Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Speaking of “a cheap rage-bait story…

    Euan is very cross.

    Euan calls someone else’s writing “a hack job at writing”. Euan claims to be a writer – a journalist – himself, yet his writing is hair-raisingly terrible. He’s not the right fella to judge someone else’s writing chops.

  • Guest post: Feel free to make the case

    Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on Christian Nationalist wish list.

    “Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”

    Well, that’s got things arse-about-face, hasn’t it? Secularism – properly understood – does not exclude religious voices. Secularism actually guarantees a space for their participation in public life, precisely because it’s public life and so takes all comers. Secularism says, “Oh, that’s what you believe, is it? Fine. Feel free to make the case. Feel free to argue what you like. No strongarming, mind; but that’s about the limit of the limits.” (This is why I’d classify the repressively atheist regimes of people like Enver Hoxa as not secular; they didn’t have the commitment to the state stepping back and letting people figure stuff out.)

    There’s a tendency among reactionary religionists to complain that secularism is a threat to them. That’s why in the UK you sometimes see strange confluences of the more evangelical bits of the Church singing the same song as conservative Muslims. It’s dressed up as a common concern for the rights of the religious, and – more dubiously – of religion.

    But the real motivation is that secularism threatens their ability not to make the case for their position, but their ability to enforce it. And so they’ll join together to moan about how awful secularism is. Of course, they despise each other really, and in the non-secular world they claim to want their pretence of a unified protection of religion would crumble; they’d be at each other’s throats for heresy faster than you could say “Arminian Heresy”.

    They should love secularism, because it protects them against the beastliness of others. But it also stops them being beastly in return if they happen to have the whip hand; and that’s a big price to pay. Too big, it seems.

  • Biter bit

    Now here’s a fascinating thread.

    It turns out that organizations such as Women’s Rights Network don’t much like being called “anti-rights” and seek to know the reasons for being so labeled.

    https://x.com/newsandpics/status/2076045840552984953
    https://x.com/newsandpics/status/2076045840552984953

    Let’s all of us consider our options. It’s about time.

  • An urgent review

    “Heather” Herbert may end up regretting his verbal sadism.

    Aberdeen University is conducting an urgent review of comments made by an employee who said she hoped former MP Ann Widdecombe suffered “an extremely painful death”.

    Heather Herbert, a web developer at the university, faced backlash after making the comments on Friday, July 10 following news of Widdecombe’s death.

    Herbert responded to a news report of her passing on her Bluesky account, writing: “Some good news for once.

    “I hope it was an extremely painful death.”

    She added: “I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony.”

    It’s a news article, not a TwitX burble. He’s not a she. He’s a man who hates women and isn’t embarrassed to make his hatred public.

    Aberdeen University has confirmed that they are reviewing the comments as a “matter of priority”.

    What’s to review? He said what he said. It’s only a few words. They kind of review themselves.

    Principal and Vice Chancellor, Professor Peter Edwards, added: “Ann Widdecombe was a highly respected figure in both the Westminster and European parliaments.

    “The University of Aberdeen does not tolerate violence or hateful behaviour in any form.

    “We are aware of the incident and the concerns that have been raised and are looking into the matter as a priority.”

    It doesn’t really matter whether she was a highly respected figure or not. Rejoicing that she was beaten to death is not ok.

    I’ll admit that there is one person I would like to see facing some major karma, but then he has had many people murdered and many more injured, tortured, immiserated, displaced, bereaved – the list is endless. He has literally hundreds if not thousands of lives to account for. One former MP, however right-wing, not so much.

  • The sports dunce cap

    A Facebook group called The Sports Bra tells us:

    This weekend, July 11–12, The Sports Bra is joining the boycott of Women’s Elite Rugby (WER) matches.

    That means that we will not stream matches, host watch parties, or otherwise promote WER competition during the boycott window.

    We’re doing this in solidarity with the players, fans, and organizers calling for rugby to live up to its own values of respect, integrity, and inclusion.

    The Sports Bra exists to celebrate and elevate women and girls in sports. That includes trans women and girls. Always.

    Well, no it doesn’t. Ever. Trans women and girls are men and boys. Always.

    We love women’s sports. We love seeing new leagues grow. We want more athletes on bigger stages with more fans in the stands. But growth cannot come at the cost of belonging.

    But males don’t belong in female sports. There is no “cost of belonging” in having things for girls and women. Girls and women are allowed to have their own belonging, and men shouldn’t try to force their way into it.

    They added in a comment:

    Part of our commitment to belonging means we protect our marginalized community members. We will delete comments that are hostile, threatening, or use profanity. We will block repeat offenders.

    They will delete comments that disagree with their determination to trash female sports. How progressivey.

  • Christian Nationalist wish list

    Nick Fish of American Atheists writes in a mailing:

    “The biggest lie that’s ever been told in America”

    Those are the words Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas and Chairperson of President Trump’s so-called “Religious Liberty Commission”, used to describe church-state separation.

    And if the draft report just released by the Religious Liberty Commission — along with its Christian Nationalist wish list of recommendations for policy changes — is any indication, Patrick’s (mis)belief that church-state separation is a lie was the unanimous position of the commission.

    Of course, that should come as no surprise. A panel made up of ultra-conservative, reactionary Christians and just a single (conservative) Jewish member does not represent the religious diversity of our nation. Their views on, well, everything are dramatically out of step with everyday Americans — and in some cases, the majority of their coreligionists.

    The recommendations from the panel include both the boring (a “Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty” award, “Know Your Rights” posters, and a reporting hotline) and the five-alarm fire for equality (repealing the Johnson Amendment, completely turning the understanding of the Establishment Clause on its head, and a massive giveaway of your tax dollars to religious schools).

    And all this at the behest of Trump, who is notoriously not a believer. I’m not going to call him an atheist, because that would require at least a moment or two of thought at some point. He’s just a de facto non-believer, in the same way he’s a non-believer in quantum physics or Etruscan tennis.

    Despite the report’s executive summary claiming that religious liberty “protects believers and nonbelievers alike,” the report spends 224 pages proving they don’t actually believe that. Atheists and the nonreligious appear nowhere else in the document except as an ideology to be defeated.

    Why? Because the Commission made no effort to hear from members of the atheist community.

    Can we not call it that? Can we not keep bunching things into “communities”? Can we not just say “atheists” and leave it at that?

    It’s not just that they deny that we might have a shared commitment to freedom of conscience. Rather, it’s that they believe we don’t exist at all except as enemies of their freedom.

    Possibly the most chilling line of the entire report makes that belief crystal clear: “Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”

    Wut? Theocracy excludes religious voices from the process of government? Theocracy puts religious voices at the core of government; that’s why it’s called theocracy. The line is chilling but also incoherent.

    Anyway, thanks for the update Nick; keep up the good work.

  • Another escalation

    Freedom of the press much?

    The Department of Justice has subpoenaed New York Times journalists after they reported on security concerns involving the new, Qatari-gifted Air Force One, marking a dramatic escalation of President Donald Trump’s campaign against the media that has drawn condemnation for eroding a fundamental freedom of American democracy.

    …

    The subpoenas seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan next week, the Times said, adding that federal agents delivered some subpoenas to the reporters at their homes. The subpoenas were issued after FBI Director Kash Patel and other Justice Department officials met at the White House on Friday to talk about the matter.

    …

    “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, said in a statement.

    Hey it’s not our consciences on the line. The appearance of the feds should shock us; it’s Patel and his thugs who need their consciences shocked.

    Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Trump’s “war on the press is looking for another victim.”

    He said in a statement that the subpoenas “break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted.”

    The department said that “to be clear, reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are.”

    Cool. Question: who classified the information, and why? Is it classified for reasons of public safety and the like, or is it classified because it’s dirty and they want to keep it secret?

    Issuing subpoenas represents further ramping up of Trump’s effort to threaten independent new organizations by leveraging the power of the federal government against them. It is also part of a systematic pattern by the Republican president to attempt to undermine press freedom in order to shield him[self] from negative coverage.

    And by “negative coverage” we mean truthful reporting on his many violations of longstanding norms and outright crimes.

    Earlier this year, the Justice Department issued subpoenas seeking to compel testimony from reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. In both cases, the department later withdrew the subpoenas.

    They were just kidding both times, right? Funny stuff.

    During his first term, Trump suggested that the press constituted an “enemy” of the American people. Since returning to the White House last year, he has waged an aggressive campaign against the media unlike any in modern U.S. history.

    Trump’s pattern of attacks against news outlets and media figures he believes are overly critical of him has included filing lawsuits against outlets whose coverage he dislikes, threatening to revoke TV broadcast licenses, and seeking to bend news organizations and social media companies to his will.

    He’s just doing what any self-respecting dictator does.

  • Misusing their formidable funding

    Amnesty better lawyer up.

    Round of applause.

  • More for the Amnesty file

    The Herald (Scotland):

    JK Rowling’s support centre for female sexual assault victims – Beira’s Place – has been labelled an “anti-rights” group by Amnesty International UK.

    Beira’s Place was founded in 2022 by the Harry Potter author to provide trauma-informed support service to women survivors of sexual abuse. The organisation labels itself as “women-only” and does not include transgender people.

    It doesn’t include giraffes, either; what’s your point?

    Amnesty updated its report this month to include 51 gender critical groups, including For Women Scotland and Beira’s Place.

    It warns the UK had experienced a “significant decline” in protections for LGBT+ rights, with the nation falling from first to 22nd place in the ILGA-Europe (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association).

    Wait. ILGA has to mean International Lesbian, Gay Association. ILGA is not ILGABTI. Somebody here is hiding something.

    In a published list of 117 UK organisations, Amnesty International mentions Beira’s Place under “gender critical” in the anti-rights categories.

    Amnesty International also condemns For Women Scotland – the group of women who took the Scottish Government to court over policies which allowed transgender women – born male – to take up female-only spaces on public boards.

    The group has also recently had a successful legal victory over the Scottish Government and the Scottish Prison Service’s placement of trans people in the female prison estate.

    The Scottish Government confirmed it would not appeal the decision and has removed all trans women from staying in the female estate, however further clarity is sought on whether transwomen are restricted from accessing women’s-only services in prisons.

    If they’re not they should be. Enough already. Stop pretending it’s progressive to force women to share everything with men.

  • Your early response

    Amnesty may have made a mistake.

    Maybe that’s why Amnesty has hidden the report. Worried about the libel perhaps maybe possibly? Hmmm?

  • He hopes it was extremely painful

    Ah yes the oh so progressive trans activismists share their thoughts on the murder of a woman they dislike.

    He hopes she was chained to a bed, screaming in agony.

  • Be careful with the exclamation points

    Peter Tatchell outdid himself today. This morning:

    But it turned out she’d been battered to death.

    So Tatchell had to try to undo his initial glee.

    It hasn’t gone all that well.

    It’s not really something you can claw back once it’s out there.

  • The Nation’s nadir

    As we’ve all noted a million times, they can’t make their case without lying constantly. The Nation:

    The Supreme Court upheld anti-trans athlete laws in the recent Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ decisions, declaring that Title IX, the bedrock of gender-based protections in public schools, does not extend to transgender student athletes.

    The laws are not “anti-trans”. The laws are pro-equal rights for women and girls. The issue isn’t trans, the issue is that male people are male and thus can’t be in women’s sports because being male entails many physical advantages. It doesn’t matter what flavor of ideology tries to get around that fact; it’s only the fact that matters. Women have their own sports because otherwise they would have no sports. It is unfair, unsporting, unreasonable for men to try to infiltrate women’s sports on the grounds of being “trans”.

    The court’s decisions are part of a global campaign to legislate and litigate trans people out of public life. This was made clear during oral arguments back in January; attorneys and justices alike scrutinized the bodies of trans girls, debating the size and shape of their organs, muscles, and bones. Yet the banality of the scene—procedural buzzwords, shuffling papers, cordial back-and-forths couched with honorifics—almost obfuscated the violence of it all.

    Violence my ass. The violence is men slamming into women in the football game.

    Alan Hurst, then Idaho’s solicitor general, said transgender girls pose “a real threat” to safety and fairness in women’s athletics. “We cite Your Honors to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report that says 600 women have lost 890 medals in 29 different sports,” he said, arguing that ( presumed) cisgender women are losing en masse to transgender ones and that trans women and girls don’t belong in women’s spaces.

    The United Nations official in question is Reem Alsalem—the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She filed an amicus brief with the court supporting trans-exclusionary laws. This comes after years of pushing reports at the United Nations that painted trans women as a danger to their peers. The court’s final opinion echoed the language in her brief.

    Of course “trans women” i.e. men are a danger to women in contact sports. What is the Nation doing publishing this lying manipulative garbage? Why doesn’t the Nation give a damn about women?

    Hurst’s comment about Alsalem’s work has a few problems. Among them: The numbers are not particularly meaningful or accurate. But facts have never stopped Alsalem. Through her writings to the United Nations, she has become a leading mouthpiece for far-right propaganda and misinformation about trans people, propelling untruths into policy and law and declaring war, in her words, on the concept of “gender equality” itself.

    Bordering on libelous if you ask me. Also rude, tendentious, inaccurate, manipulative. The Nation should be embarrassed.

  • No more beardos

    Hegseth has his pants in a bunch again.

    As they juggle ongoing U.S. military operations against Iran and a host of other national security challenges, senior Pentagon officials have also been pressing ahead on a far different priority: tightening the grooming, fitness and appearance standards of the American service members. 

    Military officials have recently taken steps to address troops who fail to meet hair, weight and physical fitness standards, nine months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a blunt message to a room full of admirals and generals at Marine Corps Base Quantico, declaring there would be “no more beardos” and “fat troops.” 

    Because appearance is everything, troops. After all, would Hegseth be in charge of the military if he looked like, say, Trump? No he would not.

    The renewed emphasis comes as Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News host, has privately complained in recent days about seeing service members with facial hair and has expressed frustration over lapses in physical training and violations of military height and weight standards, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. 

    And he is the expert. He’s a tv guy, and he knows tv stuff. Appearance is everything.

    One official told CBS News that Hegseth believes his message has not been fully embraced by the military’s senior leadership despite his repeated public and private calls for stricter enforcement. The military official, who is not authorized to speak publicly and talked with CBS News under condition of anonymity, said the defense secretary was frustrated that his speech to the top brass gathered from around the world at Quantico last year did not produce the rapid change he expected. 

    Is he sobbing himself to sleep every night? I hope?

    The military is overhauling how they measure body composition following Pentagon guidance to all the services issued in December in an effort to restore the “warrior ethos” demanded by Hegseth and has rolled out guidance that frames shaving as a matter of military readiness rather than appearance. 

    Erm, what? How is a requirement to shave a matter of military readiness as opposed to its opposite? “I’ll be with you in just a few minutes, sir, I have to shave first, I hope the invaders don’t overrun our position beforeoopsaarghboom…”

    Over roughly 18 months as defense secretary, Hegseth has repeatedly argued in speeches, policy directives and public remarks that relaxed appearance standards are symptomatic of a military culture that has drifted away from discipline and combat readiness. 

    Of course he has. He’s a tv guy, and he’s not bright.

  • Just rename it Dainty Care

    The Telegraph on the Waitrose “feminine products” absurdity:

    Waitrose has rebranded its “feminine care” section after receiving a complaint claiming it was not inclusive of transgender people.

    Sanitary products will no longer be referred to as female following a complaint which said “not all people who have periods are women”.

    Except, of course, they are. That’s kind of the whole point. It’s kind of the whole point with cows and ewes and hens and mares and it’s kind of the whole point with women. Without that whole point there are no women or men. We’re animals first of all, and we’re divided into the egg-havers and the fertilizers. Without that we don’t exist at all.

    The section rebrand came after an internal complaint said it was “disappointing” that sanitary products were referred to as “feminine care”.

    Well, frankly, it’s also disappointing that the Telegraph is silly enough to use the vague meaningless “sanitary products” instead of, say, menstrual products. “Sanitary products” could just mean bottles of floor-cleaning liquids and similar. The issue here is menstruation, not some vague nameless detergent.

  • Amnesty hates women

    Amnesty International and Amnesty UK are drunk.

    A movement to defend women’s rights is not an anti-rights movement.

    Amnesty is pretending that men have a right to be seen and treated as women if they claim to be women, and that women have no right to tell such men to stay out of women’s organizations and spaces. Amnesty has lost its tiny mind.

  • rainbow logos once a year

    The stupid, it burns.

    Waitrose whispers sweet nothings in our ear.

    The very headline is bad. Sanitary products? So you’re talking about stuff you put on floors to clean them, and stuff you pour down toilets and stuff you sprinkle in garbage cans and stuff you sprinkle on the sinks and bathtubs to scrub away the unsanitary slime and whatnot? But no; of course that’s not what they mean at all. “Sanitary products”=the wads of absorbent cotton women of childbearing age use to soak up the monthly shedding of the uterine lining. Isn’t it odd that those products are labeled “sanitary” as if to reassure us that the disgusting unholy taboo trayf nasty stuff that feeds new humans as they develop from fetus to baby will be soaked up and thrown away without disturbing the fastidious. We’re already on weirdly squicked-by-women territory, and it doesn’t get better from here.

    Anyway. Let’s get to the really important stuff: supermarket chains that pwodwy suppowt the alphabet soup communidee. Who cares what faction of demanding men Waitrose supports? Is it men who do most of the Waitrose shopping?

    They want their shops and workplaces to be places where people can be themselves without fear of judgement. They say. Do they? Does that mean they want their employees to be grumbling and swearing whenever they’re in a bad mood, telling customers to fuck off, helping themselves to an occasional luxury item? I doubt it. I strongly doubt they care at all about employees “being themselves without fear of judgement” – they care about employees doing their jobs and not demanding higher wages.

    Oh well don’t be so literal, they might tell me if they were here. They didn’t mean all the time and about everything – they meant about trans people. What about them? Um…that it’s required to declare solidarity with them in one way or another at least once a month? Something like that.

    So they do. “We celebrate Pride, we talk about inclusion, but ah ah ah watch out, inclusion isn’t just about rainbows once a year. No indeed. That’s why we have to stop calling sanitary products (the stuff meant to soak up filthy womany goo, you know) ‘Feminine Care’. It’s so disappointing that we do that, as if women were the only people who spill filthy goo once a month.”

    Wouldn’t it be simpler to skip the women or women and men part and just call it Filthy Goo Care? Wouldn’t that just be so inclusive and inclusive?

    There’s more.

    Yet the language we use still suggests that these products are exclusively for women and femininity.

    [sound of screeching brakes]

    What?? That these products are for femininity? What does that even mean?

    It doesn’t mean anything unless you interpret it through the lens of morbid envy and suspicion of women, and you thus have a resentful idea that women horde womanyism for themselves out of sheer spite and won’t share it with men because they’re that bitch back in 4th grade who had nicer sweaters than little Pauly did.

    To some people, that might seem like a small detail. To me, it isn’t. Words matter because people matter.

    Well, yes, without people there wouldn’t be any words to matter, and if there were any, they wouldn’t matter to anyone, because there wouldn’t be any anyone. We can swap tautologies all day long, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere.

  • Peak dignidee and respeck

    Yikes.

    That’s some serious constipation right there.

  • Guest post: We don’t care about the fantasies

    Originally a comment by maddog on If they do not affirm.

    The bill defines “conversion practice” as any conduct with the intention of causing the individual to have or not have (or to believe that they have or do not have) a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity.

    If you look at it a certain way, the sex realists should not have anything to fear from this statute. The key thing to remember is that sex is different and separate from “gender” or “gender identity.” The genderists scream at us all the time that we’re the ones mixing everything up, when in fact they are the ones constantly and conveniently equivocating sex and gender.

    Mostly, nobody is interested in gay conversion any more, except (1) the traditional religionists who think homosexuality is sinful, and (2) now, the transgenderists who are persuading gay kids that they are not really gay, but transgender, born in the wrong body.

    The transgenderists had better watch out, lest conversion therapy charges be levelled against them, and prosecution brought by intervening busybodies.

    Anyhow, on the “gay conversion” prong, the sex realists shouldn’t have anything to worry about, because we don’t care if someone is gay, and we are not interested in talking anyone into or out of being gay.

    On the transgender prong, the sex realists also should generally not have anything to worry about, because, again, we don’t care about the fantasies in their heads. What we care about is the reality of sex. If we correctly-sex a transgender person, we don’t have any “intention of causing them to have or not have … a gender identity.” They can claim whatever gender identity they want. That’s not important to us. Sex is what is important in a lot of contexts, and we are only talking about sex. We are only guarding against people lying about their sex.

    Having “G” gender identity does not give that person license to lie about their sex. That’s our issue, not whether or not someone claims a gender identity.

  • Oh but we meant well

    Not nearly enough.

    The Metropolitan Police has paid £25,000 in compensation to Graham Linehan following his arrest for gender-critical posts.

    Following his grotesquely public arrest by a carload of cops for…writing words.

    Mr Linehan was detained at Heathrow airport last September by five armed officers after a transgender activist complained about remarks posted on X months earlier.

    Five. armed. cops. At. the. airport. For. remarks.

    Five armed cops at the airport would make sense for a possibly armed and dangerous murderer or terrorist or similar. For a writer with opinions, it makes no sense at all – it makes anti-sense, it makes a fragment of the universe where sense goes to die.

    In a letter seen by The Telegraph, a senior Met officer wrote: “Whilst there can be no doubt that all officers acted in good faith throughout and were seeking to do their best in the circumstances, the investigation identified shortcomings in both the investigation, arrest and imposition of bail conditions.”

    No actually let me contradict you there: there can very much be doubt that all officers acted in good faith. Whatever officers decided to send FIVE armed cops to Heathrow to collar him in public did not act in good faith. They wouldn’t send five armed cops to Waitrose to arrest a shoplifter would they? But writing words is somehow five armed cops-worthy? That’s not good faith, bro.