Apparently the hospital situation is as bad as ever.

NHS trusts are “gaslighting” patients over the inclusion of transgender patients on single-sex wards, a whistle-blower nurse has warned.

Dr Sinead Helyar said that in at least one trust if patients question why there is a male-bodied person on a female-only ward, medics have been told to “reiterate… that there are no men present”.

I don’t know why the Telegraph calls her a nurse and then a doctor, but anyway, we’ve heard this story before, and it’s pretty sick-making that it hasn’t been fixed.

Official NHS trust policy documents also compare patients who ask for single-sex spaces to racists and label them “transphobes”, “offenders” and “perpetrators”, she said.

Staff who

The Catholic church knew and did it anyway, Facebook knew and did it anyway.

Facebook’s internal research found that Instagram, which it acquired in 2012 for $1 billion, makes eating disorders and thoughts of suicide worse in teenage girls, whistleblower Frances Haugen said in a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday.

Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, gathered internal documents as she grew frustrated by the company’s prioritization of growth and user engagement over its negative impacts, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.

Well, look at it … Read the rest

Maybe it’s something about the Catholic church? Is that possible?

An estimated 330,000 children were victims of sex abuse within France’s Catholic Church over the past 70 years, according to a report released Tuesday that represents the country’s first major accounting of the worldwide phenomenon.

The figure includes abuses committed by some 3,000 priests and other people involved in the church — wrongdoing that Catholic authorities covered up over decades in a “systemic manner,” according to the president of the commission that issued the report, Jean-Marc Sauvé.

Of course they did. They’re the church, God’s own representatives on earth, so obviously they get to decide. Raping children is just God’s reward to all these goddy celibate men for managing his … Read the rest

You know…if most of your police despise women, then your police are not going to be very good at pursuing cases of violence against women. They’re more likely to decide it was actually her fault, or a “sex game,” or a misunderstanding, or too trivial to bother with.

The father of a woman who died after being choked by her abusive partner has accused police of paying “lip service” to the protection of women and girls and called for a public inquiry into the culture of UK policing.

West Midlands police apologised last month for a number of failings in the case of Suzanne Van Hagen, 34, who suffered months of domestic abuse before she died in February 2013.

Owen Jones:

Also Owen Jones:

Watching the horror of the Sarah Everard murder being derailed to further stigmatise and attack trans people is frankly beyond belief.

To those responsible: do you know the damage and hurt you're inflicting particularly on young, scared trans people? Do you even care?

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) October 3, 2021

… Read the rest

Speaking of Dillahunty and dogmatism and the infallibility of personal beliefs…from last year:

Nearly headless nick is now brainless and heartless, as well. Sorry that you can't change and grow and learn…and be supportive of the people who are actually being threatened. https://t.co/eUk6ygQtWY

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) September 30, 2020

No, it's not. She is transphobic, did say transphobic things and the fact that two things CAN be true doesn't mean they are.

We ARE condemning misguided hate. You're excusing it. Bye.

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) September 30, 2020

… Read the rest

Jonathon Van Maren writes:

French clinicians are also now taking a stand. In an open letter published four days ago on the L’Express website (and covered almost nowhere in the international press), over fifty medical professionals and prominent academics, including doctors, legal experts, educational experts, philosophers, sociologists, psychiatrists, judges, and psychoanalysts, excoriated transgender ideology and condemned “sex reassignment” in children. Published in association with the Observatory of Ideological Discourses on Children and Adolescents, the letter is worth reading in full:

The link doesn’t work, but we can read the translation JVM shares.

We can no longer remain silent about what appears to us to be a serious drift committed in the name of the emancipation of the “transgender

Where vaccine-resistance gets us:

The United States surpassed 700,000 deaths from the coronavirus on Friday, a milestone that few experts had anticipated months ago when vaccines became widely available to the American public.

An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered broad access to shots, were unvaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an ample supply of vaccines.

Why? Because we also have one of the highest rates of stupid.

The new and alarming surge of deaths this summer means that the coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest in American history, overtaking the toll from the influenza pandemic

More calls to fire and shun people who don’t believe men are women:

AN SNP politician has retweeted a message calling for Joanna Cherry to be expelled from the party.

Kirsty Blackman, the MP for Aberdeen North, appeared to endorse the post amid an ongoing row over trans rights.

Or trans “rights.” The issue gets wildly confused because of the chronic failure to specify which “rights” we’re talking about. Just saying “trans rights” makes it sound as if the issue is basic human rights, when in fact what is contentious is the claim that men who identify as trans have a “right” to invade women’s spaces and take women’s prizes and jobs with no questions asked. It’s not a basic … Read the rest

Meghan Cook at Insider informs us that contestants on Survivor have just one set of clothes, so they can’t change into dry clothes after swimming. That’s not healthy.

Insider has previously reported on the potentially life-threatening consequences of wearing the same clothes and underwear for an extended period of time.

(Mind you, they could wear underwear and dry their clothes, then wear clothes and dry their underwear. But never mind, that’s a tangent.)

Gynecologist Dr. Mary Jane Minkin also previously told Insider that sitting around in damp clothes can create “a wet, moist, warm environment” that can lead to unwanted bacteria and yeast.

Specifically, competing in wet clothes for extended periods of time puts players with vaginas in an

Who are the voices on the police and institutional misogyny that need to be amplified right now (obviously exclusively women)?

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) October 1, 2021

Oh dear. That would be all the feminist women he’s blocked.

What a question from a guy who is so determined to ostracize and silence women who defend our own boundaries and our very definition. He wants to amplify our voices now after all these years of obsessive de-amplification? And he finds it obvious that he’s talking exclusively about women?… Read the rest

Catherine Bennett notes that judges and cops and politicians are still saying that some women deserve to be murdered:

[Sarah] Everard was, Lord Justice Fulford said, “a wholly blameless victim”. Ah. The other sort – the woman who contributes to her own death at the hands of a pitiless stranger – evidently lives on in the mind of the senior judiciary. Forty years after the police and prosecution virtue-rated victims of the mass murderer Peter Sutcliffe, the criminal justice system applauds a female victim who lives up to the highest patriarchal standards. Sir Michael Havers said at Sutcliffe’s trial that “perhaps the saddest part of the case” was that “the last six attacks were on totally respectable women”.

As opposed … Read the rest

Speaking of “people who need abortion rights,” I’m horrified to see that even Margaret Talbot is doing it. She does at least say “women” too, but there’s way too much peopleing.

Starting with a “women” passage:

Mississippi’s brief to uphold its law offers, among other rationales, the assertion that women’s lives are so much freer, more equal, and more replete with birth-control options now than they were in 1973, when Roe legalized the right to abortion nationwide, that we can let that right go by the wayside.

You know what that’s like? It’s like the Supreme Court saying, in the Shelby ruling, that voting rights are not an issue any more, so we can stop protecting them. It was … Read the rest

All those people shouting “freedom freedom freedom” in response to mask mandates? They’re stooges for the Koch brothers.

There’s a letter to school administrators going around, invoking the sacred institution of Parental Choice.

“I do not believe little kids should be forced to wear masks, and I urge you to adopt a policy that allows parental choice on this matter for the upcoming school year.”

But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post,

This is the kind of thing that makes this conflict so maddening.

First, “I’ve also discovered today, which I did not know, that @MForstater has publicly said women should be denied access to women’s spaces if other women think they look like men.”

Wrong. There’s no “think they look like men” about it. We all publicly say that men should be denied access to [at least some] women’s spaces. That’s it, that’s the say. Men should stay out of women’s spaces. It’s not so much “denied access” as “don’t ask in the first place.” It’s just no. Way too many men are deeply weird about women (see: Wayne Couzens), and we don’t want them in places where we pee … Read the rest

Trump thinks Twitter should be forced, forced, to let him use Twitter to incite insurrection and civil war.

“Plaintiff Donald J. Trump respectfully moves for a preliminary injunction directing, inter alia, Defendant Twitter, Inc. and all persons acting in concert with Defendant, to reinstate Plaintiff’s access to Defendant’s social media platform(s),” the filing said.

It argued that Twitter was “censoring” Trump by indefinitely banning him from the platform, adding that the company “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate.”

Violent insurrection and civil war are not open democratic debate. Trump has zero interest in open democratic debate.

Twitter banned Trump

Alex Jones is liable.

Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, is responsible for all damages in two lawsuits stemming from his false claims that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a “giant hoax,” a judge ruled this week.

District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis County, Tex., issued default judgments Monday against Jones and Infowars after he did not comply with court orders to give information in a pair of 2018 lawsuits brought against him by families of two children killed in the 2012 massacre. Jones repeatedly failed to hand over documents and evidence to the court supporting his damaging and erroneous claims that the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., which killed 26 people, 20

I’m not the only one who thinks so, either.

When I say that we’re not doing enough to
“challenge men for violence against women & girls,”
am I to say we’re not doing enough to
“challenge people for violence against people?”
I will not do that
It doesn’t put the blame where it belongs
It doesn’t protect those most at risk

— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) October 2, 2021

There are many many more furious retorts, but they’re all replies so the Guardian tweet would reappear with each one so I’ll leave it at that.… Read the rest

The Guardian is trolling us.

Pregnant and breastfeeding people are facing abysmal vaccination rates and increasing health risks from the Delta variant, and they urgently need to be vaccinated, experts warn.

…

Only one-third of pregnant adults in the US have received the Covid vaccines – less than half the vaccination rate of all American adults. And stark disparities exist among different communities, with only 15.6% of Black pregnant people vaccinated so far.

At the same time, pregnancy is a risk factor for serious illness from the coronavirus. Being pregnant and unvaccinated doubles the risk of needing intensive care for those who have Covid, and leads to a 70% increased risk of death. In August alone, 22 pregnant people

Trans-identifying man Laurel Hubbard has been named New Zealand Sports Woman of the Year. Who has not been named that?

This is Lisa Carrington. She is a New Zealand canoeist.

She won three gold medals at Tokyo 2020 and became NZ’s most successful Olympian ever. pic.twitter.com/lP4O8IztRt

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) October 2, 2021

This is Emma Twigg. She is a New Zealand rower.

She won her first Olympic gold medal at Tokyo 2020. pic.twitter.com/u1eZlqu6MF

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) October 2, 2021

These are the New Zealand women rugby 7s.

They won gold medals at Tokyo 2020.

Michaela Blyde
Kelly Brazier
Gayle Broughton
Theresa Fitzpatrick
Stacey Fluhler
Sarah Hirini
Shiray Kaka
Tyla Nathan-Wong
Risi Pouri-Lane
Alena Saili
Ruby Tui
Tenika Willison