The ruling that lifted the publication ban in the Yaniv hearing is available for our reading pleasure. It presents the reasons for lifting the ban.

In the Original Decision, I reviewed Ms. Yaniv’s privacy interests and found that they  were complex. I identified factors weighing both for and against a publication ban. Ultimately, I decided to err on the side of protecting Ms. Yaniv’s privacy because, once that is lost, it could  not be regained. The primary factor which tipped the balance in favour of this outcome was Ms.  Yaniv’s assertion that she faced threats and harassment which would escalate if she was  exposed as the complainant in these proceedings: para. 48. I expressly found, however, that if  new facts came to light which affected my balancing, I may lift the order.

Mr. Cameron has presented new facts which, in my view, change the balancing of
interests in this case such that a publication ban is no longer warranted. In particular, I have
learned that Ms. Yaniv is using her own Twitter account to tweet about these complaints and
other very similar circumstances.

Boom tish. Not very bright, is he. “No publication allowed! For my safety! But I get to publish!”

By her own admission, a number of Ms. Yaniv’s tweets within the last month are about
her waxing complaints. While she says that her mother wrote some of them, I do not find that
changes the analysis. The tweets were issued from her Twitter account, using her full and real
name, next to a picture of her. It is fair to attribute them to her, for the purpose of assessing
the extent to which she has any interest in maintaining privacy over these complaints.

The extent to which he has any interest in maintaining privacy, actually. I know the Tribunal Member (Devyn Cousineau) isn’t going to call Yaniv he, but it’s worth reminding ourselves, because every time we say “she” we make Yaniv seem more vulnerable than he in fact is. Yaniv is not vulnerable the way women are, and he is hell-bent on making other women vulnerable to him. He is a bad bad dude.

One wrong undone:

A man who was sacked by the supermarket chain Asda for sharing a video clip of the comedian Billy Connolly mocking religion on social media has been reinstated.

Brian Leach was dismissed last month after a colleague complained that a sketch he shared, in which Connolly said “religion is over” and called suicide bombers “wankers”, was anti-Islamic.

He shared the sketch on Facebook, I think in a friends-only post. He didn’t slap it up in the break room at work, so I fail to see how it’s any of his colleague’s business at all, let alone their employer’s.

The National Secular Society has been in touch with Mr Leach throughout an internal appeals process and has now learned that he has been given his job back.

NSS chief executive Stephen Evans said the decision was “a victory for common sense”.

“We welcome Asda’s decision to reinstate Brian Leach, although this case raises broader concerns about the extent to which employers can legitimately restrict their employees’ freedom of expression on social media.”

It certainly does.

H/t Helen Dale

Brendan O’Neill adds his take on the Yaniv Frolics:

A born male who identifies as female, and whose male genitalia is still intact, is suing female-only waxers on the basis that their refusal to wax his bollocks – sorry, her bollocks – is an act of discrimination. Yes, this person believes that because he identifies as female he should therefore have access to every female service, including the most intimate female services. Any female beautician who refuses to tend to his testicles is being ‘transphobic’, apparently, because they are denying his womanhood. Even though he has a penis. And testicles. And is a man. That’s hate speech, I know.

It’s parody-leftism, it’s made for people like O’Neill, and it’s a huge mistake.

Yaniv claims that the women’s refusal to give him a Brazilian – that is, to handle his penis and testicles and to remove his pubic hair, activities these women did not want to carry out – is discrimination. Yaniv says that self-identifying as a woman is sufficient to be treated as a woman and to get access to services typically reserved for women. In the words of the National Post, the HRC hearings revolve around the question, ‘Should a business be allowed to deny service on the basis of gender identity?’ Or perhaps, ‘Should a woman be forced by law to touch a penis she doesn’t want to touch?’ – that’s a franker, more honest way of putting it, though it’s obvious why people don’t put it like that, given it would expose the fundamental misogyny at play in this demented case.

Usually our Brendan isn’t all that good at spotting misogyny or giving a shit when he does. The Yaniv Movement is a gift to people like him.

There is a temptation to view Yaniv as simply an eccentric trans activist. But in truth this case is entirely in keeping with the cult of gender self-identification where one can now become a woman simply by declaring it.

Yes it is. I hate it when our Brendan’s right, but he is. Yaniv is clearly an abusive creepy asshole in every way, but he’s also exploiting the existing ideology. He didn’t make it up; it was sitting there waiting for him.

A BC human rights tribunal has been hearing Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv’s complaint that a woman who did genital waxing for women out of her living room refused to wax Yaniv’s balls. It got rowdy.

At one point, the complainant compared the business owner to a neo-Nazi. The lawyer for the business owner accused the complainant of engaging in “half-truths and fabrications.” Tribunal adjudicator Devyn Cousineau frequently had to interject to maintain decorum and to keep the hearing from careening off course.

But a substantive question remained at the core of the raucous daylong hearing: should a business be allowed to deny service on the basis of gender identity?

But that is not the substantive question. That’s pretty much the opposite of the substantive question. The substantive question is: should a woman be allowed to refuse to wax a man’s balls in her living room regardless of how he “identifies”?

To put it another way, the issue isn’t “I refuse to wax your balls because of your gender identity,” it’s “I refuse to wax your balls because I wax women only and you’re a man.”

(Frankly I don’t think anybody should wax anybody’s genitalia, because I don’t think people should wax their genitalia in the first place, and I think the whole stupid porny trend is sick, but that’s another matter.)

Jessica Yaniv, the complainant, told the hearing she was entitled to receive the advertised wax service and that if the tribunal ruled against her it could lead to a “dangerous” precedent.

“You cannot choose who your clientele is going to be,” she said.

When you’re going to be fiddling around with their genitalia in your living room with no one else around? Yes you can. When the two sets of genitalia are not identical and require different training to wax and you have only one kind of training? Yes you can.

The complaint heard Wednesday is one of more than a dozen filed by Yaniv, who describes herself as a digital marketing expert and LGBTQ activist. All allege she was the subject of discrimination by salons. A few complaints have been settled without hearing or withdrawn.

That is to say, Yaniv has been systematically seeking out women who offer waxing services in private in order to sue them. Yaniv is an evil human being.

Earlier this month the JCCF also represented two other aestheticians who were the subject of similar complaints from Yaniv. One of them, a Sikh woman, said she declined to provide the waxing service for religious and safety reasons, according to a column posted by John Carpay, the centre’s president, on the website The Post Millennial.

Businesses shouldn’t be allowed to use religion and culture to refuse service, Yaniv said.

Yanivs shouldn’t be allowed to use trans ideology to persecute women.

Originally a comment by latsot on Watch for the nod.

I’ve been talking and writing about the breaking of checks and balances in the tech industry for a couple of years and there’s a possibly useful analogy to politics. We know that checks and balances aren’t worth anything now but I think that’s because we’ve forgotten what checks and balances are.

In the tech industry, we’ve got used to everyone stealing and misusing our data in return for supplying us with things we probably don’t really want in the first place. We’ve got used to DRM being the norm so that we don’t own any of the things we buy (including things like vehicles and houses as well as things like music and books) and don’t have an unrestricted right to repair or sell them.

We’ve become used to companies like Facebook and Google overturning the sort of rights we thought we had. And some legislators around the world have started to think that perhaps we were wrong to allow those companies to be so big and have so much influence and perhaps we should break them up.

I’m all for that in principle, but I’m not sure that throwing laws about the place is really going to help. I think that because of the ease with which such companies ignore or rise above laws. These buggers pay very little tax and simply ignore laws for years or decades. Facebook’s share price went up when it received a fine of $5bn. It was less than expected. It’s about a month’s revenue. Facebook knows it got away with rather less than a slap on the wrist for doing dodgy as fuck everything.

Laws seem unlikely to work, although I welcome better ones. What we really need to do is remember what checks and balances actually are and who owns them. We do. We are the ones who need to hold companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon to account. We can’t do much about laws or how they are enforced, but we can collectively do things about the checks and balances.

For instance, there’s an Amazon warehouse opening in the town nearest to me. The checks and balances here are about exposing awful working conditions and zero hour gig economy contracts if and when (and it’s when) they appear. Changing the laws won’t work (at least, not for a while) but changing what we stand for might.

Isn’t the same true about government? Aren’t we the ones to agree to the legitimacy of democracy, for example, but refuse the false idea that MPs ought to support Brexit by default?

It’s checks and balances that are broken and we own those. We can mobilise around them. I’m sick of everyone feeling that checks and balances are things governments are supposed to do. They’re what we should do.

The BBC does a nice job of underlining how thoroughly Trump did not discourage the chanting at his Nazi rally.

President Trump told a reporter he “disagreed” with his supporters chanting: “Send her back” at Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

He also said he quickly told his supporters at a campaign rally to stop their chant.

Here’s what actually happened.

They count the seconds for us.

An open letter to Doctor Polly Carmichael, head of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock in London, from a colleague:

Dear Polly,

I am writing to you as a former clinician from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in Leeds. I wish to outline the concerns I had at the time of working there and the concerns that have either grown or developed since I left. I hope that you will address my concerns and also see the importance of investigating the concerns of other GIDS clinicians who have also left the service…

I think it is a problem that GIDS clinicians are making decisions that will have a major impact on children and young people’s bodies and on their lives, potentially the rest of their lives, without a robust evidence base. GIDS clinicians tell children and families that puberty blockers/hormone blocks are “fully reversible” but the reality is no one knows what the impacts are on children’s brains so how is it possible to make this claim? It is also a problem that GIDS clinicians are afraid of raising their concerns for fear of being labelled transphobic by colleagues.

That’s three five-alarm fires right there. Clinicians making life-altering decisions about children without a robust evidence base. Clinicians saying blockers are reversible when in fact no one knows that. Clinicians being afraid to talk about any of this because of fear of the “transphobia” label.

If gangs of sex criminals were grabbing children off the street and stuffing them with puberty blockers, that would be seen as a problem, yeh? But when it’s clinicians doing it, the establishment says aren’t they marvelous and anyone who says otherwise is a transphobe.

The author herself tried to raise issues and got called transphobic for her pains. Perhaps that’s one reason she left after a year.

Since leaving GIDS I have continued to follow transgender issues online and one of the things that I have felt concerned about is seeing the bullying and intimidation for those people who raise valid concerns about children making a medical transition being called ‘transphobic’ and ‘TERFS’ on forums such as Twitter.

I am also concerned that the attempts of Tavistock & Portman professionals, including former GIDS clinicians, to voice concerns about GIDS practice do not appear to have sunk in. Polly, as I’m sure you know very well, Clinical Psychologists are not known for going to the press but several former GIDS clinicians have done so anonymously. I cannot think of another time when Clinical Psychologists have gone to the press about concerns for the welfare of the children in their service, you have to take them seriously.

But the whole thing has so much momentum behind it now.

I also strongly believe that it is GIDS duty to make it known that it is highly unlikely that any child presenting there will be told that they are not transgender. One of my biggest ethical dilemmas whilst working at GIDS was that there were parents who brought their child to GIDS anticipating that we would confirm that the child was not transgender but we are not able to tell parents that actually there is some unspoken rule that means GIDS clinicians do not tell families, “your child is not transgender”.

So…they can confirm that the child is transgender, and do life-altering things in response, but they cannot confirm that the child is not transgender. Interesting. It’s almost like those arrangements where you go to a specialist in foot massage or eyebrow manipulation or crystal embracing and you ask if those things will fix what ails you and the answer is never ever No. Why isn’t it? Because Yes means cash and No means no cash.

I urge you to look up the stories of “detransitioners” (currently mostly American and Canadian young people) who report that they were not offered differential diagnosis of their gender dysphoria and that they were either coerced into medical transition or were not mentally well enough to give informed consent. I believe it is only a matter of time before we start to hear similar stories from British young people and that there needs to be a service available to give them support.

Many of these young people talk about feeling as though they have been in a cult and that they did not have access to any information or responses other than the affirmative approach.

It’s unmistakably a cult. The bullying, the reliance on dogmatic assertion and idiot repetition, the absolute ban on the least word of doubt or concern – that’s cult world.

There are going to be way too many needlessly miserable people in the years ahead.

Great. Just great. Trump thinks it was a brilliant idea and he’s going to keep doing it because “election strategy.” We’re stuck in this hell forever, and the only thing that’s going to change is that it’s going to get worse.

President Donald Trump’s initial racist jab at a foursome of Democratic congresswomen came as a surprise — and not a pleasant one — to many of his aides, who began texting about how to defend their boss’ tweets minutes after he fired them off.

Three days later, the shock has faded and the tweet is being used to frame a long-term political strategy.

Trump views his attacks on the four congresswomen of color as an unbridled political success, people familiar with his thinking say, and plans to continue his efforts as he moves into a period of politicking.

“I’m not relishing the fight. I’m enjoying it because I have to get the word out to the American people,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “And you have to enjoy what you do. I enjoy what I do.”

He’s not relishing it, he’s enjoying it. Got that? Also, you have to enjoy what you do; it’s the law. If what you do is screech racist insults at women, you have to enjoy it.

Despite initial queasiness from some aides at the overtly racist implications of Trump’s attacks on the minority lawmakers, most now say the President’s tactic of tying the liberal “squad” to the larger Democratic Party is a winning tactic. Many have come to his defense, declaring him correct in his view that critics of the United States should move somewhere else.

And yet, Trump has been full of criticisms of the United States for years. There are things about it he wants to change. There are things about it progressive Democrats want to change. That’s permitted. We’re allowed to want to change things about our country, and the people in charge should not be telling us to leave.

Getting serious:

The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt for defying congressional subpoenas related to the U.S. Census.

The measure, which passed 230-198, was a response to the Trump cabinet members’ failure to produce documents requested by House Democrats as part of an investigation into whether the administration attempted to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census that would discriminate against racial minorities.

Which is to say, their refusal to produce documents requested by House Democrats.

Barr said Pelosi should have waited; Barr and Ross said the House was degrading the constitutional separation of powers. If they really want to talk about degradation I think they should look somewhere else.

Updating to add documents via reporter Zoe Tillman:

AG Bill Barr and Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi today appealing to her to stop the contempt vote re: the House Oversight subpoena for census-related materials https://t.co/wKtgx2vwQ7 pic.twitter.com/4t6LDIXIad

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) July 17, 2019

A civil contempt vote means the House can go to court to sue to enforce its subpoena. A criminal contempt vote means the House makes a referral to DOJ (historically the US attorney's office in DC), which then decides whether to convene a grand jury (extremely unlikely)

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) July 17, 2019

And here's Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross: "House Democrats never sought to have a productive relationship with the Trump Administration, and today’s PR stunt further demonstrates their unending quest to generate headlines instead of operating in good faith with our Department." pic.twitter.com/jasR0coqn1

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) July 17, 2019

Trump is, predictably, digging in. Game on! Let’s see how racist we can be before anyone will stop us! Yeeha!

He’s quoting a Republican senator.

…opinion, they’re Americans. Now I’m entitled to my opinion, & I just think they’re left wing cranks. They’re the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle, & we should ignore them. The “squad” has moved the Democrat Party substantially LEFT, and…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2019

….they are destroying the Democrat Party. I’m appalled that so many of our Presidential candidates are falling all over themselves to try to agree with the four horsewomen of the apocalypse. I’m entitled to say that they’re Wack Jobs.” Louisiana Senator John Kennedy

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2019

Trump is planning to do more of this kind of thing at a rally later today.

Big Rally tonight in Greenville, North Carolina. Lots of great things to tell you about, including the fact that our Economy is the best it has ever been. Best Employment & Stock Market Numbers EVER. I’ll talk also about people who love, and hate, our Country (mostly love)! 7:PM

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2019

Son Eric is helping.

ERIC TRUMP claims on Fox & Friends that "95 percent of this country" is behind his father's message. (His approval rating is actually about half that.) pic.twitter.com/wm27V1MMLj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 17, 2019

Feminism 101: include men.

Ahhh yes, the essential glossary of modern feminist terms, which defines feminism as an equality movement, tells you which women are evil witches, and fails to say a damn thing about the existence of male dominance. https://t.co/vMQn61irnP

— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) July 17, 2019

So, curious, I looked up the women’s department online. First sentence on the home page?

The Women’s Department exists to advocate for women and non-binary students on campus.

Bolding theirs. But…why? Why can’t a women’s department advocate for women and leave it at that? Why does it also have to advocate for “non-binary students”? What is this constant attack on women for not “including” people who aren’t women?

They have a Women’s Room. It starts well enough, even if the idea of it does make me a bit queasy.

The Women’s Room is a designated women’s safe space. Located on the first floor of Union House, the Women’s Room is an autonomous place where women can feel comfortable and safe to be themselves without having to share the space with men or undergo male scrutiny. It provides a space for women to relax, talk to each other, collaborate, organise, discuss issues or read literature/brochures without embarrassment or self-censorship. It is a non-competitive and supportive space, as well as a great place to meet and get to know amazing women!

Or not such amazing women, because just saying they’re amazing doesn’t actually mean they are. But never mind that – at least they managed to get through a whole paragraph without telling us that the Women’s Room is an autonomous place where women can feel comfortable and also they have to include male people who say they identify as female. That’s refreshing.

But of course it doesn’t last. Paragraph 2 is about the availability of a fridge, lube and condoms, and other essentials. 3 is a one sentence welcome. 4 is…

Please note: the Women’s Room is a safe space. To make sure all women are safe and comfortable in this room, please note that transphobia, racism, ableism, classism, fatphobia and misogyny are not acceptable in this space.

Interesting that “transphobia” is the first item while misogyny is the last. But also – do they mean spoken aloud transphobia? Or transphobia within. Are women who don’t agree that men become women by saying so expected to self-exclude from the Women’s Room? Is there some kind of radar that knows how to detect that particular non-agreement?

Then we get a Do Not Assume and a Do Assume. Under the latter:

1. That all women are welcomed and valued in this space, including trans women.
2. That sex workers use this space and are entitled to respect.
3. That we welcome women of faith to use this space for prayer. Please be considerate where prayer practice may require silence.
4. That we all come from different backgrounds and we all have an equal right to the freedom to be self-expressive without fear of being uncomfortable, unwelcome, or unsafe due to one’s gender assigned at birth, cultural background, age, mental/physical ability, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, gender expression, class.
5. That every one in this room is entitled to respect on the basis of the respect they extend to other perspectives and experiences.

So, it’s an autonomous place where women can feel comfortable and safe to be themselves without having to share the space with men or undergo male scrutiny, but on the other hand trans women are welcomed in the space. Also, we all have a right to the freedom to be self-expressive without fear of being uncomfortable, unwelcome, or unsafe due to our gender assigned at birth or gender expression. So if a woman does feel uncomfortable and unsafe due to being a woman and noticing that there’s a man in the room designate for women? She has a right to the freedom to be self-expressive, but transphobia is not welcome. How, exactly, does that work?