Guardian rant by trans man Finn Mackay:

In December, five years later than promised, the Tories finally delivered draft, non-statutory guidance for schools on “gender questioning children”…

The document doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about this government’s hostile stance on trans identities, inclusion and rights; but, unfortunately, what it does do is further solidify in official documentation and language the politicised phrase “gender identity ideology”.

Well speaking of “politicised” what exactly do you mean by “trans rights”? What are they and how do you know?

It is in fact quite obvious what the government means by “gender identity ideology.” It means the ideology that claims men can be women and women can be men. It means the ideology that claims people invariably are what they say they are in the case of sex/gender. It means the ideology that claims people can literally be the opposite sex of their own bodies. It means the ideology that claims ideas in the head can cancel physical realities. It means the ideology that claims the brain is the only sex organ. It means the ideology that claims that vaginas and penises, ovaries and testes, are just trimming, and wholly beside the point when it comes to knowing who is which sex/gender.

The government is attempting to bring into the mainstream this contested term, a creation of rightwing sex and gender conservatism that dates back to the 1990s, and which forms a key part of renewed attacks against the LGBTQ+ community.

Liar. Saying men are not women is in no way an attack on lesbians and gay men.

As used in this context, the phrase “gender identity ideology” is actually nothing to do with gender, as in masculinity and femininity, and how this shapes our identities. 

Pffff. As if Mackay would agree he’s merely “masculine” as opposed to being literally in every sense a man.

The real gender ideology is the binary sex and gender system that requires all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual; and which attaches harsh penalties to those who deviate from this script.

More bullshit. Knowing which people are men does not require all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual. Yes, sure, there are some people who dislike girly men and boyish women, but that fact is not the same as knowing which people are which sex.

One thing this ideology does do is ruin people’s thinking skills.

Central Oregon Daily News tells us via the US Attorney’s Office:

A federal grand jury in Eugene returned an indictment Thursday charging a Cottage Grove, Oregon, woman with posting a violent threat online, announced the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon.

Elizabeth Ballesteros West, 56, has been charged with one count of transmitting an interstate threat.

According to court documents, in late September 2023, the FBI received an anonymous tip that West was threatening coworkers on Facebook. Later, in November 2023, the FBI learned West had established an account on X (formerly known as Twitter) that she was allegedly using to post and repost memes, videos and statements containing violent messages targeting Black and Jewish people and immigrants. Several of West’s posts included what appeared to be self-produced photos of firearms including several handguns, a shotgun, and an AR-style assault rifle.

Etc etc etc.

But the PostMillennial tells the story differently.

The FBI arrested a trans-identified Oregon woman on Friday who allegedly made a series of credible violent threats towards minority groups, including Jews, black people, and immigrants.

That’s just confusing. A woman who identifies as a [trans] man? Or a man who “identifies as” a woman?

Court records show that authorities were first alerted to West in September when she had posted on a transgender women’s support group page on Facebook claiming that she was being bullied by “transphobic” coworkers, and saying that she had reached “the end of my rope.”

So a trans woman then?

It’s odd that the Feds simply call him (?) a woman throughout, with no mention of transery in either direction. Law enforcement should not be in the job of lying about the sex of violent arestees.

Here he is in person, calling women who don’t believe men like him are women “probably misogynist.”

He is such a piece of work.

Susan Dalgety on the mess at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre:

Today, there are 17 rape crisis centres across Scotland, from Shetland to Dumfries and Galloway. In 2020-21, Rape Crisis Scotland – the movement’s national body – received more than £5 million for its sexual violence support work, much of it from the Scottish Government.

But as the movement evolved from a voluntary service to a professional one, the principle which underpinned it remained constant. Survivors of rape and sexual assault should have access to female-only support services. Women looking after each other in a way only women can understand. Until recently that is, when gender identity ideology, which dismisses the reality of biological sex, began to assert itself in that most sacred of female-only spaces – rape crisis centres.

A report published this week shows that the sector is now in turmoil across the UK. Women’s Services: A Sector Silenced, launched by human rights charity Sex Matters, reveals that groups are mired in confusion as they grapple with the conflicts arising out of a move towards “trans-inclusive” services, often forced on them by funders. It also points to growing evidence that women are reluctant to seek help because they do not want to risk being counselled by a man.

The lead author of the report, social-science researcher Matilda Gosling, says that those sector leaders who believe in the necessity of single-sex spaces face an intolerable choice between not offering the services that women need or losing out on funding. “These are brave, principled leaders who’ve been put in an impossible situation – and either way, vulnerable women lose,” she says.

All for the sake of men who claim to be women. It doesn’t seem entirely fair, does it.

As the report was published, an employment tribunal involving a former member of staff at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) began. Roz Adams, a support counsellor, is claiming constructive dismissal after she was subjected to a nine-month disciplinary process where she was accused of being “transphobic”. She had suggested that the centre tell a woman survivor that one of its advice workers was “a woman at birth that now identifies as non-binary”.

This is not the first time the Edinburgh centre has hit the headlines in recent years. It is run by Mridul Wadhwa, who was born male. In August 2021, Wadhwa told the Guilty Feminist podcast that “bigoted” rape victims would be challenged by the centre, adding: “…if you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma. But please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices.”

Wadhwa, who self-identifies as female, later stepped back from the remarks, issuing a statement that said: “The Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre or the rape crisis movement in Scotland is not looking to re-educate survivors when they come in for the urgent, potentially life-saving support they may need – that would be inappropriate.” But the damage had been done, with reports of women refusing to use the Edinburgh service. And evidence at this week’s tribunal further revealed Wadhwa’s strong views, including a suggestion at a public meeting in Edinburgh University last year that firing staff can be as important as hiring them when creating “inclusive” workplaces.

Be more inclusive by firing people.

A witness, who had attended the event, said that when asked how best to bring staff on board if they were not sure about trans-inclusive policies, Wadhwa replied: “Fire them.” But perhaps the most harrowing evidence to emerge from the tribunal, which is expected to end next week, was on the first day, when Roz Adams told of a woman who was refused support from ERCC because she asked if the service was women-only. She explained that the woman, in her 60s, had wanted a female-only group therapy context. On being told the ERCC was “trans inclusive”, the woman asked “is that women-only?” and later received an email saying she was not suitable to use its service.

Because she’s not inclusive enough. Women who’ve been raped are turned away from a rape crisis centre run by a man because they don’t want group therapy with men. That’s inclusion.

It also emerged that the Edinburgh centre refuses to refer women to Beira’s Place, the female-only sexual support service set up by author JK Rowling a year ago, even though they have closed the waiting list for their advocacy services. Adams, who now works at Beira’s Place, told the tribunal that ERCC “have made it very clear they won’t refer people on to our services”.

That too is inclusion. It’s all so inclusive that women have nowhere to go.

Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscelllany Room.

I wish there was one single all-encompassing, factual, non-polemical book about this. So far, there isn’t one. (But I’ll be honest: I’d love to write one myself.)

Helen Joyce’s book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality is fantastic — analogous to Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the sense that it’s a broad overview of the definition of trans and how the concept is not backed by science — just like Dawkins did with the concept of God.

But Joyce’s (excellent) book sticks to the facts, and lacks a broader analysis of the social and political context, which has so much to do with why this nonsense idea has become so popular so quickly.

Here, Kathleen Stock steps in and takes a feminist-philosophical view in her book Material Girls. (Which — I know, I’m a horrible monster, kill me now — I have only started and haven’t finished. So I can’t really speak to this one too much.)

For a pre-social-media perspective on specifically male transsexualism, transgender identity, and homosexuality, and the connection between them, Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen is very good. (And it’s available as a free PDF now, with the author’s blessing.)

And then there’s Bailey’s spiritual sequel of sorts, Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, which mostly focuses on the controversy surrounding Bailey’s book, and which launches from there into the subject of ideology and activism and how those forces interact with the pursuit of science, for better or for worse. (Very interesting, enlightening and engaging stuff.)

In Tough Crowd, Graham Linehan writes movingly about trans from the perspective of the social media landscape and what it’s like to be a celebrity who dissents from the liberal consensus and who dares to blaspheme about the topic. (I’m biased towards this book because I had a hand in its creation, and because Graham is one of my closest and dearest friends. We’re colleagues, too: we host a long-running, popular YouTube podcast together. But all bias aside, the book has been a runaway bestseller because the consensus is that it’s a brilliant, hilarious, and moving read.)

Dr. Az Hakeem has written two books from the perspective of a therapist who has seen first-hand that there’s a way for virtually all (98%) young people who are convinced that they need trans identities and sexchange surgeries that they can climb down from that belief and reconcile their minds with their bodies. His latest is the newest of the bunch of high profile trans books, and I haven’t read it yet, but I hear it’s very good.

I myself have taken a stab at a broad-overview essay, which imagines its reader as an otherwise uninformed liberal progressive looking to get a foothold into this subject. A Cliff’s Notes primer. My essay tries to pare this incredibly complex topic down to a few basic, digestible concepts to a reader who is otherwise hostile to gender-critical ideas. Here it is.

There’s no one way into this mess of a topic, and there’s no single, universal story that comes close to capturing it — yet. But I puzzle every night and day over whether such a solution is possible, in the way mathematicians and chessmasters probably puzzle over abstract theorems. I want so badly for there to be some kind of elegant, simple solution: an easily deployed explanation I can use to break my erstwhile friends free of the spell of gender madness. It’s a cult, and it’s stolen my life away because it’s stolen virtually all of my friends and colleages, and I keep wishing for some kind of science-fiction code word that will break them all out of the spell, like Angela Lansbury’s Queen of Diamonds playing card in The Manchurian Candidate — only in reverse: to break someone OUT of a mind-control trance, instead of inducing one.

There’s gotta be a solution out there somewhere that will solve this problem! Something to stop the madness!

Until we find one, I hope the recommendations come in handy for you.

Yes but.

Tensions within CNN over coverage of former President Donald J. Trump burst into the open on Thursday during an internal call with the network’s journalists, as an executive candidly questioned the approach of the channel’s new chief executive, Mark Thompson.

CNN aired roughly 10 minutes of Mr. Trump’s victory speech after he won the Iowa caucuses on Monday before cutting away. The decision to cut him off prompted derision from the former president and his allies, although critics on the left questioned why CNN had taken Mr. Trump live in the first place, given his tendency to spread falsehoods and conspiracies. MSNBC chose not to take any of his remarks live.

Mr. Thompson opened his morning conference call on Thursday by acknowledging a debate within his newsroom, saying he believed the network had a journalistic obligation to broadcast the remarks of the leading Republican candidate for president.

Not so fast.

Other things being equal, yes, news outlets do have that kind of obligation.

But other things are not equal.

Trump is not a normal political candidate. Trump is not even a normal human being. Trump is a monster and a terrible threat.

Mind you, not broadcasting his remarks might make him and his troops even worse.

But news people shouldn’t be talking about Trump as if he were a normal candidate and a normal human. Ever.

Is your dog Mormon or Catholic or Independent Fundamental Baptist?

An agency that supplies animals to the media has asked owners whether their pets are gender neutral or non-binary in a drive to be more “inclusive”.

Urban Paws, which describes itself as the leading animal talent agency in the UK, included four gender options on the application form owners are required to complete to register their pets: male, female, gender neutral/non-binary and prefer not to say.

Well it’s an animal talent agency, so it’s wall-to-wall lovvies, so it makes perfect sense. The kind of people who want their pets to make it in show biz are the kind of people who think “non-binary” is real and that it applies to non-human animals. Once you start believing in horseshit there’s no stopping point.

Yes it’s just unfathomable that women would want to be away from men in some circumstances isn’t it. It’s like saying crocodiles speak French.

Sex based rights create division, so women should not have any rights. Seems fair.

Sums it up.

So MR, a member of the board of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, doesn’t know whether a “non-binary” person has a sex? She isn’t qualified to answer that question? She would have to ask advice before answering it?

Then what is rape? If you don’t know the most basic facts about what sex humans are how can you understand what rape is? What are you doing on the board of a rape crisis center?

Naomi Cunningham points out that if you pretend [aka lie that] ERCC doesn’t employ men when its boss is a man, women who’ve been raped won’t feel safe there, let alone helped in any way.

My Twitter is heavy on the bizarre claims at the tribunal today.

“Confused” as in [cough] not being over-scrupulous about the truth.

Do NBs get to “present as male”? What does that even mean? Where did all these brains go when they left people’s heads?

MR is Mairi Rosko and she’s quite the piece of work.

As Naomi Cunningham said – “You need to tell the truth.”

Originally a comment by Artymorty on This novel should be about something completely different.

Talk about Not Getting it. Here’s yet another example of Canada becoming a global joke because it’s full of goody-two-shoes bureaucratic busybodies. I can’t imagine any other country treating its own literary legacy the way we do. If Lucy Montgomery wrote characters as annoying as Canadians appear to be today, no one would have bothered with the books.

It’s infuriating. Anne of Green Gables is surely Canada’s most famous book, and that’s because because Anne’s story has resonated with girls (and maybe a few boys, ahem) around the world, across cultures. It was never about ethnic or religious cultures, it was about a girl and her life, told colourfully and humanistically.

An Anne anecdote: when I was young, I briefly had a housemate, a seventeen or eighteen year old Japanese girl named Reiko, who had run away from her troubled home in Japan to Prince Edward Island, so obsessed with Anne of Green Gables she had been. A sympathetic retired couple on the island took her into their home for a while — how very Anne of Green Gables-like! But she eventually moved to Toronto, I guess because there’s not much work in PEI besides… I don’t know, lobster fishing, potato farming, and more Japanese Green Gables tourists?

It still amazes me that she travelled all the way across the globe as a sixteen or seventeen year old, all by herself, to PEI, because her love of Anne was so strong.

Reiko’s is a sad story, though: teenage runaways, especially undocumented girls from Asia with no family in the country, don’t tend to thrive. She ended up working in a “parlour” for a while, but me and a couple other housemates got her out of there and away from the sleazy pimp who had convinced her he was her boyfriend, and she eventually went back to Japan to try and work her life out. So… not a very Anne of Green Gables-like story in the end.

But there’s something in this anecdote about the fact that characters like Anne have a lot of meaning and significance to girls going through difficult situations all around the world. Anne of Green Gables ain’t broke. So don’t fix it.

Oh come on.

Federal commemoration of Anne Of Green Gables will be reworked with “new narratives” from Indigenous, Black and French perspectives, Parks Canada said yesterday. 

Look, if you dislike Anne of Green Gables because it’s too white then don’t commemorate it, but if you are going to commemorate it then leave it the fuck alone. It’s a brilliant work, and really very progressive in a lot of ways.

Novels depicting the red-haired orphan raised by a white, English-speaking Presbyterian couple on Prince Edward Island have been bestsellers since 1908…

WRONG. They’re not a couple, you dumbfucks, they’re sister and brother.

‘Cultures not currently presented, e.g. Acadians, Black, Indigenous and people of colour, will be shared with visitors.’

What for? Just for the sake of pissing on a classic novel about a girl because it isn’t about something else? Everyone and everything can’t be “presented” in every novel so just get over yourselves.

Sicker and sicker and sicker.

Believe men can be women, or convincingly pretend to, or else you’re terminated. From a rape crisis centre run by a man. You couldn’t make it up.

When it’s not pronouns it’s “respect” for clerics or bosses or royal personages.

A Thai court has sentenced a man to 50 years in jail for comments deemed to have defamed the monarchy – the highest ever sentence handed down under the country’s notorious lèse majesté law.

Thirty-year-old Mongkol Thirakot was originally sentenced to 28 years for posts he made three years ago on Facebook. But on Thursday an appeals court added an extra 22 years to the sentence.

50 years ffs.

The lèse majesté law criminalises any negative comment about the monarchy. The law, which has been widely criticised, is still in force despite the election last year of a civilian government for the first time in 10 years.

This is a bad habit humans have. We need to get over it.

Odd choice.

Helen. above all, just wants people to value evidence-based epistemology and the free exchange of ideas.

Just say no.

It is “highly, highly unlikely” that a trans woman with a history of violence against women will be sent to a female prison, MSPs have been told.

Never mind the highly highly; just don’t do it. Ever.

Teresa Medhurst, the head of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), said such a move would only happen in “exceptional circumstances”, after a “fairly in-depth analysis of the individual’s life history.”

Oh well if it’s fairly in-depth that makes it fine.

The SPS boss was being grilled by MSPs over the service’s new Policy for the Management of Transgender People in Custody, published at the end of last year. It was developed following the row over trans rapist, Isla Bryson, who first appeared in court as Adam Graham.

Following conviction, the SPS made the decision to divert Bryson to Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only women’s prison, rather than the planned destination of HMP Barlinnie, sparking outrage. 

Yeah no shit. Endangering a bunch of women for the sake of the feelings of one violent man – what the hell is wrong with you?

The new policy is due to come into force in February 2024. It initially states that a transgender woman “will not be eligible to be considered for admission or transfer to a women’s prison” if they have been convicted for a raft of crimes, including murder, assault, robbery, abduction, rape, and sexual harassment.

However, it then goes on to say that there is an exception to this rule if the SPS’s Risk Management Team, and subsequently an executive panel, “are satisfied there is compelling evidence that they do not present an unacceptable risk of harm to those in the women’s prison.“

What would such “compelling evidence” look like? And why does it have to be compelling? Why are there all these barriers in place to prevent men from being sent to men’s prisons? Why is so much energy being devoted to forcing helpless women into the presence of men 24/7?

Unison is supposed to be a labor union aka a trade union. It bills itself as the union for public service workers. And yet…

The Hackney branch of this labor union bashing the local Labour candidate for not believing that men can be women. Solidarity Forever eh???

“Unison” but not for women.

“Community” seeks to banish the witch:

Kauai’s Bethany Hamilton is a surfer, author, mother, and shark attack survivor. 

She recently gave birth to her fourth child, competed in the Vans Pipe Masters, and was invited to attend the Oshkosh Women’s Fund’s Annual Power of the Purse event as the keynote speaker in Wisconsin. 

But in light of Hamilton’s stance on transgender athletes, the event’s been met with backlash as community members demand that she be replaced. 

Yeah what stance is that? Does she pile them up and stand on top of them?

The controversy stems from Hamilton’s early 2023 announcement that she would officially withdraw from future World Surf League competitions in response to its policy on allowing transgender athletes to compete.

I bet that’s not what she annnounced. The news media never get this right, so I’m betting they got this one wrong too. As always, the issue is not “transgender athletes” but men in women’s competitions.

In a letter obtained by WLUK-TV, members and allies of Oshkosh’s LGBTQ+community retaliated against the Fund’s decision to select Hamilton as the keynote speaker. In the lengthy letter, protesters explained their decision to boycott Hamilton. While the Fund’s mission is to “improve the lives of women, girls, and all members” of its community, the letter says Hamilton’s views do not. 

Letting men compete in women’s sports does not improve the lives of women and girls. It’s no doubt very nice for the men who do it, but it does no one else any good at all.