Yasssssss.

Police officers unlawfully interfered with a man’s right to freedom of expression by turning up at his place of work to speak to him about allegedly “transphobic” tweets, the high court has ruled.

Harry Miller, a former police officer who founded the campaign group Fair Cop, said the actions of Humberside police had a “substantial chilling effect” on his right to free speech.

Miller, 54 and from Lincolnshire, claims an officer told him he had not committed a crime, but that his tweeting was being recorded as a “hate incident”.

At this point in the story I always pause to think about the torrents of abuse that have been poured over women on Twitter, with neither the police … Read the rest

Yes, that’s right, frame it as “first for transgender athlete!!” as opposed to “man hopes to qualify for women’s Olympics.” Make it sound like an exciting innovation as opposed to a man cheating a woman out of a place at the Olympics.

On Dec. 8, 2019, 28-year-old Megan Youngren became one of 63 women at the California International Marathon to officially qualify for the 2020 U.S. Olympic marathon trials, the race that will determine the team for Tokyo. Her 40th-place finish in 2:43:52 came as both a relief and a reward, after four months of intense training. But it also marked another significant moment: With her qualification, Youngren is set to make history on Feb. 29 as the first

Interesting. I saw the tweet, and found it exceedingly disgusting, but didn’t quite make the connection. Good thing other people did.

Another corrupt quid pro quo, but this time broadcast on Twitter for all the world to see https://t.co/OSuUZEpxWJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 13, 2020

YES, HE IS! https://t.co/YIWrCxPstm

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) February 13, 2020

New York Attorney General files this appropriately defiant response to the latest round of presidential quid pro quo extortion, and the media, members of Congress, and Twitter yawn? What is going on. This is Ukraine again. Wake up, people? Thank God the NY AG is awake, at least! https://t.co/Zr6TfYr50k

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) February 13, 2020

Holy cow! He appears to be engaging

Barr has been putting on a show of indignation.

Attorney General Bill Barr told ABC News on Thursday that President Donald Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case” but should stop tweeting about the Justice Department because his tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

I can all but hear them planning it. “Pretend you’re pissed off about my tweets.” “Hahahaha sir you’re a genius.”

Barr ignited a firestorm this week after top Justice Department officials intervened in the sentencing of Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser to the president who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

In a stunning reversal, the

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Define “civil liberty“.

It all comes down to the initial claim that trans people actually are the sex they feel they are. Yet too often rebuttals are dismissed with the insistence that these academic, intellectual debates ignore the suffering and needs of real, live people.

Yet we are told that we must prioritise the suffering and needs of some few, real live trans identified males over the suffering and needs of all real, live women and girls. We are told that there is no actual conflict since, because “transwomen are women”, they are all in fact the same group, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot who desrves … Read the rest

Well that’s a mess.… Read the rest

Another day another letter.

Letter signed by some @UniKent academics&students demanding I be no platformed (I'm speaking there on working-class women and feminism). Unsurprisingly, offers no evidence of how my views or research are "transphobic". These scholars can be contacted at kentopenletter@gmail.com. pic.twitter.com/HE5W12uwDE

— Selina Todd (@selina_todd) February 13, 2020

I haven’t been able to find the letter in non-image form so I’ll just have to proceed with this one. The very first sentence is odd – colleagues at the University of Kent have recently been informed that the university “has chosen to uphold the invitation to Selina Todd” – as if there were something shady about inviting someone to speak and then not withdrawing the invitation. As if the … Read the rest

The ACLU’s Staff Attorney on their National LGBT & HIV Project:

Three cis girls actually filed a lawsuit in CT today claiming that they face irreparable harm & sex discrimination because their trans peers are able to participate fully in school life. Imagine that being your legacy into adulthood? Urging the state to police young Black women.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) February 13, 2020

They’re not “cis” girls. Chase Strangio doesn’t get to other them from their own sex like that. They’re just girls. They didn’t choose it, they were born it, as we all were. That doesn’t make them a subcategory of their sex.

But even more dishonest is that “because their trans peers are able to participate fully … Read the rest

Why do this?

Why hedge it? Why say “self-identifying woman” instead of just “woman”?

Why can’t women just be women any more?… Read the rest

God damn ACLU.

Trans youth know who they are. Andraya just wants to run, yet she is under attack.

Andraya knows where she belongs: Running on the girls team. pic.twitter.com/o2cGwQII2m

— ACLU (@ACLU) February 12, 2020

“Andraya,” who is a boy, “just wants to run” against girls, so that he will have a nice big unfair advantage.

Even if Andraya really does think of himself as a girl, and really does think that he “feels like a girl” on the inside (the meaning of which is impossible to pin down), he still should not, and should not be allowed to, compete against actual girls. It’s grossly unfair and it should not be allowed.

These attacks aren't new. Sports have

Here’s the exchange between Selina Todd and Lloyd Russell-Moyle: just the audio.

So, Russell-Moyle didn’t say: “If people don’t consider transwomen to be women then that is against the law and they should face disciplinary procedures.” He said, beginning at about 6:30:

Well if they say a trans woman is not a woman and I will never recognize that, that’s against the law, and actually they should either have to explain themselves in great detail, and if they were unable to do that, then yes they should look at disciplinary procedures

Similar but not the same, and especially he didn’t say “consider” but “say,” and that’s a very important difference.

That said – he still has a hell of a … Read the rest

There’s a French schoolgirl who had the audacity to film “an anti-religious diatribe on social media,” to use the Guardian’s terminology.

The Guardian also buried what inspired her to do so halfway down the page.

Mila, 16, from near Lyon, became a cause célèbre in January after she made a live broadcast on her Instagram account in which she spoke about her homosexuality. A Muslim commentator responded she was a “dirty lesbian” and a “dirty whore”. She responded by posting a video diatribe against Islam.

Her outburst sparked death threats and social media users posted her personal information online, including where she was attending school. The public prosecutor has opened an investigation for “death threats, threats to commit

Politics Live on the BBC today:

"If people don't consider transwomen to be women then that is against the law and they should face disciplinary procedures".

Great to see the Woke Stasi back on the BBC.

— Ms George (@msgeorgekirrin) February 12, 2020

I’ve seen a couple of clips but I’m not sure I’ll be able to see the whole thing. I haven’t seen the bit where he says that so I can’t confirm that he did say it, but if he did…oy. He’s an MP.… Read the rest

From the Committee to Protect Journalists:

The New York City Police Department should drop all charges against photojournalist Amr Alfiky and provide a public explanation for his arrest, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Police arrested Alfiky, a photo editor at ABC news and a contributor to Reuters and The New York Times, at about 7 p.m. yesterday in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood as he was filming the arrest on the street of another individual, according to the journalist’s friend, Mostafa Bassim, who captured Alfiky’s arrest on video and spoke with CPJ in a phone interview.

Police held Alfiky at Manhattan’s seventh precinct station for about 3.5 hours, where he was given access to a

He thinks he has “the absolute right” to interfere in criminal prosecutions. He thinks wrong. It would be nice if he knew the basics of this job he decided to pretend to do.

Also, “aberition.”

Asked about Roger Stone, Trump says he has an “absolute right” to tell the Justice Department what to do pic.twitter.com/AZRv9Aff7P

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 11, 2020

… Read the rest

So much for law and order, which used to be a Republican lodestar.

The entire team prosecuting Roger Stone abruptly resigned from the criminal case on Tuesday after the Justice Department said it planned to reduce the recommended sentence for Stone, a longtime Trump associate.

The Justice Department on Tuesday said it was pulling back on its request to sentence Stone to seven to nine years in prison after President Donald Trump blasted the sentencing proposal as “a miscarriage of justice.”

…

After reports that a softer sentencing recommendation was imminent, lead prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky withdrew as a prosecutor in the case. A footnote in his court filing noted that “the undersigned attorney has resigned effective immediately.”

Zelinsky, who was