Whose rights to what.

The Government is spending £150 million at women’s jails on 500 new cells which can be used for transgender lags.

They will be single occupancy with ensuite loos and showers. But some will enable women to have their kids overnight to prepare for life at home.

Tory Baroness Scott of Bybrook confirmed the cells plan to support “transgender needs” as required by law and jail policy.

In July, a High Court Judge ruled holding transgender women in female jails is lawful because a ban would ignore their right to live as their ­chosen gender.

Their what? What right? What right is that?

There is no such right. That’s not a right. There’s no such thing … Read the rest

Poisoning the well much? The day before the Filia conference started:

Flagpoles in Guildhall Square are currently flying the colours of trans, LGBTQ+ and non-binary people, as well as suffragettes.

“trans, LGBTQ+ and non-binary” – so trans and non-binary get mentioned twice, while boring old lesbian and gay have to make do with once.

It comes ahead of a two-day ‘peaceful’ protest in support of trans rights that has been organised over the weekend (October 16-17).

That is, over the weekend of and in front of the feminist conference, protesting feminism. That protest.

Attendees of the Standing Against Transphobia will meet as a conference hosted by women’s liberation group Filia – which is accused of being ‘transphobic’ – will be

The ACLU’s fascination with customized pronouns goes back several years. It’s a deeply peculiar cause for a civil liberties organization to focus on, because it has nothing to do with civil liberties – on the contrary, it’s a campaign to coerce people’s language for no good reason.

A blog post from ACLU Northern California in July 2015:

“Hello, my name is Anna and my pronouns are she, her, and hers.” That has now become my standard greeting at meetings and events. It wasn’t something that happened naturally, but with a little practice and intention, it became a habit.

Sure, anything can become a habit. “Hello, my name is Anna and I’m a wombat” could just as easily become a … Read the rest

The ACLU wants to force people to use weird counter-intuitive inaccurate pronouns. Force them. That’s a civil liberty?

To be more accurate myself, the ACLU isn’t actually trying to do the forcing itself, it filed an amicus brief explaining why it’s wrong and evil not to.

There’s no such thing as “trans and non-binary students’ pronouns.” Nobody owns pronouns. We don’t each have our own pronouns. In English the convention is to call female people she or her and male people he or him. That’s it, it’s just the convention, it’s there to make communication flow. It’s meaningless to talk about “using a student’s pronouns.”

Also the cutesie goggly eyes don’t add anything. This isn’t a fucking joke. This … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The climate has no pronouns.

Yes, the climate disaster is here, and it is going to get worse, especially for people who aren’t lucky enough to make it to rich Western countries. Some smart dude has a couple of posts about how it isn’t going to be end-of-civilisation bad which have caused me to re-think my own position slightly from “humans will probably go extinct in the next thousand years” to “billions of people will remain a permanent underclass while a small percentage of the species explores and colonises space”.

I’m just thinking out loud here, too.

I think humans as a species are tough and resilient; it’s civilization that … Read the rest

See this is how we know nobody who could is going to do anything to slow global warming:

The most powerful part of President Biden’s climate agenda — a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy — will likely be dropped from the massive budget bill pending in Congress, according to congressional staffers and lobbyists familiar with the matter.

Why? Because Joe Manchin doesn’t like it. One guy who is beholden to the coal industry is all it takes, and we have the one guy. We’ll always have the one guy, or whatever equivalent for want of a nail the war was lost it takes. There will always be … Read the rest

Julie on the misogyny of trans activists:

To the annual FiLiA conference in Portsmouth. A 1,000-strong gathering of women of all ages and viewpoints, united by a desire and commitment to ending male violence, oppression and domination of women and girls.

Everyone there is interested in dipping their toes in the water of the women’s liberation movement. A big focus is the campaign to end rape, domestic abuse, commercial sexual exploitation, and femicide, the killing of women and girls by men because they are women and girls.

As I approach the Guildhall where the conference is taking place I hear the now only-too familiar chants by trans activists: “Trans women are women!”, “No TERFS on Pompey”. One sign

More on That conference.

Trans protest signs at the women's rights conference #Filia2021 pic.twitter.com/7h3x6lbamr

— Dr EM (@PankhurstEM) October 16, 2021

“SUCK MY DICK YOU TRANSPHOBIC CUNTS” has certainly convinced me that trans women are women.

At the end of day one of #FiLiA2021 women gather for a vigil outside the Guildhall to remember and honour all the women killed by men #femicide @FiLiA_charity pic.twitter.com/LELzpfQpxA

— Kiri Tunks (@kiritunks) October 16, 2021

The kitchen table is always there.

20m banner painted on my kitchen table. I have a studio space, but that's another story. Made for all women, even those who don't like me. #sisterhood #FiLiA2021 https://t.co/adiG2nqNVR

— Emma Dolan (@emmajaned0lan) October 16, 2021

Shocking news. Protesters outside #FiLiA2021 include

From That conference;

At #FiLiA2021 a meeting of hundreds of academics and students showing our solidarity with Kathleen Stock. Our academic freedom must be protected @Docstockk @SussexUni pic.twitter.com/gVyevkklCu

— Chantelle Burton (@Chantelle_DHD) October 16, 2021

https://twitter.com/selfcommit2othe/status/1449433969745879044 https://twitter.com/LesbianLabour/status/1449373571428540417

Ok now I have to pause to mop my eyes.… Read the rest

Tom Ball in the Times:

Students calling for the resignation of Kathleen Stock have said their campaign has been “cloak and dagger” in order to protect their own members from online harassment.

Ahhhhh I see – they want to protect themselves from harassment…so that they can harass Kathleen Stock. Interesting take.

But after all, Kathleen is the tyrannical unelected head of state who tortures and imprisons protesters and poisons her critics, and is protected by a heavily armed military.

Just kidding. She’s an academic, a professor and writer. She tortures and imprisons no one and is protected by no one. She has opinions on the fungibility of sex that the brave “cloak and dagger” students don’t like, so they … Read the rest

Much mockery about this story of a primary school canceling a Halloween parade:

An elementary school in Seattle has cancelled its annual Halloween parade this year as the event “marginalises students of colour who do not celebrate the holiday”.

The Benjamin Franklin Day Elementary School’s racial equity team decided to cancel the “Pumpkin Parade”, where students dress up in Halloween costumes, after deliberating for five years. Parents were told about their decision on 8 October through a newsletter.

…

In the newsletter sent to parents, the school noted that costume parties could become uncomfortable for some students and distract them from learning.

Halloween events create a situation where some students must be “excluded for their beliefs, financial status, or

Happening now.

In the main hall at Portsmouth Guildhall with LOTS of great women #FiLiA2021

— Joan Smith (@polblonde) October 16, 2021

At @FiLiA_charity opening plenary <shivers> #FiLIA pic.twitter.com/uPT1lJx5y6

— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) October 16, 2021

https://twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1449299401881567233 … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Enzyme on A trouncing.

Note the sleight of hand from Sally Hines about how other cultures have “recognised” that sex is not binary.

To say that they’ve recognised it is to say that it is the case, otherwise there could be no recognition. But these other cultures having divvied up the world in another way is what Hines presents as evidence that sex is not binary. And that’s question-begging. In effect, she’s saying that we’re entitled to say that sex is not binary because other cultures have recognised it as such; but they can only have recognised it as such if it is, in fact, not binary. This point stands whatever we happen to think … Read the rest

The BBC reports on the BBC report on the BBC involvement with Stonewall.

Governments, Ofcom and the BBC have had their impartiality questioned after involvement in the lobby group’s diversity schemes.

A number of high profile organisations have left Stonewall’s schemes in recent months amid growing controversy about the influence of the group on public policy.

Stonewall says it works for LGBTQ equality and that it is “deeply disappointing” that this can still be thought of as controversial.

See that’s just the usual obfuscating they do by treating L and G and B and T as all one thing, as soup instead of shot [pellets]. No, lesbian equality and gay equality are not being treated or thought of as “controversial,” … Read the rest

In case you’ve been wondering what Robert Winston said on BBC Question Time yesterday (as I had been), zip ahead to about 6 minutes in.

Partial spoiler: the core of it is: “I will say categorically, that you cannot change your sex.”… Read the rest

Oh did they indeed.

The term “mother” was removed from Scottish government maternity policies after they were lobbied by a leading LGBT+ charity, it has emerged.

So we all emerged from a coconut. Not the same coconut, mind; each person xir own coconut.

Documents released under freedom of information (FoI) legislation confirm that the charity wrote to the Scottish government last year encouraging them to adopt terms featured in their inclusive policy toolkit. The word mother now no longer appears on documents outlining maternity leave.

I wonder if Stonewall also lobbied governments to remove the word “father” from everything.

Malcolm Clark, director of the LGB Alliance, which was founded in 2019 in opposition to Stonewall’s policies on transgender issues,

So I just listened to this and sure enough – Sally Hines does not come out of it well.

If you've seen the obnoxious things that Sally Hines has been saying about Kathleen Stock today you may want to remind yourself of the time that she made a tit of herself and got a trouncing from Kathleen on the radio. https://t.co/wpLsggkFJC

— FeministRoar (@FeministRoar) October 15, 2021

The link is to the clip, not the whole hour, so no searching is needed.… Read the rest

Speaking of “Stonewall language” as opposed to BBC language or ordinary language or non-drunk language, here’s economist Frances Coppola using it in a blog post bashing Maya Forstater a couple of weeks ago:

Forstater and her supporters aggressively promote their beliefs on Twitter, hijacking threads to grandstand their agenda, forcing their opinions on people who have not invited them, misrepresenting what people have said then gaslighting them when they object, using emotionally-loaded language to short-circuit rational argument, resorting to ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority, insulting people who disagree with them, sealioning people who try to disengage. In short, behaving just like all the other cults that infest this increasingly toxic space. The effect of their behaviour is to

Four years in prison for having a miscarriage.

On Tuesday, October 5, Brittney Poolaw, a 20-year-old Oklahoma woman, was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree for experiencing a miscarriage at 17 weeks and sentenced to 4 years in state prison.

Last year, Ms. Poolaw experienced a miscarriage and went to Comanche County Hospital for medical help. On March 17, 2020, she was charged with Manslaughter in the First Degree, arrested and incarcerated. The court set a $20,000 bond, an amount she could not afford. Ms. Poolaw has been incarcerated since her arrest over 18 months ago.

…

Contrary to all medical science, the prosecutor blamed the miscarriage on Ms. Poolaw’s alleged use of controlled substances. Not even the

Originally a comment by Rob on Concealing a rape for social justice.

The saddest thing of all is that a young girl has been raped. The manner of her rape, the fact it was in a place where she was vulnerable and should have been safe just makes things worse.

The whole awful saga gives us a lot to unpick about the current state of American society especially, but I suspect about all societies.

The fact that the rape was a non-story at all until the father being arrested became a right-wing cause. The fact that the school and Board administrations either attempted a cover-up and/or didn’t properly communicate something so seriously between them. The fact that the Board … Read the rest