The recent movie “Conclave” is about the back-room politics of selecting a new pope after the death of a liberal-ish pope. The setting could possibly describe the current situation, but the movie is of course fiction. It is very good fiction, though, with a lot of interesting issues touched on, including some that might be of particular interest to readers here. Have any of you seen it?
Curiously, PZ hasn’t mentioned the UK Supreme Court’s decision on single-sex provisions. Perhaps he’s realized that he’s better off shutting up about it.
If implemented, the new policy outlines the following:
The Women’s Category will be open exclusively to athletes of the female sex.
The Men’s Category will be open to all other athletes who are otherwise eligible for competition.
These eligibility standards will apply uniformly across all sanctioned competition levels, including Division I, IA, II, III, Junior, Cadet, Youth, Veteran, and all other sanctioned categories.
Hope you’re OK. Ophelia. As I said a few years ago when your internet connection was down. I’m afraid your regular posting schedule has spoiled some of us the the point where we start worrying if a day goes by without the daily dose of sanity from B&W.
Well, thank the good heavens! Just kidding though, technical difficulties did cross my mind. As a person who has no social media accounts, no television, and only the most casual of interests in current affairs (color me a grumpy old man), this site is like home to me. I know I don’t provide much deep insight or well crafted posts (I’m not a writer!), I do look forward to reading Ophelia’s posts daily, and all the excellent comments. I actually do read most of what’s posted here, whether I think I should weigh in myself or not. Having a couple of days off is not a bad thing, however it does remind me of how valuable to me Ophelia’s input has always been, going back to the old TPM discussion board days. Sorry for the overly sentimenal outpouring, but I do appreciate Ophelia, and indeed all of the regulars here, for your continued interesting commentary. Looking forward to getting back into the swing of things, hopefully with more cyber security or whatever to keep the hacking at bay. ‘Discussing all the things’ is only as good as we make it, but I have found here that it’s important things, relevant things, provocative things that I enjoy reading about (I am a Reader!) that make this site a somewhat ideal daily ritual. :)
Good to hear Mike. :) B&W is like a little oasis of sanity and familiarity of the interweb behemoth. I must also admit I do enjoy YouTube, but a curated personal version of it. I currently subscribe to 10 channels, and I have a borrowed subscription (therefore no ads), but YouTube allows me to choose “not interested” and “don’t recommend channel” in a way that narrows down what they offer on the main page. I have to maintain this, as they recommend new garbage daily. It’s a very narrow handful of videos that I might find interesting amongst a gigantic amount of sheer digital garbage that I don’t want to wade through. I don’t have the head space anymore to suffer through what people find entertaining or even interesting anymore. Don’t get me started on ads either — in my opinion marketing is the most wretched disease of our time. How it’s metastasized in recent years is stunning. I saw a video where Adam Savage described Googling. He said that the *signal to noise ratio* has increased exponentially and now we have to scroll through multiple ads and “suggested” crap to find the simple results we were offered only a few years ago. Yep. YouTube’s “creators” too end up getting big, greedy, and start hocking vitamins and vpn’s, which they call sponsorships. When they reach this point it seems they become uninteresting concurrently. To which my response becomes *unsubscribe* and “do not recommend channel.” I can see them having “merch” and a website to visit if you want to support them, or if you’re a fan, but the sponsered stuff always seems phony and scripted…
I’m almost the same, in that B&W is the first site I open in the morning, and the last I check at bedtime. I do have a FB account, though. Oh, and Teams, now that Skype is being killed at the end of the month. Got to be able to keep in touch with my family somehow.
I rarely go on YouTube; I’ve never had an account there, preferring to follow a few people via their blogs/Substacks.
I recall claims of men claiming to be transwomen, using that claim to get into women’s change rooms & washrooms for purposes of at least voyeurism and maybe rape.
If I bring up the possibility get doubts this occurs at all.
Can anyone provide a list of confirmed cases that I can link to?
It infuriates me when people doubt that men take advantage of transgender identities to commit crimes against women.
Men do bad things all the time, and anyone who claims otherwise is flaunting a luxury belief. It’s an insult to everyone else. To such a person I say:
You talk like you’re perched in some untouchable world where male violence against women is just a rumour. The police, the courts, prison — that stuff’s always somewhere else. You only ever see it on a screen.
Well I live in the real world, and down here men rape women. Men abuse women. Men leer at women. Men harass women. Men spy on women undressing. And they film it. And they share it with other men online.
From where I’m standing, pretending men wouldn’t jump at any chance to do harm — that’s the real fiction.
The minute you hear the word ‘transgender’ you instinctually retreat to your perch where everything’s sugar and spice and bad things never happen. You don’t realize it, but you’re letting slip that on some level you already know that ‘transgender women’ are a fiction. Because if you truly saw them as ordinary human beings living in the real world — as I do — you’d understand that they’re capable of good and bad, just like everyone else. You’d have no trouble comprehending that some men who claim to be women have complex psychological circumstances that are deserving of compassion, and that others simply want to get away with things they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
In the real world, you can’t conjure a magic word that exempts any man from the rules that keep women safe and then just assume that only the right kind of man would ever dare to make use of it. And that’s all “trans” is — a magic word. A man doesn’t have to get a diagnosis or have surgeries or take drugs in order to “become” transgender. He doesn’t have to be gay or have a feminine disposition in order to “be” transgender. He doesn’t have to really feel it. All he has to do is say the word, and you — yes, you — will believe him. For once he says the word, he’s already stepped into a parallel universe where impostors and criminals cannot exist. Of course, it helps if he at least puts on a skirt, grows his hair long, and applies a little makeup. You act like even that is some great barrier that separates the world of mortal men from the mystical realm of “trans women”.
But here’s what you don’t seem to understand: lots and lots of men like to put on a skirt and wear makeup. All kinds of men — straight men, aggressive men, criminal men. There’s nothing mystical or unknowable about it. To many men, crossdresing is not a burden, it’s a kinky, exciting privilege. Remember the 1980s? Hair metal? Glam? All those ultra-macho, virile rock stars? They were showing off that they were cool and daring and manly enough to get away with it. And other men literally worshipped them for it.
Now they’re the most special people in the world. You’ve given men even more incentive to come out in public with their crossdresing proclivities — especially criminal men, because now it comes with carte blanche to enter spaces that were designed to keep women safe from them.
But you can’t allow yourself to see it that way. The problem is: “transwomen are women” doesn’t work in the real world at all. It’s a fantasy that can only exist in a fictional world where men didn’t take advantage of every opportunity to abuse women they ever came across since the dawn of time.
I dare you to really look at transwomen — even for a second — before slipping on your magical-thinking blinders. You might be shocked to realize just how un-virtuous you’ve been all along — to realize the Emperor’s been naked this whole time.
Too true, Artie. I like to say I’m not biased against trans-women, because I believe they are no more likely to commit sexual offenses than other men.
Your post does make me wonder about the iconography of transness. All the rainbows and unicorns… is this the irrepressible consciousness of it being an appeal to magic?
The minute you hear the word ‘transgender’ you instinctually retreat to your perch where everything’s sugar and spice and bad things never happen. You don’t realize it, but you’re letting slip that on some level you already know that ‘transgender women’ are a fiction. Because if you truly saw them as ordinary human beings living in the real world — as I do — you’d understand that they’re capable of good and bad, just like everyone else. You’d have no trouble comprehending that some men who claim to be women have complex psychological circumstances that are deserving of compassion, and that others simply want to get away with things they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
I recall claims of men claiming to be transwomen, using that claim to get into women’s change rooms & washrooms for purposes of at least voyeurism and maybe rape.
If I bring up the possibility get doubts this occurs at all.
Can anyone provide a list of confirmed cases that I can link to?
One of the real giveaways is the number of convicted rapists who suddenly “discover” they are “women”. Jim Baerg, you might start with the well-documented example of opportunistic, predatory, “transness” in convicted rapists. There is no distinguishable difference between these rapists and any other supposedly trans identified males demanding access to women’s single sex spaces. If activists dismiss the former as “no true trans”, then they similarly disqualify the latter, allegedly “safe” ones because there’s no way to tell one from the other.
It is telling that trans activism is perfectly fine with all of the ongoing collateral damage that women suffer, so long as the wee precious faux lasses get to “validate” themselves by invading women’s spaces. This is why “third spaces”, which could have been a solution, has always been rejected: they would short-circuit the validating effect of accessing women’s spaces, confirming the truth that trans identified males are not women. Ideologically, this was a non-starter, because “safety” is not the real goal, and neverhas been. Access and “validation” override everything, women be damned.
These activists refuse to even acknowledge there is any such danger to women, or even the slightest hint of a problem, proclaiming there is “NO CONFLICT!” between women’s rights and trans “rights.” They insist that women have no legitimate reason to bar trans identified males (which means, effectively, any and all males under any aggressively enforced “Self ID” regime), from any female, single sex spaces of any kind whatsoever, and that the their sole motivation to do so can only ever be hateful, transphobic bigotry. They can even count on Quisling females (Sally Hines, Jo Grady, Maggie Chapman, etc.) to parrot this line in their demented, misogynistic, self-congratulatory eagerness to give away women’s rights to safey and privacy.
As a consequence of this totalizing programme, supported and enforced by government and industry, women’s prisons, hospital wards, rape shelters, toilet and changing facilities, sports teams, short lists, etc., are all open to any man who claims to be a woman. Activists will not admit of any exception to this demand, because to do so invalidates their entire case: the “safe” males who are, we are told, actually women, are indistinguishable from the cheating, predatory ones. A blanket ban on all males is the only safe course of action, but genderists counter this with “TWAW!” tactically conflating gender and sex in the process. For them it’s all or nothing. And it has to be. Allow one exception and the whole thing collapses in contradiction and incoherence. Women’s resistance must be sidelined, discredited, and crushed. And it is. The worst crime of all is women saying “No” to the demands of men.
All the rainbows and unicorns… is this the irrepressible consciousness of it being an appeal to magic?
Possibly, but I think it also has a strong element of infantilization. The childish iconography enforces the idea of TiM “harmlessness”. Ironically, it goes hand in hand with the use of overtly stereotypical, sexualized “womanface.” Both are supposed to disarm resistance to their demands, painting themselves as poor, marginalized victims who wouldn’t want to cheat or rape anyone.
This makes me think of the musical Oklahoma! when Will Parker sings to Ado Annie that with him it’s all or nuthin’. Her response is “all for you and nuthin’ for me”. She sees right through him.
The trans are the same way. All for them, and nothing for anyone else, especially women, but also the LGB portion of the alphabet.
I have read enough on this blog over the last few years to be convinced that Trans is harmful BS.
The Trans issue came up elsewhere & I raised the issue of allowing “TransWomen” into women’s change rooms providing cover for rapists. Others expressed doubt about that.
Is there a website with links to news items about rapists claiming to be ‘Trans’ to get into women’s prisons, or cases of ‘Transwomen’ going into women’s washrooms or changerooms to have opportunities for rape or at least voyeurism.
I would like to have a link to such a website to give for whenever the issue comes up again.
I understood that your comment was a request for specific resources. My comment was not intended to be a direct response to that; it was a riff on the subject. I got the inspiration to write it — so I did. Now that it’s out there, it could possibly serve as an alternative rebuttal to people who express doubt that men ever exploit the transgender movement to abuse women, rather than supplying them with a barrage of counterfactual examples. Or it could serve as a complementary or supplemental response to bolster the counter-argument alongside a list of concrete examples. A double-barrel serving of conceptual unpacking alongside the hard, cold facts can make for a knockout rebuttal.
It seems to me that rebutting the statement that men never exploit the transgender movement to abuse women should be simple: what is the complete list of things men never exploit to abuse women? Let’s postulate that the transgender movement is item number one. What is item number two?
Thank you! But immediately after pressing the “publish” button, I wish I could have edited that sentence. This is often the case with me. I toss something off in a moment of passion, and then I re-read it with an editor’s eye, and it’s at that point that my mistakes come into focus.
For example:
A double-barrel blast would fit better than a double-barrel serving. Servings are for ice cream — double scoops!
A double-scoop serving is cute. A double-barrel blast is hostile and violent — as I intended my sentence to be.
As it is now, it’s accidentially a mix of aggro and cutesy.
But I’m my own worst critic. Perhaps I need not judge myself so harshly. I’m grateful you liked my sentence!
Oh gosh Arty, Ophelia has saved me here so many times. Whether it be me being provoked, or just plain hasty. I mean it’s not like I don’t have the time to self edit after I cool off a bit. Between the typos and not getting my thoughts in order before hitting that fateful button… :D
I do understand the appeal of a rant, but as you say, most people are ignorant because they aren’t being given the facts by their favourite news outlets; not because they are determined to believe, in spite of the evidence, that ‘transwomen’ are delicate flowers. Reserve the ranting for the gaslighters.
There’s not much I miss since I quit Xwitter, but Glosswitch is one I do miss.
A great read from her today.
Of all the frat boy-style responses to the UK supreme court’s recognition that women exist, there’s one that’s stuck with me the most: “JK Rowling is Andrew Tate for women.” It’s a line that’s been shared in various forms, often with a photo of Rowling celebrating For Women Scotland’s victory. As a response, it’s got everything.
There’s the callousness, comparing a woman who set up a rape crisis centre to a leading representative of the manosphere; the faux progressive posturing (as I wrote in my book Unkind, for a certain type of man, “‘not being the far right’ and ‘not being Andrew Tate’” function primarily as misogyny entitlement tokens); above all, there’s the back-slapping smugness.
Isn’t it funny, likening women’s fight for female-only spaces to men’s fight to abuse women with impunity? Hey, rape victims, you know your rapist? That’s you, that is.
JKR is certainly a lightning rod for all the Transactivists, the MRAs, and their hangers on. I suppose if she didn’t exist, they’d have to invent her.
It is Victoria’s belief, and I concur, that so much of transactivism is a cover for “Men’s rights”, disguised as empathy for the poor, marginalised, transsexuals. It is, as she writes, an offshoot of the manosphere.
The supreme court judgement was not about whether women are biologically female or a joyous, inclusive mix of identities. At its most basic level, it was about whether women are human or a porn stereotype. Humanity won. A significant number of men are so angry about this they’re threatening to rape and kill us.
This is what radicalisation looks like and women are not safe. We are condemned by incels and trans activists alike for existing as humans rather than objects, and politicians, in thrall to fictional rather than actual extremism, still say nothing. The longer they do so, the more things will escalate (as Jeni Harvey has written, this is “the most dangerous time”).
The pandering has to stop. It really is time for the world to wake up.
that tigger gave us, for the person who expressed doubt about transwomen in women’s change rooms being a problem. He says he is now convinced that it is a problem.
We both have only read a few of the items, that is sufficiently appalling.
I suppose the null hypothesis would be that a ‘transwoman’ is about as likely to commit a given type of offence as an ordinary man. Are there statistics that indicate a higher or lower offence rate?
Unfortunately, since it’s not really possible to know how many “transwomen” there are out there, it’s rather difficult to tell what their offense rate might be.
You might be interested in the following article. Some images from it get shared online rather frequently.
Can Trump & Co. sink any lower? Trump has said that he could have Kilmar Ábrego García returned to the US with a ‘simple phone call’ and that he would do so, ‘if he were the gentleman that you say he is’. But he won’t, because he insists that Garcia is a member of MS-13.
And here’s where it gets really bad.
The White House is promoting a photo of Garcia showing ‘MS-13’ tattooed on his knuckles, and Trump has previously used the same image on his Truth Social site.The problem is, there is no MS-13 tattoo on his knuckles in any other image where Garcia’s hands are visible.
The bastards are photoshopping ‘evidence’ to cover their fuck-up in deporting him.
Jim, I’m so pleased that the link has been helpful. It certainly helped me to change my mind. As you say, though, it’s really tough to read. They really are portraits of deeply horrible men.
The offense rate for transwomen is always zero, because no true transwoman would ever do such a thing. QED.
To a doubleplusgood doublethinker it depends on the context though:
• For the specific purpose of dismissing any concerns about allowing TIMs into female only spaces, no true Scotsman “trans woman” would ever do such a thing.
• For the specific purpose of defending the infallibility of self-id, any TIM who does indeed “do such a thing” is the most bonafide trans woman imaginable, which is why “she” must be allowed to serve in a women’s prison, why the victim must be forced to refer to her rapist as a “woman” (who committed rape with “her penis”), why the crime must enter the public record as perpetrated by a “woman” etc.
• Oh, and Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.
I’m sorry for this, I truly am; I know how people here feel about Judith Butler. I also detest plagiarism software running on jumped-up search engines.
However, this gave me a huge laugh this morning, and I feel compelled to share.
I asked ChatGPT to describe how to butter toast in the style of Judith Butler:
The act of buttering toast is not merely a neutral, mechanical operation but rather a performative enactment of breakfast itself, one that is inscribed within a broader matrix of cultural norms and expectations. To grasp this act fully, we must interrogate the implicit structures that render toast and butter legible as objects within the epistemological framework of morning consumption.
One does not simply butter toast in an autonomous, self-evident manner. Rather, the gesture is citational, reiterating a series of habitualized practices that constitute the normative boundaries of what “buttering” and “toast” mean within the hegemonic discourse of breakfast. The knife, a seemingly benign implement, operates as an extension of the subject, its movements governed by the tacit knowledge of what constitutes an appropriate distribution of butter. But whose butter? Whose toast? And who determines the adequacy of coverage, the sufficiency of spread?
To spread butter is to engage in a spatial-temporal negotiation with the toast’s surface, a surface that, like the body, is neither neutral nor inert but already implicated in the conditions of its own reception. The butter itself, melting into the porous texture, does not merely adhere but interpellates the toast as toast-that-has-been-buttered, a new ontological state that emerges through the process of application.
Yet, this process is neither universal nor without contestation. Alternative subjectivities and resistant practices—margarine, jam, dry toast—gesture toward the instability of breakfast norms, revealing the contingency of what is often taken as a given. In this sense, the act of buttering toast is not merely an individual choice but a site of discursive production, where the subject is both constituted by and constitutive of the structures that govern legibility, taste, and the performative materialization of the morning meal.
I see Gretchen Felker-Martin (formerly Micah Elliot Martin) has been repeatedly threatening a journalist who disagreed with Martin’s political opinions.
In today’s installment of How to Lose Friends and Alienate Nations:
Donald Trump has announced that the US is to strip mention of Europe out of its annual celebration of victory in the Second World War.
The president said that the May 8 Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) will become “Victory Day for World War Two”.
Mind you, he has one friend who may be happy with the name change, because
Russia also uses Victory Day to celebrate the end of the war.
That’s because it was the end of the war for Russia, but Trump seems to have forgotten that the war wasn’t won for another three months. He’s also renamed Armistice Day to ‘Victory Day for World War One’, and seems to believe that America did it all by itself both times, saying
[W]e won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance.
It is also looking likely that he’ll get his military parade in Washington, and on his birthday, too. I wonder if it’ll be topped off with Ivanka doing a Monroe-esque rendition of ‘Happy Birthday, Mr.President’?
The Maine Sunday Telegram has a dishonest cartoon in the editorial section this morning.
A white-coated lab tech peers intently through a microscope. He asks his assistant, “What am I looking at?”
She replies, “The true effect of trans athletes in sports.”
The effect is microscopic, geddit?
By “trans athletes in sports,” does the cartoonist mean “the effect of any trans-identified athlete in any sport”? Does he mean “The effect of transmen [females] in boys sports”? Or “The effect of trans-women [males] in girls sports”? Which is it, Bud?
Never never never does it occur to the cartoonist to ask, “The effects of males on female sports teams.”
Quite so. This is exactly what the news media do, too, as I keep complaining to monotonous effect. It’s always trans player or trans activist or trans competitor, so that we have to dig to pin down which sex the subject is. It’s journalistic malpractice and it’s ubiquitous.
Donald Trump has announced that the US is to strip mention of Europe out of its annual celebration of victory in the Second World War.
The president said that the May 8 Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) will become “Victory Day for World War Two”.
If he removes all mention of Europe, how does he talk about where the victory was won, or against what country? I get that he wants to expunge any mention of erstwhile allies, but how do you get rid of the entire theatre of operations? What then was D-day? (He can still talk about the Pacific theatre, but dropping mention of half of the world in the World War? Gives a whole new meaning to “Don’t mention the war!”)
Russia also uses Victory Day to celebrate the end of the war.
And like the radical revisionism that Trump is aiming at, the former Soviet Union edited out the massive material assistance provided by the Allies in the course of the war, which the Soviets called The Great Patriotic War. Of course they conveniently glossed over the whole Nazi-Soviet Pact, which gave Hitler the free hand he needed to start the war in the West.
[W]e won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance.
“Nobody was close”? Just fuck right off. Americans are mere mortals, just like everyone else. They are not supermen who, by birth as Americans, are magically better, than, more than, and bigger than, anyone and everyone else at doing anything and everything. This is childish “My Dad can beat up your dad!” thinking. It is possible to honour the valour of American service men and women without having to denigrate everyone else’s. Human qualities are shared by all humans; their presence in someone does not come at the expense of someone else. It’s not another of your zero-sum games. We’re not talking about cake and ice cream.
Besides, Americans did not win every battle. Sometimes they failed, or made mistakes, or just had bad luck, both individually, and on occasion, collectively. The enemies the Allies fought in World War Two exhibited these same qualities of which you claim Americans had more and better. But anyway, what would you know about it? You have no concept of service, sacrifice, honour, or bravery, unless it is expended by others for your personal benefit. All you know is what you see in movies and on TV.
You want to watch where you tread. You’ve never met a dictator you didn’t like; you aspire to dictatorship and are moving as quickly as you can get away with in that direction. Ultimately, victory in World War Two was a victory over tyranny, and a victory of the rule of law over the whims of dictators. Celebrating that victory is risky. You don’t want to give people the wrong ideas, because at some point they’re likely to celebrate victory over you.
It turns out that King Charles II has been invited by Prime Minister Carney’s government to read the Speech from the Throne at the opening of the next Canadian Parliament, on May 27. While I’m certainly no monarchist, and have never been a fan of Charles himself, this gesture is welcome and important, given the recent, recurring threats to our sovereignty spewing from the Trump White House. The reiteration of our own history and traditions helps to emphasize the fact that we are not American, and have no desire to be Americans. It demonstrates that we are connected to a wider world, and that we are not an inevitable item on the agenda of America’s supposed “manifest destiny,” which, having once directed westward expansionism to the Pacific, is now being aimed by Trump northward to encompass everything up to the Arctic Ocean. He seems to think that Canada is some kind of backwards, fawning, envious, jealous, aspiring conjoined twin, happy and eager to follow the American lead in whatever Trump wants. In his dreams. A long, until-now-undefended border, a shared use of the English language in the majority of our country, and a lack of global territorial ambition on our side of the 49th parallel, do not make us a part of the American polity. Charles’ presence at the opening of Parliament underscores this desire to remain independent in the face of American beligerance. I say good on him; it’s something useful and important. I never thought we’d ever need such gestures, but they are neccesary and welcome.
The Throne Speech is written by the government, and outlines in broad terms its legislative agenda. The King is supposed to avoid partisan politics, but it will be interesting to see what the speech will say about Canadian independence and sovereignty. I can’t imagine Carney missing such an opportunity to insert this into the Speech, seeing as how his campaign (and, I believe, his resulting victory) was based on defying Trump. I doubt Orange Julius will be mentioned by name, but I bet there will be some pointed references to him nonetheless.
The Bloc Quebecois and Parti Quebecois have already complained about the speech being given by a foreign ruler (a judgement a generally agree with), but I doubt even they would be interested in being absorbed into Trump’s (or anyone elses’s) America. If Charles can help us in our fight to avoid an American Anschluss, I can even live with his eventual appearance on our currency. If we still have a currency, he’ll have earned his place on it.
Of course they conveniently glossed over the whole Nazi-Soviet Pact, which gave Hitler the free hand he needed to start the war in the West.
The Pact was a taboo subject in the old Soviet Union, and I believe it’s currently illegal in Putin’s Russia to state that because of the Pact, Stalin’s Soviet Union bears any responsibility for starting the Second World War.
Oh bloody hell. India has fired missles into Pakistani-controlled territory in Kashmir. Pakistan says at least 31 people, have been killed. Pakistan is calling the attack an “act of war”.
“Gay Men Are A Red Flag.” “Gay men…strive to conform to the very social constructs that have long oppressed all marginalised people.” “Gay.. men…are in the most privileged position” “The real targets of the gender-critical movement are gay rights and women’s rights. You are next”. What the heck?
The one consolation is that this article is getting roasted on Facebook:
A new critique of the Cass Review, promoted by a Dr. Chris Noone, is getting a lot of obsequious coverage on Bluesky.
Benjamin Ryan takes a look at the critique’s authors:
One of the authors of a just published critique of Britain’s Cass Review on pediatric gender medicine and the systematic reviews on which it was partially based suggests that the authors were “bribed.”
It’s unclear what McLamore means by the comparison of how long peer review took for them, since the Cass Review took four years and was not peer reviewed. But the SRs on which it was based were peer reviewed and published in a journal….
It is remarkable, to say the least, that an academic would accuse of bribery the subjects of an academic critique of which that academic is an author.
(I’m not sure about the gerunded title. I’m meh on gerunded titles. Overused. Uninteresting. But I was pressed for time. Maybe I’ll come up with something better and update the post! It’s my own Substack; I can edit it to my heart’s content. We’ll see…)
Greetings from captured Brussels (and I thought Amsterdam was bad…). I was really looking forward to seeing some of the most beautiful streets, and squares, and buildings on the planet, but unfortunately you can’t see a thing through all those Belgian flags. By all means, it’s a pretty flag: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, very much like a rainbow. That ugly bright blue, white, and pink part kind of ruins it though. There is also the occasional black, yellow, and red flag. No idea what that’s supposed to represent…
Seriously, though. I can’t imagine a better reductio ad absurdum of the whole “most oppressed and marginalized group ever” narrative. Actually oppressed and marginalized people are not able to exert such total control over the public domain. As YNnB has previously pointed out, what it really boils down to is a warning and an implicit threat: “We own this place, and as long as you’re here, you’re at our mercy. If you don’t acknowledge our status as the most oppressed and marginalized group ever, we will show you just how right you are, and how far our power and control actually goes”. Fucking Tian’anmen Square (yes, I have been there) didn’t feel like a more controlled environment than this!
Is anyone setting up a GoFundMe for John Pesutto? Are Amnesty rushing to his defence? Where are the Black Pampers now he’s on the bones of his arse?
For those who came in late, John Pesutto was Victorian opposition leader (Australian state) when the “Let Women Speak” roadshow arrived in Melbourne. One of his party members, Moira Deeming, attended and was abused by Pesutto as being “Nazi adjacent”, if I’m being polite, and an actual Nazi if I represent his genuine opinion.
Well, being the tough woman she is, Deeming would not let that abuse and her subsequent expulsion from the Liberal Party go unchallenged.
Deeming won in both the Court of Public Opinion and the Courts of Law, and Pesutto is so far on the hook that he may well be bankrupted and expelled from Parliament himself.
A state Liberal leader is refusing to countenance the prospect of a by-election as his predecessor faces a hefty legal costs bill.
Former Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto has been ordered to pay $2.3 million in costs after he was found to have defamed first-term MP Moira Deeming.
Federal Court registrar Alison Legge made the cost ruling on Friday after the pair’s legal team argued about Mrs Deeming seeking to pay back a loan to NSW property developer Hilton Grugeon.
“I have determined that monies gifted or lent to Ms Deeming to assist her to meet her legal costs of the proceeding are not relevant to my determination and neither displace nor offset the quantum of her entitlement to costs,” Legge said.
In December, Federal Court Justice David O’Callaghan found Pesutto had defamed Mrs Deeming by implying she was associated with neo-Nazis who gatecrashed a controversial Melbourne rally she attended.
He ordered Pesutto pay her $315,000 on top of her legal costs for the case, which Ms Legge calculated to be $2,308,873.11.
Deeming’s barrister Sue Chrysanthou SC is also pushing for Pesutto to pay her legal fees for the costs hearings.
The scale of the final bill has raised internal fears about the Hawthorn MP’s ability to pay it, with MPs’ ineligible to sit in Victorian parliament if they declare bankruptcy.
Pesutto’s latest register of interest does not list any investment properties or any other forms of income, only his home in Camberwell.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke, as we say in Oz.
Rev, I was taught the old version of that saying. “It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person” has the benefit of applicability to situations both positive and negative; without needing to be modified, or interpreted as either irony or satire.
In any case, I agree. The bloke went way beyond the law and common decency (and even common sense) in his vendetta against Deeming, and I hope that he has to pay substantial weekly installments for the rest of his life.
That’s very interesting, Mostly Cloudy, not least because the reporting is almost honest. They give his name change history, and quote his barrister referring to him by correctly sexed pronouns.
I’m hoping that more news outlets will start explaining when a bloke is pretending to be a woman, and that they all stop believing that because he says that he ‘uses she/her pronouns’, that it means they should refer to him that way. It doesn’t.
He says Rowling is “deeply unhappy” and probably has lots of “Unresolved trauma.” Yes, how dare someone think differently from the fox-basher! She must be a miserable old spinster!
The man sounds utterly deranged. In what possible way can supporting women in the fight to hang on to our sex-based rights be construed as declaring that biology is destiny? Surely, those are complete opposites.
In what possible way can supporting women in the fight to hang on to our sex-based rights be construed as declaring that biology is destiny? Surely, those are complete opposites.
I’m guessing that the current understanding of the concept of “biology is destiny”, or “biological determinism”, as seen through translation by the Genderist Secret Decoder Ring, doesn’t so much mean that women aren’t allowed to be stock-brokers, fighter pilots, or brain surgeons, as it means that men can’t be women.
Six activists from a group called “Scottish Trans Youth” have been arrested in Glasgow after occupying the EHRC balcony. A group called Trans Kids Deserve Better is also protesting in London:
Amusing that a movement that has received deferential treatment, for fifteen years, from British politicians, media, businesses, the health service, the police and academia now thinks it’s the Most Oppressed Movement Ever.
A musician named Kate Nash (whom I’d never heard of) has released a single titled Germ. According to Wikipedia, Germ “was written in response to the result of the then-recent ruling by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that the Equality Act 2010’s definition of a woman depended on biological sex.” Unsurprisingly, the song makes a number of bizarre, fallacious, and/or contradictory claims. I think it’s interesting to see them strung together.
A musician named Kate Nash (whom I’d never heard of) has released a single titled Germ… Unsurprisingly, the song makes a number of bizarre, fallacious, and/or contradictory claims. I think it’s interesting to see them strung together.
“Mostly Cloudy puts on his Robert Christgau Glasses”.
I know about Kate Nash. She’s an indie-pop musician in Britain. She had some rather nice songs out a few years ago, like “Foundations” and “Do-Wah-Doo”.
But recently her career has hit the skids – her “9 Sad Symphonies” was a commercial flop, and Nash ended up having to sell pictures of her buttocks on OnlyFans to make up the losses. So presumably she’s decided that adopting the faddish cause of the moment will help her career.
Well, I’ve heard Kate Nash’s new pro-transmaiden song, “Germ.”
It is *terrible*.
Really terrible.
It’s a long, tuneless, lecture spoken over a drum-beat.
You cannot hum along to “Germ”.
You cannot dance to “Germ”.
You cannot “chill out” to “Germ”.
It’s “Pick-Me: The Song.”
“Germ” by Kate Nash belongs in the popular music abyss along with other horrid songs like “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris, “Kool in the Kaftan” by B. A. Robertson, “The Birdie Song” by the Tweets, “Lady in Red” by Chris de Burgh, “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice, “Life” by Des’ree, “Rockstar” by Nickelback and “Friday” by Rebecca Black.
It’s just as people have been pointing out – all previous, genuine, real rights movements have created great art, but this awful (bowel?) movement is so completely divorced from reality that it is incapable of creating anything even remotely resembling art. They have so successfully numbed themselves to any and all human emotions apart from anger and hatred that their brains can’t imagine anything at all, in case they accidentally forget to recite the mantras.
The article says Angela Howard, who describes herself as a ‘second generation witch’, lost her membership in the British Druid Order after comments she made online.
The Quakers, the Druids, the Secular Humanists…is nothing uncaptured?
On June 1, Ukraine launched simultaneous drone attacks against a number of airfields across Russia, destroying or damaging scores of aircraft, mostly heavy bombers and reconiassance planes.
This is an article exploring why there is so much uproar about the participation of male athletes in girls’ sports.
I like Bump a lot. I think much of what he writes is insightful analysis. I think he makes some good points, here, too. The article is unfortunately sullied by his mistaken impression that “it’s important to recognize that this concern is both exaggerated and selective”. He elaborates that it’s only a few male athletes who participate in girls’ sports, and they don’t always win, framing it as if the only issue is girls being jealous that a boy beat them. And of course he doesn’t phrase it that way; it’s about one kind of girl losing to a different kind of girl, in his parlance.
However, he accurately notes that there is division among Democrats on this issue, and that Republican are pushing the issue as a wedge to fracture the Democrats further. (They are doing this much more so than they are pushing the issue on its own merits, but Bump is missing what the merits are.)
I wish he could understand that the sports issue is not about “trans” athletes, but about male athletes in female sports. It does matter that males have advantages, but it matters primarily that they are male. If there is a reason to have a separate female division in sports, there is reason to keep males out of it.
Mary Anne Stephenson was one of the signatories for this letter defending the right of gender-critical women to speak in public, which is apparently why the TRAs put her on their shit-lists:
Eight pioneering nurses who formed their own union to defend the rights of women have won a landmark battle for a female-only changing room.
The Darlington nurses launched a legal action saying transgender policies put them at risk, deprived them of dignity and breached their human rights.
They claimed a biological male colleague identifying as a woman called Rose stared at their breasts as they were getting undressed and lingered too long in the changing room. One nurse had a panic attack after Rose repeatedly asked when they were alone, ‘Are you getting changed yet?’
Now, with their case heading to the courts, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has intervened, ordering Darlington Memorial Hospital to give the women their own room.
One of them, Bethany Hutchison, said they ‘hugely appreciate’ the action ‘to restore our safety and dignity in the workplace in line with the law’.
And she said the nurses would not ‘stop until this action is extended urgently to female workers across the NHS without any unnecessary delay’.
The Darlington nurses sued their NHS trust a year ago, winning overwhelming support across the country. ‘Millions of women stand with them,’ said J.K.Rowling.
I wonder if Streeting intervened because having the case go to court would have resulted in splash damage to the government? Let’s hope he feels compelled to extend this order to the entire country.
This is important. Sophie Lewis, who’s featured on B/W a few times*, wrote a tome earlier this year called “Enemy Feminisms”, which was a lengthy attack on gender-critical and anti-sex work feminists.
Now Victoria Smith has read the “Enemy Feminisms” book, and given us a lengthy critique of it:
In Lewis’s worldview, to assert, as Jenny Lindsay does in Hounded, that “women are materially definable as a class of human being” and “women (as adult human females) are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with their own sets of needs, rights and concerns” is not to hold a set of beliefs which are the starting point for feminist activism. It is to hold a set of beliefs which are the starting point for feminist fascism.
It seems that Trump’s fentanyl seizures have saved, and I quote, “285 million lives”. That’s interesting. I had no idea there were so many of us hooked on fentanyl! Two-thirds of the population would be dead now if Harris were elected, I guess.
Pam Bondi is the one who said it, if you’re curious.
It is to hold a set of beliefs which are the starting point for feminist fascism.
It’s interesting that Lewis, and Juno Dawson, among other genderists, think it’s more fascist for women to claim and protect boundaries for themselves, than it is for men claiming to be women demanding access to absolutely everything that women have, and refusing to accept any such boundaries at all. Of course this use of “fascist” is just a dressed up way of saying “You disagree with me, so you’re evil, and should be ignored and shunned by all good people,” rather than an accurate descriptor of their critics’ actual politics. It’s as laughable as Republicans calling Obama a “Marxist.”
It’s just another way of othering (like TERF), that is supposed to cast your opponents’ views so far beyond acceptability as to become off-limits. They have been deemed, by authorities whom we are supposed to accept unquestioningly, unfit to be examined, let alone entertained, by decent folk, “decent folk” being defined as those who, having outsourced their judgement to these authorities, accept this pronouncement. Failure to follw the anathema renders you suspect. Thus it serves as a dismissal and a warning, to first, try to prevent any study of these dangerous views, and second, to punish those who dare regardless to engageme with the ideas of the enemy. This is a particularly useful tactic when, as is the casr with genderism, your own ideas don’t hold up well (or at all) when faced with anything more than casual examination by someone not already espousing them.
Humpback whales may be blowing bubble rings at humans as a way to communicate, play, or interact.
The researchers documented 12 episodes involving 11 individual whales across different populations around the world. In each case, the whales approached humans and released a series of bubble rings. A total of 39 rings were observed during these curious encounters.
“Humpback whales often exhibit inquisitive, friendly behaviour towards boats and human swimmers,” says co-lead author Jodi Frediani.
“We’ve now located a dozen whales from populations around the world, the majority of which have voluntarily approached boats and swimmers blowing bubble rings during these episodes of curious behaviour.”
The researchers ruled out these bubble rings as being any part of feeding behaviour (unlike the bubble nets Humpbacks use to confuse and corral prey), communication with other whales (the bubble-ring blowers were not with other whales), or any sort of threat display (such as the bubble releases that males use with each other during courtship competition).
It’s interesting that Lewis, and Juno Dawson, among other genderists, think it’s more fascist for women to claim and protect boundaries for themselves, than it is for men claiming to be women demanding access to absolutely everything that women have, and refusing to accept any such boundaries at all
Oh yes. The best analogy would be the MctbW as Benito Mussolini, women as the Ethiopians, and Lewis/Dawson as the Giovanni Gentile-type apologists for Mussolini.
I’ve been trying to find, without any luck, some posts with links to a webcomic that Ophelia used to post every now and then, by someone with a Japanese name. Tetsuo Somebody? The comics Ophelia would share were critiquing gender identity ideology and it’s cultural influence. Ring any bells?
You are thinking of Sinfest, by Tatsuya Ishida. Many of the comics are about gender ideology. He’s also run some story lines (such as they are; plots are vague) where Jewish people are the villains.
Minnesota had a major act of violence overnight. One of their state representatives (and her husband) was killed; a Senator (and his wife) were shot, and are in critical condition, but might live. The assassin had a list of a lot of other Democrats he wanted to assassinate, including Tim Walz. There were also abortion providers and pro-choice campaigners on the list.
no one at the time imagined that the country would go quite that fucking insane in such a relatively short period of time. Had some of today’s demands made by trans people and their allies been transmitted backwards in time to February 2004, they would not have been taken remotely seriously, because at that time politics was mostly dominated by adults (of human male and female variety).
The Chorch has a new pope. Americans love that he’s a Cubs fan (except those on the South Side, they’ll never accept him.) But as long as the Church neglects to address this situation in a meaningful, as in making sure that those still living are indicted, I will not be as enamored of him. Until he proves otherwise, Leo is just more of the same. The excavations and identification of the bodies of fetuses, infants, and toddlers, is about to be begin in Tuam:
Trouble in the MAGAverse. Trump’s support of/subservience to Netanyahu is splitting his base, with accusations of betrayal as the US verges on entanglement in a war in the Middle East:
One of my co-workers watches US right-wing stuff in our office (don’t ask), and some of the hosts/pundits/whatevers were being surprisingly critical of Trump’s threats towards Iran. One of them was going on about how Netanyahu was the “real” president of the United States, with Trump dancing to his tune, and how the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel were “allowed” by Netanyahu (through a nationwide “stand down” order) to give him a pretext to do everything he’s done since, in hopes of ensnaring the US on his side.
Who’d a thunk it: gut the Federal government, overturn and ignore checks and balances on Presidential power, trash long-standing military alliances and trading relationships with friendly countries, admire and side with dictators, threaten to invade and take over neighbouring sovereign states, let a know-nothing crank destroy the nation’s readiness against outbreaks of infectious disease, and let a billionaire have unfettered access to sensitive information about everyone in the country (as well as letting him shut down and defund programs and angencies on a whim), and he’s good. Get involved in a foreign war that he promised not to, and they turn on him.
I’ve liked to articles by Gwynne Dyer before. He’s a “big-picture” columnist who regularly looks beyond the usual players in world politics (though he keeps an eye on them too), and includes environmental stories as part and parcel of his geopolitical observations. His most recent column is on the fishing practice of “bottom trawling”.
At the age of 99, the documentary film-maker David Attenborough has achieved his greatest triumph. With a single film clip, he has signed the death warrant for one of the world’s most destructive industries: bottom trawling. The companies and countries that do it will go down fighting and it will take time, but they will go down.
His film ‘Ocean’ got a simultaneous global release last month to build pressure for a ban on bottom trawling before the third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC-3) this week in the French city of Nice. The ban won’t happen this week and it won’t happen everywhere at once, but it is inevitable once enough people have seen that clip. You can’t forget it.
Attenborough should be considered a saint: a secular saint. He does so much more good than every Catholic saint put together – and less bad. He is a treasure, and it will be a sad day when he dies.
From the Substack that Mostly Cloudy linked to at 125:
But others with less of an excuse for holding insane opinions took the same line, on the basis that (a) trans people are a minority, (b) fighting for minority rights is A Good Thing; and therefore (c) if you demand minority rights you are On The Right Side Of History.
I think this explains a lot of the support on the left for what is at heart a regressive ideology.
Of course, billionaires are a minority too; perhaps we should start a Billionaires Rights Movement (“My Class Solidarity is Billionaire-Inclusive!”).
Interesting article by Helen Lewis in “The Atlantic”:
://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/britain-rules-woman-supreme-court/682511/?gift=XzlAM20xpGLLmLnkZLnczZo98ZgJQsiwOeVPis6ZZ9c&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Sorry, posting on an old laptop in my holiday home.
The link is:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/britain-rules-woman-supreme-court/682511/?gift=XzlAM20xpGLLmLnkZLnczZo98ZgJQsiwOeVPis6ZZ9c&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I’m struggling to keep up and have just added 3 more books to the must read before month’s end pile.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57964654-american-hitler?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_21
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43261495-the-cult-of-trump?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=LbWgNRFIwr&rank=1
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26720949-the-death-of-expertise?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18
The good news is I broke a finger in the gym this morning, so that’s an extrra 90 minutes a day for reading. :-)
But ouch!
The books sound good.
Rev, my condolences. I broke a finger on my house hunting trip to Maine; it was miserable.
Pope Fluffy is dead.
Another good article, this time about
TRA threats of violence against women
https://www.cyclefree.co.uk/why-the-tantrums/
@iknklast #6
I saw that too. I figured that his recent “recovery” was too optimistic.
The recent movie “Conclave” is about the back-room politics of selecting a new pope after the death of a liberal-ish pope. The setting could possibly describe the current situation, but the movie is of course fiction. It is very good fiction, though, with a lot of interesting issues touched on, including some that might be of particular interest to readers here. Have any of you seen it?
I saw that. I didn’t find the ending believable, but the movie was well made, and had a great cast.
Sounds innaresting.
Keir Starmer now says a woman is an adult female, and is glad we now – at long last! – have clarity on this most murky question.
Curiously, PZ hasn’t mentioned the UK Supreme Court’s decision on single-sex provisions. Perhaps he’s realized that he’s better off shutting up about it.
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine
Go to the 2025/4/22 strip ;)
^ The censorious bores have already turned up to proclaim transphobia!
USA Fencing Board Prepares for Potential Changes from Governing Bodies on Transgender and Non-Binary Athlete Eligibility Policy
Yesssssss! Now implement!
Awfully quiet over here the past few days. Are we in mourning for Pope Fluffy?
Something unannounced therefore probably something unplanned.
I’m really hoping that it’s just internet connection woes.
Hope you’re OK. Ophelia. As I said a few years ago when your internet connection was down. I’m afraid your regular posting schedule has spoiled some of us the the point where we start worrying if a day goes by without the daily dose of sanity from B&W.
If there is white smoke coming out of the router, it means there’s a new popehat.
Ophelia Writes:
And then:
(The Argumentum ad Hackiam is, of course, a fallacy that is only ever used by those who don’t have facts and logic on their side)
Well, thank the good heavens! Just kidding though, technical difficulties did cross my mind. As a person who has no social media accounts, no television, and only the most casual of interests in current affairs (color me a grumpy old man), this site is like home to me. I know I don’t provide much deep insight or well crafted posts (I’m not a writer!), I do look forward to reading Ophelia’s posts daily, and all the excellent comments. I actually do read most of what’s posted here, whether I think I should weigh in myself or not. Having a couple of days off is not a bad thing, however it does remind me of how valuable to me Ophelia’s input has always been, going back to the old TPM discussion board days. Sorry for the overly sentimenal outpouring, but I do appreciate Ophelia, and indeed all of the regulars here, for your continued interesting commentary. Looking forward to getting back into the swing of things, hopefully with more cyber security or whatever to keep the hacking at bay. ‘Discussing all the things’ is only as good as we make it, but I have found here that it’s important things, relevant things, provocative things that I enjoy reading about (I am a Reader!) that make this site a somewhat ideal daily ritual. :)
What a headache! Terribly sorry about the hacking, Ophelia. Surely an upleasant thing to have to deal with.
Here’s hoping it’s resolved soon, without too much expense, in terms of time and labour, and in terms of dollars.
Until then, I’ll keep compulsively refreshing the B&W homepage, jonesing for my fix of new Ophelia Benson content.
twiliter,
We’re peas in a pod.
Good to hear Mike. :) B&W is like a little oasis of sanity and familiarity of the interweb behemoth. I must also admit I do enjoy YouTube, but a curated personal version of it. I currently subscribe to 10 channels, and I have a borrowed subscription (therefore no ads), but YouTube allows me to choose “not interested” and “don’t recommend channel” in a way that narrows down what they offer on the main page. I have to maintain this, as they recommend new garbage daily. It’s a very narrow handful of videos that I might find interesting amongst a gigantic amount of sheer digital garbage that I don’t want to wade through. I don’t have the head space anymore to suffer through what people find entertaining or even interesting anymore. Don’t get me started on ads either — in my opinion marketing is the most wretched disease of our time. How it’s metastasized in recent years is stunning. I saw a video where Adam Savage described Googling. He said that the *signal to noise ratio* has increased exponentially and now we have to scroll through multiple ads and “suggested” crap to find the simple results we were offered only a few years ago. Yep. YouTube’s “creators” too end up getting big, greedy, and start hocking vitamins and vpn’s, which they call sponsorships. When they reach this point it seems they become uninteresting concurrently. To which my response becomes *unsubscribe* and “do not recommend channel.” I can see them having “merch” and a website to visit if you want to support them, or if you’re a fan, but the sponsered stuff always seems phony and scripted…
Anyways, I digress. Rant over. :D
I’m almost the same, in that B&W is the first site I open in the morning, and the last I check at bedtime. I do have a FB account, though. Oh, and Teams, now that Skype is being killed at the end of the month. Got to be able to keep in touch with my family somehow.
I rarely go on YouTube; I’ve never had an account there, preferring to follow a few people via their blogs/Substacks.
I recall claims of men claiming to be transwomen, using that claim to get into women’s change rooms & washrooms for purposes of at least voyeurism and maybe rape.
If I bring up the possibility get doubts this occurs at all.
Can anyone provide a list of confirmed cases that I can link to?
@Jim
It infuriates me when people doubt that men take advantage of transgender identities to commit crimes against women.
Men do bad things all the time, and anyone who claims otherwise is flaunting a luxury belief. It’s an insult to everyone else. To such a person I say:
You talk like you’re perched in some untouchable world where male violence against women is just a rumour. The police, the courts, prison — that stuff’s always somewhere else. You only ever see it on a screen.
Well I live in the real world, and down here men rape women. Men abuse women. Men leer at women. Men harass women. Men spy on women undressing. And they film it. And they share it with other men online.
From where I’m standing, pretending men wouldn’t jump at any chance to do harm — that’s the real fiction.
The minute you hear the word ‘transgender’ you instinctually retreat to your perch where everything’s sugar and spice and bad things never happen. You don’t realize it, but you’re letting slip that on some level you already know that ‘transgender women’ are a fiction. Because if you truly saw them as ordinary human beings living in the real world — as I do — you’d understand that they’re capable of good and bad, just like everyone else. You’d have no trouble comprehending that some men who claim to be women have complex psychological circumstances that are deserving of compassion, and that others simply want to get away with things they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
In the real world, you can’t conjure a magic word that exempts any man from the rules that keep women safe and then just assume that only the right kind of man would ever dare to make use of it. And that’s all “trans” is — a magic word. A man doesn’t have to get a diagnosis or have surgeries or take drugs in order to “become” transgender. He doesn’t have to be gay or have a feminine disposition in order to “be” transgender. He doesn’t have to really feel it. All he has to do is say the word, and you — yes, you — will believe him. For once he says the word, he’s already stepped into a parallel universe where impostors and criminals cannot exist. Of course, it helps if he at least puts on a skirt, grows his hair long, and applies a little makeup. You act like even that is some great barrier that separates the world of mortal men from the mystical realm of “trans women”.
But here’s what you don’t seem to understand: lots and lots of men like to put on a skirt and wear makeup. All kinds of men — straight men, aggressive men, criminal men. There’s nothing mystical or unknowable about it. To many men, crossdresing is not a burden, it’s a kinky, exciting privilege. Remember the 1980s? Hair metal? Glam? All those ultra-macho, virile rock stars? They were showing off that they were cool and daring and manly enough to get away with it. And other men literally worshipped them for it.
Now they’re the most special people in the world. You’ve given men even more incentive to come out in public with their crossdresing proclivities — especially criminal men, because now it comes with carte blanche to enter spaces that were designed to keep women safe from them.
But you can’t allow yourself to see it that way. The problem is: “transwomen are women” doesn’t work in the real world at all. It’s a fantasy that can only exist in a fictional world where men didn’t take advantage of every opportunity to abuse women they ever came across since the dawn of time.
I dare you to really look at transwomen — even for a second — before slipping on your magical-thinking blinders. You might be shocked to realize just how un-virtuous you’ve been all along — to realize the Emperor’s been naked this whole time.
If they honestly saw TIMs as women, they’d be calling them Karens and bitches and telling them to STFU.
Bjarte Foshaug #23:
I’m also sorry to hear Ophelia’s website has been hacked, and I hope it’s sorted out quickly.
Too true, Artie. I like to say I’m not biased against trans-women, because I believe they are no more likely to commit sexual offenses than other men.
Your post does make me wonder about the iconography of transness. All the rainbows and unicorns… is this the irrepressible consciousness of it being an appeal to magic?
One of the real giveaways is the number of convicted rapists who suddenly “discover” they are “women”. Jim Baerg, you might start with the well-documented example of opportunistic, predatory, “transness” in convicted rapists. There is no distinguishable difference between these rapists and any other supposedly trans identified males demanding access to women’s single sex spaces. If activists dismiss the former as “no true trans”, then they similarly disqualify the latter, allegedly “safe” ones because there’s no way to tell one from the other.
It is telling that trans activism is perfectly fine with all of the ongoing collateral damage that women suffer, so long as the wee precious faux lasses get to “validate” themselves by invading women’s spaces. This is why “third spaces”, which could have been a solution, has always been rejected: they would short-circuit the validating effect of accessing women’s spaces, confirming the truth that trans identified males are not women. Ideologically, this was a non-starter, because “safety” is not the real goal, and neverhas been. Access and “validation” override everything, women be damned.
These activists refuse to even acknowledge there is any such danger to women, or even the slightest hint of a problem, proclaiming there is “NO CONFLICT!” between women’s rights and trans “rights.” They insist that women have no legitimate reason to bar trans identified males (which means, effectively, any and all males under any aggressively enforced “Self ID” regime), from any female, single sex spaces of any kind whatsoever, and that the their sole motivation to do so can only ever be hateful, transphobic bigotry. They can even count on Quisling females (Sally Hines, Jo Grady, Maggie Chapman, etc.) to parrot this line in their demented, misogynistic, self-congratulatory eagerness to give away women’s rights to safey and privacy.
As a consequence of this totalizing programme, supported and enforced by government and industry, women’s prisons, hospital wards, rape shelters, toilet and changing facilities, sports teams, short lists, etc., are all open to any man who claims to be a woman. Activists will not admit of any exception to this demand, because to do so invalidates their entire case: the “safe” males who are, we are told, actually women, are indistinguishable from the cheating, predatory ones. A blanket ban on all males is the only safe course of action, but genderists counter this with “TWAW!” tactically conflating gender and sex in the process. For them it’s all or nothing. And it has to be. Allow one exception and the whole thing collapses in contradiction and incoherence. Women’s resistance must be sidelined, discredited, and crushed. And it is. The worst crime of all is women saying “No” to the demands of men.
Possibly, but I think it also has a strong element of infantilization. The childish iconography enforces the idea of TiM “harmlessness”. Ironically, it goes hand in hand with the use of overtly stereotypical, sexualized “womanface.” Both are supposed to disarm resistance to their demands, painting themselves as poor, marginalized victims who wouldn’t want to cheat or rape anyone.
This makes me think of the musical Oklahoma! when Will Parker sings to Ado Annie that with him it’s all or nuthin’. Her response is “all for you and nuthin’ for me”. She sees right through him.
The trans are the same way. All for them, and nothing for anyone else, especially women, but also the LGB portion of the alphabet.
ArtyMorty & Bjarte
*Perhaps* I wrote unclearly.
I have read enough on this blog over the last few years to be convinced that Trans is harmful BS.
The Trans issue came up elsewhere & I raised the issue of allowing “TransWomen” into women’s change rooms providing cover for rapists. Others expressed doubt about that.
Is there a website with links to news items about rapists claiming to be ‘Trans’ to get into women’s prisons, or cases of ‘Transwomen’ going into women’s washrooms or changerooms to have opportunities for rape or at least voyeurism.
I would like to have a link to such a website to give for whenever the issue comes up again.
Jim Baerg, there is an archive of every such incident on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1722756661380462/
And there is a summary list of names (each one a link to the relevant article) at:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/this-never-happens
@Jim,
I understood that your comment was a request for specific resources. My comment was not intended to be a direct response to that; it was a riff on the subject. I got the inspiration to write it — so I did. Now that it’s out there, it could possibly serve as an alternative rebuttal to people who express doubt that men ever exploit the transgender movement to abuse women, rather than supplying them with a barrage of counterfactual examples. Or it could serve as a complementary or supplemental response to bolster the counter-argument alongside a list of concrete examples. A double-barrel serving of conceptual unpacking alongside the hard, cold facts can make for a knockout rebuttal.
It seems to me that rebutting the statement that men never exploit the transgender movement to abuse women should be simple: what is the complete list of things men never exploit to abuse women? Let’s postulate that the transgender movement is item number one. What is item number two?
Yes it can. I wish I could write sentences like this. Good one, Arty.
Thanks for the links, tigger! Nice to have the reference material handy. :)
@twiliter,
Thank you! But immediately after pressing the “publish” button, I wish I could have edited that sentence. This is often the case with me. I toss something off in a moment of passion, and then I re-read it with an editor’s eye, and it’s at that point that my mistakes come into focus.
For example:
A double-barrel blast would fit better than a double-barrel serving. Servings are for ice cream — double scoops!
A double-scoop serving is cute. A double-barrel blast is hostile and violent — as I intended my sentence to be.
As it is now, it’s accidentially a mix of aggro and cutesy.
But I’m my own worst critic. Perhaps I need not judge myself so harshly. I’m grateful you liked my sentence!
Cheers
Oh gosh Arty, Ophelia has saved me here so many times. Whether it be me being provoked, or just plain hasty. I mean it’s not like I don’t have the time to self edit after I cool off a bit. Between the typos and not getting my thoughts in order before hitting that fateful button… :D
Thank You tigger_the_wing
I think using this list would be the best option in most cases.
Appealing as a rant might be, the list seems less likely to get the back up of someone who merely expressed doubts about trans-women being rapists.
I do understand the appeal of a rant, but as you say, most people are ignorant because they aren’t being given the facts by their favourite news outlets; not because they are determined to believe, in spite of the evidence, that ‘transwomen’ are delicate flowers. Reserve the ranting for the gaslighters.
Which leaves you plenty of opportunity to rant!
There’s not much I miss since I quit Xwitter, but Glosswitch is one I do miss.
A great read from her today.
JKR is certainly a lightning rod for all the Transactivists, the MRAs, and their hangers on. I suppose if she didn’t exist, they’d have to invent her.
It is Victoria’s belief, and I concur, that so much of transactivism is a cover for “Men’s rights”, disguised as empathy for the poor, marginalised, transsexuals. It is, as she writes, an offshoot of the manosphere.
https://thecritic.co.uk/trans-activism-is-progressive-mans-manosphere/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=other
She is the absolute best. Every sentence a gem.
BTW I posted this link
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/this-never-happens
that tigger gave us, for the person who expressed doubt about transwomen in women’s change rooms being a problem. He says he is now convinced that it is a problem.
We both have only read a few of the items, that is sufficiently appalling.
I suppose the null hypothesis would be that a ‘transwoman’ is about as likely to commit a given type of offence as an ordinary man. Are there statistics that indicate a higher or lower offence rate?
Jim Baerg, 50:
Unfortunately, since it’s not really possible to know how many “transwomen” there are out there, it’s rather difficult to tell what their offense rate might be.
You might be interested in the following article. Some images from it get shared online rather frequently.
https://scientificparentofatranskid.substack.com/p/fact-check-rates-of-sexual-offending
But given the unreliability of such figures, I’d argue it’s better to avoid using them.
The offense rate for transwomen is always zero, because no true transwoman would ever do such a thing. QED.
Can Trump & Co. sink any lower? Trump has said that he could have Kilmar Ábrego García returned to the US with a ‘simple phone call’ and that he would do so, ‘if he were the gentleman that you say he is’. But he won’t, because he insists that Garcia is a member of MS-13.
And here’s where it gets really bad.
The White House is promoting a photo of Garcia showing ‘MS-13’ tattooed on his knuckles, and Trump has previously used the same image on his Truth Social site.The problem is, there is no MS-13 tattoo on his knuckles in any other image where Garcia’s hands are visible.
The bastards are photoshopping ‘evidence’ to cover their fuck-up in deporting him.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpdz72lwe1yo.amp
Jim, I’m so pleased that the link has been helpful. It certainly helped me to change my mind. As you say, though, it’s really tough to read. They really are portraits of deeply horrible men.
J.A. #52
To a doubleplusgood doublethinker it depends on the context though:
• For the specific purpose of dismissing any concerns about allowing TIMs into female only spaces, no true
Scotsman“trans woman” would ever do such a thing.• For the specific purpose of defending the infallibility of self-id, any TIM who does indeed “do such a thing” is the most bonafide trans woman imaginable, which is why “she” must be allowed to serve in a women’s prison, why the victim must be forced to refer to her rapist as a “woman” (who committed rape with “her penis”), why the crime must enter the public record as perpetrated by a “woman” etc.
• Oh, and Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.
Is this a trick question?
Are you sure it’s not a Sharpie?
I’m sorry for this, I truly am; I know how people here feel about Judith Butler. I also detest plagiarism software running on jumped-up search engines.
However, this gave me a huge laugh this morning, and I feel compelled to share.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BxRAxqE1f/
Should I be at all concerned by the fact that this actually makes sense?
Hilarious! This is clearer than what little I’ve read of Butler herself.
It made me think of Bilbo after decades with the One Ring feeling like butter spread over too much toast.
Or is that Butler spread over too much toast?
I see Gretchen Felker-Martin (formerly Micah Elliot Martin) has been repeatedly threatening a journalist who disagreed with Martin’s political opinions.
https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1918289080242323765#m
How very Trumpian of Felker-Martin.
In today’s installment of How to Lose Friends and Alienate Nations:
Mind you, he has one friend who may be happy with the name change, because
That’s because it was the end of the war for Russia, but Trump seems to have forgotten that the war wasn’t won for another three months. He’s also renamed Armistice Day to ‘Victory Day for World War One’, and seems to believe that America did it all by itself both times, saying
It is also looking likely that he’ll get his military parade in Washington, and on his birthday, too. I wonder if it’ll be topped off with Ivanka doing a Monroe-esque rendition of ‘Happy Birthday, Mr.President’?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/05/02/trump-strips-mention-of-europe-from-ve-day-celebration/
The Maine Sunday Telegram has a dishonest cartoon in the editorial section this morning.
A white-coated lab tech peers intently through a microscope. He asks his assistant, “What am I looking at?”
She replies, “The true effect of trans athletes in sports.”
The effect is microscopic, geddit?
By “trans athletes in sports,” does the cartoonist mean “the effect of any trans-identified athlete in any sport”? Does he mean “The effect of transmen [females] in boys sports”? Or “The effect of trans-women [males] in girls sports”? Which is it, Bud?
Never never never does it occur to the cartoonist to ask, “The effects of males on female sports teams.”
Quite so. This is exactly what the news media do, too, as I keep complaining to monotonous effect. It’s always trans player or trans activist or trans competitor, so that we have to dig to pin down which sex the subject is. It’s journalistic malpractice and it’s ubiquitous.
If he removes all mention of Europe, how does he talk about where the victory was won, or against what country? I get that he wants to expunge any mention of erstwhile allies, but how do you get rid of the entire theatre of operations? What then was D-day? (He can still talk about the Pacific theatre, but dropping mention of half of the world in the World War? Gives a whole new meaning to “Don’t mention the war!”)
And like the radical revisionism that Trump is aiming at, the former Soviet Union edited out the massive material assistance provided by the Allies in the course of the war, which the Soviets called The Great Patriotic War. Of course they conveniently glossed over the whole Nazi-Soviet Pact, which gave Hitler the free hand he needed to start the war in the West.
“Nobody was close”? Just fuck right off. Americans are mere mortals, just like everyone else. They are not supermen who, by birth as Americans, are magically better, than, more than, and bigger than, anyone and everyone else at doing anything and everything. This is childish “My Dad can beat up your dad!” thinking. It is possible to honour the valour of American service men and women without having to denigrate everyone else’s. Human qualities are shared by all humans; their presence in someone does not come at the expense of someone else. It’s not another of your zero-sum games. We’re not talking about cake and ice cream.
Besides, Americans did not win every battle. Sometimes they failed, or made mistakes, or just had bad luck, both individually, and on occasion, collectively. The enemies the Allies fought in World War Two exhibited these same qualities of which you claim Americans had more and better. But anyway, what would you know about it? You have no concept of service, sacrifice, honour, or bravery, unless it is expended by others for your personal benefit. All you know is what you see in movies and on TV.
You want to watch where you tread. You’ve never met a dictator you didn’t like; you aspire to dictatorship and are moving as quickly as you can get away with in that direction. Ultimately, victory in World War Two was a victory over tyranny, and a victory of the rule of law over the whims of dictators. Celebrating that victory is risky. You don’t want to give people the wrong ideas, because at some point they’re likely to celebrate victory over you.
It turns out that King Charles II has been invited by Prime Minister Carney’s government to read the Speech from the Throne at the opening of the next Canadian Parliament, on May 27. While I’m certainly no monarchist, and have never been a fan of Charles himself, this gesture is welcome and important, given the recent, recurring threats to our sovereignty spewing from the Trump White House. The reiteration of our own history and traditions helps to emphasize the fact that we are not American, and have no desire to be Americans. It demonstrates that we are connected to a wider world, and that we are not an inevitable item on the agenda of America’s supposed “manifest destiny,” which, having once directed westward expansionism to the Pacific, is now being aimed by Trump northward to encompass everything up to the Arctic Ocean. He seems to think that Canada is some kind of backwards, fawning, envious, jealous, aspiring conjoined twin, happy and eager to follow the American lead in whatever Trump wants. In his dreams. A long, until-now-undefended border, a shared use of the English language in the majority of our country, and a lack of global territorial ambition on our side of the 49th parallel, do not make us a part of the American polity. Charles’ presence at the opening of Parliament underscores this desire to remain independent in the face of American beligerance. I say good on him; it’s something useful and important. I never thought we’d ever need such gestures, but they are neccesary and welcome.
The Throne Speech is written by the government, and outlines in broad terms its legislative agenda. The King is supposed to avoid partisan politics, but it will be interesting to see what the speech will say about Canadian independence and sovereignty. I can’t imagine Carney missing such an opportunity to insert this into the Speech, seeing as how his campaign (and, I believe, his resulting victory) was based on defying Trump. I doubt Orange Julius will be mentioned by name, but I bet there will be some pointed references to him nonetheless.
The Bloc Quebecois and Parti Quebecois have already complained about the speech being given by a foreign ruler (a judgement a generally agree with), but I doubt even they would be interested in being absorbed into Trump’s (or anyone elses’s) America. If Charles can help us in our fight to avoid an American Anschluss, I can even live with his eventual appearance on our currency. If we still have a currency, he’ll have earned his place on it.
Your Name’s not Bruce? #65 :
The Pact was a taboo subject in the old Soviet Union, and I believe it’s currently illegal in Putin’s Russia to state that because of the Pact, Stalin’s Soviet Union bears any responsibility for starting the Second World War.
Oh bloody hell. India has fired missles into Pakistani-controlled territory in Kashmir. Pakistan says at least 31 people, have been killed. Pakistan is calling the attack an “act of war”.
https://www.itv.com/news/2025-05-06/india-launches-several-strikes-on-three-locations-in-pakistan-jammu-and-kashmir
Yeah that’s not good.
I thought people here might be interested by this Attitude article:
Are gay men doing enough to support trans women? Four community voices give their take
There are so many different things to criticize in there that I’m not even going to try.
“Gay Men Are A Red Flag.” “Gay men…strive to conform to the very social constructs that have long oppressed all marginalised people.” “Gay.. men…are in the most privileged position” “The real targets of the gender-critical movement are gay rights and women’s rights. You are next”. What the heck?
The one consolation is that this article is getting roasted on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/attitude.co.uk/posts/dani-st-james-india-willoughby-ella-morgan-and-mzz-kimberley-give-their-take-in-/1209643390824196/
Not sure what else to expect from a magazine called “attitude”.
In the meantime, I’ve just learned from public radio that the cabarets of the Weimar republic “featured many nonbinary characters.”
They must have slipped thru a time machine.
A new critique of the Cass Review, promoted by a Dr. Chris Noone, is getting a lot of obsequious coverage on Bluesky.
Benjamin Ryan takes a look at the critique’s authors:
https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1921208546122686472#m
Over at my Substack, I’ve updated and expanded a recent comment of mine from here at B&W (which was later upped to a Guest Post).
Marketing the motley crew: Trans inclusivity policies are actually promotional incentives
https://artymorty.substack.com/p/marketing-the-motley-crew-trans-inclusivity
(I’m not sure about the gerunded title. I’m meh on gerunded titles. Overused. Uninteresting. But I was pressed for time. Maybe I’ll come up with something better and update the post! It’s my own Substack; I can edit it to my heart’s content. We’ll see…)
Gerunded titles are valid, gerunded titles are loved.
Greetings from captured Brussels (and I thought Amsterdam was bad…). I was really looking forward to seeing some of the most beautiful streets, and squares, and buildings on the planet, but unfortunately you can’t see a thing through all those Belgian flags. By all means, it’s a pretty flag: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, very much like a rainbow. That ugly bright blue, white, and pink part kind of ruins it though. There is also the occasional black, yellow, and red flag. No idea what that’s supposed to represent…
Seriously, though. I can’t imagine a better reductio ad absurdum of the whole “most oppressed and marginalized group ever” narrative. Actually oppressed and marginalized people are not able to exert such total control over the public domain. As YNnB has previously pointed out, what it really boils down to is a warning and an implicit threat: “We own this place, and as long as you’re here, you’re at our mercy. If you don’t acknowledge our status as the most oppressed and marginalized group ever, we will show you just how right you are, and how far our power and control actually goes”. Fucking Tian’anmen Square (yes, I have been there) didn’t feel like a more controlled environment than this!
Is anyone setting up a GoFundMe for John Pesutto? Are Amnesty rushing to his defence? Where are the Black Pampers now he’s on the bones of his arse?
For those who came in late, John Pesutto was Victorian opposition leader (Australian state) when the “Let Women Speak” roadshow arrived in Melbourne. One of his party members, Moira Deeming, attended and was abused by Pesutto as being “Nazi adjacent”, if I’m being polite, and an actual Nazi if I represent his genuine opinion.
Well, being the tough woman she is, Deeming would not let that abuse and her subsequent expulsion from the Liberal Party go unchallenged.
Deeming won in both the Court of Public Opinion and the Courts of Law, and Pesutto is so far on the hook that he may well be bankrupted and expelled from Parliament himself.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke, as we say in Oz.
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/vic/2025/05/16/john-pesutto-bill
Rev, I was taught the old version of that saying. “It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person” has the benefit of applicability to situations both positive and negative; without needing to be modified, or interpreted as either irony or satire.
In any case, I agree. The bloke went way beyond the law and common decency (and even common sense) in his vendetta against Deeming, and I hope that he has to pay substantial weekly installments for the rest of his life.
Britain’s first transgender MP, Katie Wallis, (formerly known as Jamie Wallis) has been in court, accused of harassing “her” ex-wife:
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/jamie-katie-wallis-mp-live-31672694
That’s very interesting, Mostly Cloudy, not least because the reporting is almost honest. They give his name change history, and quote his barrister referring to him by correctly sexed pronouns.
I’m hoping that more news outlets will start explaining when a bloke is pretending to be a woman, and that they all stop believing that because he says that he ‘uses she/her pronouns’, that it means they should refer to him that way. It doesn’t.
Jolyon Maugham has found out J. K. Rowling has launched a new fund to protect women’s sex-based rights. He’s not happy:
https://x.com/FeministRoar/status/1926228413498417589#m
He says Rowling is “deeply unhappy” and probably has lots of “Unresolved trauma.” Yes, how dare someone think differently from the fox-basher! She must be a miserable old spinster!
Thanks for that link, Mostly Cloudy.
The man sounds utterly deranged. In what possible way can supporting women in the fight to hang on to our sex-based rights be construed as declaring that biology is destiny? Surely, those are complete opposites.
I’m guessing that the current understanding of the concept of “biology is destiny”, or “biological determinism”, as seen through translation by the Genderist Secret Decoder Ring, doesn’t so much mean that women aren’t allowed to be stock-brokers, fighter pilots, or brain surgeons, as it means that men can’t be women.
Trump sent a “free speech” team from the US state department to the UK to interview UK anti-abortion campaigners, and report back to the White House.
https://archive.ph/raXKb
Isn’t it interesting that the “Free Speech” issue Trump objects to is women having control over their own bodies?
Six activists from a group called “Scottish Trans Youth” have been arrested in Glasgow after occupying the EHRC balcony. A group called Trans Kids Deserve Better is also protesting in London:
https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/scottish-news/25191734.six-arrested-connection-west-george-street-protest
Amusing that a movement that has received deferential treatment, for fifteen years, from British politicians, media, businesses, the health service, the police and academia now thinks it’s the Most Oppressed Movement Ever.
Now? It’s thought that ALL ALONG. And persuaded/bullied all its fans and supporters to think so too.
A musician named Kate Nash (whom I’d never heard of) has released a single titled Germ. According to Wikipedia, Germ “was written in response to the result of the then-recent ruling by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that the Equality Act 2010’s definition of a woman depended on biological sex.” Unsurprisingly, the song makes a number of bizarre, fallacious, and/or contradictory claims. I think it’s interesting to see them strung together.
Here’s a website with the lyrics.
The lyrics to that song read like something an AI trained on Bluesky would come up with.
And say what you may about “MacArthur Park”, any lyric with “someone left the cake out in the rain” is using their imagination at least.
P.S. – and they never had that recipe again.
It’s just as people have been pointing out – all previous, genuine, real rights movements have created great art, but this awful (bowel?) movement is so completely divorced from reality that it is incapable of creating anything even remotely resembling art. They have so successfully numbed themselves to any and all human emotions apart from anger and hatred that their brains can’t imagine anything at all, in case they accidentally forget to recite the mantras.
Oh dear, the irony….’Witch thrown off Druid training course after trans row’.
https://archive.ph/GHsT5
The article says Angela Howard, who describes herself as a ‘second generation witch’, lost her membership in the British Druid Order after comments she made online.
The Quakers, the Druids, the Secular Humanists…is nothing uncaptured?
Pretty much. CFI and Free Inquiry are.
Another snitch list….a group has created a ‘Blocklist of Transphobic people in Publishing’.
https://x.com/LoobyLouDino/status/1531965355224182785?s=20&t=mWXIoRqRaymm1OBcDAG7lg
Sorry, that list is from a few years ago.
I wonder if things have changed in the publishing industry today. Probably not.
FWIW
Skeptic magazine has an article titled: True but unfashionable, sex is binary.
More propaganda from the BBC:
https://xcancel.com/SonyaDouglas/status/1929554438370279563#m
‘What It Feels Like For An AGP’.
On June 1, Ukraine launched simultaneous drone attacks against a number of airfields across Russia, destroying or damaging scores of aircraft, mostly heavy bombers and reconiassance planes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/02/operation-spiderweb-visual-guide-ukraine-drone-attack-russian-aircraft
WaPo opinion writer Philip Bump: Parents invest so much in youth sports. Then came Trump.
This is an article exploring why there is so much uproar about the participation of male athletes in girls’ sports.
I like Bump a lot. I think much of what he writes is insightful analysis. I think he makes some good points, here, too. The article is unfortunately sullied by his mistaken impression that “it’s important to recognize that this concern is both exaggerated and selective”. He elaborates that it’s only a few male athletes who participate in girls’ sports, and they don’t always win, framing it as if the only issue is girls being jealous that a boy beat them. And of course he doesn’t phrase it that way; it’s about one kind of girl losing to a different kind of girl, in his parlance.
However, he accurately notes that there is division among Democrats on this issue, and that Republican are pushing the issue as a wedge to fracture the Democrats further. (They are doing this much more so than they are pushing the issue on its own merits, but Bump is missing what the merits are.)
I wish he could understand that the sports issue is not about “trans” athletes, but about male athletes in female sports. It does matter that males have advantages, but it matters primarily that they are male. If there is a reason to have a separate female division in sports, there is reason to keep males out of it.
I found this reposted on J. K. Rowling’s X site.
“It’s Time for Liberal Physicians to Rethink American Gender Medicine”
An Ob-Gyn in Iowa has writen about the “gender affirming” hysterectomies she carried out. And why she’s now worried:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/164586786?r=62st1&triedRedirect=true
The UK government has chosen Mary Anne Stephenson as their choice for the head of the EHRC . Now the TRAs are after her:
https://nitter.poast.org/FeministRoar/status/1930717584191885669#m
Mary Anne Stephenson was one of the signatories for this letter defending the right of gender-critical women to speak in public, which is apparently why the TRAs put her on their shit-lists:
https://archive.is/hFUIk
The grapevine is buzzing with the news that the Darlington nurses have won their case.
Here’s a link to a story:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14790917/Victory-Darlington-nurses-win-landmark-battle-female-hospital-changing-room.html
I wonder if Streeting intervened because having the case go to court would have resulted in splash damage to the government? Let’s hope he feels compelled to extend this order to the entire country.
This article by trans-identified male Juno Dawson calls Dawson’s political opponents on the transgender issue “maggots”.
How very Trumpian:
https://archive.ph/gGJmU#selection-2619.5-2619.40
We shouldn’t be surprised, though. Dawson also said “a lot of gay men are gay men as a consolation prize, because they couldn’t be women.”
Roz Kaveney- oh dear:
https://bsky.app/profile/rozkaveney.bsky.social/post/3lqzsvgpuoc2i
“Teansphobia” sounds like the fear of cups of Earl Grey.
This is important. Sophie Lewis, who’s featured on B/W a few times*, wrote a tome earlier this year called “Enemy Feminisms”, which was a lengthy attack on gender-critical and anti-sex work feminists.
Now Victoria Smith has read the “Enemy Feminisms” book, and given us a lengthy critique of it:
https://thecritic.co.uk/a-clean-up-job-for-bullshit-politics/
* E.g., here:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/feminism-is-for-everyone-except-women/
It seems that Trump’s fentanyl seizures have saved, and I quote, “285 million lives”. That’s interesting. I had no idea there were so many of us hooked on fentanyl! Two-thirds of the population would be dead now if Harris were elected, I guess.
Pam Bondi is the one who said it, if you’re curious.
It’s interesting that Lewis, and Juno Dawson, among other genderists, think it’s more fascist for women to claim and protect boundaries for themselves, than it is for men claiming to be women demanding access to absolutely everything that women have, and refusing to accept any such boundaries at all. Of course this use of “fascist” is just a dressed up way of saying “You disagree with me, so you’re evil, and should be ignored and shunned by all good people,” rather than an accurate descriptor of their critics’ actual politics. It’s as laughable as Republicans calling Obama a “Marxist.”
It’s just another way of othering (like TERF), that is supposed to cast your opponents’ views so far beyond acceptability as to become off-limits. They have been deemed, by authorities whom we are supposed to accept unquestioningly, unfit to be examined, let alone entertained, by decent folk, “decent folk” being defined as those who, having outsourced their judgement to these authorities, accept this pronouncement. Failure to follw the anathema renders you suspect. Thus it serves as a dismissal and a warning, to first, try to prevent any study of these dangerous views, and second, to punish those who dare regardless to engageme with the ideas of the enemy. This is a particularly useful tactic when, as is the casr with genderism, your own ideas don’t hold up well (or at all) when faced with anything more than casual examination by someone not already espousing them.
Humpback whales may be blowing bubble rings at humans as a way to communicate, play, or interact.
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/marine-animals/humpback-whale-bubble-ring-communication
The researchers ruled out these bubble rings as being any part of feeding behaviour (unlike the bubble nets Humpbacks use to confuse and corral prey), communication with other whales (the bubble-ring blowers were not with other whales), or any sort of threat display (such as the bubble releases that males use with each other during courtship competition).
Link to the original paper is here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/mms.70026
It’s the humpback whale equivalent of ”So long, and thanks for all the fish”.
(The “so long” part anyway. Other species have nothing to be grateful to humans for)
#110 Iknklast
“Trump’s fentanyl seizures have saved, and I quote, “285 million lives” ”
I first read that as Trump having seizures due to fentanyl use.
To bad that was inaccurate, Trump having lethal seizures about a year ago, would have saved many lives.
Senator Padilla (California) was forcibly removed and handcuffed from a press briefing when he tried to ask Kristi Noem a question.
Link here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/12/los-angeles-protests-alex-padilla-kristi-noem
Video here: https://youtube.com/shorts/gL08Xe31Ff8?si=mEWvUqGulpM6ryvM
Your Name’s not Bruce? #111
Oh yes. The best analogy would be the MctbW as Benito Mussolini, women as the Ethiopians, and Lewis/Dawson as the Giovanni Gentile-type apologists for Mussolini.
Jeeeezus.
I’ve been trying to find, without any luck, some posts with links to a webcomic that Ophelia used to post every now and then, by someone with a Japanese name. Tetsuo Somebody? The comics Ophelia would share were critiquing gender identity ideology and it’s cultural influence. Ring any bells?
Not with me, sorry.
You are thinking of Sinfest, by Tatsuya Ishida. Many of the comics are about gender ideology. He’s also run some story lines (such as they are; plots are vague) where Jewish people are the villains.
Thank you! I see I have shared three of his cartoons (on separate occasions). I tend not to remember names…
Thank you, Sackbut! Yes, Ishida does seem to have been driven rather batty by Oct 7th.
Minnesota had a major act of violence overnight. One of their state representatives (and her husband) was killed; a Senator (and his wife) were shot, and are in critical condition, but might live. The assassin had a list of a lot of other Democrats he wanted to assassinate, including Tim Walz. There were also abortion providers and pro-choice campaigners on the list.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/2-minnesota-lawmakers-shot-targeted-incident-officials/story?id=122840751
This is significant. Tom Harris, a former UK MP, now regrets for voting for the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.
He gives his reasons here:
https://tomharris2.substack.com/p/mea-culpa-my-part-in-the-rise-of
The Chorch has a new pope. Americans love that he’s a Cubs fan (except those on the South Side, they’ll never accept him.) But as long as the Church neglects to address this situation in a meaningful, as in making sure that those still living are indicted, I will not be as enamored of him. Until he proves otherwise, Leo is just more of the same. The excavations and identification of the bodies of fetuses, infants, and toddlers, is about to be begin in Tuam:
https://punchng.com/796-babies-feared-buried-in-septic-tank-at-catholic-run-home-for-unwed-mothers/?fbclid=IwY2xjawK_oxNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFpenc2RjU4Ym9nY1BTcXJSAR7GDAJQOVVczuFC8xedI7IJQzz9uUgHfklFFMIzZ8KZotlKlrdGYpzDYprV-g_aem_IHoqqaoaNsnfM3NmVo-BlA
Humanae Vitae my ass, Leo.
Martina is awesome, as usually. I heard the interview this morning on NPR:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9xzgg91lpo
Here’s an appropriate comment on US politics of the last several years.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/slam
Trouble in the MAGAverse. Trump’s support of/subservience to Netanyahu is splitting his base, with accusations of betrayal as the US verges on entanglement in a war in the Middle East:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5355680-maga-trump-iran-divide/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wp72224jzo
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/18/trump-iran-israel-maga-policy
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-iran-trump-maga-republicans-1.7565322
One of my co-workers watches US right-wing stuff in our office (don’t ask), and some of the hosts/pundits/whatevers were being surprisingly critical of Trump’s threats towards Iran. One of them was going on about how Netanyahu was the “real” president of the United States, with Trump dancing to his tune, and how the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel were “allowed” by Netanyahu (through a nationwide “stand down” order) to give him a pretext to do everything he’s done since, in hopes of ensnaring the US on his side.
Who’d a thunk it: gut the Federal government, overturn and ignore checks and balances on Presidential power, trash long-standing military alliances and trading relationships with friendly countries, admire and side with dictators, threaten to invade and take over neighbouring sovereign states, let a know-nothing crank destroy the nation’s readiness against outbreaks of infectious disease, and let a billionaire have unfettered access to sensitive information about everyone in the country (as well as letting him shut down and defund programs and angencies on a whim), and he’s good. Get involved in a foreign war that he promised not to, and they turn on him.
Ironies abound.
I’ve liked to articles by Gwynne Dyer before. He’s a “big-picture” columnist who regularly looks beyond the usual players in world politics (though he keeps an eye on them too), and includes environmental stories as part and parcel of his geopolitical observations. His most recent column is on the fishing practice of “bottom trawling”.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/bottom-trawling/
Here’s the clip in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzG9AwlypaY
It’s grim viewing.
Attenborough should be considered a saint: a secular saint. He does so much more good than every Catholic saint put together – and less bad. He is a treasure, and it will be a sad day when he dies.
From the Substack that Mostly Cloudy linked to at 125:
I think this explains a lot of the support on the left for what is at heart a regressive ideology.
Of course, billionaires are a minority too; perhaps we should start a Billionaires Rights Movement (“My Class Solidarity is Billionaire-Inclusive!”).