all going to try to rat each other out. It will be a most edifying spectacle.

In fact, depending on what those Trump Organization family members have already said — and to whom — it may already be too late. Importantly, because the Trump Organization case is now criminal, individual employees and officers of that organization can face criminal charges for their specific roles in any corporate wrongdoing. Donald Jr. and Eric still serve as executive vice presidents of the organization, a title that Ivanka Trump previously also held. And, of course, before his presidency, their infamous father was at the helm of the organization.

This is Frank Figliuzzi talking, former FBI guy, now MSNBC legal commentator.

During my FBI career, including my time leading one of the largest white-collar crime branches in the field, and later, as a corporate security executive, I saw corporate employees mistakenly think that their companies’ attorneys represented them, too, in cases of corporate malfeasance. Big mistake. A company attorney represents the company, not the individual employees or executives.

And you don’t want to be trusting the people who run that company, even (or especially) when they’re your siblings or your daddy.

If any of the Trump family members have already even casually answered questions posed by their organization’s counsel or hired investigators, they may have mistakenly thought that what they were providing was privileged. And those statements would be privileged — but not if the organization decided, in its own interest or at the direction of the former president, that maybe Eric or Don Jr. or Ivanka needed to take the fall to save the organization or keep its notorious CEO out of prison.

They know he’d do it in a heartbeat.

For the Trump family, it may already be too late to get their stories straight. And doing so may not even be in their individual best interests. That’s why it’s time for each of them to separately lawyer up, avoid public statements — and be really nice to one another.

Ah but they don’t know how to be nice.

Ok that one is pretty funny.

The Palmer Report:

The Trump Department of Justice received secret access to several reporters’ phone and email accounts. The content was not available to them but the recipients’ email and phone record of contact was given to them.

The reasons that this is a big deal is that:

1) records were obtained secretly.

2) the person and their organization were not notified within 90 days after the records were obtained.

3) Bill Barr had to have authorized secretly getting these records but didn’t follow required procedures.

4) this is more of the Trump Administration’s vendetta against the free press

One more for the file.

Via Arty Morty, meet “gender therapist” Wallace Wong:

Last month [i.e. March 2019], Justice Gregory Bowden of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada ruled that a 14-year-old girl may begin receiving testosterone injections without parental consent. Bowden’s ruling, hailed as a “massive legal win” by the American LGBTQNation, ensured treatment would proceed without parental influence by declaring that if either of the girl’s parents refer to their daughter as a girl, they will be considered guilty of family violence under the Canadian Family Law Act.

If their daughter decides she’s a giraffe but her parents refer to her as a human will they be considered guilty of family violence under the Canadian Family Law Act? How many magical categories can be forced on parents by the Canadian Family Law Act?

The father was seeking a reversal of Bowden’s decision in the BC Court of Appeal.

“[These injections] will completely disrupt her puberty,” he said. “Her bones will stop growing, her brain will stop developing… and she’s not gonna be a boy. She won’t even have the bone-strength left to be a girl anymore.”

The father was still trying to get a court date.

Last Monday, however, new information surfaced that may favor Clark’s chances before the bench. Dr. Wallace Wong, the psychologist who labeled Maxine [not her real name] transgender, is facing calls for an inquiry into the conduct of his practice.

On February 28 [2019, the day after Bowden’s decision was released, Wong spoke at an event hosted by Vancouver Public Library. In a tape of the event obtained by Canadian pro-family group Culture Guard, Wong is heard proudly describing the scope of his children-only “gender therapy” practice, noting that his youngest client is not yet three years old and that he has 501 orphans and foster kids in his local practice.

Wong burbled about the soaring “need” for his “gender therapy,” but he was creating the “need” himself by diagnosing children as gender-broken.

Wong actually said aloud, at this library talk, that the way to get “gender therapy” fast without any pesky questions or delay was to threaten suicide.

“So what you need is, you know what? Pull a stunt. Suicide, every time, [then] they will give you what you need,” Wong said, adding that gender-dysphoric kids “learn that. They learn it very fast.”

These words take on a particular significance for Maxine’s case, in which Bowden relied heavily on the opinion of Wong and his colleagues that “continued delay in hormone treatment” was placing Maxine “at risk of suicide.” In fact, Bowden references Wong as claiming that Maxine had already experienced a suicide attempt “linked to [her] gender dysphoria.”

So Wong tricked the judge and then bragged about it in a talk at a big urban library. Clever.

I think this is the same case as the one involving the non-compliant father who was sent to jail just a few weeks ago.

H/t Arty Morty

James Kirkup sees reasons for optimism.

An example of that came at the weekend when Baroness Falkner, the new chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, told the Times that women should not be penalised or abused if they believe that transgender women do not become female by dint of their professed identity.

‘Someone can believe that people who self-identify as a different sex are not the different sex that they self-identify,’ she said. ‘A lot of people would find this an entirely reasonable belief.’

Does that also mean we can say it, write it, tweet it, underline it, campaign for it?

When I started writing about these issues, it was partly because I was worried that politics was failing to facilitate those discussions. In a few months in 2018, I collected dozens of private accounts from serving parliamentarians from several parties, who said they believed that some policies and practices aimed at benefiting trans people could have adverse effects on other people’s rights, status and services, especially women. Yet almost none of those politicians would say so publicly, because they felt the climate around the issue was simply too hostile and toxic.

It still is, but the island inhabited by the non-believers may be getting a little bigger and thus safer and more comfortable.

The Washington State ACLU is what???

From the WoLF piece:

The judge has issued a ruling in Andrea Kelly’s motion to intervene against the ACLU’s attempts to prevent the lawful public disclosure of records about male transfers into Washington State female correctional facilities. Judge Thomas Rice, who expressed clear indications from the beginning of the case that he sympathizes with the ACLU’s attempts to protect males transferred into women’s prisons, denied the motion to intervene and removed Kelly from the lawsuit – but not before Ms. Kelly obtained critical information from the Department of Corrections as part of the DOC’s court filings in this lawsuit.

The ACLU is protecting males transferred into women’s prisons, at the expense of women in women’s prisons. Males are the oppressed class and women are their oppressors.

The court records revealed the answers to many of the questions our client sought to obtain from the Washington State Department of Corrections through her Public Records Act Request, and also corroborated whistle-blower reports from local radio station KIRO-FM that a serial rapist is now being housed in the Washington Correctional Center for Women. However, the judge also granted an injunction against the public release of the responsive documents.

These records confirm our suspicion that the ACLU of Washington is seeking to suppress public records requests which prove that male rapists are being housed with vulnerable women in Washington prisons, and that there are official complaints of sexual assault by these men from within the prison.

The men’s right to privacy trumps the women’s right to safety, it seems. So the men get privacy to continue sexually assaulting the women.

WoLF’s client made a record request.

The request asked for documents pertaining to:

1. A complete and accurate count of inmates who identify as transgender (gender identity differs from sex identified at birth) in the custody of the Washington Department of Corrections [please break this information down by location]

2. Number of inmates that have been transferred from a men’s facility to a women’s facility since January 01, 2021

3. Total number of male persons who identify as female, non-binary, or any other gender identity that are currently housed in a women’s facility

4. Number of inmates who have transferred from a women’s facility to a men’s facility from January 01, 2021 to March 18, 2021

5. Number of female persons who identify as male, non-binary or any other gender identity that are currently housed in a men’s facility

In the following weeks, the ACLU of Washington and Disability Rights Washington (DRW) filed a lawsuit to prevent the release of documents requested by our client and members of the press. The ACLU claimed this was necessary for the “safety” of their clients who were supposedly at risk in the women’s prisons. 

And the ACLU apparently didn’t give two shits about the safety of the women in the women’s prisons.

Despite the information obtained from the court record, the decision and logic of the judgment itself create a dangerous new precedent. WoLF has obtained descriptions of the responsive documents listed in the court record, including PREA complaints against violent male sexual offenders who have raped and terrorized women both in and out of prison. However, the judge has enjoined us from releasing these documents, citing his concern for the “safety” of the male prisoners.

From the beginning of this case, The Honorable Judge Rice has shown a blatant disregard for the safety, dignity, and human rights of women — treating both female prisoners and our client with outright contempt. 

The decision has invented a new, completely fictional, exception to the Washington Public Records Act, and the state has failed to meet its legal obligation to release the records to the public. 

In fact, our client still has not received a response to her first request: “A complete and accurate count of inmates who identify as transgender (gender identity differs from sex identified at birth) in the custody of the Washington Department of Corrections [please break this information down by location].”

In an ACLU webinar hosted last week, ACLU lawyer and spokesperson Chase Strangio named WoLF as an “enemy,” and claimed that the public records requested by our client were an “excuse to hype up a false sense of some sort of safety crisis,” “FOIA abuse,” and “the ultimate gaslighting.”

I wonder how Strangio explains to herself how it’s ok that women are being sexually assaulted by the men whose “privacy” she’s protecting.

But Judge Rice and the ACLU have all read the same documents we have — which prove that male rapists are being admitted to women’s prisons under “gender identity” policies and raping women in these facilities. However, throughout the course of the case, both the judge and the ACLU have pretended that they do not know this, that women’s concerns about being housed with these men are unfounded, and that the male rapists and murderers are the real victims in this case. This, in fact, is the ultimate gaslighting.

Also the ultimate “Meh, who cares, it’s only women.”

It turns out Obama doesn’t think much of Trump. Who could have imagined that?

According to a new book, Obama called Trump a “madman”, a “racist, sexist pig”, “that fucking lunatic” and a “corrupt motherfucker”.

Check, check, check, check.

The remarks are reported in Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump by Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer at the Atlantic, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy. …

“He’s a madman,” Dovere reports Obama telling “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big checks they were writing to his foundation”.

“More often: ‘I didn’t think it would be this bad.’ Sometimes: ‘I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig.’ Depending on the outrage of the day … a passing ‘that fucking lunatic’ with a shake of his head.”

Obama’s strongest remark, Dovere reports, was prompted by reports that Trump was speaking to foreign leaders – including Vladimir Putin, amid the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow – without any aides on the call.

“‘That corrupt motherfucker,’ he remarked.”

That corrupt motherfucker currently subject to criminal investigation by the New York Attorney General.

Where did Ireland get the idea for industrial schools? From those go-getting Protestants to the east of them:

The Industrial Schools Act was intended in 1857 to solve problems of juvenile vagrancy in England by removing poor and neglected children from their home environment to a boarding school. The Act allowed magistrates to send disorderly children to a residential industrial school. An 1876 Act led to nonresidential day schools of a similar kind.

There were similar arrangements in Scotland, where the Industrial Schools Act came into force in 1866. The schools cared for neglected children and taught them a trade,^[1] with an emphasis on preventing crime. Glasgow Industrial School for Girls is an example formed in 1882.

They were distinct from reformatories set up under the 1854 Youthful Offenders Act (the Reformatory Schools Act) which included an element of punishment. Both agreed in 1927 to call themselves approved schools.

Well yes, it sounds so much more benign, doesn’t it.

An Industrial Feeding School was opened in Aberdeen in 1846. Industrial schools, like the contemporaneous ragged schools, were set up by volunteers to help destitute children. Their philosophy differed in that they believed that an education was not enough: these children needed to be removed from the harmful environment of the street, trained to be industrious, and given a trade they could practise.

Some schools were residential, but other children were day-boys. The regime was severe, with a tightly-timetabled daily routine that stretched from waking at 6:00am to bedtime at 7:00pm.

During the day there were set times for religion and moral guidance, formal schooling, doing housework, eating, and learning trades, with three intervals for play. The boys’ trades were gardening, tailoring, and shoemaking; the girls learned housework and washing, knitting, and sewing.

In other words it was prison for children.

H/t latsot

The reversal of reality aspect is soooooooo gaslighty. Daily Beast asked Stephen King about a falling out with JK Rowling.

King said: “Jo cancelled me. She sorta blocked me and all that. Here’s the thing: She is welcome to her opinion. That’s the way that the world works.

“If she thinks that trans women are dangerous, or that trans women are somehow not women, or whatever problem she has with it – the idea that someone ‘masquerading’ as a woman is going to assault a ‘real’ woman in the toilet – if she believes all those things, she has a right to her opinion.”

This is what I mean by the reversal – this “or that trans women are somehow not women” – that “somehow.” Come on. He’s not mystified about what kind of how it is that trans women are not women. I also strongly doubt that he’s clueless enough to think it’s impossible that any man would ever pretend to be trans in order to lurk in the women’s toilets, especially now that all anyone has to do to pretend to be trans is to say “I’m trans.”

He knows all that perfectly well. It’s the world he grew up in and lived in for decades. It’s only in the last 5 minutes that we’ve been ordered to agree that men are women if they say they are.

Lego is making…lesbian and gay and bi and trans dolls? But how do you do that with Lego dolls? Or any dolls? That’s like saying Lego is making liberal dolls and conservative dolls, or Jewish dolls and Christian dolls, or vegan dolls and keto dolls.

Everyone Is Awesome: Lego to launch first LGBTQ+ set

Can’t you just see little Sophie and Aidan staging a war between the fabulous trans dolls and the monstrous gender critical dolls?

Can you pick out which ones are lesbian and which are gay and which are trans? Are there any non-binary dolls? How about queer? Can you tell?

In the “spraying room” at Lego HQ, tiny figurines are layered with bright, glossy paint before being placed on a rainbow-esque arch. The result, a waterfall of colour with 11 brand new minifigures striding purposefully towards an imagined brighter future, is the Danish toymaker’s inaugural LGBTQIA+ set, titled Everyone Is Awesome.

The colours of the stripes were chosen to reflect the original rainbow flag, along with pale blue, white and pink representing the trans community, and black and brown to acknowledge the diversity of skin tones and backgrounds within the LGBTQIA+ community.

What about class? Why aren’t there colors to acknowledge the diversity of money and power? What about religion, politics, occupation, nationality?

In all but one case no specific gender has been assigned to the figures…

How do you “assign” a “gender” to a tiny plastic figure?

The exception is the one with the weird cone on its head, which is supposed to be a tribute to drag queens. So drag queens are grey? I predict ructions.

“Growing up as an LGBTQ+ kid – being told what I should play with, how I should walk, how I should talk, what I should wear – the message I always got was that somehow I was ‘wrong’,” he said.

That’s sad and bad and needs to change, but in the meantime, he didn’t “grow up as an LGBTQ+ kid” – he grew up as a gay kid.

The set goes on sale on 1 June, the start of Pride month, but a few Afols (adult fans of Lego) and Gayfols have been given a preview.

“This set means a lot,” said Flynn DeMarco, a member of the LGBTQIA+ Afol community and a contestant on the television show Lego Masters US.

Oh that community. That’s a lot of membering for one person.

Updating to add: Sorry, they’re not dolls but Minifigures. I’m not Lego-literate. I was going to strikethrough “dolls” and swap in “Minifigures” but there are way too many, it would make the post look like measles, so just correct it in your head.

Here’s a surprise – the House did approve the January 6 commission because 35 Republicans voted for it.

The House of Representatives voted 252-175 on Wednesday to pass a bill to set up a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Why it matters: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy andGOP leadership oppose the commission, but 35 House Republicans voted in support of the bill, underscoring the fault lines within the party in the aftermath of the insurrection.

The amount of Republican support makes it far more difficult for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to try and dismiss the commission outright as a partisan effort.

Interesting.

It’s sad when you think you have a gotcha and everybody just laughs at you.

Cue shocked intake of breath – she has a car? And an apartment? And shops for groceries? And committed a parking error?