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 … Read the rest

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

Breaking: Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the 116th Supreme Court justice. Her ascent diversifies the bench, while leaving in place its conservative tilt. https://t.co/s0Z0CnzUsX

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 7, 2022

Adding

BREAKING: Applause breaks out in Senate chamber as Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson becomes the first Black woman ever confirmed to sit on the nation’s highest court. https://t.co/EvvheYil09 pic.twitter.com/HRA8dOUsqA

— ABC News (@ABC) April 7, 2022

… Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

All the points missed at once.

Trans athletes – who are chronically underrepresented in sport – are being made to choose between being who they feel to their very core, and the sport they love, while being demonised as cheats.

They’re not transitioning to gain an advantage. It is who they are!

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) April 7, 2022

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 … Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

BREAKING:
The @UN General Assembly has voted to suspend Russia from the world organisation’s leading human rights body over allegations of horrific rights violations by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
In favour: 93
Against: 24
Abstained: 58 pic.twitter.com/oYwbryFWc8

— Mikhail Khodorkovsky (English) (@mbk_center) April 7, 2022

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.

The UN General Assembly has suspended Russia from the UN Human Rights Council after evidence of atrocities in its invasion of Ukraine. https://t.co/rE5b7rXh1h

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) April 7, 2022

EARLIER: Ukraine's President Zelenskiy called on Russians to protest against the war following the emergence of gruesome videos

Who's this bloke on Woman's Hour talking about what a woman is?

— Helen Saxby (@helensaxby11) April 7, 2022

My paperback is out on May 5th. Would love to come on and talk to @BBCWomansHour about it. But radio silence (literally) https://t.co/jKuTuFPr9u

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) April 7, 2022

Did we just hear the death knell of transactivism for a radio 4 audience? Can we give Lavery more of a platform? He’s just said he wants the queen to die & that ordinarily ppl are too thick to understand that women have penises.

— Jo Bartosch (@jo_bartosch) April 7, 2022

If you want to know the real difference between men and women, just listen to the @Emmabarnett @BBCWomansHour interview with

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 … Read the rest

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 

Navarro and Scavino:

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,

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) … Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

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

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.

Pathetic. The Fawcett Society responds to EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers:

The recently published EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers confirms our understanding of the current law. Providers of single-sex services can restrict or modify access for trans people when doing so is necessary to achieve a legitimate aim, and when the action taken is proportionate in balancing impacts on different groups of women.

But (yet again) the issue isn’t “trans people,” it’s men who claim to be trans women.

But much more to the point – “balancing impacts on different groups of women” shouldn’t have anything to do with impacts on men, including men who claim to be trans women. The set … Read the rest

And another thing.

Republican legislators who sponsored the bill emphasized that the punishments outlined were for doctors, “not for the woman”, said the Oklahoma state representative Jim Olsen.

Bollocks. Forcing women to gestate and push out babies they don’t want is extreme torture. It’s beside the point that the bill also punishes doctors, because the whole concept of forced pregnancy is punitive.

Notably, the bill was also unusual for being revived from the 2021 legislative session. During hearings in 2021, Olsen said he felt ending abortion was a moral duty and compared terminating a pregnancy to slavery.

Dead wrong. Forcing women to bear children is slavery – literal slavery. It’s hard labor, it’s not paid, it’s against their … Read the rest

The war on women continues to rage.

Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.

And this doesn’t make forced pregnancy the law in Oklahoma, it also catches Texas women in its trap.

More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas

Trump has been trying to tell historians what to say about him.

As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”

Point missed. He… Read the rest

The current issue of Free Inquiry arrived yesterday. One of the esteemed editors found the perfect illustration for a column I wrote.