Carol Tavris at Skeptic (the Shermer one):

American culture is prone to psychological and medical contagions. An idea catches fire, seeming to be a plausible and important explanation of a familiar problem — depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sexual dissatisfaction. The idea outruns evidence. Experts emerge to treat people suffering from the problem, exploiting the most credulous. They open clinics. They give prestigious lectures and write books. They make fortunes. They blur the diverse possible origins of a person’s difficulties, attributing them all to the latest explanation.

Throughout the 1980s, the hot explanation was childhood sexual abuse: you have an eating disorder? Your father (or grandfather, or uncle, or close family friend) probably molested you. You don’t remember that? You repressed

Lia Thomas continues to troll the women he is bullying.

Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal.

‘It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,’ one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

In other words he’s forcing them to see his erections.

‘Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,’ the UPenn swimmer said. ‘But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and

This is the wrong question:

America’s hottest city is nearly unlivable in summer. Can cooling technologies save it?

America’s hottest city shouldn’t be a city at all, because it’s in a desert. We shouldn’t be expanding cities in deserts as global warming gets worse, we should be shrinking them. It’s stupid to squander resources on cities that are doomed by global warming.

Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, is accustomed to a hot desert climate, but day and night temperatures have been rising due to global heating and the city’s unchecked development, which has created a sprawling urban heat island.

It’s the unchecked development that’s the problem. The development needs to be checked, starting yesterday.

“Phoenix is already unlivable in

Big Sibling is reading your mail.

A teacher and mother-of-three has been questioned under caution by Merseyside Police for sending a letter to Girlguiding UK raising safeguarding concerns.

Ok then, I guess if anyone has any safeguarding concerns about Girlguides UK, she’d better keep them to herself. Sorry girls! You’re on your own.

Her story begins in November 2021 when it emerged that Girlguiding UK had appointed a local commissioner called Monica Sulley, a role that involves overseeing Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. 

Sulley is a trans woman who posts photos of himself on Instagram…

…wearing dominatrix clothing, one of which was captioned “Now behave yourselves or Mistress will have to punish you #mistress.” She

O rilly?

Donald Trump has only $93 million in cash left, according to Forbes. His properties are all indebted.

The Trumps could potentially owe $100 to $300 million or more in back taxes, restitution, and penalties — and that’s just in the NY AG civil case alone.

— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) January 27, 2022

Who’s this guy? He’s a former Assistant DA for New York state, who prosecuted Trump “university.” He’s probably not just making this up.

Trump’s cash crunch helps explain why he needed to strong-arm the Republican National Committee into paying his legal fees for his criminal defense, $1.6 million and counting.

— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) January 27, 2022

I would like to watch him lose everything, and… Read the rest

Sarah Ditum reviews Laurie Penny’s new book in the Times.

“This is a story about the choice between feminism and fascism,” Laurie Penny announces in the first line of Sexual Revolution. That’s not true. Actually, it is a story about Laurie Penny, a 35-year-old manic pixie dream person (pronouns they/them) who blundered to public attention as an angry young woman blogging about feminism, went on to chronicle the Occupy movement, and has spent the following years maintaining a white-knuckle grip on whatever the latest trend for the online left happens to be.

Just as the online left itself has, which economically explains why it’s so horrible.

“Fascism” is nothing but a placeholder here for “things Laurie Penny thinks

Suzanne Moore on Laurie Penny’s attempt to claim oppression by Julie Bindel:

I do find it bizarre how an actual lesbian, à la Bindel, can be criticised by a person (I won’t use the offensive word woman) in a heterosexual marriage to a bloke for putting down “LGBTQ authors”. (I don’t know if said bloke is self-identified as a bloke, and care even less.) Penny plays as ever to their American audience; Bindel doesn’t play this game at all. She doesn’t have the time; she has actual feminism to do. 

…

I do realise it is very “bio-essentialist” of me to refer to myself being the mother of an actual young person, because the Penny persona depends on being

The Times on the police abuse of Jennifer Swayne:

Jennifer Swayne, 53, was detained for more than 12 hours after placing posters around Newport that made claims about trans women in prisons and said “humans never change sex” and that men in dresses should stay out of women’s spaces.

She accused Gwent police of operating “like the Stasi” after they raided her home and took a book of essays on “the theory and practice of transgendering children”. Edited by Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans, an academic previously no-platformed by university students, the book contends that politics rather than science accounts for the rise in the number of transgender children. Swayne said that police did not say why they took the book,

The BBC also did a sloppy lazy story yesterday on how the Newport police abused a woman for putting stickers on lampposts. Some of the wording is identical to that of the trainee reporter for the South Wales Argus; I don’t know if one copied the other (or which came first) or they both drew from another source. Anyway it’s bad and insidious crap.

A 53-year-old woman has been arrested after stickers were placed around a city “directed towards the transgender community”.

A sloppy lazy unsupported claim right in the lede. Who says that’s how the stickers were “directed”? Why say that in the lede when in fact the stickers don’t mention “the transgender community”? Why tilt the story … Read the rest

A guy in India has set out to persuade men to stop treating women’s bodies as swear-words.

The speaker, Sunil Jaglan, begins with a question, “Raise your hand if you have used cuss words that name mother’s, sister’s or women’s intimate body parts?”

People smile sheepishly, looking around for moral support before awkwardly raising their hands, “Everyone here has used gaali, sir, this is normal,” says one man.

…

“But, is it right?” asks Jaglan.

To this, the women shout: “Of course not! Why target us or our body in your slurs? Why don’t people understand when they use misogynist profanities they actually target their own mothers and sisters? Is this what we are teaching our kids?”

Yes, … Read the rest

It’s not pro-life, it’s anti-women. The pregnancy is everything, the woman whose pregnancy it is is nothing.

The family of a Polish woman who died on Tuesday after doctors refused to perform an abortion when the foetus’s heart stopped beating have accused the government of having “blood on their hands”.

The woman, identified only as Agnieszka T, was said to have been in the first trimester of a twin pregnancy when she was admitted to the Blessed Virgin Mary hospital in Częstochowa on 21 December. Her death comes a year after Poland introduced one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.

Don’t go to hospitals named The Blessed Virgin Mary if you can possibly help it. Try … Read the rest

Just as you can’t “cut ties” with the Supreme Court.

Basic law primer

You cannot, by statute “cut ties” with the EHRC

It was established by statute to ensure your compliance with the act.

You might as well say you’re “cutting ties” with the charity commission.

Enjoy your childish tantrum.
We will enjoy them being adults.

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) January 27, 2022

It’s very Trumpy to say you’re cutting ties with a supervisory board you can’t cut ties with.

Libby Brooks at the Guardian has more:

The UK’s equalities watchdog has written to the Scottish government asking it to pause plans to simplify the legal requirements for gender recognition.

LGBT+ equality campaigners hit back at the unexpected

More indignation.

Statement: LGBT Foundation to sever all ties with the EHRC – Our response to EHRC statements on upcoming LGBTQ+ legislation. https://t.co/1Ho11f5cEp pic.twitter.com/7Dqy08MLFt

— LGBT Foundation (@LGBTfdn) January 26, 2022

These organizations don’t seem to have paused to ask themselves what human rights are, ever at any time. The result is that they end up sounding like small children who think they have a “right” to all the ice cream they want right now this second.

Rights aren’t simple. They’re not a matter of just “I want this therefore I have a right to it.” They have to be judged on the basis of their impact on other people. They’re a balancing act. The T+ people seem to think … Read the rest

Stonewall responds to the EHRC:

Today’s statements from the EHRC are an attack on trans equality and undermine EHRC’s core purpose of regulating, promoting and upholding human rights.

What is trans equality? What does that mean? In what way do trans people not have equality? It’s not part of “equality” to identify as something you’re not and then force the world to accept your self-identification.

The two statements – in response to plans to legislate for a ban on conversion therapy in England and Wales, and Gender Recognition Act reform in Scotland – effectively seek to exclude trans people from improved rights and protections. 

But the putative conversion therapy isn’t conversion therapy, and it’s not a right for people … Read the rest

UN Women on Twitter is so stupid.

Every.
Time.
You.
See.
Sexist.
Behaviour.
CALL.
IT.
OUT.

— UN Women (@UN_Women) January 26, 2022

I’ve “called out” @UN_Women’s sexist behavior several times. Fat lot of good it did me.

Only yesterday they behaved sexistly.

No matter

who we are,
whom we love,
what our gender is,
when we were born,
where we come from;

why we fight is the same:

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL.

— UN Women (@UN_Women) January 25, 2022

No, why we fight is not the same “no matter what our gender is.” If you say it is you’re saying there’s no need for feminism, and that, given the realities, is intensely sexist. Tell women in Afghanistan that “why … Read the rest

Femicide Census has written an open letter to Gwent Police.

Dear Chief Constable Pam Kelly and Superintendent Vicki Townsend,

Two women at the top, supervising cops who arrest and abuse a woman for posting feminist material.

We write from the Femicide Census, the UK’s only resource documenting the number of women killed by men. Our research has been used by the Home Office and the police, for example, when state bodies need to cite data on women killed by men. This is because the UK government and state agencies fail to collate this data.

Why? Why do they fail or refuse to collate the data? I’d be interested to know.

On 25 January 2022 we were alerted via Twitter

And so the incompetent hacks (unless, worse, they’re doing it on purpose) roll up to spread the malevolent lies. A “trainee community reporter” in the South Wales Argus:

GWENT Police have issued a plea to people in Newport to not remove any posters they see in the city – after sharp objects were found behind some.

No they weren’t. Someone claimed they were, and the police took the claim seriously, or pretended to.

The warning comes as a 53-year-old woman was arrested on Sunday, January 23 after being caught spraying stickers to two lampposts by patrolling police officers.

Lampposts that, as I understand it, are already covered in stickers. (Also you can’t “spray” them. The police said they were … Read the rest

Guest post by Jon Gallant

Our increasingly woke life in the arts and sciences and in the groves of academe includes sanctification of membership (or claimed membership) in certain favored sub-populations.  In New Zealand, for one example, the Aukland artist Peter Robinson has built his career half-seriously as a Maori artist—out of a Maori inheritance of 3.125%, a single great-great-great-grandparent.  At the University of Saskatchewan, Prof. Carrie Bourassa (who sometimes presented herself as “Morning Star Bear”) has become an influential figure in “indigenous” Canada, based on a Metis grandfather who had, it turns out, as much reality as the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and Buraq, Mohammed’s flying horse.  I propose to follow a similar path, but one a little more … Read the rest

Meanwhile –

I'm quite happy to talk to @gwentpolice you know, hit me up!

Plus, the VAST majority of my stickers are not STFU TERF, but actually catgirl based positivity, so nice cherry picking there! pic.twitter.com/CzY4S1gTKw

— N3KOcardiff! – for a kinder, prettier world! (@N3KOcardiff) January 25, 2022

update: not arrested, no trouble, police have no issue with me covering up/removing transphobia!

Silly stickers 1, TERFs 0!

plus, some of the officers I spoke to actually seem to like my stuff, which was a surprise :)

— N3KOcardiff! – for a kinder, prettier world! (@N3KOcardiff) January 25, 2022

A surprise? Why? It’s women they hate.

Also, a lot of what I covered up was outside *schools*…

Would you rather your

Gwent police have issued a statement about their ludicrous and abusive arrest of Jennifer Swayne on Sunday.

Statement following a 53-year-old woman from Newport being arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.

But there was no reason for “suspicion of displaying threatening or abusive writing.” All they had to do was look.

I don’t think it’s normal police practice to arrest people for putting posters on lampposts. I think they give tickets or citations; I don’t think they haul people off to jail.

Superintendent Vicki Townsend said:

“We’ve received several reports in relation to posters containing offensive material appearing in Newport between October and January.

“Officers on patrol