Yesterday in Atlanta:

Shootings at two massage parlors in Atlanta and one in the suburbs Tuesday evening left eight people dead, many of them women of Asian descent, authorities said. A 21-year-old man suspected in the shootings was taken into custody in southwest Georgia hours later after a manhunt, police said.

The attacks began around 5 p.m., when five people were shot at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor in a strip mall near a rural area in Acworth, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Atlanta, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker said. Two people died at the scene and three were transported to a hospital where two of them also died, Baker said.

…

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in statement Wednesday that its diplomats in Atlanta have confirmed from police that four of the victims who died were women of Korean descent. The ministry said the office of its Consulate General in Atlanta is trying to confirm the nationality of the women.

The killings came amid a recent wave of attacks against Asian Americans that coincided with the spread of the coronavirus across the United States.

Encouraged by Donald Trump’s insistence on calling it the “China virus,” especially when people begged him not to.

Guess what Trump was doing yesterday.

In Scientific American of all places:

Trans Girls Belong on Girls’ Sports Teams

But “trans girls” are boys, so no they don’t.

In February 2020, the families of three cisgender girls filed a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools, the nonprofit Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and several boards of education in the state.

The girls are not “cisgender.” That’s a stupid made-up word to make female people seem like just one section of a larger category of female people. It’s a manipulative cheat. Girls are girls. Boys who either think they “feel like” girls on the inside, or claim to in order to win sporting competitions they otherwise lose, are not girls. The set of girls does not consist of cisgender girls and trans girls; there are only girls. Boys are boys. That’s what the words mean. An apple isn’t a trans potato, and a potato isn’t a cisvegetable potato. Things are what they are, and they don’t become some other thing by putting the word “trans” in front of them.

The families were upset that transgender girls were competing against the cisgender girls in high school track leagues. They argued that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in high school sports and should be forced to play on boys’ teams.

Did the families really argue that the boys should be forced to play on boys’ teams? I doubt it. I think what the families argued is that the boys should not be allowed to play on the girls’ teams, end of story. I don’t think anyone wants to force the boys to do anything, I think the goal is to stop the boys forcing the girls to compete against boys on their own teams.

State legislators around the country are pushing bills that would force trans girls to compete on boys’ teams.

Again: I don’t believe it. The point is not forcing girls to see their teams taken over by boys; what the boys decide to do then is their problem.

There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children…

Blah blah blah, and never mind about the attacks on already marginalized girls.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time people have tried to discredit the success of athletes from marginalized minorities based on half-baked claims of “science.” There is a long history of similarly painting Black athletes as “genetically superior” in an attempt to downplay the effects of their hard work and training.

Boys who claim to feel like girls are not a “marginalized minority” in the way black people are. Girls are not a privileged majority in the way white people are. Comparing this issue to racism is scummy.

Recently, some have even harkened back to eras of “separate but equal,” suggesting that transgender athletes should be forced into their own leagues. In addition to all the reasons why this is unnecessary that I’ve already explained, it is also unjust. As we’ve learned from women’s sports leagues, separate is not equal. Female athletes consistently have to deal with fewer accolades, less press coverage and lower pay. A transgender sports league would undoubtedly be plagued with the same issues.

Therefore, boys should be allowed to compete against girls so that the girls will get even less in the way of accolades, press coverage, and pay.

Much science.

Updating to add: L Beatrice published an article at Uncommon Ground last August titled “Why Jack Turban Should be Investigated by the American Medical Association.”

Jack Turban, insistent critic of Abigail Shrier’s book on transitioning of young girls, constantly claims puberty blockers are safe. He is paid by a firm that manufactures them.

Leo Igwe writes:

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is shocked by the news of the expulsion of a 6-year-old pupil, Catherine Karma, from your school. According to the report, your school expelled Ms. Karma in connection with some suspicions of ‘witchcraft’. Your management concluded that she was a ‘witch’ and was involved in ‘witchcraft activities’. You claimed that her presence would endanger the lives of other pupils and staff.

The decision to expel Ms. Karma is shameful, outrageous, and difficult to comprehend. First of all, how did your school confirm that Ms. Karma was a witch? How were you able to ascertain that she indulged in witchcraft activities (whatever that means)? In fact, what does your school understand by witchcraft?

From the report, your school expelled Ms. Karma based on the notion that she had magical powers and could kill or harm other pupils and staff through occult means.

How could you believe this nonsense? How could you accept that this six-year-old girl had such powers? Now think about this, if Ms. Karma had the supposed magical powers, don’t you think that she would have used them to resist her expulsion from the school? Your school did not stop at merely entertaining this mistaken notion, the management went further to punish her and now truncate her education and training based on misplaced fears and anxieties.

Look, even if some students entertained such misconceptions, what should be your duty as a school? Your role is to educate and enlighten pupils and lead students out of ignorance and superstitions. Your role is to dispel irrational fears and anxieties, not reinforce these misconceptions. By expelling Ms. Karma, your school has failed in its role as an educational center. Your school has betrayed the academic and enlightenment trust that the parents and the society repose in it.

AfAW urges you to take all the necessary measures and ensure that Ms. Catherine Karma continues her education without any further disruption. Your management should ensure that this educational failure does not repeat itself in your school again.

Thanks in anticipation of thoughtful consideration of this letter

Sincerely

Leo Igwe Ph.D Religious Studies(Bayreuth)
Chief Executive Officer, Advocacy for Alleged Witches
Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW)

One the one hand boys who “identify as” girls and take their athletic prizes, on the other hand boys who shove cameras up girls’ skirts.

A school vowed to take action after sixth form students expressed fury over a reported “upskirting” incident on a spiral staircase.

A group of male students were allegedly caught taking photographs up the skirts of girls using the transparent glass staircase, in the centre of the sixth form canteen area, at Broughton Hall Catholic High School on Friday.

What kind of complete idiot puts a transparent staircase in a mixed-sex school?

Some students told the ECHO that girls have been advised to “wear shorts” under their skirts and were told there may be plans to install frosted glass panels at the West Derby school.

That sounds comfortable, and convenient, and not at all shaming, and not any kind of financial burden. Also brilliant to tell the girls wear an extra layer of clothes instead of telling the boys to stop being leering pervy female-hating shits.

The girls at the school say it’s been a problem for years, the officials at the school say this is the very first they’ve heard of it.

“It used to make us really uncomfortable. We would ask if we could wear trousers but we were told no, we had to wear skirts. There were girls sent home for coming in with trousers on.”

“You have to wear those garments that make it unpleasantly easy for boys to peer and photograph and grope and even rape. Them’s the rules.”

Several other young women who attended the school shared their disgust on social media.

One said: “Today I’m genuinely embarrassed to say I went to Broughton Hall high school and sixth form. In the sixth form building in the middle of the canteen there is a spiral staircase which has glass surrounding it.

“For years girls have said they feel uncomfortable walking down those stairs in skirts yet the school has done nothing about fixing that problem.

“It’s now been said that a group of around 15/20 lads have been sitting at the bottom of the stairs taking pictures of girls walking down them.”

And the adults running the school couldn’t figure out that this would happen because…they’re robots?

Fair Play for Women won.

Fair Play For Women have today won their High Court challenge against the Office for National Statistics. The ONS has conceded that the proper meaning of Sex in the Census means sex as recognised by law.

The High Court has now ordered “What is your sex” means sex “as recorded on a birth certificate or Gender Recognition Certificate”. The substantive hearing listed for 18 March is vacated and ONS must pay costs of both sides.

The Guidance accompanying the question “What is your sex?” is now published, on a final basis, and directs everyone to answer according to their legal sex for the remainder of the Census.

Jason Coppel QC for Fair Play For Women argued that the sex question in the Census is “a straightforward binary question, not a choice” at the initial hearing on 9 March.

It occurs to me that it’s a seriously important thing in life to know the difference between what you can choose and what you can’t. There’s a lot you can choose, including in how your sex influences your behavior, but what you can choose is not infinite. Knowing that difference save a lot of time and effort, and spares the rest of us a lot of endlessly stupid conversations.

Sir James Eadie QC for the ONS had argued that sex was an ‘umbrella term’ that includes a range of concepts such as ‘lived’ and ‘self-identified’ sex. He also claimed that asking about a person’s sex as recognised by law risks a breach of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which relates to privacy. The judge Mr Justice Swift disagreed. He stated that Fair Play For Women had a “strongly arguable case” and granted an interim order that forced ONS to immediately change its Guidance.

This case establishes that sex is a distinct concept in law, not something shaped by how a person feels, and that organisations need not worry about asking people their sex when they need to do so.

Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play For Women, said

“Being male or female is a biological reality that affects all our lives. That’s why it’s important to collect accurate data on sex in the Census. Sex data gets corrupted if the ONS conflates sex with the idea of a feeling, called gender identity, under the question ‘What is your sex?’.”

“It is also wholly unnecessary because a new question has been added to this census specifically about gender identity. We welcome this separate question on gender identity. We simply want accurate data on sex to be collected too. ONS plans would have seen gender identity recorded twice and sex getting muddled.”

High five to FPFW.

Remember that insultingly not-real FBI “investigation” of Brett Kavanaugh? Some of the Dems want to look into it. I don’t think it will make any difference, because He’s on the Court now and them’s the rules, buddy – you’re stuck with him no matter how dishonest and rigged the process was. I don’t think it will make any difference but it would be something to have the record show what happened.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who serves on the judiciary committee, is calling on the newly-confirmed attorney general, Merrick Garland, to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.

We all know it was not thoroughly at all. It was over a weekend or something, and it ignored report after report after report of sleaze and worse.

The FBI was called to investigate the allegations during the Senate confirmation process but was later accused by some Democratic senators of conducting an incomplete background check. For example, two key witnesses – Ford and Kavanaugh – were never interviewed as part of the inquiry.

Just for one tiny example of leaving out the subject and his accuser.

Among the concerns listed in Whitehouse’s letter to Garland are allegations that some witnesses who wanted to share their accounts with the FBI could not find anyone at the bureau who would accept their testimony and that it had not assigned any individual to accept or gather evidence.

Which was all too obvious at the time, since the whole process ended an hour or two after it began. They didn’t have time to investigate all the claims we knew were being made. It was infuriating.

“This was unique behavior in my experience, as the Bureau is usually amenable to information and evidence; but in this matter the shutters were closed, the drawbridge drawn up, and there was no point of entry by which members of the public or Congress could provide information to the FBI,” Whitehouse said.

So how is that an “investigation”?

He added that, once the FBI decided to create a “tip line”, senators were not given any information on how or whether new allegations were processed and evaluated. While senators’ brief review of the allegations gathered by the tip line showed a “stack” of information had come in, there was no further explanation on the steps that had been taken to review the information, Whitehouse said.

“This ‘tip line’ appears to have operated more like a garbage chute, with everything that came down the chute consigned without review to the figurative dumpster,” he said.

It sounds more like a Warner Brothers cartoon than an FBI investigation.

No motivation is too tiny and trivial and self-centered to justify trashing a woman for no particular reason and without even knowing enough to back up the trashing.

Staggering, isn’t it. He doesn’t know much about it, but he flings the casual smear anyway, because he wants to take a picture of his socks.

More on the Green Party’s suspension of the co-chair of Green Party Women:

A bit of background.

There has been an ongoing ‘debate’ between some trans-activisits and others, particularly some feminists (derogatorily called TERFs – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists).

Emma Bateman is co-chair of Green Party Women and brought the following motion to the Green Party’s recent conference. The motion was not heard and Emma was not allowed to speak at the conference. She has now been suspended from the Green Party. I will not go into the reasons for the suspension since it is a matter of on-going disciplinary proceedings. However, I think it is important for people to see the motion that caused such upset (including from the leadership) within the Green Party:

Ensuring Sex and Gender Are Not Conflated

Synopsis Final Text

Sex refers to biology which is immutable, gender is a social construction Discrimination against women may be based on their perceived sex, however there are aspects of discrimination females face based on sex not gender.

To address discrimination it is imperative that accurate sex- segregated data is collected.

Motion

Insert into RR540Women’s Rights

The Green Party calls for a review of the language used in law, in government bodies and NGOs to ensure that sex and gender are not conflated, and that accurate terminology is used where relevant which recognises that the category ‘woman’, which was formerly a sex based category, is now, by some parties , considered to be gender based.

When data is being collected and analysed to form policy in relation to women, attention should be paid to whether the data is segregated by sex or by gender, and sex segregated data must be collected in order to monitor the effect of [that] the alteration in the categorisation of women is having on women.

For that, the party suspended her.

Emma Bateman writes:

On March 8th, International Women’s Day, I was suspended from the Green Party after a complaint by 2 fellow Green Party Committee members because I queried whether trans women are female.

Green party policy is that ‘trans women are women’.

Now we must agree that they are also female.

Things that are now unacceptable to say in the Green Party include:

“It is not discrimination to say that males should not be in a women’s group.”

“people cannot change sex”

“males cannot become females”

“What is a female?”

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

From a comment on the post:

I have left the Green Party because they have adopted a completely unreal stance on biology and are focussed on the interests of a few. They demand belief in the female penis and claimvthat sex isn’t binary. At the most recent conference it was stated that talking about female abuse such as FGM and breast ironing was transphobic. Also the chair said that using the word woman was transphobic. Now it appears that ‘focussing on the environment instead of on marginalised groups’ is eco fascism.

The Green Party!

How original.

Elliot Page doesn’t remember exactly how long he had been asking.

In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the former Ellen Page, star of the anti-abortion movie Juno.

But he does remember the acute feeling of triumph when, around age 9, he was finally allowed to cut his hair short. “I felt like a boy,” Page says. “I wanted to be a boy. I would ask my mom if I could be someday.” Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Page visualized himself as a boy in imaginary games, freed from the discomfort of how other people saw him: as a girl. After the haircut, strangers finally started perceiving him the way he saw himself, and it felt both right and exciting.

Hey guess what: me too. Or not quite, not that literally, but close. I spent a lot of my play time pretending to be a boy or man character too, though I also pretended to be Laura Ingalls (who was herself a tomboy kind of girl) or Mary Lennox or Jane Banks.

We are speaking in late February. It is the first interview Page, 34, has given since disclosing in December that he is transgender, in a heartfelt letter posted to Instagram, and he is crying before I have even uttered a question. “Sorry, I’m going to be emotional, but that’s cool, right?” he says, smiling through his tears.

No, because men don’t cry, especially not before the interviewer has even said anything besides “Hello.”

It’s not hard to understand why a trans person would be dealing with conflicting feelings in this moment. Increased social acceptance has led to more young people describing themselves as trans—1.8% of Gen Z compared with 0.2% of boomers, according to a recent Gallup poll—yet this has fueled conservatives who are stoking fears about a “transgender craze.” 

Ok slow down there. Let’s think about this. “Increased social acceptance has led to more young people describing themselves as trans”…which can be seen as tolerance and liberality, or as social contagion that encourages “young people” to make drastic and irreversible changes to their bodies. It can be seen as both.

Second point: it’s not just conservatives who see that “increased social acceptance” can be a euphemism for “social contagion” and that the latter is not always beneficent. Given the inherent absurdity of what people mean by “trans,” it’s inevitable that it’s not just conservatives who think the whole idea is futile and destructive. Constantly framing “trans” as the latest expansion of human potential rather than a perverse and anti-reality daydream just throws more wood on the fire.

But having arrived at a critical juncture, Page feels a deep sense of responsibility to share his truth. “Extremely influential people are spreading these myths and damaging rhetoric—every day you’re seeing our existence debated,” Page says. “Transgender people are so very real.”

No, that’s the big lie again. Nobody is debating anyone’s existence, what we’re disputing is the description. We think you’ve got the description wrong.

Meanwhile, J.K. Rowling is leveraging her cultural capital to oppose transgender equality in the name of feminism…

No, not in the name of feminism. She really is a feminist, she’s not faking it. It’s funny how fans of the ideology think changing sex is completely real while feminists who call themselves feminists are fake.

Over the course of two conversations, Page will say that understanding himself in all the specifics remains a work in progress. Fathoming one’s gender, an identity innate and performed, personal and social, fixed and evolving, is complicated enough without being under a spotlight that never seems to turn off.

It’s not complicated. Forget about gender, focus on sex. It’s not complicated: you are what you are.

“Gender” is what you do with it, so by all means disrupt that if you want to, wear the “wrong” clothes if you want to (and can get away with it, which is where it does get complicated, but not the way Katy Steinmetz means), just don’t pretend that the social rules about gender are identical to the physical facts of sex.

A lot of it just has to do with clothes. In a way that seems absurd, but I guess in another way it doesn’t – they are in our face all the time after all.

Page’s tour de force performance in Hard Candy led, two years later, to Juno, a low-budget indie film that brought Page Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and sudden megafame. The actor, then 21, struggled with the stresses of that ascension. The endless primping, red carpets and magazine spreads were all agonizing reminders of the disconnect between how the world saw Page and who he knew himself to be.

That part I can get. I would find it acutely uncomfortable and weird to have to wear feminized clothes, not really for any coherent reason, just because of the “not me” feeling. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in a suit and tie either; I rely on that androgynous middle ground, kind of Rachel Maddow territory (I could put on a blazer if I had to). Maybe if Hollywood conventions could just allow that, Page wouldn’t have felt forced to join this masquerade.

Jeez, Nebraska, take a chill pill. You can’t make us eat your damn beef.

Nebraska’s governor Pete Ricketts railed Monday against a proclamation by the governor of neighboring Colorado that encourages people to avoid meat for one day a week, calling it a “direct attack on our way of life” and signing a pro-meat declaration of his own.

Well the beef-producing “way of life” has some horrendous environmental fallout, so maybe that should be part of the picture. The fact that something is a “way of life” for some people doesn’t mean it’s harmless or beneficial for all people or for the environment that all animals (including us) depend on.

“If you were to get rid of beef in our country, you would be undermining our food security, an important part of a healthy diet, and also destroying an industry here in our state that’s very important,” Ricketts said.

Activists haven’t sought any similar measures in Nebraska, but Ricketts said he wanted to push back preemptively against their ideas “to make sure they don’t get any traction”.

You have to eat meat for every meal every day, god damn it, because you owe it to Nebraska.

Oooh police state, where are our freedoms, it’s the thin end of the wedge, soon we won’t even be able to spit in people’s faces any more.

“What are you going to do, arrest me?”

Police issued a warrant for the arrest of Terry Wright, 65, of Grants Pass, Oregon. The incident on Thursday at a Bank of America in Galveston was captured by the officer’s body camera, the Galveston County Daily News reported.

Police said they had obtained an arrest warrant on resisting arrest and criminal trespassing charges.

The jackass governor has lifted the state mask mandate, but businesses – like banks for instance – can have their own rules. We can’t go into the bank naked, and we can’t go into the bank without a mask.

Police said a bank manager called police after Wright refused to wear a mask while inside, and then refused to leave the building when asked.

She was fighting for our freedom!

Wright told the officer she had come to the bank to make a withdrawal. The officer asked her to go outside or put on a mask. She refused.

“What are you going to do, arrest me?” she asked.

He replied: “Yes, for intruding on premises.”

She said: “That’s hilarious.”

Wright told the officer the law said she didn’t have to wear a mask. As the officer took out handcuffs, she pulled away and began to walk toward the door. The officer stopped her and forced her to the ground. After she was handcuffed, she complained her foot was injured.

“Police brutality right here people,” she said. Replies of “no” and “no, it’s not” could be heard.

They can, too, they can be heard very clearly. It’s heart-warming.

Ah yes, if you have to step down as governor because of accusations of sexual assault, it’s ok because you can just run for the Senate instead. Nobody cares what senators do to women.

The former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, a Republican who stepped down amid allegations of sexual assault, is reportedly considering a run for US Senate next year – prompting concern among Republicans that his candidacy could tip one of the state’s two seats to the Democrats.

But no concerns among Republicans that a guy who steps down amid allegations of sexual assault maybe shouldn’t just start over as a senator? Or that it makes Republicans look kind of sleazy?

Greitens, a former Navy Seal, resigned as governor in 2018, less than two years into his first term, over allegations of sexual assault.

A woman with whom he admitted having an extra-marital affair told a Missouri house investigative committee Greitens restrained, slapped, shoved and threatened her during a series of sexual encounters that at times left her crying and afraid. He was alleged to have taken a compromising photo and threatened to blackmail the woman.

In other words she kink-shamed him. Isn’t she the one who should have stepped down and been punished?

Greitens said the allegations amounted to a “political witch-hunt” but eventually bowed to Republicans and Democrats who called for his resignation.

Because hey there’s always the Senate.

Yes see this is what you don’t understand – it’s nothing to do with “passing,” it’s just being.

Hurr hurr women don’t have books, women have pouty poofy lips the better to suck you with. Women don’t look like adult people who can think and talk, women look like Barbie dolls only stupider.

Hurr hurr, but that’s not the point at all – it’s the opposite of the point. Women don’t have to be hot, sexy, pointy, goldy, blondey, porney – women don’t have to be a menu item for men. That’s not what women are for and it’s not what defines us. We don’t need to pass.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Ad absurdum.

I wonder what Bristol SU would do if every single male student self-defined as women.

Or, perhaps more to the point, if none of the female students did. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, these are the points I think need to be hammered home at every opportunity and in every possible way:

• Redefining “woman” in terms of thoughts and feeling to make it tautologically true that “trans women are women” makes it no longer true that biological females who fail to think or feel in the proper “female”/”feminine” manner are women.

• Even if we were to accept that – according to their own definition (if they had one) – TIMs are “women” it still doesn’t imply that they belong in the same spaces as biological females, because then there is no longer any justification for saying that the latter are “women” in any relevant sense of the word (the flying mammals vs. clubs for hitting baseballs distinction again). As Daniel Dennett put it in a different context, it’s all “just a bad pun”. Indeed if you have what it takes to detect a pun when you hear one, you know pretty much everything you need to know to debunk all of gender ideology.

• What the trans lobby is advocating is not taking the circle that already includes the biological females and expanding it to also include the TIMs, but replacing the circle entirely.

• The old circle included roughly half the world’s population. It’s far from clear that the new one includes anyone but the TIMs, so who is really being most “exclusionary” here?

• What exactly are the ways of thinking and feeling required to qualify a “woman” anyway (circular logic doesn’t count), and how do we make sure that only people who really do think / feel in the ways required are allowed into “women only” spaces?

• Any “gendering” what so ever is misgendering, and any bathroom, sporting event, domestic abuse shelter, prison etc. that’s “gendered” in any way is gender-inappropriate in my case.

• If trans men are men, then I’m not. If TIM’s are women, they are the only “women” as far as I’m concerned.

One further advantage of this approach is that there is nothing the TAs can object to without totally giving the lie to the idea that this is all about trans people’s right to define “who they are”. There is no way to claim access to the spaces of biological females without defining who the latter are as well. If I am what you are, then you are what I am. So ultimately what they are saying is: “Biological females are whatever they have to be to make me one of them, and they don’t get a say in the matter”.

She had it and then she dropped it. Australian Senator Janet Rice:

The #March4Justice rally has just kicked off at Parliament House and more than 100,000 people are marching for gender equality across the country today too. We have had ENOUGH! Enough of the misogyny, enough of harassment, enough of sexual violence and assault, enough of this toxic environment, and ENOUGH of the patriarchy! We need to believe women, we need action and we need an end to gendered violence.

It’s disgusting that neither the PM nor the Minister for Women can be bothered to join us and meet the women who have come to their doorstep today.

Enough is enough.

EDIT: I want to acknowledge a number of people in the comment section calling out my use of the term “womxn”. I sincerely apologise for my ignorance that this term is seen by many as being the opposite of inclusive and harmful to trans and gender diverse people – it was absolutely not my intention to platform anti-trans views! It was meant to exclude “men” from the term (i.e that women are not simply a derivative of men), not exclude trans people. Trans women are women (and hopefully one day this won’t even need to be stated). I had no idea it had been appropriated by TERFs and will definitely be looking into this more and having further discussions. Thanks to everyone who has brought this to my attention.

Must not talk about women. Must always change the subject to talk about men who call themselves women.

An exchange:

Well when X attacks a trans woman it isn’t misogyny, because trans women are men who call themselves women. The category “all women” doesn’t include men.

Spiked gives us…the “contrarian” take on the murder of Sarah Everard. It’s written by a friend of hers, who decided not to go to the vigil on Clapham Common, because it had been “hijacked.”

It is not a tribute to her any more, it’s about something else – and I don’t like what it has become.

I can see not wanting to go to a big public thing like that when you’re a friend of the murdered woman. I can see that the gap between the feelings of people actually close to her and strangers is huge, and that it would feel uncomfortable or worse to ignore it. But.

Sarah was a victim of one of the most horrific crimes imaginable. She was extremely unlucky – that is all there is to it.

No, it really isn’t. It’s part of it, for sure – it’s a matter of luck to cross the path of a murderer, yes, but it’s certainly not all there is to it. There’s more to it. There’s the popularity of violent porn, for one thing.

Her abduction and murder is not, in my opinion, a symptom of a sexist, dangerous society.

Taken by itself perhaps it wouldn’t be, but given the statistics on violence against women, what else can it be? A symptom of a society that is completely free of sexist violence?

When something awful like this happens there is a rush to look for reasons and apportion blame. If the suspect police officer in custody is eventually tried and found guilty of her murder, then I will hold him alone responsible. I will not be blaming ‘men’ or ‘the police’ for the actions of one individual. There will always be the odd psychopath out there – male or female – and there can be no accounting for that fact.

As I said, very Spiked-friendly. Everything is just random, there’s no explaining it, there are no patterns, it’s like lightning or tornadoes, it just happens.

As for us, her friends? Let us grieve for our loved one, brutally taken in such an awful way. The public reaction to her death has been overwhelming, and for the most part very touching. But be assured, the misuse of it by those with an ‘agenda’ is not a comfort to us.

What agenda is that though? An agenda to end violence against women? Is that really such a sinister and corrupt goal?

Rules are rules, and the Vatican can’t just go around breaking them whenever it feels like it.

The Roman Catholic Church cannot bless same-sex marriages, no matter how stable or positive the couples’ relationships are, the Vatican said on Monday. The message, approved by Pope Francis, came in response to questions about whether the church should reflect the increasing social and legal acceptance of same-sex unions.

Tsss. Of course not. The Vatican isn’t about social and legal, the Vatican is about God Said So.

But how does the Vatican know God said so? God said God said so. But how do the rest of us know that’s true? God said so.

The message underlines the church’s insistence that marriage should be limited to a union between a man and a woman, saying that same-sex unions involve “sexual activity outside of marriage.” In the Vatican’s view, same-sex marriages are not part of God’s plan for families and raising children.

But how does the Vatican know what God’s plan is? (See above; repeat indefinitely.)

Bestowing a blessing on a same-sex couple’s relationship would also be an “imitation” of the nuptial blessing, the Vatican said. God, the Vatican said, “does not and cannot bless sin.”

What is “sin”?

While we ponder that question it’s interesting to remember that for generations the Vatican protected priests who sexually molested children. It’s interesting to note that the Vatican considers sex between two loving adults “sin” and considers sexual molestation of children by Vatican-affiliated adults something to protect and conceal from the authorities. “Sin” must be a very strange and complicated thing altogether.

Because of the Vatican’s stance on marriage, critics have accused the church of treating LGBTQ people as lesser members of its congregation. In an apparent response to those concerns, the Vatican said on Monday that its declaration is not meant to be “unjust discrimination.”

It called on Catholics “to welcome with respect and sensitivity persons with homosexual inclinations.”

And in particular, if they’re priests who like to grope and fondle children, welcome them and hide them and protect them – the priests, that is, not the children. The children are filthy little demons.

The message cited Francis’ own words from 2016, when he wrote, “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”

That line comes from “Amoris Laetitia” (The Joy of Love), the papal treatise on families that was widely seen as Pope Francis’ move to make the Catholic Church more inclusive.

Don’t bother.

I wonder what the future will be like for them. Maybe global warming will make it all irrelevant, but maybe it will make it even worse. The Telegraph’s summary to refresh our memory:

Women Talk Back hosted women-only meetings at Bristol University to discuss male violence against females, and argued the presence of men could make attendees fearful to speak out.

The students refused entry to male-born transgender people who self-identify as women, classed as men under equality laws unless they have changed their legal sex.

Now Bristol Students’ Union has ordered the society’s president, Raquel Rosario-Sanchez, to stand down and banned her from union leadership posts for two years.

And committee members must complete an “equality, diversity and inclusion” course.”

“The society was told that Bristol SU defines women as “all who self-define as women, including (if they wish) those with complex gender identities that include ‘woman’, and those who experience oppression as women”.

I wonder what Bristol SU would do if every single male student self-defined as women.