From That conference;

Ok now I have to pause to mop my eyes.

Tom Ball in the Times:

Students calling for the resignation of Kathleen Stock have said their campaign has been “cloak and dagger” in order to protect their own members from online harassment.

Ahhhhh I see – they want to protect themselves from harassment…so that they can harass Kathleen Stock. Interesting take.

But after all, Kathleen is the tyrannical unelected head of state who tortures and imprisons protesters and poisons her critics, and is protected by a heavily armed military.

Just kidding. She’s an academic, a professor and writer. She tortures and imprisons no one and is protected by no one. She has opinions on the fungibility of sex that the brave “cloak and dagger” students don’t like, so they hide their identities while they try to bully her out of Sussex University.

Organisers of a protest planned in the centre of campus have advised attendees to “conceal your identity to protect yourself and others”. One of the campaign leaders said that activists did not want to reveal their identities for fear of opening themselves up to abuse or potential defamation claims.

Just as bank robbers don’t want to reveal their identities for fear of ending up in prison.

[Rio] Jacques, who is the first activist from the campaign to speak openly, added: “It’s very much cloak and dagger, but that’s not the way we want it to be. The masks — it’s not meant to be threatening. It’s just for the protection of the people that want to be vocal.”

It’s for the protection of the people who want to abuse and threaten Kathleen Stock with no cost to themselves.

“No one wants to lose their place at university, but at the same time we don’t want to sacrifice our right to defend ourselves with our words.”

Defend themselves from what? Stock doesn’t bully or threaten them. They are the aggressors here.

In its manifesto, Anti Terf Sussex describes Stock as “one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes, espousing a bastardised variation of radical feminism”. It claims she is harmful and dangerous to trans people adding: “We’re not up for debate. We cannot be reasoned out of existence.”

The group’s suggested reading includes an essay by Christa Peterson, a PhD student at the University of Southern California. For the past two years years, Peterson has led a Twitter campaign against Stock, culminating in the essay published earlier this year.

Christa Peterson is an absolutely poisonous individual, and she does indeed spend an astonishing amount of time shouting at Kathleen on Twitter.

Much mockery about this story of a primary school canceling a Halloween parade:

An elementary school in Seattle has cancelled its annual Halloween parade this year as the event “marginalises students of colour who do not celebrate the holiday”.

The Benjamin Franklin Day Elementary School’s racial equity team decided to cancel the “Pumpkin Parade”, where students dress up in Halloween costumes, after deliberating for five years. Parents were told about their decision on 8 October through a newsletter.

…

In the newsletter sent to parents, the school noted that costume parties could become uncomfortable for some students and distract them from learning.

Halloween events create a situation where some students must be “excluded for their beliefs, financial status, or life experience”, the school said. “It’s uncomfortable and upsetting for kids”. According to nonprofit organisation GreatSchools, 15 per cent of the students at the elementary school belong to low-income families.

So it’s not so much about students of color as it is about students of not much money. Here’s a shocker: I don’t think this decision is absurd; on the contrary, I wonder why schools need “Halloween parades” in the first place. Halloween is a pseudo-holiday that’s been inflating absurdly over the past…I don’t know, decade? Couple of decades? So apparently schools are joining in, but that seems stupid to me. Halloween is basically about demanding candy from the neighbors. It’s also about the fun of dressing up, but what’s that got to do with school? Nothing.

Holidays are all, without exception, gigantic marketing opportunities, and that’s how they get so ridiculously inflated. Somebody is making a fortune out of conning people into buying yards and yards of white fluff that is supposed to suggest cobwebs and spoils the appearance of October front gardens. Schools don’t need to observe Halloween.

Happening now.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on A trouncing.

Note the sleight of hand from Sally Hines about how other cultures have “recognised” that sex is not binary.

To say that they’ve recognised it is to say that it is the case, otherwise there could be no recognition. But these other cultures having divvied up the world in another way is what Hines presents as evidence that sex is not binary. And that’s question-begging. In effect, she’s saying that we’re entitled to say that sex is not binary because other cultures have recognised it as such; but they can only have recognised it as such if it is, in fact, not binary. This point stands whatever we happen to think about sex and sex-categorisation.

Another, related, point: what entitles these other cultures to say that sex is not binary? Presumably, it’d be some appeal to a fact of the matter. But if that’s the case, we have two competing sets of claims: one built around sex’s being binary, and another built on it’s not being binary. The competing merits of these claims could then be assessed.

I will not offer odds on which set of claims is the more likely to be truth-tracking. And their truth-trackingness has nothing to do with which culture is making it. Sometimes, people are just wrong.

(And sometimes, they’re misrepresented by dimwit sociologists. But I digress.)

Maybe Hines is being sloppy with language: maybe “recognised” is the wrong word to use. But in that case, it’s not at all clear what she’s on about.

But that much we’d all guessed anyway.

The BBC reports on the BBC report on the BBC involvement with Stonewall.

Governments, Ofcom and the BBC have had their impartiality questioned after involvement in the lobby group’s diversity schemes.

A number of high profile organisations have left Stonewall’s schemes in recent months amid growing controversy about the influence of the group on public policy.

Stonewall says it works for LGBTQ equality and that it is “deeply disappointing” that this can still be thought of as controversial.

See that’s just the usual obfuscating they do by treating L and G and B and T as all one thing, as soup instead of shot [pellets]. No, lesbian equality and gay equality are not being treated or thought of as “controversial,” the issue is the T part. The T is not the same, and should be discussed separately.

The podcast reveals that a senior figure in the Diversity and Inclusion department described Stonewall as “the experts in workplace equality for LGBTQ+ people” in internal correspondence, in response to questions about the BBC’s Allies scheme.

Concerns have been expressed about Stonewall being regarded as “the” experts, given the diversity of opinion among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people over Stonewall’s policies.

And over a great many other things. Yes, exactly – who died and made Stonewall god? Nobody.

The department runs an “Allies training” course, which was set up in conjunction with Stonewall, to provide guidance to staff. In an Allies training meeting, BBC trainers used language and material around sex and gender which is contested. The “genderbred person” – a graphic used by groups like Stonewall to explain sex and gender issues – was presented to staff, with no alternate views presented.

An incredibly childish graphic used by groups like Stonewall to explain sex and gender issues to grown-ass adults. It’s cringe as well as wrong and stupid.

The Nolan Investigates podcast understands that the Diversity and Inclusion department had a role in the drafting of the latest BBC News style guide around issues of sexuality and gender. The style guide sets a standard for the language used by BBC News, often in contested areas.

The document defines homosexuality as “people of either sex who are attracted to people of their own gender”. This is similar to the definition used by Stonewall, and different from the standard dictionary definition, in that it defines attraction as based on gender rather than sex.

And in doing so it’s engaging in this familiar campaign of coercing people gay and straight to fuck people according to gender not sex.

Sam Smith, an investigative journalist who left the BBC recently after working there for 25 years, told the podcast she thinks that some people within the BBC are frightened to speak out to say what they really think about Stonewall.

It would be strange if they weren’t frightened.

She says: “The trouble is the impartiality element of this, for people who do not agree with Stonewall’s campaigning position on the gender identity issue, it is not nice for an organisation to align itself with Stonewall and Stonewall’s mission”.

She said she had queried the BBC’s use of “political” and “campaigning” language but was told “the BBC had checked this with Stonewall and Stonewall were fine they were fine with it and therefore the BBC was fine with it”.

Great. Perfect. So if I’m beating someone around the head with a bottle, and that someone tells me to stop, I just say I’ve checked with Stonewall and they’re fine with it, and I get to carry on with the beating.

In case you’ve been wondering what Robert Winston said on BBC Question Time yesterday (as I had been), zip ahead to about 6 minutes in.

Partial spoiler: the core of it is: “I will say categorically, that you cannot change your sex.”

Oh did they indeed.

The term “mother” was removed from Scottish government maternity policies after they were lobbied by a leading LGBT+ charity, it has emerged.

So we all emerged from a coconut. Not the same coconut, mind; each person xir own coconut.

Documents released under freedom of information (FoI) legislation confirm that the charity wrote to the Scottish government last year encouraging them to adopt terms featured in their inclusive policy toolkit. The word mother now no longer appears on documents outlining maternity leave.

I wonder if Stonewall also lobbied governments to remove the word “father” from everything.

Malcolm Clark, director of the LGB Alliance, which was founded in 2019 in opposition to Stonewall’s policies on transgender issues, claimed the changes were unnecessary and counterproductive.

“Gay people don’t want the word mother removed,” he said. “For a word that has such resonance, and is understood by everybody, to be cancelled by a lobbying organisation, without any public discussion, is just absurd.”

Absurd, misogynist, insulting…erasing. It’s literally a campaign to erase women from the language.

However, Benjamin Cohen, chief executive of the LGBT website Pink News, was supportive of the introduction of gender-neutral terms.

Well he’s not being erased. We are.

“The people who are concerned about this are actually a relatively small but vocal minority,” he said.

You know who else is a small but vocal minority? Trans people.

He added: “Having policy that is inclusive is actually really important to lesbians and gay couples who are starting families.

Does he actually think lesbians want to get rid of the word “mother”?

So I just listened to this and sure enough – Sally Hines does not come out of it well.

The link is to the clip, not the whole hour, so no searching is needed.

Speaking of “Stonewall language” as opposed to BBC language or ordinary language or non-drunk language, here’s economist Frances Coppola using it in a blog post bashing Maya Forstater a couple of weeks ago:

Forstater and her supporters aggressively promote their beliefs on Twitter, hijacking threads to grandstand their agenda, forcing their opinions on people who have not invited them, misrepresenting what people have said then gaslighting them when they object, using emotionally-loaded language to short-circuit rational argument, resorting to ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority, insulting people who disagree with them, sealioning people who try to disengage. In short, behaving just like all the other cults that infest this increasingly toxic space. The effect of their behaviour is to prevent rational debate and silence dissenters. 

While I sympathise with their emotional intensity, reducing this complex and difficult subject to a simplistic binary definition solves nothing. All it does is arbitrarily exclude some of the most vulnerable people in our society from the rights and protections that others enjoy, at potential risk to their health and even their lives. 

See it? “the most vulnerable people in our society.”

Really? How? Why? In what sense? Who says?

No; no how; no reason; no sense; Stonewall says.

It’s bullshit. Vulnerable people are refugees, asylum seekers, religious minorities, peasants, exploited workers, trafficked women and girls, political prisoners, poor people, migrant workers, abused children, homeless people, people with severe mental health problems, people with chronic disabling medical conditions…and so on. I don’t think trans people are that kind of vulnerable unless they’re also trafficked or homeless or the like. Some are, but then their vulnerability is because of those circumstances and not so much because of their being trans.

I think the fervor and maudlin sympathy with which people recited the Stonewall “most vulnerable” creed is insulting to all the seriously vulnerable people out there and even insulting to trans people themselves.

There’s another odd thing about Coppola’s post and her comments in the discussion with Maya that followed it.

Currently, the law permits people who are born one sex to transition legally to another. Whether someone is a “woman” is no longer determined by their biological sex at birth.

It’s that. She says it again in the comments.

A person who has a GRC has gone through a process of gender reassignment that may or may not include surgery and/or medical treatment to make their physical characteristics resemble more closely the norms of the sex to which they have transitioned. They are thus legally female whether or not you or anyone else thinks they “look like women”. Whether someone is female or male is defined by the law, not your opinion, and the law says that someone who has a GRC is legally the sex to which they have transitioned.

…

The fundamental issue here is that you do not believe a man can ever become a woman, whatever the law says. Please don’t imagine that I haven’t noticed your weasel words. You “recognise the change of legal status”, but you don’t accept that the person has changed sex.

She thinks (or claims to think) that being legally declared a woman is being a woman. She thinks (or claims to think) that getting a Gender Recognition Certificate equals literally becoming a literal woman (or man) – that it’s not just a legal change it’s also an ontological change.

When Maya makes the distinction Coppola accuses her of “weasel words.”

The fundamental issue here is that you do not believe a man can ever become a woman, whatever the law says. Please don’t imagine that I haven’t noticed your weasel words. You “recognise the change of legal status”, but you don’t accept that the person has changed sex.

Well yes, because how could we? And why should we? Why do we have to agree that men literally turn into women the moment they receive the GRC? Why are we required to subscribe to fatuous, nonsensical beliefs?

Four years in prison for having a miscarriage.

On Tuesday, October 5, Brittney Poolaw, a 20-year-old Oklahoma woman, was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree for experiencing a miscarriage at 17 weeks and sentenced to 4 years in state prison.

Last year, Ms. Poolaw experienced a miscarriage and went to Comanche County Hospital for medical help. On March 17, 2020, she was charged with Manslaughter in the First Degree, arrested and incarcerated. The court set a $20,000 bond, an amount she could not afford. Ms. Poolaw has been incarcerated since her arrest over 18 months ago.

…

Contrary to all medical science, the prosecutor blamed the miscarriage on Ms. Poolaw’s alleged use of controlled substances. Not even the medical examiner’s report identifies use of controlled substances as the cause of the miscarriage. Even with this lack of evidence, the prosecutor moved forward with the charge. On October 5, after just a one-day trial, Ms. Poolaw was convicted and sentenced to a four year prison term.

You’ll be astonished to learn that Ms. Poolaw is not white.

Ms. Poolaw’s case is just one example of the troubling trend we are documenting in Oklahoma that replaces compassion and respect with criminal prosecution. In recent years, Oklahoma prosecutors, especially in Comanche and Kay Counties but also in Craig, Garfield, Jackson, Pontotoc, Payne, Rogers, and Tulsa counties have been using the State’s felony child neglect law to police pregnant women and to seek severe penalties for those who experience pregnancy losses. This use of prosecutorial discretion directly conflicts with the recommendations of every major medical organization, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, all of which know that such prosecutions actually increase risks of harm to maternal and child health.

Those risks are already shamefully high: the US has terrible stats on maternal health compared to other developed countries.

This report comes from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Women! Right there in the name of the group! It’s like spotting an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Originally a comment by Rob on Concealing a rape for social justice.

The saddest thing of all is that a young girl has been raped. The manner of her rape, the fact it was in a place where she was vulnerable and should have been safe just makes things worse.

The whole awful saga gives us a lot to unpick about the current state of American society especially, but I suspect about all societies.

The fact that the rape was a non-story at all until the father being arrested became a right-wing cause. The fact that the school and Board administrations either attempted a cover-up and/or didn’t properly communicate something so seriously between them. The fact that the Board Chair either lied or stated as fact something he didn’t know. The fact that an activist felt empowered in a public meeting to accuse the rape victim of lying (presumably without any evidence at all).

The fact the understandably angry father was the one treated as being in the wrong and arrested to boot. The fact that the USAG just assumed the fathers arrest was related to anti-vax protests and used him as an example of ‘terrorist’ behaviour. The fact that the alleged rapist was shuffled off to another school without a safety plan that prevented him raping another girl under similar circumstances. In fact, I wonder if there are only two victims. Sodomy and violent oral sex seem kind of deep end for a first timer, but maybe?

Lastly, given the nature of the rape(s), I would put money on the boy being a habitual consumer of quite nasty hard-core porn, the freely available existence to minors of which causes me considerable concern. I suspect people often hardwire to their early arousal experiences. If those come about from watching hard-core non-consensual simulated rape/non-consensual porn, rather than consensual fumbling with a similarly aged partner – it’s begging for trouble at some point. I’m sure there are other things we could pick out of this. It just screams of a society that is becoming increasingly dysfunctional.

The Guardian says the climate disaster is here. Not on the way, but here.

“We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, puts it.

The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical boundaries. Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe this much within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary, with the oceans alone absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.

Until now, human civilization has operated within a narrow, stable band of temperature. Through the burning of fossil fuels, we have now unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet. The last time it was hotter than now was at least 125,000 years ago, while the atmosphere has more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in it than any time in the past two million years, perhaps more.

So the thing is, we didn’t evolve to live in this climate. We evolved to live in a different climate, which is now gone. Permanently gone.

“We are conducting an unprecedented experiment with our planet,” said Hayhoe. “The temperature has only moved a few tenths of a degree for us until now, just small wiggles in the road. But now we are hitting a curve we’ve never seen before.”

And it’s swimming in oil, and we have no brakes, and there’s a cliff just past the curve.

Nolan Investigates Stonewall is now available In Your Area so I’m listening. It starts with how can the BBC possibly claim to be impartial when it’s part of the Stonewall Says We’re Awesome scheme? Will it move down the league table because of this podcast?

And then a very important question: is the language they use when reporting on trans issues BBC language or Stonewall language?

Aha, thought I. Stonewall language. That’s why we keep seeing these stupid platitudes with their stupid wording. Of course it is. That’s why people keep babbling about “trans rights” without ever explaining what rights trans people have that the rest of us don’t. That’s why there’s all this Most Oppressed Most Marginalized Most Excluded hyperbole even though it is such bullshit. It’s all Stonewall Language.

I just saw someone I used to respect, tweeting about the guy whose daughter was (allegedly) raped at her school, calling him “anti-trans.” How is he anti-trans??? Because he wants his daughter’s school not to pretend her rape didn’t happen? Because he said the boy was wearing a skirt? Is he supposed to just accept his daughter’s rape? Does that hold even if the boy isn’t trans at all but just exploiting the new toilet rules?

Stonewall Language. A pox on it.

Cristina Beltrán in the Washington Post:

To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness

Or we could just recognize that conservatism is not exclusively white. We know this already. “The Hispanic community” in Florida is highly conservative, because of the flight from Castro’s Cuba. That’s not “whiteness,” it’s politics. I don’t see what’s gained by calling it Whiteness.

Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.

How is that different from class? It’s not as if the billionaires are eager to share their billions with working class whites.

Multiracial whiteness promises Latino Trump supporters freedom from the politics of diversity and recognition. For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one’s racial identity as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to colorblind individualism. In the politics of multiracial whiteness, anyone can join the MAGA movement and engage in the wild freedom of unbridled rage and conspiracy theories.

In other words a lot of people vote against their own interests. We know. I don’t see what “Multiracial Whiteness” adds to that.

Call it power, hegemony, inequality – call it something reasonably exact. “Multiracial Whiteness” is just pseudo-clever academic paradox, which helps no one.

What he said.

Never mind that privileged cis girl who got raped, worry about the trans girls instead!

It’s funny, because I don’t remember the mainstream media ever being this attentive to feminist concerns.

Finally, a non-Fox-adjacent source: Newsweek:

Several parents have demanded that Loudoun County school board’s superintendent resign over allegations that the school district covered up two sexual assaults alleged to have occurred on school grounds.

…

In an interview with The Daily Wire, Scott Smith—a father who was arrested at a previous Loudoun County School Board meeting on June 22 after a debate over a draft policy on transgender and nonbinary students’ rights escalated— alleged that his daughter was sexually assaulted at Stone Bridge High School by a student allegedly dressed with a skirt on May 28.

During the June 22 meeting in which Smith was arrested after being dragged out, superintendent Scott Ziegler dismissed any concerns about assaults on school grounds allegedly committed by transgender students.

That’s not necessarily what the allegation is. The point is not that the alleged rapist is trans, the point is that a policy that allows male people to use the toilets meant for female people is a gift to rapists. The point is that the female people who need those segregated toilets don’t know who is trans and who isn’t, and that they shouldn’t have to risk it or worry about it.

“To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” he said.

Which was a big honking lie.

“I think it’s important to keep our perspective on this, we’ve heard it several times tonight from our public speakers, but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”

Again: not the point. The predator student doesn’t need to be trans, the problem is the freedom to bounce into the girls toilets because skirt.

Five months later, another alleged sexual assault by the same teenager took place at Broad Run High School in October.

…

During Tuesday’s meeting, a number of parents expressed their concerns over the alleged assaults while calling for superintendent Scott Ziegler to stand down.

“How do you expect parents across this county to drop off their kids and entrust you all to keep them safe when you’ve shown on more than one occasion you are not up for the job,” Monica Sadeghi said, via 7News On Your Side.

“When the Catholic Church passed predator priest from parish to parish the walls came eventually crashing down on them. And they were finally held accountable for the abuse. When is doctor Ziegler and this board going to be held accountable?” added Theresa Lieberman.

It’s the Catholic church all over again.

Smith told The Daily Wire that the suspect raped his daughter in the girl’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn.

He alleges the student took advantage of the school’s Policy 8040, which was passed in August to allow students to use their name and gender pronouns, and permit “gender-expansive and transgender students” to use school facilities such as locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond to their “consistently asserted gender identity.”

That can’t be right. The (alleged) Stone Bridge rape happened in May, which is before August, when the school’s policy was passed. The student can’t have taken advantage of a policy passed in August to commit a rape in May. It’s part of the horror of this story that the school board passed the policy after the rape. Months after it.

At the Glinner update, ripx4nutmeg tells us of a story that the left-of-Fox news media so far refuse to touch.

First, a little history. In August, the Loudoun County School Board, a group of nine people who manage 94 public schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, passed a gender identity policy to allow boys to use facilities for girls, such as restrooms, if they identify as girls, and for sex-based protections for girls in sports to be removed. Seven of the nine members of the board voted for the policy.

Team Fox reported on it, Team Left of Fox ignored it. Lefty feminists have nowhere to go these days. The last 50 years might as well not have happened.

Now go back to the distant past a couple of months before the Loudoun County school board told boys to feel free to invade girls’ toilets and locker rooms, when there were news stories about an angry man being dragged away by police from a Loudoun County school board meeting. This is before the “go ahead and use the girls toilets, boys” decision.

We now know that the man in the picture is Scott Smith, and he was dragged away from a meeting this June, just days after his daughter was allegedly brutally raped by a boy wearing a skirt in a girls’ school toilet, in late May.

This happened BEFORE the board voted to make it even easier for boys to access girls’ spaces.

I didn’t know that until reading nutmeg’s piece. Breathtaking. “Oh, a boy raped a girl in the girls’ toilets? Well let’s make that easier for the boys, shall we? Fabulous.”

Meanwhile they’d tried to bury the whole “he raped her in the toilets” story.

According to the report, other parents were told an incident had occoured but there was no mention of sexual assault. Smith was told his daughter had been physically assaulted, not sexually, and staff told him it would be handled internally, without the need for police involvement. 

He was enraged by that decision and challenged them in person on it, which led to the school board – which had refused to call the police when a pupil had been raped – calling the police because the father of the victim had made a scene. This, however, led to his daughter being taken to hospital where it was confirmed that she had been sexually assaulted.

A few weeks later at the school board meeting, Loudoun County School Superintendent Scott Ziegler said: “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms … the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”

During the same meeting, Smith allegedly revealed what had happened, only for a well known ‘activist’ to tell him his daughter was lying and that she would destroy his business. Enraged, he began to swear at her, which led to the police very publicly dragging him away and charging him with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The county prosecutor, who knew about the allegations surrounding Smith’s daughter, then allegedly pushed for him to be jailed.

I can’t fathom this. Just cannot get a grip on it, any more than if it were a greased pig. The school board wants to make schoolgirls vulnerable to boys in the girls’ toilets. It wants to so eagerly, so almost lustfully, that it lies about a rape that has already happened in the girls’ toilets.

The boy, who’s been described as someone who occasionally wears dresses, has since been charged with two counts of forcible sodomy; one of anal sodomy and one of forcible fellatio, and the court hearing was due to take place this month.

A few days ago the boy was arrested again – for sexual battery and abduction on another girl at another public school, just 2.5 miles away, in an incident that allegedly took place earlier this month. It’s no longer clear if the court case will go ahead this month, and the latest arrest appears to be the reason why the whole story has come to light in the last few days.

Breathtaking.

Susanna Rustin at the Guardian was thinking the feminism-transism standoff was starting to ease a little, but now she isn’t. The mainstream types are too close to the loonies for that to be the case.

Starmer’s recent comments on the Andrew Marr Show, along with remarks by the new Green party co-leader Carla Denyer, make it clear that they too believe that gender-critical feminists’ ideas are beyond the pale. Asked by Marr whether it is transphobic to say that only women have a cervix, a reference to a comment made by Labour MP Rosie Duffield last year, Starmer replied: “It is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.” Not only does Starmer disagree with Duffield’s use of the word “woman” to refer to biological sex rather than gender identity; he thinks women who hold such views should keep quiet. Denyer, meanwhile, called the gender-critical gay and lesbian rights charity LGB Alliance a “hate group”.

Quite. They’ve turned their backs on women in favor of cossetting gender-fanatics. Half the population, the half that ensures there is a population, meh, but men in lipstick taking women’s places at the Olympics, stunning and brave.

In common with others, including the philosopher Jane Clare Jones, I also see a connection with the environment. I think there are parallels between the failure to address the implications of our planet’s finite resources and our dependence upon it, and the idea that human potential is boundless. While I want people to be free to live as they choose, I also believe that human bodies have limits. And I am concerned about the influence on young people of the idea that, with the aid of medical technology, these can be transcended.

That, yes, and along with that there’s the disproportion – the urgency of our predicament on this cooking planet compared to the triviality of any one person’s idenniny. Gender dogma is intensely annoying because of this conceited “we can do anything” grandiosity, and also because of its adolescent selfishness and Look At Me-ism. I have looked at you, over and over, and all there is to see is self-centered dramatics. The longer this goes on and the more it escalates, the less possible it is to respect anything about the belief system.

Continuing with Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review of David Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe:

Pius XI – formerly Achille Ratti, librarian, mountain-climber and admirer of Mark Twain – was elected Pope in February 1922, eight months before Mussolini bullied his way to the Italian premiership. For 17 years the two men held sway over their separate spheres in Rome.

They met only once, but there was a huge amount of back-channel communication.

Mussolini saw that he could use the church to legitimise his power, so he set about wooing the clergy. He had his wife and children baptised. He gave money for the restoration of churches. After two generations of secularism, there were once again to be crucifixes in Italy’s courts and classrooms. Warily, slowly, the Pope became persuaded that with Mussolini’s help Italy might become, once more, a “confessional state”.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. Trump isn’t really a believer, of course, but he was happy to pretend when it served his purposes.

Kertzer demonstrates that the Pope’s failure to protest effectively against the fascist racial laws arose not simply from weakness, but because antisemitism pervaded his church. Mussolini scored a painful hit when he assured Pius that he would do nothing to Italy’s Jews that had not already been done under papal rule. Roberto Farinacci, most brutal of the fascist leaders, came close to the truth when he announced: “It is impossible for the Catholic fascist to renounce that antisemitic conscience which the church had formed through the millennia.” And Catholic antisemitism was thriving. Among Pius’s most valued advisers were several who – as Kertzer amply demonstrates – saw themselves as battling against a diabolical alliance of communists, Protestants, freemasons and Jews.

To put it another way, Catholics and fascists had and have a lot in common.