Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Guest post: You’re not paying the price

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Read the room.

    Would Ferrell have been as enthusiastic if his friend had come out as a bear, or a lawn mower? Would he have been as keen to travel across America if Harper had decided he was a toddler rather than a woman? Would he have changed his friend’s diapers? Would he have been willing to pay that price, to carry that burden, to put up with the imposition? (Quite apart from the hit to his reputation that passing a grown man off as an infant would have inflicted. That would have been fetish too far.) I doubt it. Well, by accepting him as a women, and encouraging (insisting?) that others do so, he’s expecting women to accept him in places he doesn’t belong. He’s pushing the price, the burden, and imposition of his friend’s delusion onto women who might not be as willing to put up with them. Yet they’re the ones with a problem. Supposedly. Ferrell is essentially getting them to “change the diaper” he’ll never have to.

    Loyalty and friendship are good things, but when they cloud your judgement about what is best for your friend, and what your friend is asking/expecting/demanding of others, it papers over things that may not be healthy. You can’t assume that your personal experience with your nice, loving, harmless friend mirrors others’ experience of him, because it may not be the same. You’re never going to be the women in the restroom he enters, but you’re going to use your celebrity, friendship, and loyalty to bully women to accept this man’s presence in women’s spaces. You’re not paying the price in fear and uncertainty that the women upon whom he’s intruding will. Your friend is not harmless. Even if he never assaults a women, his presence in women’s spaces is an unwanted intrusion of someone who refuses to accept women’s boundaries. Nor can you apply your experience of him to everyone else who shares his delusion, yet your advocacy for trans “rights” will help other men who are not as seemingly benign and harmless as your friend to violate those same boundaries that your friend does.

  • Read the room

    The sheer blind stupidity and absence of thought in this stagger the mind.

    “I don’t know why trans people are meant to be threatening to me as a cis male. I don’t know why Harper is threatening to me…why would you care if somebody’s happy? Why is that threatening to you? If the trans community is a threat to you, I think it stems from not being confident or safe with yourself.”

    He says it himself and doesn’t even fucking notice he’s said it. Yes, bozo, you are a male, and therefore men pretending to be women are not a threat to you. That does not, however, mean they are not a threat to anyone at all. Can you figure out why? With that rather forceful nudge? Do I have to spell it out that it’s because NOT ALL OF US ARE MALE?

    God almighty.

    Updating to add:

  • Trending

    An unhappy distinction for New Zealand.

    Doctors are prescribing up to seven times more puberty blockers for gender dysmorphia to young transgender patients in New Zealand than other similar countries, a new medical reseach paper has found.

    The paper published by academics Charlotte Paul, Simon Tegg and Sarah Donovan, was published today in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

    In their paper, “Use of puberty-blocking hormones for gender dysphoria in New Zealand: descriptive analysis and international comparisons”, the authors found that use here was approximately 1.7 times higher than in the Netherlands, and between 3.5 and 6.9 times higher than in England and Wales, and 3.9 times higher than in Denmark. 

    Not a race you want to win.

    H/t Rob

  • Legally an aardvark

    There are things the law can’t do. Lots of things, actually. A big thing the law can’t do is change physical reality. You can pass a law saying the sun orbits the earth, but the sun will continue to not orbit the earth. The sun is not subject to human laws. There are lots of things you can replace “the sun” with in that sentence.

    “Caster Semenya is legally female, was assigned female at birth, raised as female, and identifies as female. It seems clear on the face of it, therefore, that Semenya is female.”

    Interesting choice of word, “seems.” “Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.’”

    In fact, of course, no it doesn’t seem clear on the face of it that Semenya is female. Not on the face of it or the foot of it or the buttocks of it. All four items in that fatuous list are social, aka a matter of choice, aka artificial as opposed to natural, aka fantasy as opposed to reality. And speaking of on the face of it, the faces of the women Khelif punched know damn well he’s not female.

    It’s cringey seeing adults continue to say these ridiculous things.

  • Scion shmion

    Weirdo Kennedy can’t get a date for the prom.

    On August 23, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his presidential campaign. Citing the war in Ukraine and the “war on our children,” as well as “relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” the scion of the famous Democratic political family announced his support for the Republican candidate.

    “These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” he added.

    In reality, Kennedy had tried just a week earlier to sell his support to the Harris campaign in exchange for a position in her cabinet, preferably as Secretary of Health and Human Services. After getting laughed out of the room, Kennedy decamped to Team Trump, where the candidate wouldn’t commit to a cabinet post, but was at least willing to appear publicly with him.

    Attaboy Junior! He won’t dance with you but at least he’ll let you hold his…er…flowers.

    “In about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I’ve already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me,” Kennedy said that day in Phoenix.

    In fact, Kennedy is working hard to be a spoiler for Harris, fighting to keep his name on the ballot where it could harm the vice president’s campaign and to remove it where his appearance might hurt Trump. It’s a remarkably shameless ploy for a man who spent his career as an environmental attorney and is now willing to get in bed with a politician who thinks windmills cause cancer and fossil fuels are the future.

    They match up well though. Spoiled, entitled, empty. A pair of greedy conceited hacks with no morals.

  • Irreplaceable

  • Into the same risk pools

    JD Vance wants to make medical insurance Great Again.

    “You also want to implement some deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them. A young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition. We want to make sure everybody is covered, but the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.”

    Jesus christ. How stupid do you have to be? That’s how insurance works: everyone pays in; not everyone needs to use it; it’s there for the people who do need it. Universal health care/insurance=everyone pays in and not everyone needs it. The one-size approach is the one that works; any other approach is just back to pay as you go, which does not work.

    By invoking a “deregulatory agenda,” Vance is pitching a return to the bad old days when people with preexisting conditions couldn’t get coverage. Harris put this in personal terms during her debate with Trump: “I don’t have to tell the people watching tonight, you remember what that was like? Remember when an insurance company could deny [coverage] if a child had asthma, if someone was a breast cancer survivor, if a grandparent had diabetes?”

    But Vance and his horrible friend want to go back to that.

  • Ownership

    “Any slave girls you may own,” he says.

  • Infinite toys out of infinite pram

    Soapy Molly and the furious tantrum:

    Won’t someone please think of the pram?

  • You can’t say that

    Somebody who calls xirself “Pride in Labour” exclaims:

    STATEMENT: Our Response to Labour Councillor’s Transphobia

    Transphobia according to whom? The person or people exclaiming, of course.

    Between the headline and the piece there’s a shiny banner screaming “Labour must take immediate action against Laurie Burton”. Oh yeah? Maybe Laurie Burton should take action against Pride in Labour.

    The pomposity of them is a sight to behold.

    Pride in Labour is aware of incidents of transphobia by a Labour councillor in Southend Council. The councillor in question has made deeply transphobic remarks towards the Scottish political activist, Sophie Molly on Twitter/X, and made comments more widely about the trans movement. It is clear there is an issue with transphobia within the party.

    Ooh, aware, is it? Well I’m aware of incidents of stupidity by Pride in Labour. Now what do we do?

    Who decides what remarks are transphobic? Who decides what remarks are deeply transphobic? Who appointed the deciders? Who asked for any of this?

    The councillor has been posting transphobic remarks, including referring to trans women as “blokes”, engaging with people known to push hateful ideology against trans people, and reposting content from the LGB Alliance.

    So?

    Trans women of course are blokes. Women are women, and trans women are blokes. That’s what “trans” means.

    What does “engaging with people” mean? What business is it of Pride in Labour what people a councillor “engages with”?

    The claim about “hateful ideology” is of course just their enraged name-calling, which gets less credible the more they do it. It’s neither ideology nor hateful to say that men are not women.

    Nobody needs the permission of Pride in Labour to share content from LGB Alliance.

    We recognise that people are entitled to their views on any matter

    Like hell they do. That’s exactly what they don’t recognize. They think they get to tell us what views we can have.

    but when those personal views turn toxic and become harmful to another person who is protected under the Equality Act, disciplinary action must be taken.

    And what exactly is Pride in London’s method of determining when personal views “turn toxic”? How does it know when such views “become harmful to another person”? Which person are they talking about?

    Pride in Labour will be writing to Southend Council to lodge a formal complaint and will also lodge a complaint with the Labour Party itself. There is no room in the Labour movement for transphobia, and it is important the party acts immediately.

    So Pride in Labour doesn’t recognize that people are entitled to their views on any matter. It says it does but it then instantly demonstrates that it doesn’t. Quite a pointless exercise.

  • Reviewing proposed amendments

    Oh good, another luxury idenninny.

    Germany’s parliament will be reviewing proposed amendments submitted by a pro-pedophile group tomorrow, sparking concerns from child safeguarding advocates. Krumme-13, a lobby group which advocates for lowering the age of consent and legalizing child pornography, is seeking to add language to the constitution which would establish “pedosexuality” as a protected sexual identity.

    Can we spot the problem here? I think we can. I think it’s pretty god damn obvious. Children are children. Adults raping children should not be legalized. The age of consent is necessary because children are not born with adult brains.

    Dieter Gieseking, the founder of Krumme-13, announced the upcoming vote to his supporters in a post made to the group’s website last week.

    “K13online calls for a ban on discrimination against gays and lesbians AND pedophiles in the constitution,” reads the statement. “The vote… will be broadcast live on Parliamentary TV.”

    Not the same thing. “Gays and lesbians” refers to adults. Men who want to rape children are not comparable to lesbians and gay men.

    Gieseking, a 68-year-old former Federal Border Guard official, founded K13 in Trier in 1993 and promoted the group as a “self-help” organization for “pedosexuals.” He has been repeatedly charged with the possession of child pornography.

    In 1996, Gieseking was sentenced to eighteen months, for which he served one year in prison, on charges related to operating a mail order child pornography service from a van. In 2003, Gieseking again appeared in court accused of possession of child sexual abuse materials obtained between July 1999 and January 2001. The pornography was found on Gieseking’s computer after a search of his residence in August 2001. His devices contained a total of 216 image files of naked children, and he was sentenced to eight months in prison.

    But but but his sexual idenninny makes him want child pornography which means children have to be sexually tortured for his enjoyment, because it’s his idenninny you see, which should be protected.

  • Guest post: One day the winds will shift again

    Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Remains.

    So, to sum up:

    1. Over the last few decades, Catholic “special educational” institutions the world over have been exposed at best (at *best*) as safehouses and private gardens for pedophiles, and at worst as infanticide factories where the mothers of neglected-to-death babies were also enslaved for years, most famously in Ireland but really in every country where the Catholic Church has any presence at all. (Germany’s own pedophile scandal hit in those halcyon days of 2021 and caused a large number of lapsed Catholics to actually strike their names from the Church’s rolls, which in this country means the government finally stopped giving the Church taxes on those peoples’ behalf.)

    2. In the wake of George Flloyd, and on the back of decades of First Nations activism and many scandals within Canada itself (such as multiple reservations being so horribly mismanaged they didn’t, and probably still don’t, have reliable access to potable water), some activists and academics revived Canada’s longstanding conversation over its own Christian-run “residential schools”, the last of which closed down less than thirty years ago. It’s notable that the State allowed the Catholic Church to run more than half of these, in a country that also had policies discriminating against Catholics into the 1960s that effectively barred them from becoming public servants or working in large private companies (except within the province of Quebec, of course, where there weren’t enough Protestants to staff the required positions).

    3. These activists and academics gathered some anecdotes and made inferences based on the Catholic Church’s horrible track record in other countries, and began speculating quite…forcefully…on the probable existence of mass graves in Canadian residential schools on a scope and scale of the Irish “mother-and-baby homes” aka infanticide factories. As part of their speculative research, they organised ground-penetrating radar of residential school grounds which indeed showed that those grounds were not uniform.

    4. The Canadian government, at the same time it was classifying protesters against COVID restrictions as domestic terrorists, took the foregoing speculations and hypotheses and dubious evidence as dispositive, and publicly toyed with the idea of criminalising any public or private statements against the existence of mass graves in residential schools in an analogy to Holocaust denial, which itself was only made illegal (at least in the context of “promoting antisemitism”) in Canada in 2022 on the same wave of woke religious fanaticism.

    5. Wherever these putative “mass graves” have been actually excavated, no evidence for any human remains has been identified. Not one single time. And as this process has gone on, the claims have been walked back from “mass graves” to “unmarked graves”, some of which may well exist, possibly because any original markings had at some point been removed or worn away without having been replaced.

    I am no friend at all of the Church (Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise), and I am certainly not a “conservative Catholic”, but I admit to raising a bit of a skeptical eyebrow when the government demands, on pain of imprisonment, that I have to affirm belief in facts which are not in evidence simply because they affirm a general narrative that is currently in-vogue with a bunch of people drunk on their own sense of righteousness.

    Notwithstanding the dubious justness of their own cause, they don’t seem to understand that one day the winds will shift again, and the positions they insist are true today will one day be vilified as calumny. It would be wise if, at such a time, those villains did not have a precedent of having been thrown in prison for saying things the governing regime insisted (based on very little evidence) were false. It seems to me plainly obvious that dismantling our hard-won norms of free speech, giving all-too-human governments the power to arbitrate what is true, is simply a terrible idea destined to backfire and redound to the detriment of everyone, very much including its proponents.

    But perhaps that makes me a “right-wing extremist”, after all.

  • The fatal click

    Be careful what you like where others can see you.

    In 2023 the playwright David Greig had to apologise to staff at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, where he was artistic director, for being “careless and harmful” after “liking” two tweets that a writer alleged were transphobic.

    Yes children that’s right, there are people monitoring what you “like” (i.e. what you register your liking of or agreement with or respect for by clicking the “Like” button on one social media platform). Who knew anyone had the time? Let alone the inclination? Let alone the malice and stupidity and feeling of entitlement to tell all of us what we can and can’t say or even “like”?

  • Mommy my gender hurts

    From the Department of Things No 5-year-old Ever Said:

  • Necks are not like desk chairs

    But what if you identify as benefiting from chiropracty?

    I googled chiropracty after reading those and was fairly horrified to find that the results all took it for granted that it’s a legit branch of medicine. How did that happen?

  • Guest post: Medically promoted forced teaming

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Some people may find this phrasing awkward.

    … a clinical health psychologist and clinical director of the Transgender and Intersex Specialty Care Clinic at Mayo Clinic.

    Oh great, medically promoted forced teaming. My understanding is that the preferred and/or technically correct term is DSD, and that “intersex” was considered insulting and misleading. But here we have the MAYO CLINIC using it in order to lump it in with transgenderism, in accordance with the bullshit “Sex is a spectrum!” tenets of gender ideology. DSDs are, in my understanding, a range of discreet, sex-specific ways in which human development fails to achieve the goal of producing one of two types of healthy, functional reproductive tissues and systems that normal development is, ideally, supposed to build. While the occasionally ambiguous or confusing external genitalia may lead to an incorrect “assignment at birth” to the wrong sex*, with subsequent complications resulting from the psychological baggage that comes with socially imposed gender roles, the DSD condition itself has nothing whatsoever to do with putative “gender identity.” To suggest there is some connection (which this teaming up is designed to suggest, like some genderist version of Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Throat) is deceptive.

    Where do these two completely different phenomena overlap? Nowhere, as far as I can tell. What commonalities of treatment are there? I would think very few. I can only conclude that this yoking together of such disparate conditions is a politically motivated [tactic], not medical. Who gains from this arrangement? Trans ideology. Who suffers? Anyone suffering from a DSD condition, as their actual physiological needs have been coupled to the demands of a delusional belief system that is completely unrelated to DSDs, and may be almost entirely psychological. Have they updated their obstetrics and midwifery centres to shackle them to departments dedicated to studying and promoting the important roles played by storks and cabbage leaves in human reproduction? It would make as much sense as this linkage between transgender “medecine” and the care of people with DSDs.

    *The use of which terminology is one of the sole reasons, along with the imputation of sex being a “spectrum” through abuse of the whole “intersex” idea, that transgenderism has ever concerned itself with people who have DSDs. The politically expedient appropriation of concepts germane solely to DSDs is the only point of the operation, the only reason they’ve been dragged under the “trans umbrella” in the first place. This unethical appropriation provides a good chunk of the supposed “science” that genderists claim to have supporting their ideology. Take that away and they’re left with even less justification and proof for their contentions.

  • Some people may find this phrasing awkward

    The Mayo Clinic blog in September 2022:

    Is chestfeeding the new breastfeeding?: Explaining gender-neutral medical terms.

    Articles or online posts — even other articles on this blog — are now often using phrases like “person with a uterus,” “pregnant person” or “anyone with a prostate,” instead of the words “woman” or “man.”

    Some people may find this phrasing awkward or wonder why it is used — believing that the words “men” and “women” are simpler. The change in language could even feel challenging or threatening.

    The change in language could even feel like, and be, part of a ferocious campaign to push women out of sight in every possible context.

    “Controversy is created when people feel like gender-neutral terms are erasing the gender binary. And that’s when we get a little bit of pushback, because some say, ‘Well then, you’re basically saying that men or women don’t exist,’ ” says Cesar Gonzalez, Ph.D., L.P. (he/they), a clinical health psychologist and clinical director of the Transgender and Intersex Specialty Care Clinic at Mayo Clinic. “That’s not what we’re saying.”

    No, he/they, that’s not what we say. What we say is that you’re linguistically deleting women from everything to do with women, for the sake of pretending that men can be women. We also say that medics of all people should not try to convince us that some men are women.

    The purpose is to use terms that are accurate and apply to you no matter your sex or gender identity.

    Think about pregnancy, which is often viewed as being an exclusively female phenomenon. It’s easy to use the term “pregnant women” without a second thought.

    But there are transmasculine individuals who may become pregnant, and they don’t feel that the term “pregnant women” applies to them. The more neutral term “pregnant person” can apply to someone who is male, female or nonbinary, and everyone is included.

    But “transmasculine individuals” who “become” pregnant are women, whether they feel that the word applies to them or not. It’s not the job of medics to prop up people’s fantasies, especially fantasies about something as basic and medically relevant as which sex they are.

    Using exclusive terms can be harmful. As an example, contraception is sometimes defined as ways for women to prevent pregnancy, says Dr. Davidge-Pitts.

    No, it’s always defined as that, because that’s what it means. Think about it. Contra. Ception. Get it now?

    But that definition excludes transmasculine individuals, Dr. Davidge-Pitts says, who then might not feel that they need contraception. And even if they are aware that they need contraception, they may not be comfortable asking for it if they don’t feel that their provider will be accepting of their identity.

    Then they need to grow the fuck up. They do not need to change the language for everyone for the sake of their fragile breakable feeble idennniny.

    “By not acknowledging inclusivity, we’re adding to health inequity, we’re adding to further discrimination, and we’re adding to people not being comfortable seeking medical care, which then relates to poor well-being and health long term,” Dr. Davidge-Pitts says. “It has this domino effect.”

    Hey, guess what, Doc, it works the other way too. I’m not comfortable seeking medical care from medics who talk this kind of drooling pathetic bilge. I want adult medical care thank you very much.

    “People who don’t fit into boxes are the ones who experience the most stigma, the most discrimination, the most harassment, the most health disparities,” Dr. Gonzalez says.

    Really? Really? Are you sure about that? Not immigrants? Poor people? Homeless people? Addicts? People of color?

    I think Dr. Gonzalez just made all that up. A homemade on the spot statistic, which seems highly unlikely to be true.

  • Allowed into conference

    Suzanne Moore on Labour’s indifference to women:

    On the conference floor, grumblings of winter fuel allowances, the cruel two-child benefit cap and assisted dying rumble under the surface. But the big issue Labour [has] yet to get its head around is that of people like me: women who believe, shockingly, that biology is real. 

    This is the first year that the Labour Women’s Declaration (LWD) movement has been allowed into conference and it has a stall and some terrific events. The LWD believe that women and girls are subject to discrimination and oppression on the basis of their sex, have the right to single-sex spaces and are not to be intimidated for discussing this. 

    Such a zany belief, yeah?!

    But The LGB Alliance, which was founded in opposition to Stonewall’s policies on transgender issues, is still verboten. When I asked their spokeswoman why, she said they are never given any explanation. Why lesbian, gay and bisexual people cannot organise without including the many diverse groups now under the cover of the trans umbrella, many of whom aren’t same sex-attracted, is simply ridiculous.

    Well, if Labour won’t explain, we’ll have to explain it for them. They’re misogynist and homophobic. If they don’t want to be called that, they should stop performing it.

    It’s fine for women with status to stick their necks out â€“ which these days simply means insisting that biological sex exists â€“ but others in the room told us that if they speak up at their local Constituency Labour Party (CLP) meetings they are met with hostility.

    The institutional capture of radical trans ideology may slowly be beginning to crumble top down but it is still deeply embedded in our schools, the NHS and universities. And that’s a challenge.

    Most Labour people will say this is not a priority. There is too much other stuff to sort out. But at some point even the dimmest of them could join the dots between this dismantling of women’s rights and the fact that male violence is rising and that most of those who present with gender dysphoria are teenage girls who reject the burgeoning signs that they are turning into women. 

    If it were anyone else it would be a priority, but it’s just boring tedious women so we have to sort all the other stuff out instead.

  • You be the judge

    Wait.

    Isn’t this parody? Everyone is yelling at it but surely it’s parody. Isn’t it?

  • “Practical training”

    Another thing about those residential “schools” –

    Residential school students did not receive the same education as the general population in the public school system, and the schools were sorely underfunded. Teachings focused primarily on practical skills. Girls were primed for domestic service and taught to do laundry, sew, cook, and clean. Boys were taught carpentry, tinsmithing, and farming. Many students attended class part-time and worked for the school the rest of the time: girls did the housekeeping; boys, general maintenance and agriculture. This work, which was involuntary and unpaid, was presented as practical training for the students, but many of the residential schools could not run without it. With so little time spent in class, most students had only reached grade five by the time they were 18. At this point, students were sent away. Many were discouraged from pursuing further education.

    So in fact they weren’t even schools, they were prisons with forced labor. It’s all so very Goldenbridge.

    Abuse at the schools was widespread: emotional and psychological abuse was constant, physical abuse was metred out as punishment, and sexual abuse was also common. Survivors recall being beaten and strapped; some students were shackled to their beds; some had needles shoved in their tongues for speaking their native languages. These abuses, along with overcrowding, poor sanitation, and severely inadequate food and health care, resulted in a shockingly high death toll. In 1907, government medical inspector P.H. Bryce reported that 24 percent of previously healthy Indigenous children across Canada were dying in residential schools.  This figure does not include children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when critically ill. Bryce reported that anywhere from 47 percent (on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta) to 75 percent (from File Hills Boarding School in Saskatchewan) of students discharged from residential schools died shortly after returning home.

    75 percent!!!