The other day I fumed about Amnesty’s siding with the Scottish Ministers instead of For Women Scotland; so did JKR.

Seriously.

ABC News (the one in Australia) reports:

For many National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participants, a federal government decision means they can no longer access sexual services funding under the system, or they could risk financial pressure.

Sydneysider Oliver Morton-Evans says this decision has been “deeply disappointing” for many who live with a disability, including himself. “Now, only those who are financially well-off in the disability community can afford this service by paying out of pocket,” he said.

Whereas instead the government should be paying for this “service”? Because access to women’s bodies or at least hands is a human right?

Throughout times in his life, Mr Morton-Evans has sought the services of sex workers. He described it as an overall enriching experience.

Slaveowners said the same thing.

Mark Grierson, CEO of Advocacy Law Alliance/Disability Advocacy NSW, said there are valid and legitimate reasons as to why these services should be funded through the NDIS.

…

“We strongly feel that people with a disability need that access to intimacy, pleasure and sexuality like everybody else. Many have got quite severe physical disabilities and some may need extra assistance to get access to that sort of pleasure and intimacy,” he said.

But “access” to someone else’s body can’t be made a legal right without implying that some people are obliged to provide that body.

“Intimacy in all forms is vital. It’s a level of human connection and vulnerability that a lot of disabled people have challenges accessing anywhere else,” he said.

Therefore it should be a consumer item like any other consumer item, right? No, because it involves access to the bodies of other people.

Woman who writes a column for the Washington Post tells women to shut up and take it.

Competition is never equal, and it is only sort of, approximately, occasionally fair. The best we can ask is that it be meaningful, that it teach us something about ourselves. This is the context in which transgender athletes enter into sport, and the people who would reduce this self-seeking to an unfair “them” against “us” are missing the point entirely: Sport doesn’t tell us who we are biologically, but spiritually, and psychologically, and the first thing it tells us is not to be victims. So it’s a step backward for so many women athletes to cry frailty in the debate over trans participation.

Stop. Stop right there. Stop right there, shut up, hit yourself in the face.

It is not a step backward for women to want to continue competing against other women. It’s a step in the same direction we’ve been going ever since women were allowed to play in serious sports at all. It’s not backward or whiny or weak or cowardly or whatever other snotty sneery insult you’re trying to sneak in here: it’s just the same division of sport into men’s and women’s for the sake of fair competition for women. What do you think you look like, calling women names for wanting that?! Accusing women of “crying frailty”?! And by the way you meant fragility, you hack. Frailty is a moral term not a physical one. You’re a hack and a coward and an enemy of women.

…the lawsuit brought by San José State co-captain Brooke Slusser and 10 other Mountain West volleyball players asking emergency injunctive relief to bench a San José State player for, in their view, not being a proper woman doesn’t clarify the matter.

Snotty. Snotty, snide, childish. It’s not about “not being a proper woman”; it’s about being a man. Men are not “improper” women; men are men. Propriety is not even slightly the issue. It’s not about etiquette, it’s about bodies.

Newsweek says Biden should have arrested Trump on January 21, 2021.

[B]y failing to arrest Trump immediately, Biden allowed the seriousness of Trump’s treasonous acts to diminish in the public’s collective memory, granting Trump’s supporters and others who might be swayed to his side the chance to believe that it was an open question as to whether or not he’d engaged in insurrection (when it definitely was not). It allowed the media, too, to make it seem like less than a fact, engaging in the usual horserace political coverage once it was election season, even though one of the candidates was a would-be usurper.

It’s true. Trump paid no real price for that mind-bogglingly serious crime, and now four years later he’s actually fucking back. He tried to overthrow the government then, and now he’s back as the head of the government. It’s pathetic. It’s a horror show.

We arrested and charged many of those who’d been at the Capitol that day, yet failed to apprehend and prosecute the ringleader. Trump’s very freedom made people doubt his guilt, since humans have this terrible tendency to believe that we get what we deserve. If Trump had really engaged in a coup, they reckoned, why wasn’t he sitting in a federal brig?

We also have this terrible tendency to believe that the people in charge know what they’re doing. They haven’t arrested Trump, so there must be compelling reasons not to, so we’ll just move on and forget all about him.

The Sun reviews Smoggie Queens, hijinks ensue.

CALL me a wide-eyed optimist, if you like, but when a second female impersonator joined EastEnders this month, I thought: “Surely to God, we’ve reached peak drag queen and the BBC can find another obsession now.”

These men are across ­absolutely everything, after all, starting with four different versions of Ru Paul’s global abomination, which the Beeb has got on a loop.

Yes but the Beeb is every bit as obsessed with minstrel shows oh wait no it’s not. Mocking and insulting people of color is unacceptable but mocking and insulting women is wholesome every day entertainment. Right?

Smoggie Queens is up there with the worst ­sitcoms I’ve ever watched, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

For if TV’s drag era has taught us anything it’s the fact that behind nearly every ­grotesque facade there is a ­seriously dull man with some very odd ideas about women.

Which must be why the Beeb likes it so much.

Without doubt, Smoggie Queens will indulge all who follow as well, as it seems to be cut from the same holier-than-thou cloth as its host broadcaster, and in the absence of a decent punchline ends most of the episodes with the same sort of morality ­lectures that used to punctuate The Cosby Show.

Toxic masculinity, the ­blurring of gender lines, the importance of LGBTQI+ reps at work — you know the sort of cobblers. None of it stops Smoggie Queens assuming all straight men and old people are thugs and bigots until they’ve draped themselves in the rainbow flag, naturally.

However, the lack of self-awareness certainly fuelled the pay-off to episode one: “We are who we are, strong, fierce and unreservedly queer. If you can’t find us, keep searching, know your worth, because we’re out there somewhere on this big old queer earth.”

Can’t find you?

Switch your telly on, man. You can barely find anything else.

Ok but they identify as marginalized so shut up.

No actually let’s not bring back blasphemy laws.

Humanists UK stands up for blasphemy.

A poster advertising comedian Fern Brady’s tour is ‘sacrilegious’, according to a complaint received by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Given ASA rules, this complaint could lead to the comedy poster being banned.

Humanists UK is concerned that the ASA will ban the poster on grounds of causing religious offence, as it has with similar adverts in the past. It says that doing so amounts to a de facto anti-blasphemy law, which is an unreasonable restriction on free expression.

To put it mildly. If blasphemy is forbidden then we can’t point out that old stories about gods and devils and angels are just that: old stories. We need to be able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. We’re allowed to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Priests and mullahs and rabbis have no jurisdiction over free people.

BBC trolling us:

The BBC pundit Sharron Davies has joined forces with a leading human rights charity in accusing the national broadcaster of potentially casting a shadow over next month’s Sports Personality of the Year (Spoty) event by naming Barbra Banda as their women’s footballer of the year.

The BBC was the subject of widespread criticism on Tuesday after announcing that a player banned from the 2022 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations for elevated testosterone levels had received its coveted award.

See that will be why the Beeb did it. Feminist women must be trolled and punished and generally shoved around.

Now Davies, the former Olympic swimmer who worked as the poolside reporter for the BBC at this year’s Paris Olympic Games, has joined the charity Sex Matters, as well as former British distance runner Mara Yamauchi, British sailor Tracy Edwards, and the campaign group Fair Play For Women in sending a strongly worded letter to Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC head of sport, and Stephen Mawhinney, the head of sports journalism.

…

In their letter, Davies and her fellow signatories say: “Banda won [the BBC award] in a public vote, but BBC Sport owns the process and must own the outcome, since BBC Sport managed the creation of the shortlist, and BBC Sport promoted Banda’s nomination on social media.

“Banda is a player whose sex has been called into question. It’s been reported that Banda was withdrawn from a women’s tournament rather than face a sex test. Given the known issues around male athletes with disorders of sex development finding their way into women’s sport, it is disappointing that the BBC would actively promote someone whose eligibility to play in women’s sport is in question.”

Disappointing but all too predictable. The questionable eligibility is of course why the BBC chose that particular athlete.

Sally Hines thinks people in developing countries don’t know how to make babies.

Fiona McAnena last week on fairness in women’s sport:

The Football Association does not allow mixed football for adults. That is what it will tell you. But this month a 17-year-old girl was suspended for questioning the presence of a bearded man in the opposing team. That was an offence under the FA’s code of conduct because that man says he is a woman.

So which is it? You might think the FA should pick one and only one, but wait, there’s an escape clause. The bearded man is not a man, because he says he’s not. Bam, problem solved.

Since 2013, the FA has allowed male players who identify as transgender into women’s teams if they can show they have lowered their testosterone. 

To point out the obvious, that’s a very bizarre and unfair “if”. Lowering one’s testosterone does not reverse all the physical advantages that have accrued since puberty started. The skeleton doesn’t shrink.

Three years ago the UK’s Sports Councils published transgender inclusion guidance that pointed out that male puberty is not reversible, that testosterone suppression does not change that, and that allowing male players into women’s teams is neither fair nor safe in a contact sport. Since then the biggest participation sports – athletics, swimming, cycling – have changed their rules to protect the female category, as have many others. But not football, the biggest team sport in the country.

The biggest and also, surely, one of the most contact-prone. There’s a lot of accidental or non-accidental crashing and bumping in football, and women aren’t going to want to get bumped by a man. My guess is that the presence of a man on the other team would be generally inhibiting for the opposing team, which all by itself – even if no crashing ever happened – is a more than adequate reason to say NO to men in women’s football.

Oh look, it’s not just a guess.

A year ago, Telegraph Sport reported on a row that was tearing apart the Sheffield and Hallamshire women’s football league. One player, an adult male, was causing havoc. The male ability to shoulder women off the ball, combined with running speed, “made a mockery of the game”, one player told me. Other teams withdrew, fearing injury. Privately, one of his team-mates expressed her worry, saying she tried to be on the same side in training so as to avoid his tackles. But she did not dare say so publicly.

What I’m saying. It hobbles the opposing women even before the damn match starts.

This is a recurring theme. A player at the club who reported the 17-year-old told me that she knows it is not right. She claims that a player was tackled so hard by a transgender player that she ended up concussed, and a defender had her shoulder broken trying to block a shot from a transgender player. But she says “there’s a culture of fear around discussing this, which means nobody can complain, including opposition players and managers, because when they try to bring it up, the local FA has always shut it down”.

So injury to women and destruction of their sport doesn’t matter, but confirmation of men’s claims to be women does matter.

Why is that exactly? In all these years I’ve never seen a convincing explanation.

The Sheffield incident prompted more than 70 MPs and peers to sign a letter to the FA expressing their concern about its policy, and the risk of harm to female players. Earlier this year, in response, senior FA officials met a small group of MPs at Westminster. I was at that meeting, and heard the FA justify its approach on the basis that 72 is a small number in the context of the 2.6 million who play football. 

72 men bashing women is a small number compared to 2.6 million. Well that’s fine then.

Hmmmmm. It says “NHS inform” at the top. It shows other available languages. Surely the goal here is to inform patients. And yet…

The goal is surely to inform, and yet the NHS tells people, including people who don’t read English, that there are people who are not women or girls yet who “bleed from their vagina.” Well, what people? What people are those exactly? What people who are not women or girls have the ability to “bleed from their vagina”? Why don’t we all know about them? Why haven’t we all always known about them?

The NHS, let’s remember, is not the Guardian or the BBC, nor is it an activist on social media. The NHS is a health service. An important part of its work is providing information that is as clear and unambiguous and easy to understand as it can possibly be, and also as accurate. Accuracy is key. You don’t want to go mixing up milligrams and micrograms, and you don’t want to go mixing up women and men. You need to know exactly what the patient weighs before you prescribe meds, and you need to know exactly what sex the patient is before a whole lot of things. That’s the job, and it’s crucial. Pretending boys and men can menstruate is the opposite.

Here NI is “a place for lesbian and bisexual women” in Belfast. Its most recent Facebook post, six hours ago:

One, it carefully omits “sex” from the “regardless of” bit. Two, the image is of a woman brandishing her fist at a cringing shaking man while shouting at him.

To repeat: it calls itself “a place for lesbian and bisexual women.”

Pretend-woman Robin Moira White in the Independent:

Today continues the Supreme Court hearing of the For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers appeal. Ostensibly, this case concerns guidance issued by the Scottish government about who can be considered for places on boards of public bodies in Scotland. In fact, it comes down to a dispute about the meaning of the word “sex” in the UK Equality Act 2010, the definition of “woman” and “man” under that act – and the place of trans people in our society.

As if you can change the realities of who is a woman and who is a man by passing an act. As if we don’t already know who is a woman and who is a man. As if it made any sense to change the definitions of “woman” and “man.”

For Women Scotland, supported by intervening “gender-critical” or anti-trans organisations, argues that “sex” can only mean “biological” sex, defined by someone’s chromosomes from conception. The Scottish government, supported by interventions from the UK Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the international human rights organisation Amnesty says no, “sex” in the Equality Act includes transgender people who have been through the gender recognition process…

Blah blah blah. It’s all so ridiculous. You might as well redefine “death” – let’s change it to mean “a delicious meal.” Cheerful, but temporary. Death remains death, and changing the meaning of the word doesn’t and can’t change the reality. It’s much the same with life, and birth, and conception, and sex, and woman and man. Name them all Flopsy if you want but the realities remain.

Those who support For Women Scotland say that a finding which upholds the Scottish rulings would be disastrous for women’s rights. Their position appears to rest on exaggeration and hyperbole. Writing in the Daily Mail, Julie Bindel said this outcome would lead to the “destruction” of women’s rights. Given that the rulings have been in place since 2022 and women’s rights appear not to have been destroyed in the past couple of years, this seems polemic at best.

He says smugly, ignoring all the ways women’s rights have been battered and contested and diminished in the past couple of years. This conceited jerk blathering away in the Indy under the pretense of being a woman is one dent in women’s rights.

From the New Republic:

Sargent: Indeed. I want to ask you about this idea of self-censorship under that pressure. You have some experience and insight with what happens inside The New York Times. You were public editor. How do you think editors and newsroom leaders experience criticism like this from Trump? Do they see it as something to worry about? Do they get anxious about being perceived as being biased against Trump? How does this sort of stuff register internally there?

Sullivan: There’s a real push and pull about it. Reporters want to do good stories. They’re not going after Trump, or it’s not really about their personal politics or whether the Times leans left or right. They want to do a good story. They want to do stories that get attention, that could win a prize, that tell us something that we didn’t know. That’s what motivates reporters and their immediate editors.

As you go higher up the food chain, there is a concern that big news organizations not be perceived as too liberal or liberal at all. They want to be seen as neutral. The question is, and this came up a lot during the campaign and it just comes up all the time, can you really be neutral when you’re dealing with Donald Trump? 

That.

That’s the thing about Trump: it’s not even about left v right or Democrats v Republicans. Or it is about that but before you even get to that, it’s about Trump himself, Trump the person, Trump the human monstrosity. It’s about handing power to a human with no trace of conscience or empathy or generosity or any such other-directed feeling and morality. We haven’t seen that before. We’ve seen people in power with not enough such feeling, or with such feeling aimed in the wrong direction, but not people with none of it at all.

So, in that sense, it’s grotesque to demand “neutrality” about him. It’s a moral outrage to be neutral about a person like that.

Oliver Brown points out that women are entitled to think we’re being trolled.

The failure of Barbra Banda to meet sex eligibility rules is not in question: indeed, Andrew Kamanga, president of the Zambian football association, confirmed in 2022 the striker had not met the “gender verification criteria” and so could not compete in the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations. He gave this statement to the BBC. And so it is doubly extraordinary to discover that in 2024, Banda has just been anointed BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year.

The Confederation of African Football is one of the few major sporting bodies in recent years to have mandated sex testing. Fifa and the International Olympic Committee, by contrast, adopt the fundamentally wrong-headed stance that you are whatever your legal documents say you are. So does the NWSL. Its policy states: “People designated female at birth, regardless of their gender identity or gender expression, are eligible to compete.” That is why Banda has been able to tear it up in the United States for Orlando, and at the World Cup for Zambia, and at two successive Olympic Games – and yet been deemed ineligible for Africa’s major continental showpiece. One organisation takes biological sex seriously, while the rest apparently could not care less.

That’s because the rest are more spiritual. What sex you are is in the mind, not the body.

With Banda, as with Khelif and Semenya, there is a stubborn refusal by the apologists to engage with the crux of the matter: namely, that if you are female, as you say you are, take a test. That is the one measure that would put all the uncertainty to rest. Without it, the wagon-circling around Banda is pure posturing. “Barbra Banda is a woman”: that was the opening line of an article about the case in 2022. The evidence? That Banda was registered and raised as one.

You can raise a dog as a giraffe, if you like, but that dog won’t be a giraffe. “Raised as” is just hand-waving, the way talk of the soul is just hand-waving.

This is why sex testing is so fundamental to protect fair sport for women. This is why so many female athletes are in favour of the return of quick, non-invasive swabs to remove the ambiguity. The intellectual substance in acclaiming Banda’s womanhood is rooted in nothing more than one person’s self-declared identity. But we cannot know that Banda is definitively a woman – for the simple reason that the player has been kept away from the one test that would prove it.

Whatever it takes to cheat women.

Originally a comment by maddog on You’ve never been.

… because you’ve never been denied any area of expression, there’s a lot women take for granted. You’re not punished every time you act in a way that is feminine. You don’t know what it’s like to be forced into a lot of toxic male social dynamics that feel terrifying. You don’t know what it’s like to feel your brain malfunctioning on testosterone.

What a liar.

Women “have never been denied any area of expression”? In what world? Women have for centuries been, and continue to be, denied almost every form of expression until relatively recently, and then only partially permitted, and only in modern Western democratic countries. Women in Afghanistan aren’t even permitted to speak in public, and not even in their own homes if someone outside could imaginably hear their voices. Women take what for granted, now? On account of “never [having] been denied any area of expression?

Women are “not punished every time you act in a way that is feminine”? Are you kidding me? The stereotypes of femininity imposed on women because of their sex are the punishment for having the audacity to be born female. That’s precisely why many women rebel against “act[ing] in a way that is feminine.”. Of course, women are also punished for not acting in a way that is feminine. The stereotypes of femininity are designed to oppress and to punish women. Submissiveness, subordination, relegation to unpaid domestic labor, and the like are promoted as proper standards of femininity because these qualities keep women powerless. Women’s fashions are created — largely by men — to keep women vulnerable. Women’s shoes? Modern footbinding. A woman couldn’t run in those shoes to save her life. Skirts for women but not men? Gives men much easier access to women’s private areas for humiliation or rape. Tight skirts, like pencil skirts, aren’t as easy for men to penetrate, but they restrict women’s natural stride. Again, women couldn’t run to save their lives if they had to. Women’s clothes deliberately designed without pockets? Burdens women with an auxiliary appendage (purse) subject to easy loss or theft, rather than allowing women to keep their valuables on their person and hands-free, unlike men. Women being forced to “act in a way that is feminine” is the punishment. Don’t tell me that women don’t know this and don’t feel this.

Women “don’t know what it’s like to be forced into a lot of toxic male social dynamics that feel terrifying”? As if women don’t see those social dynamics up close and personal? As if women don’t suffer the consequences of ” toxic male social dynamics”? As if the “toxicity” of male social dynamics isn’t comprised of misogyny? As if women aren’t terrified of and terrorized by “toxic male social dynamics”?

There may be a point that women “don’t know what it’s like to feel your brain malfunctioning on testosterone,” but that’s pretty rich coming from a man. Women are commonly accused of being crazy, or “having their brains malfunction” from estrogen. That’s why women are called ” hysterical”; this supposed illness is used as a bludgeon against women to dismiss what women say, to ignore what women feel, to overlook women’s concerns, to keep women oppressed. Now you want to claim ” testosterone brain poisoning” as an excuse for male behaviors, as a reason not to hold men accountable for their testosterone-influenced actions. “Crazy hormones” is deployed against women, but proffered as a mitigating factor in favor of men. Classic double standard, that.

TL;DR: You lie. There’s a lot you “take for granted” that you don’t know about what women really experience.

So people voted for Trump thinking he would make housing cheaper?

Do they know what he’s been doing for the past half-century? His day job, if you like? His one skill?

Is Trump serious about massive tariff hikes that could increase prices for US consumers as soon as he begins a second presidency, which was won partly because voters were so frustrated with inflation and costs of housing and groceries?

And they thought Trump would lower the costs of housing? Really?

Just curious.

In honor of Yay Blasphemy hour here’s this week’s Jesus and Mo.

How about no.

Labour MP Tahir Ali has today advocated for blasphemy laws during Prime Minister’s Questions.

The MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley asked Keir Starmer if he would “commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Speaking in the Commons, Ali added that “November marks Islamophobia awareness month,” and that “last year the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the desecration of religious texts, including the Quran, despite opposition from the previous government.”

Then the UN Human Rights Council needs to have a word with itself. Goddy rights are the enemy of human rights. “Prophets” are the fictional goon squad that enforces bad retrograde misogynist religious laws and we have every right to say what we think of them. MP Tahir Ali has no right at all to impose his religion on anyone else (including his own children), any more than trans ideologues have a right to impose trans ideology on anyone.

The Prime Minister replied that the Government is “committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division”, including Islamophobia and antisemitism.

Oh did he now. Listen up, Mr Starmer: we get to dislike Islam as well as Christianity and Judaism. We get to dislike the “Abrahamic” religions. We get to say what we dislike about them. They’re all forms of illegitimate power, and it’s not a secular official’s job to put up a fence around them.

Ali said that “mindless desecration only serves to fuel division and hatred,” with the Prime Minister adding: “desecration is awful.” 

Oh shut up. Theocracy is awful. The imaginary Eternal Prime Minister we can never vote out, never dissent from, never correct, never tell to fuck all the way off, is not something secular heads of secular governments should be shielding from the people.

Trans-identifying man Brianna Wu tells women we’ve never been denied anything so we just don’t get it.

Yes he actually wrote that. Women have never been denied any area of expression, he says, blithely ignoring all the many many areas of expression we have been denied, and in some cases punished for trying to enter. Man lectures women on how we have never been told “No” so we just don’t understand.

…you’ve never been denied any area of expression, there’s a lot women take for granted. You’re not punished every time you act in a way that is feminine. You don’t know what it’s like to be forced into a lot of toxic male social dynamics that feel terrifying. You don’t know what it’s like to feel your brain malfunctioning on testosterone.

Now let’s talk about all the things you don’t know what it’s like, Mister Wu.