The Independent (once a real newspaper) being absurdly censorious about a woman calling a man a man:

JK Rowling is facing backlash again after deliberately misgendering trans activist India Willoughby.

Oh no, not backlash. How will she cope?

There’s no such thing as “misgendering.” It’s a made-up crime or error. India Willoughby is a man. He’s also a bully and a toad – why doesn’t the Indy report on that instead of hissing like a burst hot water pipe at women who refuse to obey his orders?

The Harry Potter author has faced repeated criticism in recent years over her views on transgender rights, saying previously that she would rather go to jail than refer to a trans person by their preferred pronouns.

Blar blar blar. Fools yammer at her, and for some strange reason she doesn’t give a shit.

On Sunday (3 March), Rowling shared a lengthy tirade against the idea of trans women being allowed in female locker rooms, writing: “When men – all men, however they identify – are banned from women’s spaces, those who disregard the ban can be challenged, inside the space and out.”

Tirade yourself, Indy. Lengthy yourself, Indy. Snotty tendentious wording noted and rejected with contumely.

Willoughby responded to Rowling’s comments on Monday, writing on X: “Genuinely disgusted by this. Grotesque transphobia, which is upsetting. I am every bit as much a woman as JK Rowling. Recognised in law, and by everyone I interact with every day. The debate about whether JK Rowling is a transphobe is over.”

But he’s not. MPs can pass all the laws they like saying men can be women, but it still won’t be true. Laws can’t change facts apart from facts about the laws.

Last week, Rowling hit out at Sky News for referring to murderer Scarlet Blake as a woman in its reporting.

No she didn’t. She said words; she didn’t hit anyone.

Mostly Cloudy pointed us to The Economist on the WPATH files.

Leaked discussions reveal uncertainty about transgender care

Already we’re in the woods, because calling it “care” is tendentious.

The files shed light on a controversial area of medicine that has largely retreated into the shadows

A big stride farther into the woods, because it’s not really medicine as commonly understood. It’s more like tampering.

Few areas of medicine arouse as strong emotions in America as transgender care.

Not really medicine and not really care. Experimentation perhaps, stripped of most of the usual cautions.

It’s strange that such a reckless ideological pseudo-medical trend has even conservative publications like The Economist mouthing the jargon.

The publication this week of hundreds of posts from an internal messaging forum will add fuel to this fire. The files show members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (wpath), an interdisciplinary professional and educational association devoted to the field, discussing how to treat patients.

The non-profit group that obtained and published the files, Environmental Progress, which pushes strong views on more than just the environment, claims that the documents reveal “widespread medical malpractice on children and vulnerable adults”. That claim is questionable. 

Well sure it is, but so is the claim that giving people cross-sex hormones and neo-genitalia is medical care.

But wpath standards of care have previously been cited by other medical organisations, particularly in America. The discussions of its members show that the provision of so-called gender-affirming care is riddled with far more doubt than wpath’s outward message that such interventions are “not considered experimental”.

And why is that? Because so many lunatics are so determined to make these horrifyingly drastic interventions seem normal and beneficial.

Based on the files, wpath has members who are worryingly dogmatic. But mostly the exchanges reveal a group of surgeons, social workers and therapists struggling with how best to serve patients. They debate the challenges of gaining informed consent for medical treatments from children and people with mental-health disorders.

Except, yet again, that the “medical treatments” are not medical treatments as commonly understood. They’re new and experimental and drastic. This fact matters.

Concerns about making irreversible changes to children’s bodies, and the impossibility of gaining their informed consent for this, have been at the heart of controversy over transgender medicine. In America 23 states have now restricted or banned such care for minors, even though almost all medical associations in America support it…

Which itself is bizarre.

The surgeon from California shares his website, which includes a menu of surgical options, and adds that he’s “quite comfortable tailoring my operations to serve the needs of each patient”. This attitude to surgical shopping is uniquely American. Pandering to it will not help gender medicine with its argument that it is medically necessary and non-experimental.

There you go. This is what I’m saying. It applies to the whole thing, not just to the surgeon from California.

wpath, and those arguing for gender-affirming care more broadly, have felt the need to present a level of certainty in an area of medicine full of uncertainty. Bringing frank discussion into the open will surely be healthy. 

And not assuming that it is a genuine “area of medicine” will also surely be healthy.

So today there are the WPATH files.

Advocates of gender-affirming care say it’s evidence-based. But now, newly released internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical. American Medical Association, The Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and thousands of doctors worldwide rely on WPATH. It is considered the leading global authority on gender medicine. And yet WPATH’s internal files, which include written discussions and a video, reveal that its members know they are creating victims and not getting “informed consent.” Victims include a 10-year-old girl, a 13-year-old developmentally delayed adolescent, and individuals suffering from schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. The injuries described in the WPATH Files include sterilization, loss of sexual function, liver tumors, and death. WPATH members indicate repeatedly that they know that many children and their parents don’t understand the effects that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will have on their bodies. And yet, they continue to perform and advocate for gender medicine. The WPATH Files prove that gender medicine is comprised of unregulated and pseudoscientific experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults. It will go down as one of the worst medical scandals in history.

It’s always the internal files.

Originally a comment by Rob on By a reasonably clear margin.

For those who can’t access the Herald story, the StuffNZ version:

The man’s lawyer, Emma Priest, said this was a unique set of circumstances that would never be repeated by her client who has ADHD and autism and got caught up in the “frenzied Posie Parker protests”.

She said a conviction would be out of proportion to his offending and would result in difficulty in the young man gaining employment.

His ADHD and youth amplified his impulsivity that day. Priest said her client had taken responsibility, was truly remorseful and willing to engage in restorative justice – which was declined.

Since the offending, he has undertaken 180 hours of volunteer work at the Red Cross, completed the Man Alive programme and counselling sessions, Priest said. The man also offered to pay $1000 in reparation

IS ADHD, Autism, and youth and excuse for unprovoked assault on someone 45 years older than you? I don’t think so. If he’s truly remorseful and has undertaken substantial and appropriate community work to make amends – that is something that could be taken into account in sentencing. Community work would be a pretty typical sentence for a first offender of a ‘moderate’ assault. Even so, I think he has been very lucky indeed to have no conviction entered against his name. I also don’t think that he should have got name suppression. NZ Courts use this far too liberally in my view. They let him off, the least they could do is allow us all to decide how we interact with him in the future and evaluate his future behaviour.

Finally, much of that ‘frenzied atmosphere’ was whipped up by NZ media, especially Stuff. Collectively they ran many articles in the weeks leading up to PP’s visit. Universally they took a one sided view. Published untruths and did not correct them. Painted trans people as the most vulnerable ever whom of course we must all support, and painted PP and anyone who wanted to see her as the next best thing to a nazi hate group. Then they tsk tsk when the primed mob turns violent.

There were many complaints to the media ethics body following these events. The decision acknowledged that coverage had been very one sided, but said that coverage could be balanced over time. That of course has not happened.

Another turn of the screw, and another, and another…

That’s two men who are UN Women UK delegates and two women who are not UN Women UK delegates.

And of course the Supreme Court has ruled – unanimously, albeit for different reasons – that the 14th Amendment doesn’t disqualify renowned insurrectionist Donald Trump. I can’t even be bothered to link to a source, because everything is so shit. Open season on women; the worst human on the planet still alive and still hell bent on breaking everything.

I need a picture of fluffy lambs or something.

Yes that will do.

That’s ok Sonny, we know you meant well. Get on with the rest of your life.

A young man who was filmed punching a 71-year-old woman in the head during the heated Posie Parker counter-protest in Auckland last year has been granted a discharge without conviction and permanent name suppression.

Because men matter and women don’t, you see.

Judge Glubb said the gravity of a conviction on the young man would be out of proportion to the seriousness of his offending.

He fractured her skull. With his fist. In her face.

In a victim impact statement, she told the court that since the assault, she had been unable to go out and interact with people. She could not sleep without taking medication and any noise caused her severe stress, she said. “The crime itself has had a huge impact on my general wellbeing,” she said.

…

“I’m satisfied by a reasonably clear margin a conviction would be out of all proportion to the gravity of the offence,” Judge [Kevin] Glubb said.

I’m honestly astounded that a judge would say that. He’s saying a man punching a woman in the face so hard that he fractures her skull is trivial.

Open season on women. Go ahead, boys, you’re allowed.

Hell and damnation. The large young man who punched an elderly woman in the face and broke her eye socket in NZ last year has gotten away with it. He even gets to remain anonymous.

It’s just fucking open season on women, isn’t it.

JKR is kicking the ant nest today. Doing a fine job of it, too.

I’m jealous of “a lot of you think the UN should intervene whenever women bruise your egos.”

Uh oh uh oh! She roused the Willoughby!

How dare you! Recognized in law AND REALITY! I missed that bit – when did reality announce that it recognizes Willoughby as officially a woman? Someone alert the BBC.

Updating to add –

This is what it’s all about. Fact and opinion. It’s not an opinion that men are not women, it’s a fact, but it’s treated as if it were an opinion, and (not coincidentally) a forbidden one at that. Cath Walton at The Critic:

A funny thing happened to me on the way to BBC redundancy. I was put through a lengthy disciplinary process for saying truthful things about sex and gender — not quite the same as the very visible farce that unfolded last week around Justin Webb and the complaint against him, but an earlier example of the BBC’s festering problem with accuracy around biological sex.

The festering problem is the “It’s true but you mustn’t say it” one.

(There are plenty of truths one shouldn’t say in ordinary everyday non-journalistic life, but journalism is a different thing altogether. If it ain’t true it ain’t journalism.)

The truth has become punishable: the lie that trans-identified men are women is not. So here’s my tale, and I hope it helps explain the BBC’s contortionist thinking on accuracy and impartiality around sex and gender.

A couple of years ago the BBC started using the word “cis” as if it meant something real.

The BBC Academy teaches that it’s important journalists don’t adopt activist language as their own — and I feared that “cis” was to become normalised by repeated use, just as gender identity did.

It’s fascinating that the BBC teaches that because good grief.

So I decided to write a Twitter thread about “cis”, figuring that at least if someone complained, then editorial managers would have to read it, and any complaints would themselves prove it was a contested political term that shouldn’t be adopted.

The idea that if something is true, it is not an opinion, is at the root of this journalistic dilemma.

And the whole thing, really. The whole war over trans ideology. If it were true it wouldn’t be an ideology, but it’s not true, so there you go.

It explained that using “cis” involves accepting a system of belief underpinned by an understanding that there are two types of women, male women and female women, and this is as yet scientifically unsupported. (I didn’t really need the “as yet” but I thought I’d cover my bases).  

Or rather underpinned by a misunderstanding that there are two types of women. Underpinned by a confusion, or more bluntly, a lie. (Of course she didn’t want to put it that way to her bosses; I’m just pointing out how much truth she had to leave out because the BBC is so corrupted by this stupid ideology.)

Within about an hour I was told to take it down by my then boss on the News Channel for allegedly breaching the social media rules. After an afternoon of emailing, we brought another editor into the conversation. But neither was able to explain which part of the thread was untrue, and therefore might fall into the error of opinion.

Spoiler: they never were able to do that. They still aren’t.

So there was a hearing, there were reports, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, all without being able to find anything untrue in what she said.

Then Russia attacked Ukraine and she told her boss she was willing to delete, because she wanted to move on.

By then, deletion wasn’t enough. This is the most extraordinary part. I was told to admit to managers that I’d been wrong and would never do it again, or the disciplinary would proceed.

This wasn’t just policing of public speech, which is part and parcel of everyone’s contract. It was a demand that I internally confess my wrongthink, and repent. Obviously I wasn’t going to do that. Everything I’d said was true, and no one had been able to identify a single opinion I’d publicly expressed. In fact, to this day, that is the case.  

And that sums up this whole god damn tedious war, doesn’t it. All we’re doing is telling the truth, and the result is endless denunciation and shunning and expulsion and sometimes outright violence.

What this says, in effect, is that if the facts are on one side of a debate, we mustn’t articulate them, because it would reveal your thinking. The very willingness to make certain indisputable statements about biological sex is the crime, because gender activists have rendered the debate landscape so toxic and chilling that truth has become an emblem of defiance rather than clarity.  

…

Many people have understood for some time that this is the case, but the Executive Complaints Unit ruling has now made it public policy. Biological sex has officially became a mere “viewpoint”. 

See also: the sex of men who murder other men by strangling them.

Voting for stupid.

[W]ith an entirely preventable outbreak of measles spreading across Florida, medical experts are questioning if quackery really has become official health policy in the nation’s third most-populous state.

As the highly contagious disease raged in a Broward county elementary school, [Florida Surgeon General Joseph] Ladapo, a politically appointed acolyte of Florida’s far-right governor Ron DeSantis, wrote to parents telling them it was perfectly fine for parents to continue to send in their unvaccinated children.

…

Ladapo’s advice deferring to parents or guardians [on] a decision about school attendance directly contradicts the official recommendation of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which calls for a 21-day period of quarantine for anybody without a history of prior infection or immunization.

It’s not a situation in which the glories of free choice should trump medical expertise. Choice is a good thing, ceteris paribus, but avoiding a dangerous disease is an even better thing.

It is also in keeping with Ladapo’s previous maverick proclamations about vaccines that health professionals say pose an unacceptable danger to the health of Florida residents. They include official guidance to shun mRNA Covid-19 boosters based on easily disprovable conspiracy theories that the shots alter human DNA and can potentially cause cancer – “scientific nonsense” in the view of Dr Ashish Jha, a former White House Covid response coordinator.

Yes but you see they’re all in on the plot. Just ask Naomi Wolff.

Reporting false information, incidentally, is something Ladapo is familiar with himself. He was found to have personally manipulated data in a 2022 study of Covid-19 vaccines to wrongly assert they posed an elevated risk of cardiac illness or death in young men.

Shouldn’t that get him disqualified? At a bare minimum?

Ladapo has been hailed a “superstar” by DeSantis, who sidelined then dumped his predecessor Scott Rivkees for contradicting the governor’s position on social distancing and face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ladapo became a vocal cheerleader of the governor’s anti-mask, vaccine and lockdown decrees; and was a prominent member of Frontline Doctors of America, a fringe cluster of radical physicians that pushed ineffective medicines such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Oh well. It’s not the most populous state in the country. Texas and California have more.

Happy to oblige.

Storyhouse part 2. To recap: Storyhouse Chester did a purported Weekend of Events Celebrating Women & Girls which included women on the stage berating women in the audience for not being on board with talking about men who playact women at an event celebrating women.

The chief berater on the stage, I’ve now learned, was Patsy Stevenson, the woman who bounced to fame by making the Sarah Everard vigil All About Her. Here she is again:

Listen to what she says. Those pesky women in the audience asking questions get trans people murdered. She actually said that. Someone applauded when she said that.

On the upside, there were roughly 40 people in the audience. The places seats 800.

Storyhouse’s promo for Patsy Stevenson’s talk:

Join us for an impactful afternoon with Patsy Stevenson, an award-winning Campaigner, Equal Rights Activist, public speaker, and writer. Patsy, named Harper’s Bazaar Woman of the Year, rose to prominence after her arrest at the Sarah Everard Vigil captured public attention. 

That is, she exploited Everard’s murder to “rise to prominence.”

Also: “impactful.” Get out. Go on, get out, right now.

In her keynote speech, Patsy will delve into the essence of activism, sharing personal anecdotes and the unexpected journey of her arrest photo going viral. She’ll address the issue of misogyny within the police force and explore community-driven solutions to reclaim our streets for safer walks home. Additionally, Patsy will unveil exciting news about her forthcoming book, set to be published in Spring 2024. 

In short, she’ll talk about herself.

This house is your house…unless, of course, you are a feminist woman.

“Proudly trans inclusive” means “proudly feminist excluding.”

Behold, how inclusive:

It was a Weekend of Events Celebrating Women & Girls and yet…

Hadley Freeman:

The convicted murderer Scarlet Blake, previously known as Fangze Wang, is male. That is why he is going to a men’s prison, after being found guilty last week of strangling Jorge Martin Carreno in what was described in court as a sexually motivated killing. And yet, Thames Valley police have recorded Blake’s crime as having been committed by a woman: “Blake identified as a female in custody. As such, Blake is recorded as female in our recording system,” a spokesman for the force said.

That’s stupid. What if Blake identified as Rishi Sunak? Or Charles Windsor? Or Maggie Smith? Or a detective chief inspector with Thames Valley Police?

Yet because gender ideologues have energetically promoted the idea that gender identity is sacred, and that a man who says he’s a woman should be treated with the same respect as one who comes out as gay, the media, the police and even the court have dutifully referred to Blake as “she”.

You know what else is “sacred” i.e. worthy of respect in a democratic society? Telling the truth. That applies especially to items like who bashed and strangled and drowned this man?

…as a teenager Blake was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock in London, the NHS’s only youth gender clinic, which has since been shut after numerous concerns about its methods.

He was given puberty blockers at 17 and hormone treatment the following year. He is now 26, so this would mean he was under the Tavistock’s care in about 2015-2016, a period when — as Hannah Barnes details in her 2023 book about the Tavistock, Time to Think — the clinic was prescribing blockers with especial enthusiasm, even though it was known that they affect bone density and cognitive and sexual development.

I suspect they don’t affect cognitive development in a good way.

Oh dear, no one seems to have noticed.

Learn to spell “head.”

Depressing for them that no one paid any attention.

Is this the V&A? Looks like the V&A.

Why this object in this place? What’s it got to do with the price of food?

Ok, I know, no need to shout – no reason and nothing. A moment of attention on Twitter. Achievement unlocked.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Of the communinny.

Of course the outsize benefit of identifying as trans is why we’re seeing more and more charlatans seize on trans identities as a get-rich-quick scheme, like Dylan Mulvaney, Abigail Thorn, and thousands and thousands more cropping up everywhere.

Plus there’s the fact that when you’re inside a “community” that brooks no dissent, you’re not going to say anything if you’re unhappy. If you do a comprehensive survey of Scientologists, they’ll report being the happiest, most satisfied people in the country — a 100% perfect satisfaction rate. After all, Scientology is the greatest discovery on the planet, and on all the other planets, too! They’ll also report that Scientologists face more discrimination from outsiders than any other group. That outsiders who don’t agree with the in-group’s most bizarre demands are an existential threat is a core tenet of any cult or sect. (And it’s actually true: rational ideas do indeed threaten people’s commitment to Scientology, or gender identity ideology.)

Honestly, why do people bother doing surveys like this? We already know exactly what responses are and aren’t allowed to be expressed by this group. What’s next? “Over 99% of Muslims in Saudi Arabia report a strong belief in the holy truth of the Quran and high levels of satisfaction with their religion.” No fucking shit; thanks for clearing that up.

Interesting. One football club drops a player who was charged with domestic abuse, and another football club grabs him up. Thanks, lads.

On Thursday, with his team mired in the Championship’s relegation zone, [Sheffield Wednesday head coach Danny] Rohl announced his intention to sign free-agent left-back Nico Schulz. Schulz had been training at the club.

Why is he a free agent? He was released by Borussia Dortmund last year after being charged with domestic abuse. Schulz denied the allegations.

Legal proceedings came to an end this week when the case against him was dropped. Schulz agreed to pay €150,000 (£128,000) to domestic violence charities — but was not convicted, with the case officially dropped.

SO let’s err on the side of “the bitch lied” and get on with training.

Schulz’s former partner reported him to German police over domestic abuse allegations in June 2022. The Dortmund district court approved charges against him in February 2023, before the city’s public prosecutor brought those charges to court last December.

The public prosecutor’s office declared charges over the following three accusations:

• (January 2020) After throwing a cup of water on the floor, Schulz allegedly kicked her in the stomach, pushed her against a door, pulled her hair, and threw her against a mirror.
• (March 2020) Straight after coming out of the shower, Schulz pulled her down, kicked her stomach, choked her, and hit her twice.
• (August 2020) While pregnant, he targeted her with misogynistic language, took a key from her, and spat in her face, leading to her fleeing into a nearby business.

But she didn’t want to give evidence, so

…this week the court decided to drop the case if he paid five different charities, including one focused on domestic violence, €30,000 (£26,000) each within three months. He will not have a criminal record.

So Borussia Dortmund thought it worth dropping him but Sheffield Wednesday thought it worth hiring him.

How nice for him. Not so nice for the women he cheated.

Nice smirk, too.

Survey finds.

A survey of more than 90,000 transgender people in the U.S. — the largest nationwide survey of the community ever — found that trans people continue to experience workplace and medical discrimination. However, the overwhelming majority of them still report more life satisfaction after having transitioned. 

That’s all very well but it’s far from the only question. You could let a bunch of people do whatever they want and then survey them and find they liked doing whatever they want. It’s not surprising that people like to do something they want to do. The question remains, what about everyone else?

To be blunt, at this point I don’t even care whether trans people experience more life satisfaction or not. I’m too busy caring about the rest of us and our life satisfaction. Other things being equal, sure, it would be great if everyone had peak life satisfaction, but when one tiny set of people’s life satisfaction depends on fracturing the rights of women and same-sex attracted people and confused children, then I can’t really celebrate the news that our trans siblings are enjoying their new prominence.