“organized transphobic violence”
She doesn’t “have to say” that of course; she chose to.
Arguing that gender is not something to celebrate but a system of oppression which should be rejected is not “organized transphobic violence.”
But this guy knows better.
Reading that gender is a system of oppression will encourage violence!
What must it be like being an academic now? Can you imagine having to teach students who believe all this crap? To say nothing of having colleagues who do.
Oh yeah? And they’re the only ones, are they?
The mental health of the UK’s transgender community is at crisis point, with many people “hanging by a string”, professional bodies and support groups have told the Guardian.
The stark warnings follow a week of intensified public discussion of transgender rights as the government moved to exclude trans people from a ban on conversion practices.
What are “transgender rights”? They’re so often mentioned and so rarely spelled out.
And, for the umpteenth time, “conversion” is the wrong word – the loaded word, the inaccurate word, the thumb on the scale word. It’s not a form of “conversion” to provide therapy and discussion before making permanent physical changes that could be regretted. The phrase “conversion therapy” was coined to name the practice of trying to talk people out of being lesbian or gay. Being lesbian or gay involves zero permanent physical changes – no surgeries, no binders, no hormones, no puberty blockers, nothing.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission also published guidance saying transgender people could legitimately be excluded from single-sex services if the reasons were “justifiable and proportionate”.
That is, men could legitimately be excluded from women’s spaces. For the millionth time it’s not a generic “transgender people” issue, it’s a women’s right to women-only services issue.
The focus on such issues has raised concerns among experts, who see a direct line between statements made by politicians and individual wellbeing. “There is strong evidence that minorities experience greater levels of stress when their rights are being debated,” said Dr Adam Jowett, the chair of the British Psychological Society’s Sexualities Section.
And so do women. We’re not literally a “minority” but we are a set of people treated as inferior to the other set of people. We get stressed when our rights are being debated, and dismissed and ignored, too. But, you know, yawn yawn – all those millions of boring women, telling you to hang your coat up – we can’t be bothered to care about their rights and their stress. Trans people are so much more exciting.
Helen Belcher, the chair of the education and advocacy group TransActual and a Lib Dem councillor, said: “I am furious that our equalities body is telling me that I am a second-class citizen and can only do things if everyone else is OK with it. Now every trans woman in the country is gearing up to fight to have a wee. It’s vile.”
But women who want to have a wee without men in the adjoining cubicles? Meh.
Another meeting at the corner of Inclusion and Fairness.
“And what this UK sport document says is,” says Ed Milliband at 1:00, “look, inclusion is important in sport but so too is fairness.”
But inclusion isn’t “important in sport” in any blanket sense, for the very simple and obvious reason that much of sport is competitive, which rules out being generally “inclusive.” Competition is necessarily, inherently, non-inclusive. Competition excludes.
You can of course have “friendlies”; you can play games for the fun of it, you can decide not to keep score, you can bring everyone in and just run around and have a blast. But sport qua sport has winners and losers, so a generalized “inclusion” just is not part of the picture. Fairness, on the other hand, is not in tension with winning and losing.
And in conclusion, at 1:19, “I think there are tricky issues here, but I think, I come back to this point, which is: how would you be feeling as a trans person after the debate, the kind of debates that we’ve had in the last few weeks – I think you’d be feeling awful.”
But Mr. Milliband, what do you think women are feeling? Why don’t you come back to that point? Why do you think only about how a trans person is feeling? Why don’t you think also about how a woman is feeling? Why? Seriously, why? Why have trans persons shoved women off this bit of space where politicians and rights organizations and news media think about people who are feeling awful? Why are women no longer on the radar? Why do you single out trans people and ignore women?
A dishonest headline:
The usual lie told in the usual way – by concealing “men who identify as women” under the blanket “transgender.” Men can’t compete against women at British Cycling elite events.
They’ve now changed the headline, no doubt in response to a torrent of furious replies to that tweet. It now says:
Transgender women no longer able to compete at elite female events run by British Cycling
Men no longer able to force themselves into women’s races. Finally.
From the story:
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said earlier this week he did not believe transgender women should compete in female sporting events – a view he conceded might be “controversial”.
In response, LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall said: “Trans people deserve the same opportunities as everyone else to enjoy the benefits of sport, and blanket exclusions on trans people participating are fundamentally unfair.”
Same old lie. It’s not a “blanket exclusion on trans people participating,” it’s exclusion of men from women’s competitions.
The Stonewall lie is the last sentence in the piece. Of course it is.
Scientists believe they have been given an extraordinary view of the last day of the dinosaurs after they discovered the fossil of an animal they believe died that day.
Awkward sentence, but you get the idea. They think they’ve found a fossil dinosaur that was killed by the asteroid that smacked what’s now the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out nearly all animal life on the planet.
The perfectly preserved leg, which even includes remnants of the animal’s skin, can be accurately dated to the time the asteroid that brought about the dinosaurs’ extinction struck Earth 66m years ago, experts say, because of the presence of debris from the impact, which rained down only in its immediate aftermath.
The debris is there. I call that exciting.
“It’s absolutely bonkers,” said Phillip Manning, a professor of natural history at the University of Manchester.
…
He said the team had also discovered the remains of fish that had breathed in impact debris from the asteroid strike, which occurred 1,864 miles (3,000km) away in the Gulf of Mexico.
That and the presence of other debris that rained down for a specific period immediately after the asteroid strike allowed them to date the site much more accurately than standard carbon dating techniques.
Don’t look up.
Hadley Freeman on the breaking of the spell:
The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.
There aren’t the same kind of visuals coming out of prisons. At all. Lia Thomas is an absolute poster boy for This Is Not Fair. (It would be funny if it turned out he’s a double agent.)
Encouraged, no doubt, by the openness of the arguments about Thomas, protests kicked off again when it was announced that 21-year-old Emily Bridges — who, until last month, was racing as a man — would compete in the women’s British National Omnium Championship. Bridges was ruled out at the last minute when someone realised she was, rather awkwardly, still registered as a male cyclist. But a change of tone was palpable in British Cycling’s announcement afterwards that “fairness is essential”, and Sara Symington, the head of Britain’s Olympic cycling programme, said the UCI needed to change its policy of allowing transgender riders to compete against women.
The cracks are widening. There’s still an awful lot of widening left to do though.
Two weeks ago, the Times’s chief sports writer, Matt Dickinson, wrote on Twitter, “Are we really talking about fairness in sport in the transgender debate – or fear and prejudice?”
“Fairness” replied hundreds of women, including some from his own paper. The only replies agreeing with Dickinson were from other male sports writers, insisting that the way the trans women athletes had been treated was “horrendous and disgusting” (John Cross, Daily Mirror ) and “awful” (Martyn Ziegler, The Times) It’s sweet how males always stick together, isn’t it?
Sweet as in poisonous, yes.
Last month, Angela Rayner came up with a solution: “I think we should be taking it off social media and taking it away from commentators,” she intoned solemnly. Ah yes, censorship from the left. That always plays so well! Oddly, only a month earlier Rayner had been loudly insisting that the next leader of the Labour party will be a woman. Presumably that kind of woman-chat is permitted by Rayner, just not what a woman actually is.
I wonder if Rayner would think that prediction had come true if a trans woman became leader of the Labour party. I wonder if she wouldn’t think at all that it’s just more of the same but with lipstick.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg says he hasn’t given up on the Trump investigation.
The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, publicly discussed his office’s investigation into Donald J. Trump for the first time on Thursday, insisting that the inquiry has continued despite the recent resignations of two senior prosecutors who had been leading it.
Did they just misunderstand?
Mr. Bragg said in an interview that his office had recently questioned new witnesses about Mr. Trump and reviewed additional documents, both previously unreported steps in the inquiry.
But citing grand jury secrecy rules, Mr. Bragg declined to provide details on the new steps in the investigation, which has focused on whether Mr. Trump committed a crime in inflating the value of his hotels, golf clubs and other properties.
I wonder if it’s really focused on whether he did as opposed to whether they can prove it in court. Not the same things.
In December, Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., directed the two senior prosecutors leading the inquiry, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, to present evidence to a grand jury with the goal of seeking an indictment of Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg, two months into his tenure, halted that presentation after disagreeing with Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne on the strength of the case.
Their subsequent resignations led to public criticism of Mr. Bragg, particularly after The New York Times published a copy of Mr. Pomerantz’s resignation letter, in which he said he believed that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable. In the letter, Mr. Pomerantz also said that the investigation had been “suspended indefinitely.”
It’s reminiscent of the chickenshit club – what James Comey called prosecutors who were proud of never losing cases when he worked in the office of the SDNY US Attorney, because it hinted they avoided taking on cases they were likely to lose.
Lavery interview part 2 (I needed a break from transcribing).
At 35 minutes: Emma Barnett: “You have written ‘I’m quite sure that women’s rights are not, have never been, and must never be sex-based.’ [Lavery says “Yeah.”] But to those women who believe that they must have sex-based rights for a variety of reasons ranging from sport to women-only spaces for different purposes – you’ll be very familiar, our listeners will be as well – how can you say that with such surety?”
Lavery: “Well again I say it on the basis of twenty years of [? access? experts?], research, and teaching in the field, I have been doing this work for a long time.”
He’s an expert, you see. She’s not, we’re not, but he is. Credentials, my dear; you wouldn’t understand.
“The notion of sex-based rights is a very recent phenomenon,” he continues, “it hasn’t existed for more than a few years and it’s a really bad deal [or idea] for women.”
No. Rather, what’s happened in those “few years” is that men like him have tried to appropriate both womanhood and feminism, so we’ve been forced to keep pointing out that men like him are not women and do not get to take our stuff.
Lavery: “Here’s the thing, Emma, I actually had a debate with one of my GC friends -“
Barnett interjects to say GC=gender critical feminists.
” – I would say gender critical activists because I think many of them are explicitly not feminists, but I’m happy with whatever, but -“
Barnett [interrupting with some energy]: “Hang on, hang on, I’m sorry, Grace, Grace, just pause that thought – if you don’t want a world where the borders of what it is to be a woman are policed, why are you trying to police the borders of what it is to be a feminist, and what some women are meant to care about?”
Boom.
I’ll leave it there.
All the points missed at once.
What does “chronically underrepresented in sport” mean? How “represented” should they be? How does Owen Jones know?
Maybe the kind of people who are trans simply tend not to be into sport. Some people aren’t, you know.
But also, clearly being trans throws up some obstacles to being “represented” in sport. It throws up some obstacles that are not incidental and unnecessary, they’re inherent. Sport is all about bodies, and trans people mess with their bodies in ways that may make sport unpleasant or impossible or unfair to others or all three.
How does Owen Jones know that no “trans people” are pretending to be trans to get the advantage? He doesn’t, of course. He simply assumes it, which is pretty stupid for a purported journalist. I for one think Lia Thomas is pretending. I don’t know that, but I suspect it.
And finally, what is this childish “It’s who they are!” nonsense? No, actually, it isn’t who they are; the whole point is that it’s who they aren’t. That’s what “trans” means.
Ok I listened to Lavery on Woman’s Hour. I’m relieved: Emma Barnett didn’t let him get away with much. It starts at 17:25 in case you want to listen.
20:10 Lavery: “I think what we’re really talking about is do we think the category ‘woman’ designates a class of biological being, or do we think that it’s a political category whose meaning can change over time. I think reasonable people can take different perspectives on that question, but historically speaking the people who have taken the position that it is a biologically essential category have tended to be on the side of patriarchy, and those who have claimed that it is a political category that has been deployed to oppress a class of people have been feminists. In the UK at the moment those terms are contested, the terms of the contest are a little confusing.”
That’s just nonsense. It’s not the case that “historically” feminists thought “woman” was a political category as opposed to a biological one. Of course they didn’t, because there weren’t men like Lavery running around saying they get to be women too.
At 32:12 Emma asks “Do you not understand or perhaps sympathize as to why they think of that [the strength advantage and unfairness in sport] as proof that there is such a thing as the female body?”
Lavery: “Well again I’m not for a moment contesting that there is such a thing as a female body – you know, you’re asking me if I can sympathize with a position I’ve told you I don’t agree with, so I guess my answer is yes, I can understand why people would hold the view that there was a naturally occurring organic type, after all that is what patriarchy tells us every day, and it is a very difficult view to get your head out of.”
Emma: “Are you saying that every woman who believes that is effectively having their mind warped by patriarchy?”
Lavery: “Uh I wouldn’t use that phrase, I think that it is difficult to think one’s way out of structures that one is informed of frequently.”
He starts to waffle on but Emma interrupts him: “But the irony is obviously some of those people are very much feminists and have thought [of] nothing but about patriarchy and how to think their ways out of those structures and still come to the conclusion that the male body retains an advantage over the female body.”
Score!
At around 34:25 Lavery says it’s “a profound historical novelty” for feminists to think women are “a naturally occurring type” i.e. people with female bodies. “I do not think you could find a single feminist who would take that view prior to Caitlyn Jenner appearing on the front cover of Vanity Fair.”
Classic narcissistic man setting feminist women straight on what feminism is.
The word is “suspend” not “expel” or “remove” so I assume that means it’s temporary, but anyway, there it is. Of course other flagrant rights-violators remain.
Who's this bloke on Woman's Hour talking about what a woman is?
— Helen Saxby (@helensaxby11) April 7, 2022
Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on If they cannot answer a simple question.
Would Labour expect to go unchallenged if it had screwed over workers rights in favour of bosses, in the process espousing a mistaken and distorted view of relevant law promulgated by the bosses themselves?
That’s… pretty much New Labour though.
I mean, even from people who support that shift, you get the criticism that pre-Blair Labour “was mired in an ossified form of unionism and leftism that refused to recognise that the world had fundamentally changed. A spent political force facing oblivion” to quote Rob.
And there is some merit to that.
The British economy is 80% service sector. Contrast with 1950, when it was an even split between service sector and everything else. Classical “workers rights” approaches that focus on the shop floor, need to have shop floors to be relevant enough to win elections.
So however one may feel about it, Labour hasn’t really been a worker’s party for decades, to the point where suggesting it should be is controversial within the party.
Labour’s problem is that it is a centrist, not leftist, party. Centrism is often the politics of Nimbyism. This is what it means to be economically conservative, and socially liberal – left only so far as it is not your backyard.
I’m a guy, women’s rights aren’t my backyard. Rapists getting into women’s prisons for example, isn’t going to hurt me much, if I went to prison it would be to a men’s prison and having fewer rapists around would be, if anything, to my benefit in that circumstance.
Women’s sports, are sports I don’t compete in. Any concerns around trans inclusion in women’s sports aren’t in my backyard. I don’t go to women’s toilets unless the men’s side is out of order and there’s a pre-arrangement to that effect, so, that’s not really in my backyard either.
I could very easily proclaim TWAW and the costs of saying that, would fall on someone else. I can proclaim “TERFs” deeply “privileged” because it isn’t my prison, it isn’t my sports, and it isn’t my toilet.
At the same time, I’m relatively economically comfortable with a positive bank balance. I’ve got no debt, I’ve got savings. Raising wages, putting in market protections for local businesses and building a strong social welfare system raises economic demand, which also increases production thus reducing unemployment, but at the cost of higher inflation. If I were in debt, higher inflation would mean the bank eating some of that debt, but as I have savings, that’s not personally desirable for me.
If I was British, I would be the target market for New Labour. Being economically leftwing costs me money, whereas being socially leftwing costs me nothing. Centrism has the profound benefit of not being in my backyard.
Labour cannot campaign on economics, because to do so is to tread in the Nimby’s backyard. Pushing identity bullshit thus has to serve as a means of establishing leftwing credibility in its stead.
The current state of disorder within Labour is a natural result of centrist Nimbyism, and not everybody is a Nimby. To break out of that, requires some serious consideration of what Labour is really about – sans identity issues.
Scientists are trying to get people to wake up and smell the smoke.
I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?
On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.
But the planet is heating faster.
Even limiting heating to below 2°C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the press conference on Monday: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And yet, this is precisely what President Biden, most other world leaders, and major banks are doing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Chase and other banks are contributing to murder and neocide through their fossil fuel finance.
Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk. For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the “business as usual” occurring all around me. It’s so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it’s really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it’s really happening.
You’d think that would be clear enough in light of the wildfires and heat domes and desertification and floods that are already happening, but it seems not.
It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics.
The first cruise ship is due to arrive here in Seattle on April 11. They burn 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day.
The House voted on Wednesday to hold two of Donald Trump’s top advisers – Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino – in criminal contempt of Congress for their months-long refusal to comply with subpoenas issued by the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack.
The approval of the contempt resolution, by a vote of 220 to 203, sets the two Trump aides on the path toward criminal prosecution by the justice department as the panel escalates its inquiry into whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
…
The contempt citations approved by the House now head to the justice department and the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, who is required by law to weigh a prosecution and present the matter before a federal grand jury.
Should the justice department secure a conviction against the Trump aides, the consequences could mean up to a year in federal prison, $100,000 in fines, or both – though it would not force their compliance, and pursuing the misdemeanor charge could take months.
They tried to invoke “executive privilege” – you know, that thingy in the bottom drawer that makes it ok to steal an election.
At the business meeting last week where the select committee voted unanimously to recommend that the full House find Navarro and Scavino in contempt of Congress, Raskin delivered an emotional rebuke of the supposed executive privilege arguments.
“This is America, and there’s no executive privilege here for presidents, much less trained advisors, to plan coups and organize insurrections against the people’s government in the people’s constitution and then to cover up the evidence of their crimes.
“These two men,” Raskin said of Navarro and Scavino, “are in contempt of Congress and we must say, both for their brazen disregard for their duties and for our laws and our institutions.”
It all makes me rather emotional too, i.e. ragey.
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Lost in the fog, with added emphasis.
… political enemies who care much less about the issue than they enjoy watching Labour fall apart.
Maybe a party whose members and leader are unable, or unwilling, to define one of the classes of people whose protected characteristics are enshrined in UK law isn’t really ready to govern. If they don’t know what a woman is, they’re not fit for office. If they know what a woman is but are afraid to say it then they are even less fit for office. Sometimes standing up and saying “no” is more important than being “kind” (or “kind of scared.”)
Many (if not most) of those asking for Labour’s definition of woman are not “political enemies” but are simply trying to wake the party up. They realize that Labour’s position is wrong and misguided but are unwilling to let it slide. The Labour Party is being held to account by those whom it seeks to represent. Is this not the very heart of democracy? Accountability and representation? If they cannot answer a simple question, if they are willing to give away rights that are not theirs to give in order to avoid pissing off a tiny, aggressive minority making unreasonable and unethical demands, how can they be trusted to govern honestly and openly? How is it that women are expected to sacrifice their own political interests in favour of men who are trying to take their places and spaces? Would Labour expect to go unchallenged if it had screwed over workers rights in favour of bosses, in the process espousing a mistaken and distorted view of relevant law promulgated by the bosses themselves? Not bloody likely. Well, this is the same but worse, because they’re helped to screw over half the population in one go, and they’re too stupid or cowardly to acknowledge it.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand where people get the confidence to talk this kind of confused nonsense.
Why, at this moment of both national and international crisis, has the media decided that the most important question for a party that hasn’t been in government for 12 years, is a hypothetical one about genitals?
One, they haven’t – media questions are not exclusively about genitals, or gender. Two, news flash: women’s rights still matter.
It’s not really about vaginas, it’s a quest for the “gotcha” moment, the inescapable trap of deliberately twisted logic which merits unpicking.
It’s not really about vaginas perhaps, but it is really about women. If white people were furiously agitating to be “validated” as Black I think Zoe Williams would see the problem, but when it’s men, somehow she can’t make it out through the fog.
Labour’s position has not changed since 2019 – it supports both the reform of the GRA and single-sex spaces. This is the next battleground for gender-critical feminists, who would like to see the party drop its support for reform, on the basis that any such move allows for more trans people – generally cast by some as predatory men – to access single sex spaces. When faced with the question of what defines a man or a woman, Labour is not only being implicitly asked to row back on its own policy, but also to backtrack on current legislation which says that trans men are men and trans women are women, regardless of whether they have undergone medical treatments.
Legislation could “say” that airplanes are oak trees, but that wouldn’t make it true. Trans women are men who want to “live as” women; they’re not literally women.
As things stand now, the government has blocked reforms to the GRA and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has provided guidelines extending the circumstances under which trans people can be excluded from single-sex spaces.
But the issue isn’t about “trans people” being excluded from single-sex spaces, it’s about men being excluded from [some] women’s spaces. That’s not a quibble, it’s essential. The men aren’t being excluded because they’re trans, they’re being excluded because they’re men. Williams frames it as cruel irrational exclusion of trans people, and that’s dishonest.
“Legitimate justifications” now include female-only fitness classes and the toilets of places of worship where it may offend people, on religious grounds, to have inclusive spaces.
There it is again. No, not “inclusive spaces”; toilets where men can intrude on women.
I can’t even wrap my head around the person who doesn’t want anybody trans in their aerobics class…
Again – it’s not the “trans” bit, it’s the male bit.
Labour needs to take a stand based on principles of equality with which they are familiar. They could also maybe learn from their history of being wedged – on Brexit, and long before that, on nuclear disarmament – by political enemies who care much less about the issue than they enjoy watching Labour fall apart.
What principles of equality? What does trans dogma have to do with equality?
When the left is mired up to its nostrils in fantasies sometimes even Boris Johnson gets it right.
Boris Johnson has said he does not “think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events”, amid the fallout from his decision not to ban conversion practices for people questioning their gender.
Well, as we have seen, that all depends on what you’re calling “conversion.” I don’t consider it “conversion” to tell a man he’s not a woman.
Johnson also said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which were “dedicated to women”.
Imagine that. Just imagine thinking a woman in prison shouldn’t have to share a cell with a rapist.
He also insisted it was right to exclude people who were questioning their gender from a long-promised ban on so-called conversion “therapy”.
Or, to translate, he also insisted it was right to encourage people who were questioning their gender to think carefully and talk to a therapist before making irreversible changes to their bodies.
It doesn’t sound so malevolent put that way, does it. Why not talk to a therapist first? Why not think seriously about the possibility of regret down the road?
Johnson said: “I suppose I’d just make a few points: I don’t think that it’s reasonable for kids to be deemed so-called Gillick competent to take decisions about their gender or irreversible treatments that they may have. I think there should be parental involvement at the very least. That’s the first thing.
“Second thing, I don’t think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events. And maybe that’s a controversial thing, but it just seems to me to be sensible.”
The prime minister added: “We will have a ban on gay conversion therapy, which to me is utterly abhorrent. But there are complexities and sensitivities when you move from the area of sexuality to the question of gender. There, I’m afraid, there are things that I think still need to be worked out.”
In other words gender and sexuality are not the same thing, so it’s not just self-evident that they should be bundled together.
It’s bizarre to see BJ talking more sense than the other team, but there it is.
More on Fawcett. Check out their staff – most of them were hired in the last six months. It doesn’t say how long the CEO has been there, but other than the CEO the staffer who has been there the longest (hired in 2016) is…
…a man.
ANDREW BAZELEY, POLICY, INSIGHT & PUBLIC AFFAIRS MANAGER
Andrew joined Fawcett in 2016. He works across the breadth of issues Fawcett campaigns on, developing research proposals, formulating policy based on that evidence, and advocating for change in a lead role within our public affairs team. He has led on work including our Local Government Commission, in the development of our Equal Pay Bill, and on our Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood. Before joining Fawcett he worked for three years in Parliament, including as a policy advisor on work and pensions issues, and for four years in local government including a year spent managing a ‘big data’ team. Andrew holds a Masters in Public Policy from Birkbeck College, where he is also studying for a Law degree in his spare time, which there isn’t much of as he’s also a new dad.
I guess he’s there to make sure Fawcett “balances” women’s rights with those of the people who matter.
