Good news:

The Hobart City Council’s discrimination towards me has finally been resolved. The depth of the lying, scheming, gaslighting, privacy breaches, and frustration of processes has been astounding.

The culture that facilitated this appalling conduct has radiated from the top. I’m pleased that the extent of the discrimination has finally been admitted and owned. I’m optimistic that there will be change; there has to be as what happened was illegal and immoral.

You can have all the diversity plans, flags, and photo opportunities you like, but they’re worthless showboating if words and action don’t align. Discrimination is not ‘welcoming’ or ‘inclusive’.

I tried to book a public venue, and I should have been able to hold my event. It was shameful for the Council to censor political beliefs, especially when these beliefs are fair, fact-based, and held by millions of Australians. It’s wrong and anti-democratic.

And anti-women.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Next phase.

The “whatever genitals Alex was born with is not common knowledge” part conflates identities with biological sexes, and that’s the most dangerous part.

It’s one thing for a young person to imagine in her own mind a suite of gender-role personas, like characters in a story, and then to declare which of these imaginary gender-role characters she has cast herself to play. So far, so foolish.

But to then cross over into declaring that these different characters have different biological sex characteristics… that’s where the irreversible harm comes in. Harm to herself, because she’s likely to develop psychological distress over the mismatch between her imaginary character’s body and her real-life body, and harm to everyone else, by promoting the erasure of women’s rights by undefining the words man, woman, male, and female.

Human experiences are inevitably richer than the categories we carve out for them.

I want to say to that writer, it’s you who’s impoverishing the human experience by turning the biological sexes into cardboard characters. Real life is a lot richer without all the hokey gender horseshit. As Julie Bindel said twenty years ago, “Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.” Even the names gender roleplayers choose for themselves have a whiff of soap opera cheese to them: it’s a world of lissome, wispy Chloés and rugged, raspy Chases.

If Gender: Phase Two involves discovering that none of the characters you’ve created in your mind are three-dimensional enough to capture your true complexity, then Gender: Phase Three will be discovering that the whole exercise was a colossal waste of time and energy. If you’re lucky, you get to Phase Three with most of your body intact. But many won’t. And publications like Nature share the blame for that.

Wouldn’t you think if you’re the police looking for a missing person you’d want to put out the most accurate information possible in order to…you know…find the missing person?

Bromley Metropolitan Police Service thinks not.

People mocked, and also pointed out that searching for a missing person does depend on accurate description. Bromley Police got in a huff. No progress in finding missing person was recorded.

Victoria Smith on Starmer’s refusal to defend Rosie Duffield:

This week Duffield announced that she would not be attending local hustings due to threats of violence. To anyone who has witnessed the escalating abuse she has received for defending sex-based rights, this was not surprising. Then again, nor was it surprising to fellow MPs such as Jess Phillips, who has also faced threats to her own and her family’s safety, simply for doing her job.

…

Many of those who threaten MPs are paranoid, mentally unwell, in thrall to conspiracy theories, and/or egged on by extremist groups. They must be held responsible for their actions, but we also cannot ignore those who have encouraged them.

The truth is that in Duffield’s situation, some of this encouragement has come from Labour activists themselves, and in some cases sitting MPs. I am sure these people would claim that they would never advocate violence. I believe them. However, I would ask them this: if you are going to sign a pledge that denounces feminist organisations who believe sex matters as “hate groups”, or permit mob harassment of feminists at your conference, or accuse female MPs speaking of male violence of making “transphobic, dog-whistle speeches”, what do you expect to happen? To be clear, the events I refer to are not recent, nor are they specific to Rosie Duffield. This has been going on for years.

A lot of years. We’ve become accustomed to seeing former friends talk about us as if we were Nazis bent on genocide.

To be fair to Keir Starmer, he has not been involved in the worst of it (he did not sign the infamous pledge). However, if you are going to link the death of a child to Rosie Duffield saying “only women have a cervix”, what do you think that signals to someone who has been radicalised into thinking feminists want trans children dead? One response to Jess Phillips’ tweet claimed that since Duffield “spreads hate about trans people daily” she has no right to “play the victim”. Plenty of Labour activists have endorsed this view and no one in authority has told them to stop.

People who threaten or commit violence often delude themselves that it is in self-defence. Once someone has reached this state, it is hard to convince them otherwise. Labour’s “both sides” approach to the trans debate has told some deeply unhappy people that feminist MPs really are out to get them. Why should anyone be surprised if some of them believe it?

Never mind. Starmer has football to watch.

Keir Starmer has time to blather about football but not time to say a word for Rosie Duffield.

We will be with you; England is behind you. That pesky female colleague? Not so much.

Your brain on gender ideology:

“Are you transgender?” Participating in a study for their public-health class, neither Alex nor Luna knew how to answer. Alex uses they/them pronouns and identifies as agender. They are also among a growing number of young people who have been raised in a gender-neutral manner: their parents did not refer to them as a boy or a girl until they were old enough to choose for themselves. Whatever genitals Alex was born with is not common knowledge. If you are agender and were never assigned a gender, does that make you transgender?

If you were raised by deranged parents, does that make you deranged or just tragically confused?

As for Luna, today she identifies as a woman, which aligns with the gender she was assigned at birth. But this is a recent development: Luna identified as a boy for as long as she can remember and, after coming out as trans, lived openly as one throughout her childhood and adolescence. As a woman who has detransitioned, she often feels that she has more in common with transgender women than with cisgender ones, whose gender identity corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth. Although Luna doesn’t call herself transgender, she fears that answering ‘no’ to the study’s question means that her gender trajectory and experiences will be erased.

So Luna is so tragically under-educated that she thinks participating in a study is the same as an autobiography.

The difficulties Alex and Luna experienced might seem unusual. But many individuals find themselves unmoored from binary terms such as male and female, or cis and trans

Ah here we go. Phase 2. Trans is no longer the Hot New Thing that it’s treason and heresy to ignore. Trans is now your parents’ boring old politics and the new thing is to see “cis and trans” as evil binaries. Perfect.

These identities are not trivial. How people identify shapes not only their experiences of marginalization, but also their bodies.

For sure. If you identify as a rock then that shapes your body – you become a turnip.

Human experiences are inevitably richer than the categories we carve out for them. But finding the right concepts and language to describe their diversity is an essential part of the scientific endeavour. It helps researchers to capture the experiences of participants more accurately, enhances analytical clarity and contributes to people feeling included and respected. 

That’s science!

The special subtle luxury notpology in which the apology is there but the recipient is carefully not named.

The “readers added context” note tell us:

Michael Cashman CBE fails to provide a lot of important context. MP he mocked is Rosie Duffield. He accused Duffield of being ‘frit or lazy’ for safety fears after death threats. He did so on anniversary of murder of Jo Cox MP. Research shows abuse of women MPs is real concern.

I didn’t know “unreservedly” meant “minus a lot of important context.”

It’s so depressing, all this passionate enthusiastic noisy hatred of women. I’m so tired of it.

Originally a comment by Arcadia on Erring on the side of ruining kids’ lives.

I am not sure why this is apparently so difficult to understand. Everybody (I think) can come up with a description of a gender non conforming child in their mind. The likely options are that the kid will grow up to be gay, and keep not conforming; straight and non conforming; straight and more conforming (because for some kids it is a stage they go through); or lately, “trans”. Out of those four likely options, three will want their bodies intact and fully functional, and some of the fourth category will too. But all those kids are likely to be treated as the subset of category four that want blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgeries. All of those things make life harder, period, but especially if you’re trying to get on with life in any of the other categories.

It’s absolutely shocking that the conclusions that child comes to depends on what teaching/media/culture/content the child is exposed to (which these days leans heavily towards trans conclusions), which professionals the child is exposed to (which here, with these laws, are having their hands tied) and their friends and family, which are also struggling in the current culture.

But simply, whether or not your body works as nature intended when you grow up really shouldn’t hinge on what you thought when you were a child. Period.

UN Women tells us how much it hates women again.

Recent decades have marked major advances for the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) people in many places, including the legalization of same-sex relations, legal recognition of gender identity on the basis of self-identification, better access to essential healthcare, restrictions on interventions on intersex minors, and increased protections against discrimination and hate crimes. 

Shut up. Those are different things. They can’t all be dropped into a food processor and blended. Lesbian, gay and bisexual are not like transgender or intersex, and “queer” doesn’t mean anything. Legal recognition of gender identity on the basis of self-identification is not an advance, it’s a nightmare and a mortal injury to women’s rights. Trying to change sex is not “essential healthcare.” Minors should not be trying to change sex. It’s not “discrimination” in the pejorative sense to know and say that men are not women. It’s not a hate crime to know and say that men are not women and don’t belong in women’s sports or rape crisis centers.

State and non-state actors in many countries are attempting to roll back hard-won progress and further entrench stigma, endangering the rights and lives of LGBTIQ+ people.

Don’t lump them together and don’t pretend that defending women’s rights endangers the rights and lives of lesbians and gay men.

These movements use hateful propaganda and disinformation to target and attempt to delegitimize people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics. 

Stop lying. Feminist women defending women’s rights are not “using hateful propaganda and disinformation.” The UN should stop saying that.

Media and political campaigns have positioned the rights of LGBTIQ+ people as negotiable and debatable. Some try to frame the human rights of transgender people as being at odds with women’s rights, even asserting that trans women do not face gender-based discrimination or that they pose a threat to the rights, spaces, and safety of cisgender women. 

The demands of men who claim to be women are at odds with women’s rights. See Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre for more. Trans women are men, so they no doubt do face discrimination for turning their backs on dudeness, but that doesn’t mean they face the kind of sexism, let alone misogyny, that women do. They do, of course, pose a huge threat to the rights, spaces, and safety of women.

Falsely portraying the rights of LGBTIQ+ people, and particularly of trans people, as competing with women’s rights only widens divisions in the broader gender equality movement.

Not “particularly trans people”; entirely men who claim to be trans. We don’t portray the rights of lesbians and gay men as competing with our rights; don’t be schewpid. We say that some of the rights that some trans women demand compete with our rights. We say that because it’s true. If men can be in all our spaces then we lose the right to have some spaces away from men. If men can take our prizes and awards and honors then we lose them. That’s why we’re resisting.

UN Women. Again.

UN Women jumps up and down on women wearing its heaviest hobnailed boots.

Uh huh.

A piquant headline:

Former SNP equalities officer who wanted to ‘beat up terfs’ convicted of sexual assault

To be clear, it’s not that he wanted to beat up terfs convicted of sexual assault. No. It’s that he has been convicted of sexual assault. Laughably titled “equalities officer” wanted to beat up women who know that men are not women, and oh gee whiz what do you know it turns out he’s been doing some beating up himself.

A former SNP equalities officer who told how he wanted to “beat the fuck” out of gender critical feminists has been convicted of sexually assaulting six young adults.

Cameron Downing, who was an official in the SNP’s London branch, preyed on multiple victims and threatened to make rape allegations against one man if he refused sexual contact with him, the High Court in Edinburgh heard.

That is, I take it, if he the one man refused sexual contact with him the “equalities officer.” If only each man had special bejeweled pronouns it would be clearer. Anyway, point is, putative equalities boffin turns out to be not very equality-minded.

The 24-year-old, who identifies as non-binary, has been pictured at an SNP conference with former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and took part in a Pride March alongside Karen Adam, the SNP MSP and convenor of Holyrood’s equalities committee.

I have to wonder why Sturgeon would have a 24-year-old equalities officer in the first place. Surely a little experience plus maturity is desirable in candidates for jobs of that kind.

His conduct online has been criticised by JK Rowling, after he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he wanted to “beat the fuck out of some terfs and transphobes”. He also tweeted “I fucking hate terfs and transphobes with such a passion.”

Oh that guy. I remember that tweet. Says it all, doesn’t it. The trans thing isn’t really a liberation movement, it’s a pretext and a motivation for raging at women and getting props for doing so. The whole point is really just hating women with such a passion.

Police Scotland launched a probe into Downing and discovered that he had preyed on victims across Scotland in a course of conduct that began when he was only 16.

…

A female victim, now 24, told how he had made abusive comments to her at a New Year Party in 2018 about her weight, which caused her to get drunk and become sick.

Just the fella to be an equalities officer, yeah?

[O]n Friday afternoon, after two days of deliberations, jurors found Downing, of Willowbrae, Edinburgh, guilty on charges of sexual and physical assault. Judge Alison Stirling remanded Downing in custody, rejecting his lawyer’s application for bail. She told him: “Your status has changed.  I will adjourn sentence to obtain a criminal justice social work report and you will be remanded in custody.”

Equalities officer no more.

Trump failed to impress a roomful of greedy CEOs.

Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC.

“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said.

Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Dementia speeding up?

Julie Bindel on Labour’s contempt for women:

The Labour Party has managed to do it again: declare a war on women whilst attempting to appear to be very female friendly. The party claims it will halve violence against women and girls and make the streets safer for women to walk, even as it edges towards self-identification for men that claim to be female. What this translates into is fear and danger for women. 

They can’t halve violence against women and girls and make the streets safer for women to walk just by flapping their hands, or saying words, or looking solidarityish. They sure as hell can’t do it by making it easier for men to invade women’s spaces and take women’s jobs.

Starmer, who goes back and forth on whether or not a woman can have a penis, and who gave the appearance of standing by as a Labour MP Rosie Duffield was bullied and defamed within the party he leads, is now proposing to “modernise, simplify and reform” the “intrusive and outdated” gender recognition system.

You know what else is intrusive? Men in women’s spaces, taking women’s prizes, talking over women, telling women to stfu, calling women names, getting women punished and fired and banned.

The Labour Party has always had a woman problem, but right now, after years of this nonsense, I am veering towards thinking that it hates women. The bearded brocalists shilling for trans rights are misogynists wearing a rainbow flag. For decades, women have put up with the sexism within the party, from the unbridled, unreconstructed “beer and sandwiches” culture of the 1970s, through to the modern day version we are experiencing right now.

There was a time when we thought we’d won that fight, that men got it at last. Silly silly us.

It’s a god damn outrage.

Politico reports:

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Education Department’s final Title IX rule, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

What is “discrimination based on gender identity”? Why, it’s knowing that men are not women, of course. It’s the most discrimminy thing there is.

Western District of Louisiana Chief Judge Terry Doughty in an order Thursday declared that Title IX, a federal education law that bars sex-based discrimination, “was written and intended to protect biological women from discrimination.”

Why? Because women are the ones who need that protection. It’s not men who are passed over for promotions, paid less for the same job, sexually harassed at work.

“Such purpose makes it difficult to sincerely argue that, at the time of enactment, ‘discrimination on the basis of sex’ included gender identity, sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, or sex characteristics,” Doughty, a Trump appointee, wrote. “Enacting the changes in the Final Rule would subvert the original purpose of Title IX.”

Why? Because it would protect men (who pretend to be women) at the expense of women.

I hate it that Trump-appointed judges are the ones who get this right.

More on sharksbatteriesgate from Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:

Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.

Yes, but that’s been true all along. He’s worse now but he was terrible from the start.

In Las Vegas on Sunday, Trump went off-script—I have to assume that no competent speechwriter would have drafted this—and riffed on the important question of how to electrocute a shark while one attacks. He had been talking, he claims, to someone about electric boats: “I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”

As usual, Trump noted how much he impressed his interlocutor with his very smart hypothetical: “And he said, ‘Nobody ever asks this question,’ and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart.”

His relationship to MIT? He doesn’t have a “relationship” to or with or around or about MIT. He and the shark and the battery did not all attend MIT together. MIT never even sat next to Trump in the cafeteria.

Sure, it seems funny—Haha! Uncle Don is telling that crazy shark story again!—until we remember that this man wants to return to a position where he would hold America’s secrets, be responsible for the execution of our laws, and preside as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. A moment that seems like oddball humor should, in fact, terrify any American voter, because this behavior in anyone else would be an instant disqualification for any political office, let alone the presidency. (Actually, a delusional, rambling felon known to have owned weapons would likely fail a security check for even a visit to the Oval Office.)

We know. We know we know we know. And it doesn’t seem all that funny, either. It’s sort of funny in a grotesque nightmarish way, but it’s far more disgusting and enraging than it is genuinely funny.

Word is that Trump’s dementia is rapidly getting worse.

When more than 500 licensed mental health professions—including best-selling authors and well-respected psychologists—sign a petition warning that Donald Trump has clear signs of dementia, you would think corporate media would cover the story. But of course that would conflict with the corporate media’s non-stop narrative that President Biden is the one with cognitive issues.

But thankfully that has not deterred Dr. John Gartner–the founder of “Duty to Warn” and a prominent psychologist who was a contributor to the New York Times bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President”—from raising alarm bells.

So Dean Obeidallah had a conversation with Gartner.

…with Trump back in the spotlight, Gartner saw deeply alarming new symptoms prompting him to jump back into action. To put it bluntly, Gartner stated that with today’s Trump: “We see clear signs of dementia.” 

The Doctor explained that since Trump left office, there has been an obvious acceleration in his cognitive deterioration. For example, “now he can’t get through a rally without committing one of these” tell-tale signs of dementia, such as saying the incorrect word or “combining or mixing up people and generations.”

I’d agree that it’s obvious. I’ve been thinking of it, in my amateurish way, as his being more stupid, but if he’s more demented rather than more stupid, I stand corrected.

But it’s not just Gartner raising alarm bells. Others who have signed the “Duty To Warn” petition are doing the same, such as psychologist Michael Tansey, Ph.D. who wrote about Trump, “Recent shocking video displayed what appears to be signs of a serious advancing dementia which have worsened in recent months. That will inflame his underlying psychological vulnerability to rogue rage, extreme recklessness, and impulsive and violent action.”

So definitely let’s put him in charge of the nukes again.

Dr. Michael Bader, a psychologist, explained, “This is not just ‘rambling.’ Trump evidences a type of cognitive impairment seen in dementia.” He highlighted Trump’s symptoms that led to this conclusion: “word salad (incoherence), ‘loose associations’ (a lack of connection between ideas), impairments of memory, and language problems (mis-pronouncing words or making up words that don’t exist).”

Alarmingly, as Gartner warns, Trump will only get worse—especially given the stress of the campaign and his criminal woes. “Now we’re noticing deterioration almost every day,” marked by Trump becoming more erratic, impulsive and with increasingly incomprehensible speech, Gartner noted. He added, “I honestly believe that if Trump were to get reelected that he would become completely incapacitated in office.”

I see no reason to think that’s unlikely.

The Telegraph reports:

A play that criticises JK Rowling’s views on gender is struggling to cast women with 90 actresses so far rejecting parts.

Good! Serves it right!

The stage production, which is set to debut at the Edinburgh Fringe, has already caused outrage over a working title which labelled the gender-critical Harry Potter author a cunt.

Yeah women who defend women’s rights are such cunts, aren’t we.

The production is yet to cast any of the female roles, including that of Rowling herself. The part of Harry Potter film star Emma Watson has also been repeatedly turned down, and around 90 actresses have refused to take part in the project amid concerns over its critique of Rowling.

Calling women “cunts” is not a “critique” of said women.

The play, which was written by queer-identifying Hollywood scriptwriter Joshua Kaplan, tells the story of a fictional intervention staged for Rowling by the stars of the Harry Potter franchise, Watson, Grint and Radcliffe.

Oh fuck off. Intervention yourselves. Women don’t need a god damn “intervention” because we won’t say that men are women.

The work was initially titled TERF CUNT, with TERF standing for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a term which has been deployed pejoratively against women who have opposed trans ideology.

Guess what other term has been deployed pejoratively against women who have opposed trans ideology. That’s right! “Cunt”! (The Telegraph of course doesn’t actually use the full word, it uses the coy “c***” so that we won’t think it’s vulgar.)

It has been suggested by producers that some actresses may not want to appear in a play critiquing Rowling and ruin their chances of appearing in the lucrative new Harry Potter TV series on the Max streaming service.

Ah that’s nice. That’s lovely. It can’t be because they don’t want to appear in a play marinated in misogyny, no no, they must have some other greedier reason.

Oink oink fucking oink.

The Justice Department says cops in Phoenix are doing it wrong.

The Phoenix Police Department routinely uses excessive force and discriminates against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, part of a broader pattern of unconstitutional policing in one of America’s largest cities, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday.

Will there be any such reports if Trump returns? Obviously not.

In a 126-page report, the Justice Department said a federal civil rights investigation found that police in Phoenix use unnecessarily dangerous force, making situations more volatile; fail to provide proper oversight when force is used; and enforce the law based on race. Investigators also found that the department violates the rights of people who are homeless, improperly arresting them and destroying their property.

While other jurisdictions have recently responded to similar investigations by pledging to cooperate with federal oversight, Phoenix officials had publicly questioned the Justice Department probe, raising the possibility that they could refuse to accept its findings. If so, that could lead to a legal battle in which the Justice Department goes to court to pursue an order forcing the local agency under federal supervision, opening a contentious new front in the public debate over police reform and accountability.

…

The Justice Department report released Thursday noted that the Phoenix police shoot and kill people at one of the country’s highest rates. Phoenix police officers have fatally shot at least 119 people since the beginning of 2015, according to a Washington Post database tracking deadly shootings by police. This number outpaces fatal shootings by police in other cities with larger populations, including Chicago, New York and Houston.

In the report, federal investigators said they found that Phoenix police “use unreasonable force to rapidly dominate encounters, often within the first few moments of an encounter.” Officers shoot at people who present no threat or who are no longer a threat, the report says, sometimes using force against people who are already unconscious due to police gunfire. Police also use force rapidly, the report said, sometimes before even speaking to the person involved.

Nobody’s perfect.