Author: Ophelia Benson

So the ground is beginning to shift?

The Health Secretary has backtracked on his previous claim that trans women are women.

James Murray, who replaced Wes Streeting last month, previously said he defined women as “adult female and trans women”.

However, he has now claimed to have “changed what I would say” and that he accepts the difference between sex and gender.

So what is gender then? Is a skirt one gender while jeans are another? Short hair one gender and long hair the other? Crying one gender, shouting the other?

On Monday, Mr Murray was told by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Mr Streeting had changed his mind on trans rights.

Asked whether he had shifted his own position, Mr Murray responded: “Yeah, I have changed what I would say. I wouldn’t say that phrase any more. And I think that over the last few years a lot of us, myself included, have thought about this question in some detail.

Oh yes? Why didn’t you do it sooner?

But also – really? What kind of “detail”? What detail does it take to decide that oh right, it all becomes clear now, men are not women after all? Please do spell out the “detail” part. Please also explain why you didn’t think about it in some detail from the outset.

“I believe that single-sex spaces should be protected on the basis of sex, on the basis of biological sex, whilst at the same time believing in dignity for trans people – recognising that sex and gender are different things, but being absolutely clear that single-sex spaces within the NHS, for instance, need to be protected on the basis of sex.”

The thing about that is that being a trans person is itself a move away from “dignity”. There is no dignity in claiming to be the sex you’re not.

Saying you’re uncomfortable or miserable or furious with the rules about how women and men are supposed to look and behave is entirely compatible with dignity, but pretending to be the one you’re not is not.

Mr Murray once said that it was very important to debate trans rights in an interview in which he defended a transgender swimmer competing against female athletes.

Funny what a hard time they have perceiving the obvious.

Wait a second.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his opinion that the 1964 statute that led to the creation of the Kennedy Center makes “crystal clear” that the center is to be named for President John F. Kennedy only. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” the judge wrote.

In December of last year, the center’s board voted to change its name to the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Soon after the vote, 18 new letters were added to the building’s facade in front of Kennedy’s name to read: “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” The change was also reflected and on the website and promotional materials for events. When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the change on social media, she said it was “because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.”

No no no no no. That’s not how that works. It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t ever work that way. The Golden Gate Bridge is always being painted (because corrosion is always happening in one spot or another) but its name is still The Golden Gate Bridge. Notre Dame de Paris got a complete makeover after the fire, but its name did not switch to Notre Dame Édouard Phillippe.

That’s all the more true when the original name is the name in order to commemorate a particular person. Note that even Trump hasn’t (as far as I know) tried to rename the Lincoln Memorial the Lincoln and Trump Memorial, despite having told people to sweep up the cigarette butts in a more timely fashion.

There’s also of course the fact that both Lincoln and Kennedy were murdered on the job, and that’s why the Memorial and the Center exist. Trump has not been murdered on the job, so he doesn’t get a Memorial and he doesn’t get to glue himself to an existing memorial building.

Enough already.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Knock-knees.

Ah, yes, uchimata.

Pigeon toes. It’s a Japanese anime thing. Along with eyes-closed giggling with a hand covering the mouth, or showing gushing excitement by squeezing one’s elbows against the waist while waving her raised fists back and forth, or sitting on the ground, knees pointed forward and inward, legs bent out to the sides, forming a “w” shape when seen from above. It’s vaguely arguable that some of this aesthetic has roots in geisha and kabuki and old Japanese kimono culture, but these days, characters in such poses almost always come dressed in a short-skirted schoolgirl or French maid costume. It’s one of the defining aesthetics of Japanese anime, and it’s deliberately pornographic — far from traditional, ceremonial, or austere.

The “moe” look has been slowly emerging since at least the ’60s (the “cute witch fantasy girlfriend” trope, imported to Japan via American TV — I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched — was an early prototype), but it was formalized into animation style guides around the ’90s. These animators were adult men, and although the comics and cartoons they produced were ostensibly aimed at teen girls, they were often actually consumed by other adult men.

Then fashion magazines aimed at girls took it up. Real life (as opposed to drawn) teen girls in glossy photo shoots were instructed to do those poses. Soon after, pigeon-toed walking became a social contagion which has caused a medical epidemic among Japanese girls and women: they came to believe they’re supposed to walk with pigeon toes in order to be seen as desirable by men. But it causes severe and painful bone and muscle deformities.

The Sailor Moon series is probably the most canonical example of this subgenre of anime: from the 1990s, it was a cartoon about teen girls with superpowers, but it was drenched in sexualized poses and even full-frontal nudity in the original Japanese airings. It was clearly made with horny men in mind just as much as teen girls. And just as the West exported the submissive magical girlfriend to Japan via Jeannie — who called her boyfriend “Master”, you’ll recall — the Japanese kinked and sexed it up a hundredfold and exported it back to us via anime — which has become a cultural juggernaut among Western young men.

That mix, female-character driven stories told through the male gaze is ground zero for the recent trans explosion: a girl or woman is what a horny man imagines a girl or woman to be, rather than a human female. It’s no wonder trans and anime are virtually synonymous online.

And there it is in that male athlete. From the pigeon toes alone, an entire decades- and continents-spanning history unfolds before our eyes…

Look at his feet.

California Gov. candidate Tom Steyer just posted this video with trans athlete AB Hernandez, who will compete for a girls' state track & field title this weekend.

"I'm so proud of you for what you're doing," Steyer said. pic.twitter.com/iIq5VqX14J

— Jackson Thompson (@JackThompsonFOX) May 29, 2026

In case you don’t feel like clicking on the image –

Aww idn’t that precious, that sweet little girl with her shy pigeon-toed feets at the end of her teeny-tiny little legs.

For the avoidance of doubt, since even Fox can’t be bothered to say it: pigeon-toes is a male.

Notice also that even Fox won’t tell the truth. “Trans athlete” is meaningless. He’s a male athlete, competing against female athletes; in short he’s a cheat.

Trump has been working hard today.

In a spree of posts made to his Truth Social account on Saturday, Donald Trump lauded his administration’s efforts to turn the National Mall’s reflecting pool blue, denounced a judge’s ruling removing his name from the Kennedy Center, and announced he will hold an “America Is Back” rally on Wednesday to replace a concert series after a number of performers backed out.

After arriving at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, at 11.08am, Trump posted to his social media platform 25 times in the next two hours. The president’s posts included a series of apparently AI-generated images, including one of him playing for the New York Knicks and dunking over New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul; another of him riding a horse alongside George Washington and a Trump-branded race car tearing up the White House lawn; and one depicting the “Obama presidential library” as a huge garbage can holding a giant trash bag.

A totally normal Saturday for a totally normal president.

There’s always the background-wondering how much of it is “joking” and how much is absolute belief.

Trump: “I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar,… pic.twitter.com/LX1hL8LdtE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2026

I suppose one could make the case that it’s all joking – it’s patter, it’s tv personality shtick, it’s Bob Hope on steroids, it’s hyperbole to annoy the libtards. One could, but it wouldn’t be convincing, because here’s an ignorant barely literate conman so why wouldn’t he believe all that about himself?

I do wonder how “”the yips”” got in there.

Sigh.

No women’s museum for you.

The House rejected a bill on Thursday that would have advanced plans to construct an American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall, after a once-bipartisan coalition that had supported it fractured.

The legislation would have designated a location for the new Smithsonian museum, an effort that had collected supporters from both parties and has been backed by President Trump.

But Democrats rejected Republican-led changes to the bill that they said gave Mr. Trump and his allies too much influence over the development of the museum.

Well, that would be a bad outcome. We know that from long unpleasant experience.

Many Democrats also balked at language that specified the museum would be dedicated to presenting the experiences and achievements of “biological women” in the United States. Some said that such a provision could block transgender women and girls from recognition in the museum’s exhibits.

Ah. That’s another story. Listen up: men and boys who pretend to be female should be blocked from recognition in a museum of women’s history. Things for/about women should be for/about women, not women and a handful of men.

The effort to establish an American women’s history museum at the Smithsonian goes back more than 20 years. Progress has been slow, in part because other additions to the National Mall became priorities.

Right. Of course half the population is not important.

Northern news:

The Scottish Greens have been branded “extremists” who only care about “toxic gender ideology” after one of its newbie MSPs started a campaign to break the law around gender. Q Manivannan, who has already sparked controversy due to his immigration status, has made combatting the new EHRC guidance one of his main goals as an MSP.

That agent-free first sentence is garbage – it could mean anything or nothing. Branded by whom? You? Passive voice with no actual agent specified is a very low trick. But anyway: brilliant: male student from another country gets elected as a Member of the Scottish Parliament and immediately gets to work persecuting women.

This is despite the legislation being reserved to Westminster and there being plenty of other problems in Edinburgh to deal with at the moment. He has urged his social media followers to “file complaints against the Equality Act” and branded the guidance “actively harmful.”

Yeah file complaints against equality. Make it that women have no rights at all.

Originally a miscellaneous comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.

A little curio. I’ve been aimlessly tinkering and tootling with these AI machines today, and I had to share.

After using ChatGPT for a year now, I asked it to take all my input and use it to describe me to myself, in political/philosophical terms. After a year feeding it all that data, what does it see? What do I believe? Who am I? (Scary, because I’ve fed it so much personal info that could theoretically be used against me. Let’s hope that political turn doesn’t happen too soon.)

And then I thought, wait a minute, how do I know how to benchmark its taste in people? How can I tell if it did good or not in its evaluation of me? I need a baseline! So I asked it to look at the website B&W and define Ophelia Benson. (Oh god, OB, I know you already hate me for this!) And I think it did an okay job! Here’s AI’s attempt to grasp OB’s central philosophy, based on its reading of the entirety of the B&W website in about 0.4 seconds, as robots are wont to do:

Reality exists. Truth matters. Bad ideas hurt people. Euphemism is often cowardice. Relativism is often cruelty wearing manners. Religion deserves no special exemption from criticism. Feminism that will not defend women concretely is decorative. And the left is not automatically on the side of truth merely because it has humane intentions.

Umm… yeah, that seems right to me! It’s a polemic of defiance and a demand for a correction to a misguided kind of liberalism. I couldn’t agree more. No wonder I’m so addicted to this place!

Here’s its take on me:

You are a liberal with a bouncer’s bullshit detector: committed to human equality, allergic to piety, tender toward the crushed, vicious toward the self-flattering, and permanently suspicious of anyone who turns their own comfort into a theory of virtue.

Haha. I’m not a literal bouncer, but a bartender is pretty close. I do bounce people — kick them out of the bar — from time to time. And yes, bartending is a strange kind of career that appeals to me because it equalizes all humans. My patrons are CEOs or winos or charming or awkward or chatty or quiet or brilliant or stupid or bland or weird… they’re all the same at the bar: human beings. It’s almost like Zen or something. Like some kinda Eastern philosophy… everyone is the same under the bar light… that comforts me.

Anyhoo, I felt like sharing this little random insight. It gave me a wee chuckle…

/miscellany

Yesssssss!

Court Orders Trump’s Name Stripped From Kennedy Center

I’m not a fan of JFK, who was actually quite a trumpish guy in some ways (but not in others – he wasn’t illiterate for instance), but I really hated the name-addition, for aesthetic reasons among others.

A federal judge in Washington ruled on Friday that President Trump’s name was illegally added to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, writing that the law establishing the center made “crystal clear” that only Congress could change it. Mr. Trump wrote on social media that the judge, who also temporarily blocked the center from closing for renovations, should be “ashamed of himself.”

No, bonehead, you should be ashamed of yourself.

The judge’s order came in response to a lawsuit by Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, who is an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board. She objected to both the renaming and the plans to close the institution, which her lawyers argued was in fact a decision “designed to hide their embarrassment about declining ticket sales.”

Judge Cooper found that the board had been “derelict” in considering the possible consequences to programming when shuttering the center, as well as its legal responsibility to maintain the center as a memorial to the slain president. His order did not make any specific directives for reinstating programming as the board reassesses its renovation plans.

Ms. Beatty said in a statement celebrating the ruling that “the Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump.”

…

After shunning the Kennedy Center in his first term, Mr. Trump has staged a wholesale takeover of the institution in his second. He stocked the center’s board with loyalists, who installed him as chairman, ushering in a period of upheaval as many artists boycotted the increasingly politicized institution.

In Mr. Trump’s social media post on Friday, he indicated that he was now interested in giving up responsibility for the Kennedy Center, writing that he had instructed the Commerce Department to “transfer this failing Institution” to Congress. It was not immediately clear what he meant; the programming is run through a nonprofit, but Congress allots federal funds to maintain the building.

Oh it is too so clear what he meant: he’s a big sulky dodo who thinks everything should be about him all the time.

What a display.

Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson says if people don't like the new guidance on single-sex spaces, 'change the law'.

The new chair of the EHRC says the law around single-sex spaces ‘is very clear’ and many women 'do really value single sex spaces'.

🔊 Political Thinking:… pic.twitter.com/MvgSalzCQw

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) May 29, 2026

Now plenty of people listening will say “Ah well look trans men and women can use unisex toilets or single cubicles” but many of them will not think that. They want the dignity of being confirmed in their sex.

But that’s not dignity. Adults playing let’s pretend is not dignity. Adults playing let’s pretend at the expense of women is not dignity and it’s not fair or right or acceptable, either. Adults demanding that everybody else in the world play along with their fantasies is so emphatically not dignity it’s hard to know how to express it.

Idiot man continues.

Call it an adopted sex if you like but that is what they will think.

But they will be wrong. They could insist on an adopted species, too, and they would be wrong about that also. People think a lot of things; there is no absolute rule that we have to endorse everything that people think.

They don’t want separate, they want to be who they are.

No, you buffoon, they want other people to pretend they are who they are not.

How did this happen? It’s as if adults like this guy, a professional BBC employee, were insisting that we all have to agree with people who claim to be elephants or spiders or whales or rattlesnakes. It’s embarrassing.

If even the Daily Mail can’t get it right…

Men are not a minority group & kicking men out of women’s spaces isn’t a “culture war”. pic.twitter.com/HiNUB4MfEk

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) May 29, 2026

What a headline!

One, men invading women’s organizations is not a “culture war”.

Two, women resisting men’s invasion of women’s organizations is not “kicking” anyone.

Three, men are not a “minority group” even if they call themselves women.

Four, how is it not obvious that single-sex spaces=single-sex spaces and therefore men don’t belong in the ones for women?

That’s a hell of a lot to get wrong in one little headline.

If it ain’t broke why fix it?

In a bid to remake the country’s top-rated news program, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, on Thursday unveiled an overhaul of “60 Minutes,” replacing the show’s executive producer with a tech journalist and firing two of its on-air correspondents.

It’s the country’s top-rated news program, so why change it? Why change it??

Ms. Weiss named Nick Bilton, a former New York Times technology columnist and a filmmaker who has directed and produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix, as her pick to lead the 58-year-old Sunday show. Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in traditional broadcast news, will replace Tanya Simon, who had been at the show for more than three decades.

CBS News also fired Cecilia Vega, the program’s first Latina correspondent, and Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air abruptly last year by Ms. Weiss, who requested more reporting. It aired in full at a later date. Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor of “60 Minutes,” was also fired, as was Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer.

Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist with no prior experience in television, has made major changes at CBS since being appointed last year by the tech scion David Ellison. She has named Tony Dokoupil to helm “CBS Evening News,” hired new on-air contributors and personally booked some guests for interviews, a departure from the industry norm.

But the overhaul at “60 Minutes” is by far the largest gamble of Ms. Weiss’s tenure. The program remains appointment viewing for millions every Sunday night, and its viewership this season rose 9 percent from the year prior, according to Nielsen.

So why change it?

And why hire Bari Weiss to run it? Bari Weiss is basically a blogger – like me, except that I have no illusions that I should be running CBS News. You might as well fire the pilot mid-flight and tell Bari Weiss to fly the plane.

Ms. Weiss’s handling of “60 Minutes” has led to internal turmoil. Her decision to hold Ms. Alfonsi’s segment set off a firestorm, though it eventually ran with additional comments from the Trump administration. This week, Ms. Alfonsi told The Times that CBS was no longer separating editorial independence from corporate interests.

They’ll be eating our faces any minute now.

Bari Weiss, yet again.

“60 Minutes” correspondent Cecilia Vega said Thursday that she was fired and issued a blistering statement in which she accused CBS News of “censorship, both imposed and self-driven.”

Vega, who joined the prestigious TV newsmagazine from ABC News in 2023, said her contract wasn’t up until March 2027. The network did not respond to a request for comment.

Vega got the ax in a major shakeup at the long-running show. CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss ousted the executive producer, Tanya Simon, and replaced her with Nick Bilton, a former New York Times tech columnist and Vanity Fair contributor.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who clashed with Weiss over a segment on Donald Trump’s immigration policies, also exited after her contract was not renewed.

Trump and his minions are now in charge of journalism.

We are in deep shit.

Union says what?

Speaking of impact in the work place, what impact would it have on women to have men who pretend to be women in their spaces on the job? With no right to say get out?

Oh does it now.

DOJ Tries to Unmask Reddit and X Users Who Criticized ICE

The Justice Department is trying to obtain the names, addresses, financial data, and other personal information of Reddit and X users who criticize ICE’s violent immigration tactics.

Bloomberg reported that U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro has subpoenaed the massive social media platforms for the information of two anonymous users who made negative comments toward ICE. They are now part of a criminal investigation, even as Pirro’s office has yet to alert them of the charges…

This is a clear attempt at intimidation of dissent and muzzling free speech, and it isn’t the first time. In February, the Department of Homeland Security sent out dozens of subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), demanding they divulge the personal information of users who have criticized or helped locate ICE agents.

The Trump administration is paying close attention to every Reddit thread and Instagram comment that opposes its massively unpopular deportation units—and is trying to take legal action against them. This insecure authoritarianism is a real low, even for this administration, especially as Trump moves to pay his own supporters who actually committed real crimes from a $1.8 billion slush fund.

Be careful out there.

How to be extra extra extra progressive.

Dame Helen Mirren has been harassed in the street by a pro-Palestine activist calling her an “evil Zionist bitch”.

The Daily Mail has the clip.

The Telegraph continues:

Footage on social media shows the Oscar-winning actress, 80, being accosted as she walked along the street in London with her husband, director Taylor Hackford.

In the video, Dame Helen can be seen initially greeting the man with a smile and asking if he is OK as he approaches the couple while filming.

Launching into an abusive tirade, the unknown stranger says: “And there is Helen Mirren the avowed Zionist. You said Israel should last forever because of the Holocaust. And she was very happy the Palestinians houses were gone.

“You are an evil Zionist bitch. And you [Mr Hackford] as well, fuck you and all.”

So enlightened.

Ok then we’ll just reroute all the planes to Oklahoma. That’ll learn ya!

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said late Tuesday he is “drawing up plans” to end the processing of international flights in left-leaning cities, pointing to protests outside an immigration detention center in New Jersey as rationale.

Serves us right. They should cut off our water and electricity, too.

Mullin’s comments follow weekend protests at Delaney Hall in Newark, where Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) was pepper sprayed during an interaction with immigration agents.

Well duh. What kind of last name is “Kim”? Gotta be from one of them Asian countries, amirite? He’s lucky they didn’t just shoot him.

The secretary, appearing on Fox News, complained about protests on city streets outside the facility.

“They’re barricading our employees from coming in and out of the facility. Then, why are we processing international flights into the airport there? And I, we are currently — which we’re not initiating yet — but we’re currently drawing up plans to say, listen, these sanctuary cities where the local radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either,” he said.

No foreign-type restaurants, either. Shut them all down for code violations.

Critics said ending the processing of international flights at various airports would cause chaos at airports across the country, forcing airlines to cancel flights and disrupt travel for left- and right-leaning cities that depend on CBP processing at major hubs.

Well they should have thought of that before they – excuse me, I have to take this call. Chat soon.

The Justice Department continues to act like Trump’s personal hitman.

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old former magazine writer who accused Donald J. Trump of sexual assault, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The investigation centers on whether Ms. Carroll committed perjury in civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Ms. Carroll won a $5 million civil judgment against Mr. Trump that he had sexually abused and defamed her, which the president last November asked the Supreme Court to overturn. She also won a $83.3 million civil judgment against him in another defamation case.

Note: the Justice Department is not supposed to handle the president’s personal legal matters. That’s not its job at all, and the JD is supposed to act independently, including acting in ways the president doesn’t like. Separation of powers.

An inquiry into Ms. Carroll would represent the latest chapter in Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign, which has been carried out by Justice Department officials. A number of figures who brought criminal and civil cases against Mr. Trump have come under the department’s scrutiny, including James B. Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and other adversaries of the president.

The Justice Department shouldn’t be doing any of that. It’s filthy.

The investigation comes at a volatile moment in a Justice Department that appears to be increasingly controlled by Mr. Trump, who has faced little pushback from department leadership as he accelerates his campaign of retribution against those who accused, challenged or defied him in the past.

Yes, and that’s all wrong.

Originally a comment by Mark on The details of the case.

Speaking from a neurological perspective, the fact that they have a low IQ makes them more, not less, likely to re-offend. Rehabilitation requires that the subject possess a degree of intelligence to understand that what they did was wrong, to be able to empathise and put themselves in another’s shoes, so to speak. Low IQ people have many problems with doing this – and they are notoriously known to have very poor impulse control.

And it’s often not fixable. While IQ is often derided, it is a relatively useful measure of a specific type of intelligence, and neuroscientists and clinical neuropsychologists use it often. If they have a low IQ by the time they are 14 years of age, the odds are that it will remain low forever – especially if they remain in the same environment. A lot of it is set in stone by the time the child is 6 or 7 – poor early childhood nutrition, poor nutrition in-utero, low levels of mental stimuli or parent interaction, alcohol use by the mother while in-utero – all of that impacts IQ and a lot of that is irreversible.

The “punishment” given to the offenders is appalling, especially as it completely ignores any sense of justice for the victim. The judge didn’t even try to balance the right of the juvenile offenders with the need (and it is a need) for the victim to feel a sense of closure, a sense of justice. It was entirely “oh those poor widdle boys” and absolutely NOTHING (as far as I can see in the reports I’ve read) about the suffering, humiliation, pain and trauma faced by the girls attacked.

And does this judge really feel that these boys are going to learn any lesson by being let off the hook?

It’s a horrific case and a horrific act of judicial incompetence and a lack of care on the part of the judge for the victim. I’m not saying we should treat 14 year olds as adults, but neither should we treat them as if they are 5. And I’m also sadly quite certain that these boys will offend again. It’s just a matter of time.