Councillor Dom Armstrong wrote Tuesday:

It is with great sadness that I tender my resignation to the Green Party.

I have been a member since 2015 and a councillor since May 2019 in Washington/ Sunderland, a role which I will also be giving up.

In that time they accomplished good things.

I joined the Greens, and agreed to stand for public office, simply because I have two daughters. I did hope that through joining the Greens, and fighting climate change, this would be a worthy way to honour them. They didn’t always understand, especially when they were younger, why their Dad was working at nights, or at weekends, or posting leaflets in the snow, or responding to emails during holidays. Thankfully, they do now!

During the last couple of months I have become increasingly uneasy about my party’s stance on women’s rights. I have had discussions on social media with party members and activists, where, because I have politely disagreed, I have been called a transphobe, a homophobe, and worse. I have witnessed female colleagues issued with death threats and threats of rape by trans rights activists, so in comparison, I have only had a small taste of this vile behaviour.

I am also dismayed by the fact that a co chair of our women‘s committee is a biological male, who works for a company (GenderGP) that in 2018 was found guilty of illegally supplying puberty blockers to children as young as ten. The Green Party are not concerned by this, in fact this person holds another FOUR senior party roles, and gloats on social media when some women (who they are meant to represent) feel so uncomfortable about this, they leave the party.

There are many trans extremists who are very active in the party and appear to have the leaderships approval. When an emergency motion was tabled for this weekend’s conference, to discuss the issue of GenderGP’s practises, it was deliberately blocked. There was no discussion. Senior party members indicated that it was a “transphobic” motion, not worthy of debate, and there was filibustering, tactical manouvres, and political deviousness which resulted in another motion being discussed instead. This was a motion meant to discuss the safety of children!

Perhaps even worse than this, when a motion to have women’s sex based rights recognised (the day before International Women’s Day) was put forward, again the Green Party leadership were horrified, how could women dare ask for safe spaces in prisons, or ask for a fair chance in sport? The LGBTIQ+ group declared that there was no historical evidence that women had been oppressed on the basis of their sex. Women are oppressed because they ‘look like women.’ To say otherwise was declared oppressive to trans people, a hate motion, which deserved to be righteously overcome.

What???

The LGBTIQ+ group declared that there was no historical evidence that women had been oppressed on the basis of their sex. Women are oppressed because they ‘look like women.’ To say otherwise was declared oppressive to trans people, a hate motion, which deserved to be righteously overcome.

I don’t have enough swears for that.

It almost feels like I am making this up, I still can’t believe this is the party I’ve given 6 years of my life to. I witnessed appalling behaviour by the most senior people in the party, many of whom I’d admired for years (apart from Jenny Jones, who was magnificent). The dawning of this reality was quite crushing, but sobering too. What’s worse is the fact that many of our senior figures profess to hold the high moral ground on many issues, but in fact they are as bad, if not worse, than our political foes.

I feel that the party’s elite are not willing (or able) to stand up to the bullying, and in this they are complicit. The damage this is doing to the trans community (especially the children) is heartbreaking. And the lack of concern for girls and women is damning. The effects of these doctrines are already being felt; in Brighton, a women’s refuge has been denied further council funding because they insisted on female only safe spaces.

And even in the last 2 days, the party has begun its purge. Senior (mostly, again, female) party members are being harassed, and even suspended, for having the audacity to disagree with the party’s dogma.

I cannot stay in a party that puts ideology before women and children’s safety. I can’t continue to serve as a councillor without the motivation to do so 100%, and in good conscience, take the money that the council pay me, when I know I’ll no longer do the role justice.

How did we get here?

Well now we all want to know what “dinner party TERFs” are and why we haven’t been invited.

It’s some guy called Ryan Broderick who came up with the label, but it’s very misty what he meant by it. It’s something about Glenn Greenwald and a NY Times reporter called Taylor Lorenz which is too uninteresting to describe further.

Greenwald is part of a cadre of writers who position themselves as neither left or right-wing, instead focusing on culture war Twitter drama about being “canceled” and trans people in bathrooms and woke college students to make the actually very standard and traditional right-wing status quo that they’re defending sound slightly less tedious. Other writers in this network are people like former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, and, I’d argue, Slate Star Codex writer Scott Alexander Siskind, as well. There are more. They are becoming more closely connected to the “dinner party TERFs” in the UK and Ireland. Almost all of them use Substack as their home base.

Ah, you think, there’s the clue to what he meant by it: follow the link. But no, the link is just to Graham Linehan on Substack. The rest of the piece is just a lot of inside baseball that makes my eyes glaze over after ten words, and I still don’t know what I have to do to get a dinner around here.

Are the dinners at TERF dinner parties cooked by Karens?

Rachel Hewitt makes an interesting point about street harassment and who own public space.

The disappearance of Sarah Everard while she walked through Clapham, south London, at 9pm on 3 March gives horrific shape to the hum of fear that women constantly feel in public spaces. My social media timelines are full of women who are distressed by Sarah’s disappearance, and terrified that it could have been them. Men have asked what they can do to help women feel safer. But what’s needed beyond the education of individuals are urgent political solutions to counter men’s attempts to claim public spaces as their exclusive domain.

Street harassment of women by men is so common that there are no women who’ve never experienced it.

Street harassment is how men mark out public spaces as their own, making women into trespassers on male territory. Behavioural psychologists have observed how male pedestrians crowd women’s personal space at cashpoints and traffic lights, how all-male groups take up more pavement space, and how men make more antisocial noises in public than women, considering it more acceptable to speak on mobile phones at checkouts or in train carriages.

…

By abusing and harassing women, men make public spaces their own – and by entering those spaces, they perceive that women acquiesce to their abuse. 

(That is, I think she means, men see women who enter public spaces as acquiescing to abuse.)

Women are meant to be at home, sitting on eggs.

What’s missing from discussions about women’s fears is a focus on men. Men’s harassment and assault of women is part of a sustained, long-term attempt to roll back advances in women’s rights and restrict our presence in public spaces. Some well-intentioned individual men ask how they can change their behaviours to make us feel calmer and safer, and are advised to cross the road to ensure they do not walk behind us at night. But we need solutions that rise above individual behaviour, and tackle men’s abuse and intimidation of women as a systemic problem. This is an urgent frontier for women’s rights.

Instead we have men who say they are women upping the abuse and intimidation.

That’s some very feeble reasoning. Men are the most likely to hurt anyone simply because men are stronger than women; that doesn’t mean less muscular men are women’s sisters. Men don’t become our sisters by getting beaten up by men. Having something in common with a set of people isn’t the same as that set of people morphing into a different set of people. There isn’t some werewolf or vampire moment when a man who has been hurt by a stronger man undergoes a Transformation and emerges as A Woman.

And it isn’t the same fight. It’s a radically different fight. Figuring out how to live as what you are is radically different from deciding you’re not what you are and are in fact the opposite.

Well, anyway, I’m relieved that Major hasn’t been exiled to Delaware permanently, which is what I thought I’d read yesterday (or I did read it and the reporting was wrong). I know it’s trivia but I liked having dogs back in the White House after that Lump of Nothing who hates all animals.

Major got a little bitey but he’s only exiled while DOCTOR Biden is traveling.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that on Monday, the 3-year-old German shepherd was “surprised by an unfamiliar person and reacted in a way that resulted in a minor injury to the individual.”

Psaki did not disclose any information about the person who crept up on the pooch but she did say the White House medical unit handled the incident. “No further treatment was needed,” she explained. She later added that the Bidens’ two German shepherds — Major and Champ — “are still getting acclimated and accustomed to their new surroundings and new people.”

Which can’t be all that easy given what the surroundings are and what a flood of new people there must be. Major nipped a Secret Service agent’s hand but didn’t break the skin so everybody be cool.

On Tuesday, Psaki said that Major and Champ had been sent to the Bidens’ Wilmington, Del., home while first lady Jill Biden is traveling. But she said the two doggies — which are included on a very exclusive list of people or creatures who can “walk in” to the Oval Office any time — will likely return to be by the president’s side some time next week.

I love the idea of Major cruising around the house and grounds and eventually deciding to pop into the Oval Office to say howdy.

Hahahahahahahahaha

Another non-first first!

A trans woman has been nominated for the Women’s prize for fiction for the first time, with Torrey Peters making the longlist for the £30,000 award for her acclaimed debut Detransition, Baby.

Oh do shut up.

The whole point of having a Women’s prize for fiction is to get around the problem that women get overlooked so easily. “Trans women” are men; men should not be candidates for prizes designated for women.

Peters’ longlisting comes after organisers clarified in 2020 that it was open to any “cis woman, a transgender woman or anyone who is legally defined as a woman or of the female sex”. “It’s a prize for women, and trans women are women, so …” said chair of judges and author Bernardine Evaristo.

But trans women are not women, so…

Akwaeke Emezi, the non-binary transgender author who was nominated for the Women’s prize in 2019, has previously said they would not allow their future books to be entered because organisers had asked for information on their sex as defined “by law”. On Wednesday, organisers said they asked publishers to confirm eligibility “when submitting and confirming again at longlist stage”.

Well then we can’t have women’s anything. If we’re not allowed to confirm that women are women then men will take advantage.

Peters is up against former winner Ali Smith, chosen this time for the last in her quartet of seasonal novels, Summer; and comedian turned novelist Dawn French, picked for her “warm, compassionate, funny” look at motherhood, Because of You.

I certainly hope Smith or French wins.

Dang. If ever there’s an issue you’d think would be immune to the Trans Policing & Shunning it would be the Irish church’s persecution of women and children…but nope.

ExCUSE me??? Feminist women “are not welcome” to talk about the Mother and Baby Homes issue? Then who the fuck is? Priests? Popes? Men who play at being women?

Here’s a news flash: men, no matter how intensely they play at being women, remain immune to the kinds of harm done to Irish women and children by the Catholic church. Men don’t get pregnant. It’s that simple. Women have always been treated as permanently under suspicion and probably criminal because women get pregnant. It’s that simple. Men don’t suffer from that disability, and women do, and that’s all there is to it. Men who “identify as” women have nothing to do with this issue, and therefore it’s piling insult on insult to tell feminist women to gtfo of campaigning against the evils the church committed.

Just stop. Get off the train at the next station. Leave it all behind.

Updating to add:

Imagine if white people had done this when George Floyd was murdered.

But he’s not a woman.

But they’re not women so it’s not misogyny.

Who gets to say that X is lying? Who gets to say that X is lying on a widely-seen tv news-chat show? Who gets to say that X is lying without troubling to offer any evidence?

Anybody who works for Fox News, is one answer, but Fox News isn’t alone in allowing and indeed inviting a lot of claims of the “X is lying” type.

Piers Morgan has made a name for himself with that kind of thing.

Meghan Markle formally complained to UK broadcaster ITV after Piers Morgan lashed out at her and accused her of lying about her mental health on “Good Morning Britain,” according to a report.

What jumps out at you about that? What jumps out at me is how unlikely it is that Piers Morgan has any real way to know the truth about Meghan Markle’s mental health. Does she send him a report? Do any or all doctors or therapists she talks to send him a report? Do any of them send such a report to the news media? No, no, no, and no. So where does he get the confidence to say she’s lying about it?

Amid the backlash, the famed host sensationally quit the show Tuesday, just hours after storming off the set when his co-star Alex Beresford called him out for continuing to “trash” Markle following the couple’s stunning sit-down with Oprah Winfrey.

You could see it as punching up – the British royals do suck up an enormous amount of cash to keep the whole absurd pantomime going, at a time when the other remaining European monarchs ride bicycles to work. There is a hell of a lot of hierarchical flummery and “protocol” that could just go away today with no harm done. But in plenty of other ways you can see it as punching down – she’s a woman, she’s mixed race, she’s middle class, she’s a Yank. In a passel of Windsors she’s very much Not One of Us. Morgan didn’t trash her on behalf of the working class, he trashed her on behalf of Rigidly Unchanging Monarchism.

And he had no way of knowing that she was lying.

Morgan had expressed doubts on the show after Markle opened up to Winfrey about having suicidal thoughts, including claims that she was told that seeking help would not look good for a member of the royal family.

“Who did you go to?” Morgan said Monday on “Good Morning Britain.” “What did they say to you? I’m sorry, I don’t believe a word she said, Meghan Markle. I wouldn’t believe it if she read me a weather report.”

There is a real matter of journalistic ethics here. It’s a big no-no to announce that people are lying in the absence of rock-solid evidence. Saying you don’t believe her isn’t quite announcing that she’s lying, but it’s close, especially with the added “I wouldn’t believe it if she read me a weather report.” That may be why Ofcom is looking into it.

Susanna Reid has told viewers of the first edition of Good Morning Britain after the departure of Piers Morgan that they “disagreed on many things”, including his remarks on the Duchess of Sussex, and described him as an “outspoken, challenging, opinionated, disruptive broadcaster”.

…

Morgan walked off set on Tuesday after a disagreement with the weather presenter Alex Beresford and was to face an Ofcom investigation after 41,000 complaints over his remarks, including one sent on Meghan’s behalf. In a tweet, sent while the programme was on air on Wednesday morning, Morgan appeared to confirm that his refusal to retract his comments lay behind his exit.

He wrote: “On Monday, I said I didn’t believe Meghan Markle in her Oprah interview. I’ve had time to reflect on this opinion, and I still don’t. If you did, OK. Freedom of speech is a hill I’m happy to die on.” He said he was “off to spend more time with my opinions” and appended a Winston Churchill quote about free speech.

Freedom of speech, fine, but news outlets don’t have to employ people who fling around accusations of dishonesty.

Cotton ceiling again.

First one. Yes a few minutes ago I said I wanted to hook up because I thought you were a lesbian.

Second one. But you are one.

Third one. It’s not being a not-decent human being to want to know the sex of the person who wants to have sex with you. Other way around, actually – the not-decent thing is to keep what sex you are a secret.

Fourth one. No, creep, you’re the jerk – you’re the one trying to trick or bully a lesbian into having sex with you when she doesn’t want to.

Graham did this:

He also posted the text.

Almost four years ago I saw that feminists were being bullied, harassed and silenced for standing up for their rights and their children’s rights. I decided to use my platform on Twitter to bring attention to what seemed to be an all-out assault on women, on their words, their dignity and their safety. Also, I saw that vulnerable children were being fast-tracked onto a medical pathway that carried severe long-term implications. My position is very simple. I believe everyone should be allowed to talk about these issues. In fact, I believe it is a moral imperative that we do so. 

I am talking about such matters as… the scandals at the Tavistock, the confusing and misleading advice that Stonewall has been providing to institutions all over the UK regarding the nature of the equalities act, the issue of men in women’s sports, in women’s prisons, their rape crisis centres, the destruction of basic safeguarding principles that has led to all this, and the silencing and abuse of feminists, doctors, teachers, academics and writers–anyone, in fact–who questions the fashionable American orthodoxy of gender identity ideology.  

Is it American? Probably, yes. I apologize.

Around three years ago, I was among the initial signatories of a letter to Stonewall asking them to help lower the toxicity of the conversation around sex and gender and acknowledge the plurality of views on the subject. The letter was composed by Jonny Best, a gay man and longtime LGBT activist, and the majority of these initial signatories were either gay, lesbian or trans.

We wanted to see an end to women receiving death and rape threats for standing up for their sex-based rights. To that end, we asked Stonewall to commit to fostering an atmosphere of respectful debate, rather than demonising as transphobic those who wished to discuss or dissent from Stonewall’s current policies. Stonewall flatly refused this appeal within the day, and continued to dishonestly frame women standing up for their rights as an attack on trans rights. The petition has since been signed by over 11,000 people, many of them gay men and women in despair at what is being done in their name. 

“Stop trashing women in public? Oh hell no!”

This silencing of women was the main reason I entered this fight. I knew the subject of gender was fraught but I’m political by nature and I couldn’t remain quiet in the face of such vicious misogyny. I presumed that when others saw what was happening that they too would speak up and we would be able to force the debate our opponents were so desperate to avoid. 

I now realise that I was up against a much bigger beast than I thought. These platforms shape the debate and declare you untouchable when you refuse to play by their rules. The upshot is that many people presume that I am a bigot. These people also presume the same of JK Rowling and many other left-leaning, liberal and progressive women.

There’s even a special word for us.

Social media has created a through the looking glass world which is robbing everyone of their ability to think. My final statement on Twitter, the straw that broke the camel’s back, was simply “Men are not women.” A world where statements like “Men are not women” is hate speech is a world on the brink of chaos. Feminists are just the canary in the coalmine in this upside-down world where public discourse depends on the whims of a small group of men in Silicon Valley. Gender identity ideology began in American Universities, is uncritically disseminated by the popular media, but social media companies and their users are the enforcers.

Oh, American universities – Judith Butler and so on. Fair point. I reiterate my apology.

The reason you have not heard the things that I have heard is that the discourse is being shaped by trans rights activists. In place of reasoned arguments and democratic discussion, we have mantras like “No debate” and “Transwomen are women”, we have policies passing by stealth, we have bogus statistics about trans murder epidemics and we have the unconscionable weaponising of suicide for political ends.

The discourse is broken. Women’s rights are being stripped away, our children are not safe, and we are not allowed to talk about it. 

That plus we are being ordered, with menaces, to believe what we can’t believe, to believe an obvious lie, indeed an absurdity. We are being bullied and shouted at and called names for the sake of a ludicrous fantasy-based denial of reality. We are being pressured to stop knowing what we know and instead know what we can’t possibly know because it isn’t true. That becomes all the more insulting and outrageous when the thing we’re being told to stop knowing is that men are not women.

The ACLU ordered us to pretend that men are women on Facebook too.

Policing womanhood hurts ALL of us.

Funny how it’s just womanhood. Funny how they don’t order men to pretend that men are women or that women are men – funny how they leave men alone on this subject.

It’s weirdly sly and passive-aggressive to call it a “reminder” to tell us a lie. “I am here to remind you that frogs are gorillas.”

Sounds like “Jessica” Yaniv without the “trans” aspect.

An Ottawa charity focused on the well-being of Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ youth is in disarray after staff quit and speakers pulled out of a recent conference because they believe the group’s leader has multiple aliases and a history of taking her enemies to court.

That description is oddly vague. What does it mean for a charity to be “focused on the well-being” of anyone? I wonder if there’s any connection between the vagueness of the description and the alleged multiplicity of its leader’s aliases.

Maxine Adwella is known as the head of the National Collaboration for Youth Mental Health (NCYMH), which, according to its website, has spent nearly 20 years advocating for racially and culturally specific mental health services for young people.

That’s more specific, but not a lot clearer. Racially specific mental health services? Sounds kind of…racist.

However, a recent court judgment concluded that a woman named Maxine Adwella is actually an alias used by Althea Reyes, a woman with a criminal past who was declared a vexatious litigant in 2017 for repeatedly launching civil proceedings to “harass her foes,” as the judge put it.

A CBC News investigation of Reyes reveals a remarkable backstory that’s led young staff and volunteers to walk away from NCYMH. Some allege they’ve been subjected to smear campaigns and threatened with legal action for speaking out against the charity and its leader.

So much for anybody’s well-being.