It wears the badge or it gets the hose.

A campaign encouraging Scottish NHS staff to sign a pledge and wear a badge supporting gay, lesbian and transgender people has been criticised after it emerged participation in the scheme will be monitored.

Have Scottish NHS staff ever been encouraged to wear a badge supporting women?

The NHS Pride pledge, devised by Scotland’s health service and the SNP government, with input from the charity Stonewall, launches tomorrow as part of Pride month.

There’s your problem right there. Reject “input” from Stonewall.

The campaign has rankled some doctors and nurses, however, amid leaked guidance from civil servants that health boards should record uptake among staff. A Scottish government briefing passed to this newspaper states that badges should only be awarded to staff who take the pledge and it advises that the numbers of badge-wearers “and basic info on staff groups wearing the badge” should be noted.

Has the NHS ever made such a demand for support of women?

Among the leaked documents is a draft statement for an NHS newsletter by Caroline Lamb, chief executive of NHS Scotland, who says: “I will proudly wear my badge as an ally to progress. I encourage you to do the same.”

How about progress for women? Any thoughts on that? Is it all just “queer” and trans people now?

For Women Scotland (FWS), the feminist campaign group, was contacted by dozens of NHS staff when details of the scheme emerged last week. Some described the pledge as “offensive” while others complained that the campaign “belittles” hard-working NHS staff who strive to deliver patient-centred care irrespective of sexuality and gender. Several NHS trusts in England have adopted the Pride pledge in recent years.

Signing it comes with duties – it’s kind of like enlisting in the army.

Staff who sign it are advised they may sometimes need to call out hate speech, or report incidents of discrimination or acts of verbal or physical abuse “against patients, people who use our services, and staff (including contractor staff)”.

“Abuse” like, for instance, saying “I requested a woman doctor and you’re not a woman”? Like asking to be on a women-only ward? Like telling a patient she can be on a women-only ward?

One GP in Lanarkshire who contacted FWS wrote: “The idea of a group of smug Pride badge-wearers informing on their friends and colleagues sounds more like East Germany in the Stasi days or China during the Cultural Revolution than a liberal Scottish democracy in the 21st century.” The backlash comes amid criticism of Stonewall and its diversity champions scheme, to which hundreds of organisations, including the Scottish government, belong.

…

Susan Smith of FWS said the campaign threatened to discriminate against women and those with gender-critical beliefs, while Malcolm Clark from the LGB Alliance, which was founded in 2019 in opposition to Stonewall’s policies on transgender issues, warned it could be counter-productive. “Frankly, it’s sinister,” said Clark. “This sort of virtue-signalling is almost Maoist in the way it gives a platform for some people to proclaim their political loyalty but puts other staff on notice they are not good comrades.”

Trans women of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your jock straps.

Politifact has an explainer on Critical Race Theory.

The grandfather of the movement was Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell, who in the mid-1970s voiced frustration at the limited impact of landmark civil rights laws and U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the previous decade. While those changes aimed to broaden access to high-quality education, jobs and housing, they fell short, he said. Laws remained embedded in a set of values and practices that discriminated against people of color, Bell said.

You know, it was the same way with feminism – revived feminism, aka second wave. It was about vastly more than laws – it was about a set of values and practices that discriminated against women. Better laws are a good thing but they’re far from the only thing.

In plain terms, critical race theory holds that racism is part of a broader pattern in America: It is woven into laws, and it shows up in who gets a job interview, the sort of home loans people are offered, how they are treated by police, and other facets of daily life large and small.

Again, very similar to feminism.

CNN also has an explainer. Just listing the headings help explain what the angry Republicans are trying to shove back behind the curtain.

Land was taken

Slavery was the law

Interracial marriage was banned

Voting was restricted

Jim Crow was accepted

Lynching was tolerated

Immigration was biased

Education was curtailed

Good jobs were elusive

Housing was exclusionary

Health care was inferior

That’s CNN’s list, and it’s not difficult to think of more items. Representation in the culture for instance – movies, tv shows, theater, advertising. Representation in government. Representation by unions. Mass incarceration. It goes on and on. Why would we not talk about it? Why would we not teach about it? Why would we try to pretend it never happened?

How to do politics that is serious and honest:

Starting with honest – it’s not honest to say “the anti-trans movement” when he’s talking about Maya and the ruling. It’s not “anti-trans” to defend women’s rights, even when we are defending them in the face of actions and policies promoted by some trans activists.

Also, yes it is about trying to humiliate a person, when he singles Maya out for abuse and lies – when he calls her names and claims she’s doing things she’s not doing. Of course it is. His “honest” is not honest at all.

And then there’s the string of stupid abusive epithets for three prominent gender critics. That’s neither honest nor serious.

He’s very heads I win tails you lose, which is also not my idea of honest.

No, it’s the other way around. Gender critical describes our view of gender, and anti-trans is just an abusive lie. We’re opposed to the magical new dogma that says men turn into women by saying they are women; that doesn’t make us “anti-trans.”

I take issue with its use because it’s inaccurate, and malicious, and coming from a grown-ass barrister who says it and adds a lol.

Yes he’s a barrister but he’s not the only barrister, and other legal peeps are saying he’s violating all kinds of rules.

These tweets –

Solange is according to her profile a retired litigator, so she knows what she’s talking about.

I’d forgotten about Simon Cox. It’s good to forget him; remembering him is not pleasant.

He’s back at it today.

Maya does no such thing, of course.

I still think it’s not a good look for barristers to lie like this in public – not to mention the name-calling.

That’s interesting. He’s a barrister so he definitely knows more than I do about the laws…but I would think saying that Maya deliberately puts trans people “and allies” in danger does indeed appear libelous.

That aside, it’s unmistakably bullying and loathsome.

He’s “in danger” from us, in other words we’re likely to try to kill him.

What a poisonous man.

For some completely mystifying unfathomable reason, there are not many lesbian bars any more.

Rachel and Sheila Smallman spent the summer of 2016 traveling the Gulf Coast, trying to find the best place to open a lesbian bar.

There were queer bars along the coast, but they largely catered to cisgender gay men. The Smallmans visited at least five cities in four states.

Why does PBS say “cisgender”? Can we not just take that as read now? Wouldn’t “gay men” have done the job perfectly well? Would any reader be wondering if they meant trans men too?

On one night, the Smallmans met a friend at a New Orleans gay bar. They were there for about three minutes before some of the patrons and employees started yelling at them to leave because they were women. The couple and their friend hadn’t even had a chance to order a drink.

There you go. No women allowed in gay bars, and there are no lesbian bars, so hahaha wims sucks to be you.

That night strengthened Rachel and Sheila’s resolve to open their own lesbian bar. On Oct. 4, 2019, the Smallmans opened Herz in Mobile, Alabama, turning a straight dive bar into the only women-centered queer bar in the city. The only lesbian bar in Alabama. And one of four lesbian bars in the South.

But when you say “women-centered” do you mean cis women? Well DO you?

he number of lesbian bars has decreased in the past few decades to just 21, according to the Lesbian Bar Project, a collective launched by filmmakers Erica Rose and Elina Street to raise awareness and help the remaining bars survive the COVID-19 pandemic. That number is a drop from the more than 200 lesbian bars in the late 1980s, according to a 2019 report from Greggor Mattson, an associate sociology professor at Oberlin College.

See, back in the late 80s, people still thought women were acceptable. Now everybody knows they’re all terfs or Karens or both.

When the “dramatic decline” in lesbian bars began, the fastest-growing type of LGBTQ bar were those where men and women socialized together. The reasons behind that shift need more research, Mattson said.

Later, “as transgender issues became more prominent, and we began to recognize genderqueer and gender nonbinary folks, bars that seemed to be open to all genders became the dominant kind of LGBTQ+ space,” Mattson said.

That way lesbians get the golden opportunity to be called cis scum by men who identify as women.

Florida has passed a law governing the teaching of history in public schools. What next, a law on what brand of shoes the students must buy?

The Florida State Board of Education unanimously voted to ban teaching ideas related to critical race theory Thursday, making it one of the largest public school systems to fall in line with conservative efforts across the country to regulate certain classroom instruction of American history.

What’s the betting that they even have much idea what it is?

The rule says in part: “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

That’s ludicrous. American history is a vast array of things, and “the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” doesn’t cover them all! It doesn’t begin to cover them all. The principles are very interesting, and worth learning about, but so are other aspects of the history, including that of the indigenous people and yes you’re damn right the enslaved people. Hey you know what, one of the things you can teach about is the tension between the universal principles on the one hand and the genocide of the indigenous people and enslavement of the imported from Africa people on the other.

The move was a victory for DeSantis, who has been a vocal critic of critical race theory in schools. He told board members, many of whom he appointed, by video before the vote that students should be served with fact-based curricula by teachers who should “not be trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.”

That’s so ignorant. What facts? There’s an infinite number of facts, so how do you decide which facts to teach about? You don’t just order a box of facts from Amazon and then distribute them to the students by alphabetical order. You have to organize the damn “facts,” and the process of doing that is called…brace yourselves…theory. You’re teaching a theory no matter what, so it’s idiotic to think critical race theory is some cuckoo in the nest because it’s not a bushel basket of Facts.

DeSantis added: “I think it’s going to cause a lot of divisions. I think it’ll cause people to think of themselves more as a member of a particular race based on skin color, rather than based on the content of their character and based on their hard work and what they’re trying to accomplish in life.”

He doesn’t think that. Even he’s not that stupid. What he thinks is that the “universal principles” version is more flattering to the country and especially to, yes, white people.

In short he has a bad conscience. He (and all the rest of these goons) don’t want the central importance of removal and enslavement and race to be taught because it doesn’t make us look good. That’s the point of life, right? To be made to look good? Shiny goldy hair, shiny blue suit, shiny pale skin?

Critical race theory is a concept that seeks to understand racism and inequality in the U.S. by exploring and exposing the ways it affects legal and social systems.

The horror! Why would we ever want to do that?

It can be done well or badly, as we’ve already seen. Robin DiAngelo is a damn fool. But the fact that Robin DiAngelo is a fool doesn’t translate to all proponents and scholars of critical race theory are fools or that the subject is stupid or evil.

Mississippi being Mississippi:

At first, it seemed a joyous occasion. There was an audible gasp in the room, then boisterous cheering and applause when the announcement was made: Ikeria Washington and Layla Temple had been named 2021 valedictorian and salutatorian for West Point High School.

The president of the local N.A.A.C.P. in West Point, Miss., Anner Cunningham, smiled as the two young women, both standout students, were photographed. “It was a beautiful and proud moment to witness two young, Black ladies standing side by side given such honors,” Ms. Cunningham said.

And moment is what it was, because it couldn’t be allowed.

But almost immediately parents of other students near the top of the rankings raised questions about who should have been honored. Within days, and breaking with longstanding tradition, West Point High School decided to name two valedictorians and two salutatorians — with two white students, Emma Berry and Dominic Borgioli, joining the Black students who had already been named.

Affirmative action for white kids! At last!

There was a lot of fancy footwork about how you count the grades and yadda yadda but the appearance at least is…what it sounds like.

The Washington and Temple families are considering a lawsuit, and they have enlisted the advice of Ms. Ross, the lawyer from Jackson. She questions the methodology used to determine class rank in West Point — saying it makes no sense — and why weighted scores are not used.

“Anybody in education knows that a weighted G.P.A. signifies that a student has taken more rigorous courses than a student with a 4.0 G.P.A.,” Ms. Ross said.

A top grade in an easy course isn’t scored the way a top grade in a difficult course is.

Mississippi is still Mississippi.

Meanwhile girls continue to be relentlessly harassed and bullied.

Some girls can be contacted by up to 11 boys a night asking for nude images, the schools watchdog for England says.

In an Ofsted survey, girls explained that if they blocked boys on social media “they just create multiple accounts to harass you”.

The report also found nine in 10 girls experienced sexist name-calling or were sent explicit photos or videos.

The watchdog is warning that sexual harassment has become “normalised” among school-age children.

That is, the sexual harassment of girls. Real girls, not boys who have a fantasy that they’re girls. While people are losing their shit over “misgendering” real girls are treated like crap day in and day out as if that were just normal. Why doesn’t sexual harassment get 1/100th of the attention that “misgendering” gets?

In the survey, girls said boys “just won’t take no for an answer” when asking for explicit images.

In other words boys somehow get the message that they’re allowed to persecute girls for their own amusement and sexual gratification. Where do they get that message? Why aren’t girls seen as people as opposed to holes for boys to use?

Amy, not her real name, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that when she was in sixth form she was raped after a party.

Now 25, she believes there was a wider culture of sexual harassment that played a role in what happened to her.

No no it’s sex positivity. She’s just being sex negative. Rape is just a kink and she’s a Karen to object to it. She’s crying white tears.

Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman said she was “shocked” that young people said it was a significant problem at every school the watchdog visited.

“It wasn’t in some, it was in all of them,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Maybe this issue is actually more important than anyone’s “pronouns” or “gender identity”? Maybe the adults have somehow become so distracted by the burning issue of men’s right to demand that women call them Suzy that there just isn’t time or attention left for schoolgirls being tormented by schoolboys?

Trump “issued a statement” – i.e. blurted out a bunch of stupid plus treasonous.

As President, I had a great and very productive meeting in Helsinki, Finland, with President Putin of Russia. Despite the belated Fake News portrayal of the meeting, the United States won much, including the respect of President Putin and Russia. Because of the phony Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, made-up and paid for by the Democrats and Crooked Hillary Clinton, the United States was put at a disadvantage—a disadvantage that was nevertheless overcome by me. As to who do I trust, they asked, Russia or our “Intelligence” from the Obama era – meaning people like Comey, McCabe, the two lovers, Brennan, Clapper, and numerous other sleezebags – or Russia, the answer, after all that has been found out and written, should be obvious. Our government has rarely had such lowlifes as these working for it. Good luck to Biden in dealing with President Putin—don’t fall asleep during the meeting, and please give him my warmest regards!

He hasn’t become more intelligent in the past four months.

From 2018:

If you’ve been taking the New York City subway lately, you may have noticed that some stops are a little more colorful than usual, as rainbow flyers celebrating Pride month have cropped up in stations across the city. The posters are formatted and designed like official MTA announcements, with statements like “No hatred or prejudice allowed at this station at any time.” But the gag is, it’s not the MTA that’s putting them up — it’s a New York resident.

Pride Train is a guerrilla anti-bigotry campaign spearheaded by Thomas Shim, a global creative director at the advertising agency Y&R New York, and his friends. The group formed last year and has since expanded, adding volunteers and contributors to queer New York’s most public spaces for the second year in a row.

Me and my friends Ezequiel and Jack started this project last year a week or two before Pride month. It seemed to us we could be very complacent because we’re in a blue state. Then we started talking about hate crimes, and all these smaller, microscale-level hate crimes happening all around NYC — some of them happening in subway stations. We wanted to do something about LGBTQ rights in general, and subway stations are the most public places in NYC.

They started with a rainbow flag sticker to put on trains, then got inspired to do imitation transit posters.

So you were aware of how vulnerable LGBTQ+ people are when it comes to public transportation?

Yes, it entered into our process. It’s the most public space, but it’s the darkest place in NYC. Things happen there. It affects us every day — not just LGBTQ people, but also women and people of color being attacked both physically and verbally. Two of the three people behind this project are people of color, so it’s a double whammy. You’re constantly watching your back, and I feel more unsafe than ever. We’ve become a target and it’s scary.

They almost had it for a second! They mentioned women! But then it slipped away…as it always does.

How do you identify?

We have a lot of people working on this project. The three of us who started it, we are a mix of gays and non-gays. I’m Asian American. Last year was two people of color and one white person, and this year it’s the same. But we have a bunch of volunteers, people who contribute and come up with new ideas for our social media channels. This year at our kick-off meeting we had about 15 people, but there are 20+ people across NYC helping out.

A lot of people…no telling if any of them are women. What are women, again?

Anyway, assuming this story is true, the posters aren’t official transit posters.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Prolonged drought aka desert.

States like Arizona, Utah, and Nevada are among the highest per capita water users in the US. People move to states without much water, then use water like there is a huge supply. The states with the lowest per capita usage are mostly in New England, where there is a better supply of water. I don’t have too much sympathy with people who move to the desert and then consume water they are usually stealing from somewhere else. And there is a water fountain in Phoenix that shoots water up to 560 feet (though the average is 300 feet). Most of that will evaporate in the desert air.

Also, Lake Mead should not have been built. The lake is evaporating more than 600,000 acre-feet every year. The Colorado River has so many dams that it no longer reaches the mouth for several months each year.

None of this is acceptable. Deserts are inappropriate places for intensive development. I realize some people like it hot, and don’t want winter cold, but if there isn’t enough water to sustain the lifestyle you require, you need to live somewhere else.

Why live in the desert if you want to have a lawn from suburban Chicago?

And may of the lawns are based on eastern US ideas of a lawn, which were carried over here from England. So we are trying to build lawns in a desert where rain is scarce modeled on lawns from a country with regular rainfall.

If the human species goes extinct, we may be the first species to be extincted by its own stupidity.

Again – infuriating.

Why put it that way? Why not put it the more obvious way: this is a victory to treat women as having rights themselves? Why put all the emphasis on trans people and what they want and by doing that, imply that women are 1. the enemy and 2. vicious bullies? WHY DO THAT?

Why the hemming, the apologizing, the anxious propitiation, the quaking sensitivity, along with the blank indifference to women?

But trans people’s rights are absolutely protected…

Who said anything else? Why say that? Why assume that feminist women are trying to take away trans people’s rights? WHY DO THAT?

You know they face harassment and bullying from school onwards…

SO DO WOMEN. So do women, and women are half of everyone, so why are we ignoring the bullying of women in favor of wringing our hands over the bullying of men who say they are women? (That’s what both Radio 4 and Falkner mean by “trans people,” of course – we all know trans men are a distant afterthought.) Why don’t women’s rights matter any more? Even to women? Why has the trans bullying been so very effective?

Uh oh.

[Water] Levels in Lake Mead – the largest US reservoir by volume – fell to historic lows on Thursday, as the region continues to face the effects of a devastating prolonged drought.

Stationed on the main stem of the Colorado River in the Mojave [desert] along the Arizona-Nevada border, Lake Mead was formed with the construction of the Hoover dam, which generates electricity for areas in Arizona, California and Nevada. It provides water for urban, rural and tribal lands across the south-west.

It’s approaching its lowest level ever and it will get lower over the summer.

In normal years, the dam produces enough electricity for 8 million people, but the water shortage will slow energy output while adding additional pressure on the increasingly water-starved systems across the west.

And this part of the west is desert. It’s already desert and now it’s a desert in a drought. The problem is, millions of people live there. I’m not sure we thought this through.

Roughly 75% of the American west is currently mired in “severe” drought, according to the US Drought Monitor, but the region has been strained by drought conditions for decades. The climate crisis has amplified effects of the dryness, as rising temperatures obliterated the already sparse snowpack and baked even more moisture out of the landscape.

And [arms flailing in the effort to get the point across] this was already desert country. Why anybody thought it would be a good idea to fill it up with people is beyond me.

Suzanne Moore on that ruling:

What a huge amount of time, money and, for Maya Forstater, unimaginable anxiety it has taken to establish that she should not be sacked for believing simply that biology is real.

For knowing what we all knew until 5 minutes ago, when we received strict orders to stop believing it.

At a time when the scales are falling from people’s eyes about just how campaigners such as Stonewall operate, Fortstater’s win is cheering for all of us. I was never sacked for my gender critical beliefs but I was certainly made to feel that my workplace had become a hostile environment. How many people are labouring under the same pressure?

Approximately way too many.

For it is mostly women who are losing jobs and being abused if they do not accept extreme trans ideology. This week, after a two month “probe” by Abertay University, a Scottish law student called Lisa Keogh was finally cleared of “wrongdoing“ after saying that “women have vaginas”. Her classmates reported this as an offensive comment. Marion Millar, another gender-critical feminist, was recently arrested and charged by police in Scotland for her tweets.

And a judge forced Maria MacLachlan to call the man who punched her at Speakers’ Corner “she.”

The road back is long and twisty.

Death threats.

Metro Vancouver says yeah!

Our “pronouns” will be was/were.

Much progressive.

Updating to add screenshot:

Well…

Assuming “1940s Germany” is meant to suggest Germany 1940-45 as opposed to Germany 1945-50, I have to say well but what about the fact that Germany 1940-45 was engaged in genocide as well as global total war with casualties in the millions? What about that part? I’m not seeing that happen to trans people, or anything resembling it, or anything that looks as if it could possibly if left alone over a long time end up resembling that.

To put it more crisply, I’m not seeing the persecution.

Not seeing you as you see yourself is not persecution. It’s the universal human condition, and it’s not persecution, it’s just how things are. We all look different from the inside as opposed to the outside. That’s just how “inside” and “outside” work.

People who see this tweet will think of Willoughby as the person who composed this tweet. That’s not everybody else’s fault, it’s Willoughby’s.

H/t Dave Ricks

Maybe it’s nature’s desperate last gasp effort to get us to stop destroying the planet – convince enough of us that we don’t know the difference between female and male and surely the birth rate will plummet.

Holding on to it like an exposed lie, you mean.