Tim Adams chats with Billy Bragg for The Observer:

He smiles. “One thing was I had never met an out gay man until then. I’m sure I had met gay men in Barking but none of them were out. And then on stage Tom Robinson starting up with (Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay and all around me these blokes started kissing each other. I thought: ‘Fucking hell, what’s this?’ But it didn’t take me long to realise that it was a common cause – that the fascists are after anyone who is different, any minority. But you need those experiences to discover that solidarity.”

It’s a memory of that moment, I think, that has prompted his partisan anger on the issue of trans rights, his opposition to feminists such as JK Rowling, who argue for biological women’s right to their own protected spaces.

Right, because women are not a minority and not different. We’re just those same old boring annoying mommies who tell you to pick your clothes up off the floor and those same old frustrating annoying bitches who won’t open their legs on command.

Speaking to the self-styled “luxury communist” Ash Sarkar earlier this year, Bragg suggested he was embarrassed to have come to the issue fairly late. His instincts went back to old ties of solidarity against discrimination.

But not solidarity against discrimination against women. Oh god no. Women are horrible, and women are not discriminated against.

My own strongest feeling, I tell him – I reported on the cultish-seeming evangelism of the Mermaids group lobbying for the untested certainties of hormone treatment way back in 2016 – was that if ever there was an issue that social media is ill-equipped to debate, it is this one. I haven’t seen evidence for Bragg’s assertion that his most prominent opponents are “saying that trans people don’t exist”. Surely it is more the case that we are talking about different complex views in a genuine conflict of rights.

No. It’s not a genuine conflict of rights. It’s a genuine conflict between women’s rights and the notional, invented, unworkable, bogus “rights” of men to force everyone to call them women and let them steal everything that belongs to women.

“My problem with people like Rowling, like Julie Bindel, is really who they are lined up with,” he says. “[Rowling and Bindel] are people who I agree with about women’s rights. I agree with them about abortion. But we don’t agree on this.”

Because he’s a bro and he all too obviously does not give one tiny shit about women.

JKR taking NO prisoners today.

If you’ve spent any time at all on the left of politics, you’re familiar with the progressive male class warrior, usually middle-class himself, whose interest in women’s issues begins and ends with sex work, stripping and abortions. He might claim to be a feminist ally and mutter vaguely about ‘equality’ if the need arises, but when a genuine assault on women’s rights erupted under his nose, he cut left wing women adrift without a second thought. He expected us to be so blindly tribal that we’d surrender single sex spaces, jettison the very language we use to describe ourselves, give up fair sport, agree rapists should be locked up in women’s prisons and that lesbians are bigots for not wanting to sleep with the penis-ed, because (horrors!) some people on the right thought these things were wrong, too.

Over the last few years, a huge number of PMCWs have become men’s rights activists in all but name, and it’s been profoundly depressing, if not entirely unexpected, to see how enjoyable they’ve found it. Even while attacking women for finding themselves on the same side as right-wingers, the PMCWs stampeded to join the team that was threatening women with rape and violence, harassing women’s conferences, attempting to block access to gender critical events and physically assaulting female demonstrators. PMCWs are everywhere online, lecturing women reliant on state-run services for not welcoming the male-bodied into communal changing rooms and rape crisis shelters, presuming to police women’s language and tone, turning a blind eye to all statistics on male sexual violence that might contradict the ‘you’re all scaremongering bigots’ narrative and demonstrating that their deepest empathy will always be reserved for those who were born with a penis. The truth is that the left has fucked up monumentally on gender identity ideology and until it owns the mistake, it will continue to hand the right valid talking points. As more and more PMCWs realise this, they’ll take shameless refuge in accusations that we, the women criticising the injustice and insanity of gender identity ideology, were enabling the far-right. The fact is that they’ve done exactly that, by refusing to accept that there was anything wrong with a movement that was causing serious harm to troubled young people, trampling all over women’s rights and seeking to remove single-sex services for the most vulnerable.

The sense of betrayal women on the left feel towards men like Bragg will take a long time to disappear, if it ever does. I think we all take some grim satisfaction, though, in the fact that evidence of the PMCWs’ misogyny and complicity is a matter of public record, because the panicky back-pedalling and whitewashing that’s just begun is quite something to behold.

Taking no prisoners.

So you’re saying trans ideology is a religion. We agree! It’s a religion, not a politics, and sure as hell not a progressive or egalitarian or liberationist movement.

Karens are complaining about being murdered yet again:

Rallies have taken place across Australia in response to a wave of recent violence against women. Demonstrators want gender-based violence to be declared a national emergency and stricter laws put in place to stop it. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the issue was a national crisis. In Australia, a woman has been killed on average every four days so far this year.

…

Speaking at a march in the capital Canberra attended by thousands of protesters, Mr Albanese admitted the government at all levels needed to do better.

“We need to change culture, the attitudes, the legal system and the approach by all governments,” he said. “We need to make sure that this isn’t up to women, it’s up to men to change men’s behaviour as well,” he added.

And that very much includes the men who call themselves women, and who keep trying to position themselves as “most vulnerable” to male violence.

Finalleeeeeeeeeeeee

The NHS is to crack down on transgender ideology in hospitals, with terms like “chestfeeding” set to be banned.

Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, will this week announce a series of changes to the NHS constitution which sets out patients’ rights. Referring to “people who have ovaries” rather than “women” will also be prohibited under plans to ensure hospitals use clear language based on biological sex.

The new constitution will ban transgender women from being treated on single-sex female hospital wards to ensure women and girls receive “privacy and protection” in hospitals. Patients will also be given the right to request that intimate care is carried out by someone of the same biological sex.

It’s about god damn time.

Last year a report by the think tank Policy Exchange said NHS trusts were compromising women’s rights by providing same-sex intimate care based not on their biological sex but their self-declared gender identity.

You’d think they could have figured that out for themselves.

There has been fierce debate around attempts to reduce the use of the word “woman” in discussions on subjects including pregnancy and childbirth, and any move to do so has provoked ire from some feminists.

From all feminists. Anyone who doesn’t feel ire about that massive insult is not a feminist.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on And what about toast, and earthworms?

I’ve seen this a lot, the condensing of all ostensibly progressive causes into a great, faceless ideological black hole. The logical endpoint of the moral-bidding-war meltdown that is “wokeness” is that it becomes a singularity: to those inside, it’s a realm of infinte virtue. To everyone else it looks literally pointless. “Woke,” both the word and the movement, always had not-so-subtle transcendental, spiritual connotations: a shade adjacent to nirvana.

The city-funded community centre at the heart of Toronto’s gay village provides a great example. About 20 years ago they put up a mural on the side of the building which loomed over the heart of the neighbourhood. It depicted a middle-aged leatherman, shirtless but clad in fetish gear — black German police-style visor cap, leather harness, chaps, black boots, etc. — next to a teenage girl straining to crush her breasts into a binder. The message was clear: adult men’s fetishes and distressed teen girls’ trans identities are to be the community’s new areas of activist focus.

And sure enough, that was exactly what we saw the community centre focus on in the ensuing years.

Credit where it’s due: they do pick apt murals. Just a couple years ago the leatherman-with-trans “boy” mural was replaced with a new one, just as prescient as the first was in capturing the cultural mood inside the building: now it’s a raised fist — a universal symbol of righteous protest — filled in like a quilt with patches that depict the “progress” flag, various shades of the colour brown (skin tones, one presumes), animal hide prints (animal rights?), blue waves (the environment), and miscellaneus patterns whose symbolism I can’t decipher. That tracks with the direction “wokeness” is going: an incoherent melding of anything anyone claims to be a virtuous cause into one big nondescript fist of self-righteousness.

I’ll bet that the people who work inside that community centre think they’re at the epicentre of all virtue, that their noble mission has naturally expanded from serving gays in the time of rampant AIDS and gay bashing, to LGBT outreach, to LGBTQ+ propaganda, to 2SLGBTQQIA++ hysteria, and now at last they’ve arrived at righteousness in its true, pure form, having transcended individual causes.

I know for a fact that the gay people who live and work in the neighbourhood have little or no use for the community centre’s services anymore. I am one such gay person, and I wouldn’t darken their bloody doorstep. This “community centre” offers nothing to me but insults and condescension.

One question (of many):

It was the third argument before the Court in three months related to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss of the 2020 Presidential election. This one (Trump v. U.S.) was about his claim that Smith’s prosecution of him for election interference (U.S. v. Trump) must be dismissed because a former President is immune from criminal liability for any official acts he undertook in office. 

In what way is it an “official act” for a president to interfere in an election? Especially to interfere in an election in which he is one of the candidates? What’s “official” about that?

Michael Dreeben, arguing for the government, said, “The Framers knew too well the dangers of a king who could do no wrong.” To that point, Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer whether a President who “ordered the military to stage a coup” would be immune from prosecution. After an uncomfortable beat of silence, he answered, “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act.” When Kagan flatly asked, “Is it an official act?” he said that “it could well be,” but that it would depend on the specific facts and context.

So is it just a kind of magic, like the magic that creates “royalty” and all that goes with it?

Why would we want to have a pseudo-royal as president?

The conservative Justices’ perspective is clear: holding accountable the person who is President is far less important than protecting the functioning of the Presidency. Kavanaugh even railed against past independent-counsel investigations, saying “President Reagan’s Administration, President Bush’s Administration, President Clinton’s Administration were really hampered.” (Kavanaugh himself presumably did some of the hampering as part of Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s team that investigated Clinton.) 

Well that’s awkward.

Whither “woke”?

So where does all of this leave woke itself, or the broader push for social, racial and environmental justice that has been growing roughly ever since the death of Michael Brown in 2014 sparked the Black Lives Matter movement? What happens now to the idea of being more open to sometimes uncomfortable challenge from minority perspectives that were previously suppressed: of saving the planet; uncovering forgotten histories; inclusivity at work; “be kind”? That isn’t dead. If anything, it’s quietly going mainstream.

Wut?

Social justice is not the same thing as “environmental justice” and climate change isn’t fundamentally political. What to do about it is politicized (but shouldn’t be), but the change itself is not responsive to whether we shout “fascist!” or “wokerati!” at it.

For what else do you call it when the 60-year-old head of MI6 declares his pronouns on the social media channel X, or retired GPs and priests are getting arrested on climate protests?

What else do I call what? Those are two radically different things, so there’s no point in calling the pairing of them anything. What else do you call it when Oklahoma plays tennis, or goats tell you their pronouns? What else do you call it when random item 1 or random item 2? Eh?? Eh??! I want an answer!

Is there any room at all to say that Brynn Tannehill at The New Republic is exaggerating?

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Donald Trump’s lawyer, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that would well be an official act.” 

Based on that one line of questioning, Trump’s argument should be going down in flames 9-0. A democracy cannot survive when its supreme leader can arbitrarily decide that it’s in the nation’s best interest to rub out his opponents, and then leave it to some future court to decide whether it was an official act, because he’ll get away with it as long as there aren’t 67 votes in the Senate to impeach. And given that it will have been established that the president can put out a contract on political foes, how many senators are going to vote to impeach?

But the justices did not laugh this argument out of court. Quite the contrary: At least five of the justices seemed to buy into the Trump team’s arguments that the power of the office of the president must be protected from malicious and politicized litigation. They were uninterested in the actual case at hand or its consequences. Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, perhaps captured my response to the Supreme Court’s arguments best: “I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S. Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”

At a minimum, it appears the court will send all of the federal cases back down to lower courts to reconsider whether Trump’s crimes were “official acts.” It’s also likely that their new definition of “official acts” is likely to be far broader than anyone should be comfortable with, or at least broad enough to give Trump a pass. This delay all but guarantees that Trump will not stand trial for anything besides the current hush-money case before the 2024 election.

This is catastrophic in so many ways. The first is that it increases the already high chances that the United States ends up with a dictator who will attempt to rapidly disassemble democracy in pursuit of becoming President for Life. It simultaneously increases the chances that yes, he will go ahead and violate the civil and human rights of political opponents and classes of people he calls Communists, Marxists, and fascists.

And so on.

We’re doomed. We have at best eight or nine months before we slide into the pit.

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic on Alito and Trump and sedition:

[T]his week, [Alito] told us, in essence, that in his view democracy depends on allowing presidents to commit federal crimes, because if ex-presidents were to be prosecuted for such things, the United States would become a banana republic. That’s a Supreme Court justice saying that. And while Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and even Clarence Thomas didn’t go that far Thursday, it was obvious that the court’s conservatives are maneuvering to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn’t see the light of day before the election—in other words, that a sitting president who very clearly wanted Congress to overturn a constitutionally certified election result (about this there is zero dispute) should pay no price for those actions.

When I wrote seven years ago that we rested our hope on conservative judges who will choose our institutions over Trump, trust me, I wasn’t saying I was confident that they would. I was terrified that that day would eventually come. It came yesterday. The conservative jurists chose Trump. It will stand as one of the blackest days in Supreme Court history.

Our only hope is for Trump’s head to explode.

Yes let’s just throw all the toilets and changing rooms open to everyone, why not.

A gang of voyeurs hid in mixed-gender changing rooms at swimming pools to secretly film more than 5,000 young women getting undressed, a court heard.

Adam Dennis, 39, and Robert Morgan, 33, boasted of “hunting” teenage victims and made catalogues of their pictures to share and trade online.

Inner London crown court heard that the gang used hidden cameras to observe women in pools in east London and Surrey between April 2013 and November 2017. A fellow voyeur, Declan Golden, fled to the United States, while Miguel Jose Sainz’s whereabouts are unknown.

Gosh, they’re all male. What a surprise.

Oh puhleeze.

Same old same old same old cheat – “transgender athletes” instead of “male athletes competing against women.”

See also:

All this verbal cheating and distorting so that men can cheat by playing in women’s sports.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Because she is a woman.

Somewhat tangential, but:

What kind of idiot puts that sort of thing in writing? People at work don’t always like each other and sometimes talk smack about each other, but leaving a trail is a whole different thing.

Lawyers get to read some interesting stuff that gets produced in discovery, so I could tell you some stories. Except that I can’t.

Emails aren’t quite the gold mine that they were back in the 1990s and 2000s, when people would routinely write things that they would never dare put in an interoffice memo. A lot of that talk has moved to texts and messaging apps, as in this story.

Anyway, there’s a recent story that I have no involvement in that is a classic case of “what were these people thinking” by people who really, really, really should have known better. One part of the story is here, but I’ll try to summarize:

A couple of partners at a major Los Angeles firm — including one who headed its employment practice, i.e. a guy who spends his life advising and defending companies accused of discrimination and harassment and knows exactly how damaging stupid emails can be — for years made racist, sexist, and homophobic comments in their work emails to each other.

Of course, the immorality and stupidity isn’t confined to the two emailers. The reason this story came to light was because the two lawyers left the firm and started up a rival practice, taking many of the first firm’s attorneys (and, presumably, clients) with them. Original firm is of course pissed off at this, as they always are, and so elects to torch the departing attorneys’ reputations by releasing these emails. This does in fact succeed in sabotaging the infant splinter firm, but people began to ask the obvious questions like “wait, how long have you known about these assholes, and you only (pretended to) care when they LEFT your firm?” Original firm has since been dumped by multiple clients, and is being sued by several former employees for discrimination.

The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.

The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.

Sounds like dictatorship.

Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.

Also, plus, besides…come on…do they really think the men who wrote the US constitution intended to give the chief executive the right to murder people at will?

The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.

Which seems to me like burning the house down to protect it from thieves. The fact that Trump is a nominal Republican is dwarfed by the fact that he’s a moral monster and an aesthetic horror. He’s not a conservative, he’s a terrorist and a power-mad egomaniac. He’s a moral sewer. You wouldn’t think Republicans would want to marinate themselves in moral sewage.

Trump has the conservative justices arguing that you cannot prosecute a former president for trying to overthrow the country, because then they might try to overthrow the country, something Trump already attempted and is demanding immunity for doing.

And is apparently going to get for doing.

No previous president has sought to overthrow the Constitution by staying in power after losing an election. Trump is the only one, which is why these questions are being raised now. Pretending that these matters concern the powers of the presidency more broadly is merely the path the justices sympathetic to Trump have chosen to take in order to rationalize protecting the man they would prefer to be the next president. What the justices—and other Republican loyalists—are loath to acknowledge is that Trump is not being uniquely persecuted; he is uniquely criminal.

Same with “Trump derangement syndrome.” We’re not deranged; he is uniquely grotesque and horrible.

Quislings everywhere.

Osborne has the gall to say Joanna Cherry brings “so much hate and toxicity” to a “debate designed to celebrate all lesbians” by which of course she means “including the male ones.”

Hate and toxicity yourself you bad webbis.

What they really think of us:

The chief fire officer (CFO) and assistant chief fire officer (ACFO) of Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service both sent messages suggesting they wanted to kill or harm female colleagues. In the WhatsApp messages – which have been leaked to ITV News – the senior officers also use the words “lazy cow”, “bint” and “useless” to refer to women in the service.

Several of the messages target Area Manager Jan Morris, who resigned from the service this year after reading what had been said about her. “She does the square root of fuck all,” the now ACFO Adam Matthews messaged in February last year. “I’ve got no loyalty to the lazy cow,” he added in March 2023. He then shared a cartoon GIF of someone being thrown under a bus.

It could be true that she didn’t do much, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok for male colleagues to call her sexist names amongst themselves. What kind of idiot puts that sort of thing in writing? People at work don’t always like each other and sometimes talk smack about each other, but leaving a trail is a whole different thing.

When Jan posted on LinkedIn the same month asking for help finding a company which made uniforms for female firefighters, ACFO Matthews shared the post on WhatsApp and wrote: “She is having a whinge on LinkedIn again, that’s the reason this gender shit pisses me off, constantly rammed down our throats.”

Gee, I wonder why she would have any interest in this gender shit.

Jan alleges that the men – who were both promoted shortly after sending some of the messages – wanted her to leave the service because she is a woman, despite the fact that she has an unblemished career spanning 26 years. Speaking exclusively to ITV News, she said: “I’ve lost my career. I’m stepping away from the job I’ve loved for 26 years because I’ve been made to feel so devalued and unwelcome.

“I can’t do it anymore. I can’t work with people who think it’s ok to do things like that. They don’t deserve their jobs, don’t deserve to be in those positions. This is not how I wanted to end my career in the fire and rescue service. I should be stepping out the door proud as punch not through the back door because people have forced me into it.”

These bros talk about other female colleagues in similar terms, like “fucking bint” and wanting to throw them out of windows.

Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service recently conducted an independent review of its culture. Responding to the publication of the report just a few weeks ago, Mr Hardiman wrote: “It did not find a toxic culture and there was no evidence of current discriminatory practices and/or behaviours.”

At the time of his statement, ITV News understands that the CFO knew about most – if not all – of the message messages.

So he straight-up lied then. That’s interesting.

We shared our findings with the chairwoman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Dame Diana Johnson MP, who is currently conducting an inquiry into the culture of the fire and rescue sector, following investigations by ITV News into multiple fire services.

She said: “We know leadership is really important in the fire and rescue service and to see leaders writing things like that about female fire fighters is very shocking. The idea has been put forward that this is a ‘few bad apples’, but actually what this is pointing to is much more about the general culture of those in leadership positions. Reading those messages, I’m worried a great deal what the culture is like in that fire service.”

It ain’t cuddly.

Overturned:

Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction for sexual assault and rape was overturned by New York’s highest court, reopening the landmark case that fueled the #MeToo movement and highlighting the challenges of holding powerful men accountable.

Many accusers of the former Hollywood movie mogul condemned Thursday’s decision, with the actress Ashley Judd telling reporters it was “an act of institutional betrayal.”

But maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was purely a matter of law and due process and all that.

In a bitterly divided 4-3 ruling, the state Court of Appeals said the trial judge made a critical mistake by letting women testify that Weinstein assaulted them, even though their accusations were not part of the charges he faced.

The appeals court said the trial judge compounded the error by ruling that if Weinstein took the witness stand, prosecutors could question him on a wide range of “loathsome” conduct, including bullying and fits of anger toward associates.

…

Weinstein is not expected to be freed immediately, as he faces a separate 16-year prison term imposed last year in California after he was convicted for the 2013 rape of an actress at a Los Angeles hotel. That conviction still stands.

If he has another term to serve why would he be freed at all?

Judge Madeline Singas dissented from Thursday’s decision, saying the majority opinion “perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence” and makes holding defendants accountable for sexual assault “significantly more difficult.”

She also accused the majority of whitewashing the facts and continuing what she called a “disturbing trend” of overturning jury verdicts in sexual violence cases.

Let me guess. Men protecting men’s right to rape women. Am I close?

Good one.

Here we see the problem with BBC reporting:

Girl, 13, charged after Ammanford school stabbings

Ok, we think, it’s the BBC, so…is the girl really a girl?

And we can’t tell by reading the piece.

A 13-year-old girl has been charged with three counts of attempted murder after two teachers and a pupil were stabbed at a school in south-west Wales. Dyfed-Powys Police said the teenager was arrested at the scene at Ysgol Dyffryn Aman, in Ammanford, Carmarthenshire.

Two teachers and a teenage pupil were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening stab wounds. They have all since been discharged.

And thanks to all the previous lying about the sex of various men who claim to be women, we can’t be sure the BBC is telling the truth about this one. We just don’t know.

Trans trans über alles, über alles in der Welt.

The German Parliament, or Bundestag, passed one of the world’s most far-reaching sex self-determination policies on April 12, despite protests from women’s rights campaigners. The Self-Determination Act (SBGG) establishes ‘gender identity’ as a protected characteristic and allows parents to change the sex marker on their children’s documents from birth.

Hello Germany? That’s not self-determination. It’s parental determination.

Supported by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition and promoted and supported by the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the SBGG also creates the potential for citizens to be fined up to €10,000 (approx. $10,800 USD) for revealing a person’s given name and birth sex without their permission.

So the lie is protected by the state, and exposing the lie is a crime. A serial rapist could change his name and “gender” and it would be a crime to reveal his name and maleness. What could possibly go wrong?

During the hearing on the SBGG, two trans-identified male politicians were present to advocate for and support the bill’s passage.

Tessa Ganserer and Nyke Slawik were elected to Germany’s Bundestag in September 2021 as representatives for the Green Party, taking positions that were reserved for female political representation.

Heads men win, tails women lose.