Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Which twin has the ideology?

    Wut?

    I don’t get it. Why is one more “inclusive” than the other? Unless he’s pretending that ladies/gents refers to class and thus excludes everyone below the upper class, which of course is not what ladies/gents means (not least because real gents don’t call themselves gents).

    Anyway. Public toilets are not meant to be inclooosive in every sense. They’re for everyone, so inclooosive that way, but they are separated/segregated by sex, because of the whole Territory Between the Legs aspect. Women should not be forced to accept Mr Richards in the cafe toilets.

  • When you’ve lost Priya…

    Department of Hilarity.

    Awww no. When even Priyamvada Gopal thinks you messed up, you are toast.

    She’s the Donald Rumsfeld of pseudo-academic bullshit. Bahahahaha

  • On her summer holiday

    On and on and on it goes, never getting any closer to making sense.

    The Labour MP behind a campaign for a “summer of sex” has criticised tougher guidance for trans people from her sun lounger.

    In a video recorded on her summer holiday, Samantha Niblett said she was “unbelievably ashamed” of new rules on single-sex spaces, which force transgender people to use lavatories corresponding to their biological sex.

    So she’s ashamed of rules that tell men to stay out of women’s toilets, as opposed to being ashamed of rules that tell men to go right ahead and barge into women’s toilets despite the fact that women won’t like it.

    And she’s an MP.

    A revised code of practice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) came into force on Wednesday, a year and a half after the Supreme Court ruled that sex in the law referred to biological sex, not gender identity.

    A year and a half after. Because women are such a pointless nuisance that it’s really not necessary to enforce rules that protect them.

    Dozens of Labour MPs objected to the new guidance. Among them was Ms Niblett, who told her Instagram followers on Wednesday: “Today is also Aug 5, which is a s— day. It’s a s— day because today is the day that the ‘guidance’, which is as clear as mud, comes in… All it does is dismiss the lived experience of trans people and protects nobody. This new guidance protects nobody.”

    Well, nobody except women, so yeah, that’s nobody.

    “All it does is cause more division and hatred towards trans people that just want to have their life, like minding their own business”

    Wait wait wait. They don’t “just want to have their life, like minding their own business” – that’s the opposite of what they want. They want to have women’s lives, and they want women to shut up and go away. Minding their own business is absolutely the last thing they want.

    Ms Niblett was one of more than 90 Labour MPs who signed a parliamentary motion in June that called on the Government to reject the draft EHRC code of practice.

    Elected to the Commons at the 2024 general election, she remained in relative obscurity until this April, when she launched a campaign to make 2026 the “summer of sex”. She said that she hoped to set up a sex-toy exhibition in Parliament as part of her efforts, and was planning to chair a Westminster Hall debate on sex education this autumn.

    Yes well she’s clearly the expert, not knowing what women are and all.

    Ms Niblett’s remarks on the trans guidance were denounced by Tonia Antoniazzi, a fellow Labour backbencher and one of the party’s few MPs to have openly criticised gender ideology.

    In a reply on X, Ms Antoniazzi told Ms Niblett: “Have a good break, MPs deserve it. Today, we have clarification, not more confusion. Women and girls need protection from men.

    “Stop using trans people as an argument for your pro-sex work, pro-porn agenda.”

    Well where’s the fun in that?

  • A kindred spirit

    An excellent article by Stella O’Malley at Spiked:

    …the trans issue is a prism through which almost every major cultural, political, ethical and psychological question of our age is refracted. The debate around transgender identity exposes problems that extend far beyond medicine or mental health. That’s why I no longer define trans as an ‘unfolding medical scandal’ but an ‘unfolding medical and institutional scandal’.

    To name just a few areas:

    Medicine and healthcare

    ‘Gender medicine’ has revealed what happens when medicine becomes consumer-driven. Technical advances have made possible a growing number of elective medical interventions – gender medicine, commercial surrogacy, assisted dying, some forms of abortion – which are increasingly presented as ‘healthcare’ simply because they are medically possible. The distinction between treating illness and fulfilling consumer demand has become dangerously blurred.

    And pseudo-lactation in men so that they can “feed” an infant a cocktail of hormones.

    Then there’s the mess currently being created by the mental-health industry, which is never more prominent than within the trans debate. A culture of over-medicalisation, over-diagnosis and affirmation has transformed healthcare from what was once a process of exploration, uncertainty and psychological growth into little more than emotional validation. Therapy has shifted from helping people understand themselves to helping them feel affirmed and supported. 

    Which shouldn’t be a need or desire in the first place. It’s too much. It’s expecting too much and ends up in demanding too much. We don’t get to be affirmed and supported by the whole world just because we exist.

    Academia and education

    Like healthcare, universities increasingly resemble consumer-driven businesses, anxious to keep their customers happy. I had always imagined universities as places whose purpose was to move us from darkness into light through the pursuit of truth. The poor quality of much research on gender medicine exposed just how vulnerable academia has become to ideology.

    I’m glad she uses the i-word. I talk about it as ideology all the time, but I don’t see a whole lot of other people doing so. Understanding it as an ideology explains a lot.

    The startling speed with which transgender ideology became embedded in education systems across the Western world exposed just how easily a new orthodoxy can become accepted, taught and defended by entire institutions. 

    Seriously. One minute we had a bunch of friends who were skeptical, secular, open to questions, and the next we had an army of fanatical believers.

    The decision of the left to swap class politics for identity politics has been both maddening and fascinating to watch through my splayed fingers. The unanticipated – and, let’s face it, largely unfathomable – swerve of large sections of the contemporary left towards advocating for the lifelong medicalisation of children who will one day become infertile and sexually impaired has yet to be fully analysed. Nobody yet knows why this movement that once championed the downtrodden, the importance of fair economics and equal rights now embraces self-reported identity, subjective truth and moral certainty, but it is important to reflect on it.

    We’ve been reflecting on it. For years and years we’ve been reflecting on it.

    My experiences of being cancelled, censored and censured for speaking truthfully about trans issues have shown me that modern censorship isn’t like Soviet Russia or the East German Stasi. There are no jackboots ensuring everyone stays in step. Instead, contemporary censorship more closely resembles the culture I experienced growing up in the Catholic Church, where public shaming made the policing of acceptable thought remarkably effective. Today’s censorship is led by relentless finger-wagging moralism from the new left and reinforced by professional regulators, social media moderation, reputational threats and institutional pressure.

    And blog networks.

    Over-policing and nanny-state officials have led to children being removed from home, just because parents have informed their daughter that she was not really a boy. While this may seem far-fetched, it is important to know that the UK government’s new Conversion Practices Bill promises to criminalise parents who insist on speaking the truth to their trans-identified children. Within this new culture, identity has become the new secular religion, and ‘identifying as’ has become one of its central and sacred rituals. In this context, parents are regarded as ‘dangerous’ if they don’t affirm the child’s new identity.

    Bullseye again! “Identifying as” is another one of my targets for disdain.

    Thank you Stella O’Malley.

  • Real but not urgent

    In climate news: oops we’ve passed the line already.

    …there is one type of rare, gargantuan, towering lie that makes all the other mass lies throughout human history seem like frightened, scurrying, little adorable fibs.

    It is a lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually—as the deception entered mainstream culture—even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day…

    This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.”

    To be clear, we are not talking about the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President. And we’re not referring to cartoonish hucksters and “climate skeptics” like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson.

    Polling shows only 14.8 percent of Americans deny the basic sixth grade science behind global warming. To put that in perspective, as much as 10 percent of the population still believes the Earth is flat.

    No, the monstrous, misshapen garden colossus lie we’re referring to is subscribed to by most of the U.S., has stopped and slowed climate action far more than outright denial, and keeps growing and growing. Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.”

    Or to put it another way, “global warming is real and urgent but let’s ignore it anyway.”

    I read a thing in some local outlet last week about why we keep doing something as colossally stupid as having fighter jets zoom around by way of entertainment for a few days every August. The climate toll is massive. Why do we keep doing it? Oh you know, people like it. Shrug shrug. It’s not that we say it’s not urgent, it’s that we say it’s fun and we like it.

    Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it.

    It’s the old joke about the guy who fell off a tall building and said “So far so good.”

    And with a bump coming next year from a growing, historic El Niño up to 1.7 degrees celsius average warming, likely to cause agricultural failure and food shortages, we are staring right at the vaunted 2C number.

    Why is 2C so vaunted?

    Let’s do the context thing again: 2C will mean we have completely left the stable climate period known as the Holocene. This is the 11,000-year-old era that has given us large-scale crop and livestock agriculture, which gave us cities, written language, modern science and medicine, and warm beds and showers.

    Before that, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other.

    What we grow up with is what we think is normal. It’s hard to wrap our heads around the fact that all this can go away, and that in the meantime all this can get very unpleasant indeed.

    A joint study by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter suggests that a 2C temperature increase by 2050—which we are hurtling towards, with no plans of slowing down—could result in two billion deaths. And that is virtually the best-case scenario, as temperature rise predictions have worsened and put 1.5C of warming out of reach. According to the United Nations, in order to limit warming to 2C, we would need “emissions to drop around 35 per cent by 2035.” Even if “current national commitments” were fully implemented they “would cut emissions only 12 to 15 per cent by that date.”

    The other scenario, which scientists now say “recent data aligns more closely with,” is 3C of warming. At that level, the Exeter authors warn of up to 4 billion deaths. Four billion. That is half the planet. In 26 years or less. Even for those lucky enough to survive the worst weather events, life as we know it would cease to exist due to war, involuntary mass migration, and “catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.” According to the lead author of the report, there is no realistic plan in place to avoid this scenario.

    But…so far so good.

  • Steps that could destroy evidence

    Will Trump be allowed to destroy the evidence, or no?

    A group suing the Trump administration over renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has accused federal officials of taking steps that could destroy evidence at the center of an ongoing legal dispute over damage to the landmark.

    The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), one of the plaintiffs challenging the project, asked a federal judge this week to allow experts access to the Reflecting Pool to assess its condition before additional work is carried out. The group argues that National Park Service plans to perform further repairs could alter or eliminate evidence relevant to determining what caused problems with the newly resurfaced pool.

    If Trump has anything to do with it that “could” should be “will”. If Trump can get the evidence eliminated, he will. This is Trump we’re talking about.

    In a filing submitted on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, attorneys for the organization wrote that federal officials have made repeated claims about the cause of damage to the pool while also preparing to change conditions at the site.

    “Defendants also have undertaken to destroy some of the very evidence that could shed light on the veracity of Defendants’ claims,” the filing states. The attorneys pointed to a declaration from a National Park Service official indicating that additional work was planned at the Reflecting Pool.

    See above. If Trump can bury the evidence, he will.

    The damage is central to an ongoing lawsuit brought by the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), which originally sued the Department of the Interior in May, alleging that work on the Reflecting Pool violated federal historic preservation laws. TCLF argued that replacing the basin with a blue-colored synthetic liner altered a defining historic feature of the nearly century-old landmark without the reviews required under the National Historic Preservation Act and other federal laws. According to the organization, the Reflecting Pool’s dark gray basin has been a key design element since it opened in 1923.

    Yes but you see Trump has to change everything so that everything reflects him as opposed to anyone or anything else.

    New evidence of DOJ lawyers citing construction failures is key to the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s latest filing, which quotes DOJ lawyers as saying a “rushed and botched installation” was responsible for the problems and that the “most likely explanation” for the damage was faulty installation rather than intentional acts of vandalism.

    The group’s attorneys argue those findings undermine previous representations made by Interior Department officials and raise new questions about what happened during the renovation. They also pointed to a DOJ court filing accusing Interior Department components of providing “less than fulsome information” about the resurfacing project and the issues that followed.

    No no, not fulsome. Complete or generous or just plain full, but not fulsome. Wrong word alert. “Fulsome” modifies words like praise and flattery. It doesn’t mean “full” or extra extra full.

    “Subsequent developments strongly suggest that some of Defendants’ assertions to date about the state of the Pool are false,” the filing states.

    Yuh huh. They do.

  • A reminder

    Notice anything missing?

    What’s missing: any hint of awareness that “inclusion” of men in all women’s spaces without exception is “inclusive” of men at the expense of women.

    Emily Thornberry is a woman herself, I take it, yet she blithely drives a tank through women’s rights while babbling wildly about “inclusive services for all our residents”.

    It can’t be done. If you include men in all women’s spaces without exception, then you’re not providing inclusive services for women.

    You’re also not being inclusive of women in your worldview, your politics, your awareness, your thinking. On the contrary: you are systematically ignoring women and their needs. So odd, when you’re a woman yourself.

  • Guest post: We may never get to that point

    Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Der schönen blauen Donau.

    If the last decade should have taught us one lesson, it’s that “the way it’s always been” in the past (or the tiny fraction of the past that each of us can remember from within our short lifetimes) is not a reliable indicator of what to expect going forward. As I have mentioned a few times already, in (what we used to think of as) a “normal” year here in Norway, the water-flow in our rivers would increase something like five-fold, and our hydropower reservoirs (i.e. lakes) would rise several meters above the “highest regulated water level” roughly during the 2nd half of may due to snowmelt in the mountains. By that standard 2021 still stands as the last somewhat “normal” year so far. The once so reliable “spring flood” has now been completely absent 3 times in the last 5 years, i.e. in 2022, 2025, and again this year. And despite how some people still like to spin it, the fact that 2023 and 2024 were the wettest years on record doesn’t mean the extremes “cancel out”, leaving everything “normal” on average.

    I spent a few days in Berlin back in June, but it felt more like Athens with temperatures around 34 °C (according to some of the weather forecasts temperatures were expected to reach 39 °C the day after I left!). As a Norwegian I have always thought the main problem facing homeless people was exposure to the cold. In this case, however, the local media were reporting on homeless people suffering from heat strokes and dehydration. Not that it’s been very different in South-Eastern Norway where I live. A few weeks ago just a few kilometers from my home hundreds of homes were destroyed by probably the worst fire incident in modern Norwegian history. I’m not sure how the fire got started, but the bone dry conditions after weeks of baking sun and no rain sure as hell didn’t help the firefighters gain control over the situation.

    All this and more (shorter and milder winters, longer and hotter summers, lethal heatwaves, catastrophic wildfires, severe droughts and floods, shrinking lakes and rivers and glaciers that hundreds of millions of people on this planet rely upon for drinking water, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, catastrophic hurricanes and tropical storms etc.) is after human emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly in the form of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, have raised average global temperatures by a little more than one degree Celsius. The same models that predicted this was going to happen (many different models, working independently of each other, using different algorithms, different input data etc.) are now telling us that unless governments all over the world start immediately and colliectively phasing out fossil fuels far more rapidly and aggressively than any of them is currently even considering, we’re looking at something like 3-4 °C of global warming by the end of this century (and of course there is nothing magical about the end of the century, global temperatures are only going to continue rising after that). And, yet doing anything about the problem that has any chance of working is about as fringe a position as you’re going to find.

    We may never get to that point, though. If I hear another word about a “fertility crisis” (unless the crisis in question is fertility itself), I’m going to drown the planet in a tsunami of vomit that is going to make Noah’s Flood look like a drought.

  • Throwing some random mud

    A guy called Howard Bryant (apparently a columnist at the Guardian, despite the fact that he can’t write) has lofty disdain for women who don’t want men replacing them.

    Invoking a wounded innocence that their desire for sports to be simple, just like they used to be, conservatives for a decade and a half have dreaded the word “politics”. Now they cannot get enough.

    Wut? The first clause of the first sentence doesn’t even make sense.

    Never mind; he moves on to Sophie Cunningham.

    Largely anonymous politically or otherwise during her eight-year career, Cunningham – she of the viral finger-point which has been adopted as a symbol of the white animosity toward the WNBA culture – is in her moment. Her comments in a lengthy 21 July ESPN profile stating her opposition to transgender athletes has earned her hero status of the specious “Protect Our Girls” movement, even though you’d need a microscope to find any critical mass of transgender women participating in sports at any level.

    Excuse me? Why does it have to be a critical mass? Why isn’t one enough to object to? We don’t nod cheerfully if just a few people cheat in sports or elsewhere, so why should women nod cheerfully if less than a critical mass of men take women’s places in sports?

    If a burglar dropped in at Howard Bryant’s house and took only some of the silver, a few books and paintings and bottles of wine, would he shrug and move on with his day? And what does a purported “white animosity toward the WNBA culture” have to do with anything? Just say you hate mouthy women, Mr Bryant; it will save us all a lot of time.

  • A reminder that up is down

    On and on and on it goes. Not taking no for an answer is the new “You’re not the boss of me!!”

    …on how to ensure everyone in our borough, no matter their gender identity, can live a safe life, free to express and be themselves.

    But it’s not about being themselves, is it. It’s about being not themselves. It’s about pretending to be those other people. In particular, it’s about men being not themselves, and in doing so, putting women in danger and/or taking what belongs to women. Bromides about being themselves are not useful when the entire issue is about being other people and taking their stuff.

    The Guardian explains:

    The guidance from the EHRC, the equality watchdog for England, Scotland and Wales, provides practical advice for services, public bodies and associations on how they should interpret the 2010 Equality Act.

    It applies to organisations as diverse as cafes, leisure centres, public toilets, domestic violence shelters, bowls clubs and many more.

    The code says where it is proportionate for facilities, such as public toilets and changing rooms, or services like a rape crisis centre, to be single sex then only those of the same biological sex should use them.

    This means, for instance, a trans woman, a person born a biological male who identifies as a woman, should not use women-only facilities. And a trans man should not use men only facilities.

    That’s not really a “for instance”; it’s the whole thing. Yes, boys, this means that a man who claims to be a woman does not get to bounce into women-only facilities. The end. It’s really not complicated.

    But the code also says it could amount to discrimination against a transgender person if they were forced to use services related to their biological sex. It says gender-neutral spaces are an alternative.

    Then the code is bonkers. It’s not discrimination against, it’s just reality. Men are men. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.

    Transgender people argue they should be able to use services that align with the way they identify and live their life, rather than their biological sex.

    In response, campaigners including some women’s and gay rights groups say this undermines sex-based protections, particularly for women.

    The way people live their lives is their business. The way women live their lives entails some precautions when it comes to men. The two sexes are not in the same place when it comes to life-changing events like pregnancy, rape, enslavement, and violence. It is not safe for women to agree that men can be women at all times and in all circumstances.

    Many organisations have already made changes they say comply with the law and are in line with the code, such as the Women’s Institute and Girl Guiding, which had already said membership was for females.

    But the deputy leader of Lambeth Council in London says the authority may refuse to implement the guidance, if advised it’s lawful to do so.

    Green Party Councillor Natalie Kane told the Today programme: “For us it’s about people accessing services, and we’re worried people won’t feel they can”.

    But she doesn’t mean people, does she. She means men. She means men who are pretending to be women. It’s interesting that she says “people” when she means men; it suggests that she knows it sounds bad if you say men. Saying “people” in this context is a red flag for demolishing women’s rights.

  • A wider research project

    Ah yes, the old “if someone says your research looks shady, call the police” gambit.

    Cambridge University’s embattled “academic superstar”, Professor Jason Arday, reported a fellow academic to the police after being challenged over apparent inconsistencies, errors and possible plagiarism in his work – raising troubling questions about the use of harassment law as a shield against awkward scholarly scrutiny in an increasingly litigious, low-trust society.

    Troubling questions indeed. We heretics who don’t subscribe to trans ideology are well familiar with such questions.

    The academic was Dr David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University and one of the first scholars to raise concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and several subsequent peer-reviewed publications on race, inequality and education, including his treatment of concepts such as structural racism, whiteness, decolonisation and racial microaggressions.

    Concepts which may possibly be more trendy than conceptual.

    It was not Harris’s first encounter with institutional hostility arising from his scrutiny of critical theory and related intellectual traditions, including Critical Legal Studies, Black Studies and strands of Marxist and Frankfurt School thought. Last year, Marjon revoked the emeritus title he had held since retiring in 2011 after he published a monograph critically examining the body of ideas now commonly described as critical race theory. Internal emails later obtained through a Subject Access Request showed senior administrators describing his research as “controversial” and suggesting that the University should “probably sever ties” with him. Following an intervention by CAF, however, the University reversed its decision and restored the title earlier this year.

    Daaaamn. That’s blatant. “This guy doesn’t subscribe to the trendy branch of scholarship therefore we’d better wash our hands of him.” Hello senior admins: isn’t the criterion supposed to be scholarship as opposed to controversy?

    Harris’s opening email to Arday, sent on 4 May 2023, was almost absurdly polite: unmistakably scholarly, but also courteous and measured. He explained that he was reviewing Arday’s work as part of a wider research project and attached a detailed document setting out concerns about what he described as “puzzling similarities” in the reported data, repeated passages and possible failures of attribution. The covering email concluded simply: “I would welcome any response.”

    When none came, Harris sent a brief follow-up a week later.

    Arday replied that same day but did not address the substance of Harris’s concerns. Instead, he recast Harris’s intervention as little more than pettifogging criticism of spelling and grammar, and as evidence of a failure to appreciate the structural racism and ableism which, in his view, such scrutiny helped to perpetuate.

    You know…I’m sorry to say it but the truth is, “ableism” is a rock bottom necessity in academia, and in quite a few other professions as well. In fact that’s what makes them professions: you have to know some stuff. You have to know quite a lot of stuff. You also have to understand the stuff you know. Those are indeed barriers to the professions, and they do screen out people who can’t afford years of higher education. The ableism is still essential though.

    Arday berated Harris for asking his questions.

    “Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism,” Arday added, “you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes.”

    Harris was, he said, “a monument to the fact we live in a society where grammar is valued above equity”. He ended with the warning: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

    Harris nevertheless replied, prefacing his remarks with an expression of admiration for Arday as someone who had overcome considerable personal and professional adversity, before returning to the academic issues and correcting what he regarded as an inaccurate and damaging account of his own disciplinary history.

    What followed is now a matter of public record. Arday contacted the Metropolitan Police to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris. Because Harris is based in Plymouth, the matter was referred to Devon and Cornwall Police, which declined to pursue it.

    Gosh. Doesn’t that sound familiar. “Officer, officer, that woman over there doesn’t believe that men can be women!!”

    As an organisation that defends academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law, CAF takes no view on the ultimate merits of the allegations concerning Arday’s work. We are, however, deeply concerned by what appears, on the evidence available to us, to have been an attempt to use the criminal law to suppress legitimate scholarly scrutiny.

    And that, I think, is quite obviously the product of “trans activism”. I think the trans activists have created a giant precedent for calling the cops on people who dispute a trendy ideology.

    In taking no further action, Devon and Cornwall Police got the decision right. But as the recent cases of Maxie Allen, Darren Brady, Julian Foulkes, Kellie-Jay Keen, Markus Meechan, Jennifer Swayne, and David Wootton demonstrate, police forces have not always covered themselves in glory when deciding whether lawful but contentious expression warrants arrest or investigation under broadly framed communication offences.

    Indeed they have not.

  • Guest post: Even the most well-intentioned sexologists and clinicians

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Special.

    In all honesty, I feel some pity for Isabella.

    I actually started using [the ladies’] only later on during my transition.

    The thing is, he made the choice to become a “transgender woman” because he thought society was moving towards a genuine offer, that if he invested enough in a trans identity and body, that society would buy into it, and together they’d have made a successful bargain: he and the female population would be truly integrated.

    He didn’t do any of this in a vacuum.

    It was a tragic decision he made, and it wasn’t really just one decision, but a long series of steps strung out over time, as you can see here, when he says that at one point he was in some halfway state — at least visibly gender-bending but still using men’s toilets. He’s clearly moved further along the transgender tragectory since then.

    This is where I save some blame for even the most well-intentioned sexologists and clinicians who participated in this game, including people I am personally acquainted with, who I’d almost consider friends.

    The mistake these clinicians made was to perpetuate a sort of tango, a dance in steps, a pas-de-deux between the patients and the cultural environment they inhabited — between the individuals and the zeitgeist. One partner took a step forward, then the other in turn, and this was gently prodded along in no small part by the clinicians.

    The clinical environment of “trans medicine” prodded its patients step-by-step, further and further towards “artificial womanhood”, and it matched that by prodding society, step-by-step, further and further towards accommodations for these artificial women. Those baby steps added up, and it went from teensy little exemptions to a wholesale collapse of women’s rights fairly quickly.

    The ugly truth is, if these patients had been told flat-out, bluntly, upfront, that their future lives as “transwomen” did not come with a guarantee that society would continue to dance along to the transgender tune, that there was a distinct possibility that the music would stop and they’d be left to contend with the wreckage of their bodies all by themselves, most of them would never have ventured so far into the trans fantasy.

    These male patients took these steps, one by one, because by themselves, each little step felt small enough for female society to absorb them. Each one was a quiet transaction, a small debit away from women’s rights, towards men’s. In many ways, it was the clinicians who told both sides that each of these little transactions, these little concessions — little debits — was too small to matter.

    But, as anyone who’s wrestled with an ever-increasing monthly stack of media subscriptions can tell you, all those little debits add up to big money very quickly. In a sense, the trans movement undermined the women’s movement by nickels and dimes.

    Here, Isabella is left holding the bag: he’s had all this cosmetic surgery and hormone surgery and psychological conditioning to help him imagine he’s a female, and now female society is saying, NO, we’re pulling out, we never agreed to any of this.

    Well, that’s tough. But it’s also tragic. I don’t think he quite realized he never had a written deal with women. And it was probably his clinicians who glossed over that fact as they approved each successive step in his medical and psychological “transition”.

    If you ask me, they (the clinicians) bear quite a lot of the blame. Even the so-called “good ones”, the pragmatists who never denied the reality of biological sex and who fully acknowledged the homosexual/autogynephile distinction.

  • Theft

    How dare he.

    Jim Crow. Jonathan Willoughby is not, repeat not in any way comparable to the people who were victims of Jim Crow laws. (Crow. Not Crowe. Crow. Think about it.)

    Jonathan Willoughby has freedom and rights. People subject to Jim Crow laws had neither. Jonathan Willoughby is in no way comparable to the people enslaved by Europeans in the US over many generations.

  • Der schönen blauen Donau

    As the globe warms

    Relentless heat and a dearth of rain are having a punishing effect on some of Europe’s most vital rivers. The waterways have tumbled to record lows in places, in a crisis so severe it can be seen from space.

    Stark satellite images reveal dramatically shrunken waterways weaving through parched landscapes. Low water levels have exposed vast stretches of riverbanks, as well as long sandbars usually hidden deep beneath the surface.

    …

    Europe is the planet’s fastest-warming continent, and its summers are becoming ever more extreme as the human-caused climate crisis drives unprecedented high temperatures. Successive, brutal heat waves have sucked moisture from soils and waterways and continued drought has meant little relief.

    The impacts are huge; Europe’s rivers are vital arteries transporting goods, cooling power plants, generating hydroelectric energy, drawing in tourists and providing a vital habitat for wildlife. As they shrink, people, economies and ecosystems are suffering.

    Europe’s rivers frequently plunge to low levels in summertime — but this year they have reached unprecedented levels in places. Two of the continent’s most critical waterways, the Danube and the Rhine, have been particularly badly affected.

    This CNN piece includes those comparative aerial photos of the river then versus now – green on one side and dusty brown on the other.

  • Gonna fight back is he?

    It seems Jolyon is raising money for a campaign that can’t possibly succeed. Onlookers are saying he knows damn well it can’t succeed, so he’s basically cheating people out of their cash.

    There are many replies in that vein.

    I suppose he could say he’s taking the long view, that he’s raising money to keep on campaigning against the law in the hope that the government will withdraw it. It’s still quite a taking candy from babies approach.

  • Special

    Extraordinary that they don’t see it.

    He will never be safe in a men’s toilet, he says, so his solution is for him to make women unsafe by using our toilets. And Channel 4 is too stupid or too ideological to point out this obvious flaw.

  • The most egregious

    Why Evolution is True on the Arday matter:

    This is the most egregious example I know of someone advancing to a high position in academics while constructing an apparently fraudulent past, as well as having committed multiple instances of plagiarism. The amazing thing is that Cambridge University is apparently not investigating sociology professor Jason Arday despite a complete lack of evidence for his unbelievable claims about his past.

    …

    The story or Arday, and how his claims unraveled (or now look unbelievable) has been told widely in the press. The fact that the Guardian has the most comprehensive summary of his apparent behavioral fabulism (e.g., apparent lying) is telling, for the Guardian, being very woke, would be the one “mainstream” paper I would expect to defend Arday, or at least to avoid reporting on the issue. To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, “If you’ve lost the Guardian, you’ve lost the progressives.”

    The progressives, I keep pointing out, should not be defending lies and bullshit, whether it’s gender ideology or massive plagiarism.

    H/t Peter N

  • No matter how big the box is

    Evidence shmevidence, am I right?

    The top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital carted a box full of evidence to the White House on Monday, in a bid to prove to President Trump that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by shoddy construction and not by vandals, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News on Tuesday.

    U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, a staunch ally of the president, made the case in a sometimes heated private meeting in the Oval Office Monday, hours after Mr. Trump had publicly rebuked her for dropping criminal charges against Olympic canoeist David Hearn. 

    Well she does know who he is, right? He doesn’t give a single fuck about evidence. Hearn is guilty because Trump says so, and that’s supposed to be the end of that.

    Trump earlier in the day had accused Pirro of folding “like an umbrella,” after her office on Friday filed a motion dismissing the felony case against Hearn.

    Paying attention to the evidence=folding. You’re not supposed to pay attention to the evidence, you’re supposed to do what Trump tells you to do.

    In the motion, prosecutors blamed the Interior Department for holding back critical evidence that they claimed they did not see until after they had secured the indictment from the grand jury in D.C.’s Superior Court. They said new information they had received indicated that the damage was caused by a “botched installation” by a contractor, not vandalism, as the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed. 

    The feds hid the evidence. That’s a crime right there.

  • Hallucinatory megalomania

    There’s a saga going on about a Cambridge academic named Jason Arday who claims a lot of things about himself that…shall we say, strain credulity.

    An item today:

    See, long before we get to the last three credulity-straining paragraphs, I’m cringing at the writing of the first three. It reeks of phony to me. All of it. It doesn’t read like genuine autobiography or memoir, it reads like a public relations pamphlet. It’s stiff, it’s self-conscious, it’s imitative, it’s grandiose; above all it’s straining to be Fine Writing and failing completely. That kind of writing makes my hackles go up. I probably look like a dog snarling as I read it.

    In short he comes across as both fake and pretentious. Not a charming combination, in my book.

  • Narrative shmarative

    The Great Reflecting Pool Saga has taken an awkward turn.

    Trump met with Jeanine Pirro at the White House on Monday, hours after saying that she had “choked” when she concluded that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was not the work of vandals, as the president has claimed.

    …

    The decision to drop the charges set Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally and loyal appointee of a president — on a collision course with Mr. Trump, who has made sure to inflict consequences on people within his orbit who contradict his claims. In her filing, Ms. Pirro openly undermined Mr. Trump’s narrative that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives.

    Trump’s narrative. To us peasants, that means he’s lying. One doesn’t tell stories about how Person X committed a crime – not when Person X is real and the stories could result in prison time. Trump doesn’t have the right to sit on his fat ass and tell lies about us peasants leaving footprints in his marble throne room.