Author: Ophelia Benson

Liar liar liar liar.

The effort is to ban men from the women’s pond. There are three ponds: one for men, one mixed, one for women. If the one for women stops being for women then men get all three ponds and women get zero.

Trump making us all proud.

Trump insisted on Wednesday that the United States was not in effect paying Iran to agree to the recently negotiated peace agreement, and he angrily proclaimed that his deal was better than the one former President Barack Obama signed with Tehran in 2015.

…

In an expletive-laden rant on Wednesday, Mr. Trump repeated his claim that Mr. Obama had given Iran “$1.7 billion in cash,” and then he derided his predecessor.

It’s always nice to see him swearing a blue streak when talking to journalists at the Group of 7 summit.

“And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch,’” Mr. Trump said in comments that indicated how determined he is to be seen as a superior negotiator to Mr. Obama.

But not as a reasonable sensible thoughtful adult human being.

Few issues animate Mr. Trump and other critics of the Obama-era deal as much as the U.S. shipment to Tehran of $1.7 billion in cash a few months after that nuclear deal was agreed upon. That payment was a debt owed to Iran, which bought military equipment from the United States that it never received.

Debt, gift, whatever – Obama did it and Obama is more intelligent than he is therefore he is an epithet.

Yes sir, whatever you say sir, I’m sure you’re correct sir.

Trans women are not men in dresses, he says very earnestly, somberly nodding his head along with his own assertions.

“They’re certainly not predatory men,” he adds firmly.

How the fuck would you know that, sir? How would you, for instance, know that no predatory men at all call themselves trans women? How could you know that? How could it be knowable?

It couldn’t. You can’t know that. You can’t see into the minds of every single man on the planet who claims to be trans.

“A trans woman is a woman, with all of the rights that a woman has,” he explains. Aha now we get to it. The point is, men who claim to be women get to claim all of the rights that a woman has, thus removing them from actual women.

He then expresses weird naive shock-horror that some people don’t believe his dogma. Be patient with us, sir. Keep in mind that we have thought we knew that men are not women for a very long time now.

UN experts just aren’t what they used to be.

Always reverse victim and offender on this subject.

A judge ruled Tuesday that transgender people won’t face criminal charges for using Idaho public restrooms that match their gender identities.

Aka public restrooms reserved for the sex they are not. Idaho men won’t face criminal charges for using women’s public restrooms, so women in Idaho will just have to fend for themselves, sorry laydeeez.

“This ruling will allow transgender people throughout Idaho to find and use a public restroom,” Lambda Legal lawyer Kell Olson said in a statement Tuesday, “without the fear of arrest looming over them, while we continue the longer fight to permanently defeat this discriminatory law in court.”

And it may prevent women throughout Idaho finding and using a public restroom that doesn’t have a man or two in it.

People think they’re being KiNd, but they’re blithely ignoring the unkindness to women.

So now hospitals are being ordered to tamper with minors’ puberties.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ordered Colorado’s largest provider of gender-affirming care for young people to resume medical treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy despite threats that providing the care could lead to losing federal funding.

Puberty blockers are not medical treatments! Neither is “hormone therapy” if that means giving “young people” aka minors opposite-sex hormones in order to make them look more like the opposite sex.

Such interventions may be psychological treatments in some sense – they may make the recipients feel more content or “validated” or similar. They may also or instead make them feel worse. But either way they’re not medical. Thinking you’re the other sex isn’t a medical issue.

Children’s Hospital Colorado suspended medical treatments for transgender patients under 18 in January after it said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services opened an investigation into its treatments following a series of clashes between President Donald Trump’s administration and advocates over transgender health care for children.

But you see this is the problem – there’s no such thing as “transgender health care.” Trying to change people’s sex is not health care. It’s tampering.

It may make some people happier. It may be justifiable for that reason. But it’s still not health care, let alone medical care. You kind of have to bite that bullet.

Four transgender girls, ranging from age 10 to 17, sued the hospital, through their parents, alleging that the hospital was violating the state’s antidiscrimination law by refusing to provide them treatment both because of their gender identity and their disability, gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is the distress caused when someone’s gender expression doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth.

They say that so solemnly, as if it’s true and well established as true.

People can have all kinds of distress about various things about themselves; that doesn’t mean distress about the self is a medical issue.

The girls said they feared not being able to get medication and monitoring to prevent them from undergoing puberty and developing male traits. And they cited mental health fallout, including depression and suicidal ideation.

They’re not girls though. You said so yourself: they’re “transgender girls”. Also, think about the mental health fallout of tampering with people’s puberties when the people later regret the whole thing.

It’s infuriating to see how entrenched this bullshit has become.

Euan Weddell blithely telling the world he’s not a woman, without even realizing he’s doing it.

Also…I can’t help noticing the “still looking” part. Gee I wonder why that might be.

Well you have to admit, it doesn’t get much classier.

A transgender woman who masturbated in front of shocked staff at a hospital has been locked up.

See you’re not supposed to do it in hospitals or in front of adults. You’re supposed to do it on public transportation when there’s a little girl sitting opposite you.

Former soldier Paula Stanton, aged 62, of Severn Avenue, Barry committed the sex act at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff.

The Falklands War veteran had been taken there by ambulance for a mental health assessment over concerns over a threat to self-harm.

Aha. Foolproof way to get yourself into a hospital and in the presence of staff.

Lewis Ball, prosecuting, said: “The defendant put her hands down her leggings to the groin area. Staff could see that she had her penis in her hand and that her hand was moving up and down. This was happening on and off. He made eye contact with one nurse while he was doing it.”

Winky winky.

Trump is sending the Feds to pester people he doesn’t like.

Federal agents have questioned friends and associates of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and his wife, Mr. Newsom said on Monday in a video in which he accused President Trump of using the Justice Department to punish a political enemy.

The full scope of any investigation remains unclear. But Mr. Newsom’s aides say part of the federal investigation appears to focus on his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Former employees of the governor and people affiliated with his wife’s nonprofit groups are among those who have been questioned by agents, according to the governor’s office.

A person familiar with the matter confirmed that multiple federal investigations were underway related to the governor, including one looking at his wife’s finances. But the person disputed Mr. Newsom’s assertion that the investigations were politically motivated, and said they had been initiated by federal law enforcement officials in California, not launched by officials in Washington.

Pure coincidence, eh?

I’m skeptical.

Ms. Siebel Newsom, who calls herself California’s first partner, is a documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on the social impacts of sexism. She founded a nonprofit organization called the Representation Project that advocates for gender equity, in part by developing educational materials based on Ms. Siebel Newsom’s documentaries.

Oh well no wonder MAGA is trying to stich her up. Gender equity!! It’s an outrage!!!

Mr. Newsom, in his video address, mentioned that Mr. Trump had called for his arrest last year and he said he was proud to join the “hit list” of people standing up to the president. Among the wide range of Democrats who[m] Mr. Trump has aggressively targeted is Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat from Arizona, for saying that members of the military should not follow illegal orders from the president. Mr. Kelly is also a potential 2028 presidential candidate in a Democratic primary.

So people are supposed to keep quiet about illegal orders from the president?

I think not.

Maryam Namazie:

The hijab is not simply a piece of cloth. It is one visible expression of a wider system through which women’s bodies become sites of authority, discipline and control.

In this episode of Bread and Roses TV, Maryam Namazie and Fariborz Pooya ask why women’s bodies have become such a public issue. Why are women made responsible for honour, morality, religion, culture and national identity? Why are women expected to carry society on their shoulders?

From compulsory hijab and child veiling to purity culture, abortion bans and sex apartheid, the programme examines how control is presented as protection, obedience as virtue and submission as choice. Looking at examples from Iran and Afghanistan, including the resistance of women confronting both the Islamic regime of Iran and the Taliban, it explores what interests are served when women are denied authority over their own lives. It also examines how attempts to regulate and control women are not confined to religious power, but can also be found within sections of the opposition, from the Mujahedin and monarchists to parts of the Left.

Drawing on the work of Jo Spence and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the programme argues that the struggle over hijab is not fundamentally about a piece of cloth. It is about power. It is about who owns women’s bodies.

I would go to this if I were on that side of the planet.

Call me an elitist now and get it over with, because I am very extremely totally elitist about this thing of holding a trashy fight punch hit contest in the front yard of the White House. It’s intentionally trashy, it’s rub our noses in it trashy, it’s suck it up libtards trashy. The trashier the better in Trumpthink. Everything he touches turns to trash.

Trump, who turned 80 today, will spend this evening hosting an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn of the White House. A mass media spectacle months in the making, it has transformed the White House grounds in ways that presidential historians say are unprecedented.

Late last month, construction began on the towering superstructure known as the “Claw” that now sits complete on the South Lawn, taller than the White House itself. White House staff members were told to work from home on Friday while the U.F.C. put finishing touches on the production, which it and its affiliates have spent more than $60 million to put on. Fighters are expected to be filmed walking through the Oval Office, out onto the lawn and into the claw, where some 4,000 people will be waiting to watch a total of seven fights.

It’s vulgar vulgar vulgar, and that’s why they’re doing it.

Much of the White House real estate has been given over to the U.F.C. for this. A crew of motocross stunt riders performed backflips on the South Lawn on Saturday. Another place to watch the fight was set up on the Ellipse, just beyond the White House gates. That space can hold more than 75,000 people.

This fight night is a marketeering extravaganza: The octagonal cage for the fights is plastered with the names of sponsors who paid for their brands to appear with the ultimate backdrop. It’s heavy on crypto and light beer.

Ah yes light beer. On diets are they?

Maybe there will be a miracle.

The U.F.C. event on the White House’s South Lawn faces the threat of severe weather on Sunday evening. Bob Oravec, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Weather Service, said storms were expected across much of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, including Washington, D.C., especially between 6 and 9 p.m., with damaging winds, lightning and heavy rain possible. Organizers have said lightning would be the main concern for the event, which is set to begin at 8 p.m.

Send that lighting bolt right to the “Claw”.

I for one prefer the people who don’t defend “protest” that includes smashing someone’s spine with a sledgehammer.

Premeditated destruction of property on a grand scale. Unrepentant assault against an officer of the law, taking a literal sledgehammer to the back of a police officer resulting in spinal injury & ongoing occupational health & psychological trauma, these are not acts that politicians should be condoning but condemning. Instead you are championing their violent conduct.

Please don’t kid yourself, even as Leader of the Green Party, that you can act as a law unto yourself. Whether council tax liability or convictions for perpetrators of gratuitous harm, the law does apply to all citizens equally.

Your continued betrayal & transgression of Green Party core values is concerning – as is your advocacy of violent tactics.

His dim-wittedness is not much of a plus either.

Peak top pinnacle vulgarity.

Construction crews have now built a large-scale cage on the South Lawn of the White House, dwarfed in turn by a massive arched lighting grid called “The Claw.” But before you worry that this set-up is a new development in the White House’s deportation agenda, know that it’s all for the “UFC Freedom 250” extravaganza scheduled for June 14—Flag Day and, not coincidentally, Trump’s 80th birthday.

UFC is universal fight club. Trump is a guy who likes to watch violence. He doesn’t like to be punched himself, but he loves to watch other people getting punched.

“UFC Freedom 250” is being promoted as part of our nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. More than 4,000 guests will attend, thanks to efforts by Pentagon brass—read Pete Hegseth—to fill seats with strapping military types. By this, I mean that his offer of free tickets comes with a strict “no fatties” policy. There could be an additional 125,000 watching on massive screens at the adjacent Ellipse, and presumably there’s no BMI checks there. But anything is possible, given that Trump fudges crowd sizes the same way he touts Iran peace deals.

Nothing says presidential decorum, or even “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” quite like two men in silk shorts smashing each other’s faces until the canvas underneath them runs arterial crimson. But, somehow, only 16% of Americans think the White House UFC match is a good idea. For the vast majority, the prospect of the event is blood-boiling.

Blood-boiling and nauseating at the same time.

Oh here we go. Bogus “voter fraud” accusations coming up.

FBI special agents searched an office of a progressive organization in Ohio on Thursday as part of a Justice Department investigation into its voter registration efforts, three people familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The search at the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s office comes as President Donald Trump continues to suggest without evidence that voter fraud is rampant, and repeats false claims about the 2020 presidential election. The FBI in February also raided a Georgia elections hub related to the 2020 presidential election, and California prosecutors have said they are looking into claims of voter fraud in the Los Angeles mayor’s race after Trump made unfounded suggestions of fraud.

Just after Trump made bogus suggestions or because he did? Also, he doesn’t “suggest”; he emphatically asserts, over and over again. Suggesting would be a big improvement.

Voter fraud in the United States is uncommon, according to government officials and election experts. And there would have to be a massive coordinated effort in order to affect the outcome of any election.

Trump’s FBI will overcome all these obstacles I’m sure.

Will sanity ever return?

A Green councillor who compared gender-critical authors to Holocaust deniers has been forced to study the Equality Act.

For fuck’s sake. Holocaust deniers are people who want to change the historical record to hide the fact that the Nazis murdered some eight million people. Gender critical people “deny” that people can change sex. Can we spot the difference? Yes we can: the part about murdering at least eight million people is missing.

The commonality is a factual claim, aka a truth claim. The nature of the truth claim, however, is radically different. You’d think that would be obvious to even the most mentally challenged “activist”.

Helen Elliott-Boult, a Green councillor for Stroud district council (SDC), justified the cancellation of an event featuring two authors critical of transgender ideology, set to take place at Stroud Brewery in the Cotswolds.

The event was cancelled because of fears for “the safety of members of our trans community”.

No it wasn’t. The cancelers didn’t really think the audience for the event was going to run out and physically attack their trans communinny. They just deploy this burble about fears to justify their thought-terminating censorship.

Council officers have mandated that Ms Elliott-Boult attend training, reinforcing that gender-critical views are protected by law in the UK.

Maybe they should start a little further back, and have her attend training in how to think clearly.

Ms Elliott-Boult justified the cancellation of the speaking event in the interest of “inclusion”, and compared de-platforming the gender-ideology sceptics to cancelling a Holocaust denier.

On the one hand, denying a horribly well-evidenced genocide; on the other hand, denying that humans can change sex. Quite the discrepancy.

Stroud has become an unexpected battleground for debates over gender ideology in recent years. In 2025, local police treated graffiti that stated “men can’t be women” as a hate crime.

Gloucestershire Constabulary launched an investigation into slogans daubed around Stroud ahead of the town’s annual Pride march, including the phrases “you can’t change sex”, “being female is not a costume”, and “trans women are men”.

Police said the graffiti was “targeted towards transgender people” and the incident was being treated as a “hate crime”.

Reality is not a hate crime. Reality can be horrible, and it often is, but it’s futile to try to arrest it or chastise it. The same goes for the purported interchangeability of sex. We can’t change our species, we can’t change our date of birth, and we can’t change our sex. To use a hackneyed phrase: it is what it is.

Ms Elliott-Boult responded in a statement, saying: “The complaint was resolved under the informal resolution provisions. I will be completing the same SDC councillor training as all SDC councillors. At no point did I make negative comments about gender-critical views.”

Well that’s a lie. If comparing said view to Holocaust denial is not “negative” (meaning harsh or hostile or similar) then what is?

More on the national parks ruling:

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signs, films and other materials at national parks across the country to comply with a directive from President Trump.

The ruling pauses enforcement of an executive order that called for removing or covering up materials at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans” or cast the United States “in a negative light.”

See the problem with that is that the United States has a long and plentiful history of doing things that “cast it” in a negative light. Here’s a simile: look at Trump. He too has a long history of doing things that “cast him” in a negative light. That is, he has a long history of doing bad, often criminal things. Same with the US. Slavery was bad; genocide of the indigenous populations was bad; internment of citizens of Japanese origin was bad; segregation was bad; CIA operations in Iran, Chile, a host of other countries were bad, to name just a few.

For some purposes Trump is very willing, indeed eager, to say how crappy the US was and how much better he has made it. For others, well, it’s wrap yourself in the flag and ignore all the patches.

Another bit of good news on the Trump front!

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to reinstall exhibits and signs on topics like slavery and climate change that it had removed from parks and monuments nationwide because they “do not align with its preferred narrative.”

U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston issued a preliminary injunction at the behest of groups representing park conservationists, historians and scientists, who argued that the U.S. Department of the Interior has been engaged in a “sustained campaign to erase history and undermine science.”

Removing these signs not only undermines “the integrity of the National Parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization,” Kelley said.

Kelley said she was ordering the government to restore the signs within 21 days, “by the 250th anniversary to properly honor the remarkable achievements of the United States.”

They’ll have to find a lot of tarps to hide all that activity.

Trump’s name is gone, but they wouldn’t let us watch. Petty whiney snotty all the way to the end.

No doubt the next headlines will be Trump nukes DC.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Just stop.

Lady Mondegreen writes:

The Trans Propaganda Playbook:

1) Appeals to emotion (“Trans people deserve love” “Trans Day of Remembrance”)

2) Obfuscation (“Social constructs!” “Intersex” “The Genderbread Person”)

3) Appeals to misunderstood, misrepresented, or dodgy science

(“Biologists say sex is a spectrum!” “Girl’s brain in a boy’s body!” “Clownfish!” “Did we mention intersex?”)

4) Bullying

To which I would add:

5) Tribalism (“It’s the right ‘leftist’/‘progressive’/‘feminist’ thing to do”)

6) False dichotomies (“If you’re not with us, you’re with the MAGA crowd”)

7) Word-magic/bad puns (“If we call TIMs by the same name as biological females, they magically become the same kind of people, and must therefore be given access to all the same spaces”)

8) Gaslighting/DARVO (“Isn’t it awful how that poor trans woman with her lady-cock was made to feel unwelcome in the women’s changing room?”)

9) Thought-terminating cliches (“Trans women are women!”, “Trans men are men!”, “Non-binary identities are valid!”, “Trans rights are human rights!”, “the right side of history”)

10) Sound volume/endless repetition (TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW!!!!!!)

11) Appropriation/forced teaming (“LGBTQ…”, claiming monopoly on “non-white feminism”, “Queers for Palestine”)

12) Appeals to what is best left unspecified (the definition of “woman” or “gender”, what is meant by “trans rights”, “trans healthcare” etc.)

13) The gender of the gaps (“The biological sex model doesn’t meet this impossible standard, therefore the gender identity model gets to claim victory for free without meeting any standard at all”)

Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on When in doubt, do the dangerous thing.

It might be worth stepping back a bit to understand what’s going on here. There’s obviously the stuff about particular medical practitioners being signed up to a particularly weird and inexplicably popular ideology religion, but that’s not the whole story.

No: we have to go back a few decades, to when Tom Beauchamp and James Childress published a book called The Principles of Biomedical Ethics: a book that has gone through several editions since, and been tremendously influential around the world. It’s the standard textbook for a lot of clinical ethics teaching. B&C’s basic position is this: that there are four basic principles to any recognisable moral system: respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. These four principles may manifest in any number of ways, and there may be ongoing disagreement about which is the more important and about how to apply them; but they’re there all the same. And from that, we can derive some claims about how to understand the nature of dilemmas in medical practice, and maybe hope to come up with a solution.

I’m not persuaded by their position, but it’s not completely without merit when its kept in its proper place. The real problem is the way it’s been taken up by medical schools. What was a hypothesis about moral reasoning became a dogma – “Principlism”, sometimes known as the Georgetown Mantra (because B&C were associated with Georgetown University). I’ve lost count of the number of clinicians and ethics teachers in med schools I’ve come across who think that moral reasoning is simply a matter of saying something about each of the principles in turn. On the other hand, they’re medics: maybe we shouldn’t worry too much if their attentions lie with medicine. They’re at least thinking about conduct.

However, this gets compounded by a dogma that it’s respect for autonomy that’s primus inter pares. At the most basic, this means that a patient gets to refuse even simple and life-saving treatment. And maybe if you think that people should be able to make their own damn fool decisions, that’s fine. But the dogma has also taken on another form, which is that respect for autonomy is not simply about taking patient autonomy seriously, and thereby giving patients the final say about accepting treatment – but that respect for autonomy means taking requests for treatment just as seriously as refusals.

This is plainly asymmetric, though. It’s one thing to sigh and discharge a patient who’s refusing antibiotics to treat an infection; it’s quite another to take seriously a request for antibiotics from a patient for whom antibiotics would do nothing.

Still: the (understandably) naïve way in which clinical ethics is taught to clinicians means that a lot of them end up thinking that a patient request that φ is not just a reason to φ, but that it is a powerful and perhaps overriding reason to φ, irrespective of clinical judgement.

OK: now let’s go back to the clinic, with a couple of scenarios.

In the first, a child has (let’s say) a deformed limb, and major surgery is suggested. The child is mature. In this kind of case, it is possible that his or her opinion on whether to accept the surgery would be taken seriously, and may be definitive. If the child is sufficiently mature, the reasons for the decision are irrelevant.

In the second, a comparably mature child decides that they’re in the wrong body, or that they have a gender-spirit that is not so closely aligned with their body that their body determines it, but is closely-enough aligned with the body that the body has to be altered. And the doctor thinks, “Well, a child mature enough to refuse surgery and to have that treated as compelling is surely mature enough to request an intervention and to have that treated as compelling.”

Medicine here becomes a service industry, based on a naïve understanding not just of the importance of respect for patient autonomy, but of what respect for patient autonomy is to begin with.

Maybe being signed up to genderwibble greases the wheels; but I suspect that there’s a lot of medics who’d be sympathetic to the request not because they are so signed up, or even because they’ve even thought about it in any depth, but simply because they think that that’s what respect for patient autonomy requires.