Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Trumpalism is not journalism

    The Guardian a month ago on the Bari Weiss regime at CBS:

    The veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi expressed concern about “the spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear” at CBS News and her uncertainty about whether she will keep her job after she pushed back on a directive to change her December segment on Venezuelans who were sent to the Cecot prison in El Salvador.

    Alfonsi spoke about the incident for the first time on Thursday evening after receiving the Ridenhour prize for courage at the National Press Club in Washington. Her comments come as the Trump administration has piled pressure on US media and follow the decision by the CBS News editor, Bari Weiss, to shelve the segment on the flagship news program.

    Alfonsi had alleged at the time that Weiss had “spiked” the story for political purposes, a significant accusation of journalistic impropriety. Weiss argued that the segment was delayed because it did not sufficiently include the perspective of the Trump administration.

    But the Trump administration doesn’t have a “perspective”. It has Trump, who has hatreds and rages and contempt and ignorance. Put them all together and they still don’t make a perspective, they just make chaos and disaster.

    Alfonsi was preceded in her remarks by Bill Owens, who resigned from his job as executive producer of 60 Minutes in April 2025, citing corporate interference. Owens also received a Ridenhour prize for courage.

    “I always said I’d follow Bill over a cliff, and apparently I did,” she said.

    We’re all following Bill over a cliff.

  • Tentacles

    60 Minutes has been trumpified.

    CBS News has not renewed the contract of Sharyn Alfonsi, the “60 Minutes” correspondent who clashed with Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss over a December report on a Salvadoran prison, according ​to an interview published on Wednesday in the New York Times.

    CBS pulled the ‌segment – about a mega-prison where the U.S. has sent hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants without trial – hours before it was due to air in the U.S., sparking accusations from inside “60 Minutes” and on Capitol Hill that the network ​was engaging in self-censorship under political pressure.

    …

    CBS is owned by Paramount Skydance. 

    …

    Skydance Media, run by David Ellison – the son of longtime supporter of President ​Donald Trump, Larry Ellison – ​acquired Paramount in August ⁠and installed Weiss in October as editor-in-chief. David Ellison helped secure regulatory approval for the deal which created Paramount Skydance, with the promise that the ​CBS network would reflect the “varied ideological perspectives” of American viewers.

    By which they mean the trumpy views.

  • They had done very well

    More on that judge:

    When three teenage boys were convicted over the rapes of two girls only two months apart, their young victims anticipated custodial sentences. Instead, they listened as Judge Nicholas Rowland praised the defendants’ behaviour during the trial.

    The judge told two 15-year-olds, who filmed the rapes in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, that they had “done very well” with the restrictions put in place throughout the trial, as he sentenced them to youth rehabilitation orders (YROs).

    Well after all, it was only a couple of girls. Do girls even have thoughts and feelings? Do girls even matter?

    Rowland said he wanted to “avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily”, telling the defendants: “I have to remember that you are not small adults.” 

    And obviously it’s not the slightest bit important to discourage male people from raping female people, because female people don’t matter in the first place. This is one reason it’s not at all necessary to punish male people for shoving their penises into women who are struggling to escape.

    It has emerged that Rowland, one of Britain’s most experienced criminal trial judges, was challenged by the government last year for an “unduly lenient” sentence in another violent sex case.

    Ellie Reeves, the solicitor-general, appealed against the sentence handed to Joshua Blachford, a restaurant manager, who admitted raping a colleague. Rowland told Blachford that the “numerous testimonials” from his friends and family “show a wholly different side to you” before jailing him for three years and nine months.

    It’s so sweet when men see the good side of other men. It would be terrible to let those men who have good sides, however small, suffer any serious consequences for merely raping some stupid bitch.

  • The details of the case

    The Spectator on the slap on the wrist for rapists:

    A gang of teenage traveller boys who filmed themselves raping lone schoolgirls on two occasions have been spared jail. It seems from Judge Nicholas Rowland’s remarks that ‘none of you need to go to prison today’ that he didn’t find this a difficult decision to make.

    The details of the case as reported make the judge’s choice incomprehensible. Two of the rapists, both 14 at the time, targeted a 15-year-old girl on Snapchat and lured her to an underpass where they filmed themselves laughing as they raped her. On one video one of the boys is heard saying ‘don’t film it mush’. Two months later the same two boys, joined by a 13-year old, gang-raped a 14-year-old schoolgirl, this time at knifepoint. They filmed that attack on their phones, goading one another to degrade their victim. The first victim attended the sentencing hearing. She read a poem which included the line ‘All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that comes’.

    Yes yes yes but how are the boys doing? Are they ok? Are they feeling stressed at all?

    In the second victim’s statement, read in court, she said ‘I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body…the person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be’. The harm to the second girl was exacerbated by the rapists’ decision to share videos of her assault on social media, under the pretence it was consensual. 

    Yes, that would exacerbate it.

    One triumph the internet can claim is making hatred of female people more virulent and destructive than it’s ever been.

    Judge Rowland praised these rapists, remarking that ‘you have all done very well with the restrictions put in place throughout the trial’. He also remarked that, ‘I think of you as very young and none of you have been in any big trouble before’, as though this somehow makes their horrific crimes less serious. According to Rowland, one boy’s ADHD diagnosis and anxiety made him more susceptible to ‘peer pressure’, while the second boy was in the bottom 1 per cent in IQ for his age, and had also been diagnosed with ADHD and the third apparently had ‘low intellectual capacity’ and ‘a limited understanding of consent’. Having considered all this, and remarking that ‘I have to remember that you are not small adults. I have to think how likely you are to do serious things again and I need to make sure you do not do serious things again in the future’, Rowland decided that youth rehabilitation orders would be sufficient.

    They haven’t done it before so it’s ok that they’ve now done it twice?

    Does not compute.

  • No big deal

    Speaking of the fashion for treating female people like dirt…

    A girl who was raped by two teenage boys has told the BBC that a judge’s decision to spare them jail sentences was like a “rock straight in my face”.

    Speaking exclusively to Laura Kuenssberg, the girl, now 16, said: “What was the point in putting me through that?”

    The girl, who spoke anonymously alongside her family, said the judge’s decision “almost made it seem as if what the boys did was not OK, but it was OK in the eyes of the law because they were still children”.

    The attorney general is to review the youth rehabilitation order sentences given by Judge Nicholas Rowland, who had said on Thursday he wanted to avoid “criminalising” the “very young” boys.

    Hey. They are old enough to rape a girl. That is, in fact, a crime, and not a remote or abstract crime but a very physical, up close and personal, damaging to the victim crime. Can you imagine wanting to torture a baby to death? Rape should be like that – unimaginable.

    The attorney general is to review the youth rehabilitation order sentences given by Judge Nicholas Rowland, who had said on Thursday he wanted to avoid “criminalising” the “very young” boys.

    Bro, they criminalized themselves. And they’re not so very young that they didn’t know what rape is, or how to go about it, or were incapable of it. Also what about the girl?

    The two defendants, who are now 15, were also convicted of attacking a second victim, who was raped in a field in January 2025. Another boy, now 14, was also convicted for his involvement in the second attack.

    The boys filmed the rapes on their phones and later shared some of the footage online.

    But hey. We don’t want to make them unhappy, so let’s not send them to jail at all.

  • Deemed controversial

    If women say no they must be punished, and if they talk about being punished they must be silenced. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

    Today, I was given a permanent ban of posting on my Facebook page,

    @Meta. The page can exist – apparently – but I am not allowed to post on it anymore. The page has been deemed controversial due to the Giggle v Tickle case and increased popularity of 25,000 new followers in a week. I don’t want to labor the irony of being banned on a social networking platform while fighting in court for the right to ban men from a woman only social networking platform, it is what it is. Frankly, I’d love to have the same right that you do, @Meta.

    Women are routinely punished for not accepting men as women. It doesn’t turn those men into women. Nothing will.

    Nothing will, but the fun of punishing women is forever.

  • The Office for Women and Skirty Men

    “Does the office for women stand with biological women? Or does this office also include men identifying as women?”

    “We stand with all women, Senator.”

    And by “all women” of course she means women and men who call themselves women.

    If you let men who call themselves women in then it’s no longer an office for women. It’s so simple, and so obvious, and so crucial, yet these buffoons dig in and cling to the Big Lie.

  • Plz give back racist map

    Of course it did.

    Alabama on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to use a congressional map favoring Republicans in this year’s elections, despite a lower court’s ruling that the redistricting plan intentionally discriminates against Black people.

    Duh. The two go hand in hand. In the case of Trumpians the two are indistinguishable.

    Attorney General Steve Marshall told the court that the state did not intentionally discriminate against Black residents and should be allowed to hold elections this year under a map chosen by lawmakers, not judges.

    It was an accident! So let us keep doing it!

  • Moving fast and breaking things

    He wants us all dead.

    Key officials responsible for leading US research on infectious disease threats have been barred from speaking directly with the World Health Organization — effectively shutting some of them out of the global discussions on virus outbreaks, according to documents and multiple sources who spoke to CNN.

    The Trump administration issued the directive stopping individuals at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from communicating with the WHO.

    The federal health subagency was led for decades by Dr. Anthony Fauci and oversaw developing treatments for public health emergencies including HIV/AIDs and Covid-19.

    What next? Disband all the fire departments? Convert all the hospitals to branches of McDonald’s? Set all the forests on fire?

    The restrictions hobble quick cooperation with global counterparts, multiple current and former health officials said. One staffer characterized it as unheard of during a US response to emerging public health emergencies.

    The more unheard of the better, as far as Trump is concerned. He likes to be Special.

    The directive is part of a broader Trump administration retreat from participation in global health forums — the US withdrew from WHO in January at President Donald Trump’s direction, a move that was widely criticized by public health officials — and as many US health agencies are operating with interim heads.

    Among the vacant positions are the director of the infectious disease agency; surgeon general; head of the Food and Drug Administration; deputy health secretary; and head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a leadership vacuum that observers say is unprecedented.

    They like doing unprecedented things. They think it makes them look Special.

    Taken together, it’s an unprecedented moment for national health leadership, said Dr. Dan Jernigan, a former CDC official who resigned after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted Dr. Susan Monarez, the sole confirmed director of this administration, last August.

    “Not in my 31 years at CDC” has there been a moment like this, said Jernigan, noting that a slew of other top positions are also unfilled.

    Knowledge-envy. Trump and Robert Kennedy are ignorant fools with no medical expertise, so they want to get rid of all people who know more than they do. Public health is one place to start.

    The limited cooperation with the WHO is a vestige of residual Trump and Republican frustration for the way the organization handled the Covid-19 pandemic, said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former Obama and Biden administration State Department official.

    Chains of communication that previously existed but have now been wiped out would have alerted US health officials sooner to the unfolding Ebola crisis, Konyndyk said.

    “We have public health leadership in this country now that have written off most of the institutions with global health,” he said.

    At the same time, several of the on-the-ground medical organizations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries have been severely hampered. They were previously funded by the US Agency for International Development, a division of the State Department that was dismantled amid the sweeping cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency last year.

    Musk’s revenge.

  • Speaking of offensive language

    From last August:

    An anti-transgender activist has lost her right to appeal an apprehended violence order taken out by a transgender woman, after “highly intimidatory”, “objectively harassing,” and “unnecessarily cruel” X posts.

    Content warning: This story may contain offensive language

    In December last year, regional NSW soccer player Stephanie Blanch was successfully granted the order against Kirralie Smith, who targeted Ms Blanch in multiple X posts that a district court judge described as a “sustained campaign of belittling, harassment and intimidation”.

    Intimidation? Really? Is it really truly possible for women to intimidate men that easily? Isn’t it usually the other way around?

    The posts included photos of Ms Blanch, and described her as the “bloke in the frock” who played for a women’s football team in Wingham on the NSW Mid North Coast coast. At the time of the posts, she was the only transgender athlete on that team.

    That is, he was the only man on that women’s team.

    This is why the compelled language is compelled, of course: it makes it so much easier to confuse everyone. Say “she” and “her” enough times and most of us lose track of which sex he actually is.

    Prior to the posts, seen by thousands, Ms Blanch did not know Ms Smith. The anti-trans rights activist believes transgender women should not participate in women’s sports.

    Manipulative language again. The whole con is pulled off because the manipulative language is allowed and in fact mandated, as witness this particular example itself. Ms Blanch is a man. Ms Smith is not anti-rights, she’s opposed to pseudo-rights that no one has in the first place. No, it is not a human right for adult men to force the rest of the world to call them women. Obviously men should not participate in women’s sports.

    The original judgment said that what Ms Smith had said about Ms Blanch, a person who is already marginalised by being the only transgender woman in the club, was “unnecessarily cruel, offensive, and harassing”.

    Rich, isn’t it? Man steals a position on a women’s football team and the judge claims he’s “marginalised” because he’s the only one. The warpings of the ideology are a sight to behold.

    The Binary Australia website posted multiple articles about Ms Blanch, one of which said the word woman was “[r]endered meaningless when a bloke in a frock is suddenly a woman, as we all know that a ‘woman’ is not a costume, false boobs or a drug to be taken”.

    Yes, and? What part of that is false? We’re supposed to think it’s mean, but what about the meanness of a man depriving a woman of a place on the football team?

    Doesn’t count. Doesn’t even register.

  • Little secret

    In the latest ballroom news:

    Trump has made little secret [of the fact] that his planned White House ballroom is a top priority, invoking the project more frequently than most other issues. And in recent weeks he has raged at anyone — including a federal judge, a Senate official and a local historian — whose actions threaten to slow construction.

    Cool that a fancy party palace is a top priority, because what could possibly be more important?

    On Monday, the president shared on social media a copy of a legal filing that closely resembled his own words and contended that the weekend’s shooting outside the White House campus proved the need for a ballroom.

    “Without the construction of this great Project, the President cannot safely conduct the business of the United States,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche and two other senior Justice Department officials lawyers wrote, urging a federal judge to dissolve his order that could soon halt construction. “This is a terrible, tremendously harmful case to the United States of America, and all it stands for!”

    Hahahaha “closely resembled his own words” – the words don’t resemble his words, they are his words. Nobody else would say “terrible, tremendously harmful” or “this great Project” – that’s pure dodo clumsy excitable Trump. Not to mention the exclamation point.

    The filing also mocked the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued to halt the project, claiming that the group had been “defunded by Congress due to a total lack of respect for them.” 

    Pure Trump. Recognizable from a block away.

    Experts in constitutional law and government oversight see a pattern in Trump’s behavior.

    “Simply put, as President Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said, he believes he can do literally anything,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, wrote in an email. “And he attacks anyone who tries to stop him.”

    Oooh I see that pattern too, and I’m not an expert in constitutional law and government oversight!

    Asked whether Trump has dictated Blanche’s filings in the legal case, which so closely resemble his own rhetoric, the White House and the Justice Department have not denied it.

    How cringe.

    Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly deprecated Alison Hoagland, the historic preservationist who helped the National Trust bring its lawsuit against the ballroom, as “a woman walking her dog,” saying that she had no standing in the case.

    Well yeah obviously women don’t have standing.

    Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization focused on strengthening government, said in an interview Monday that Trump acts as if he sees no distinction between his role as a private citizen and as the nation’s chief executive.

    “It’s such a misunderstanding of his responsibility to the public and the nature of our constitutional system,” Stier said, adding that Trump feels empowered to pursue his personal priorities. “He’s surrounded himself with people who are willing to enable that, and those that aren’t, he fires.”

    That’s putting it rather politely. There is misunderstanding there no doubt, because Trump understands very little, but what he’s doing is much more a matter of will than of cognition. He does what he wants to do, because he wants to do it. Understanding doesn’t really play much of a role either way.

  • On the basis of potential pregnancy

    If you want some tortuous legal reasoning, have I got a treat for you.

  • Guest post: It’s not as if there is a clear line of demarcation

    Originally a comment by maddog on Anyone with any sense.

    If non-macho men use men’s toilets, they will be subjected to humiliation, abuse, and violence.

    It’s always been that way. Smaller boys/men, geeks, effeminate guys, brainiacs, gay men, goths, hippies — all of these and others, who don’t perform macho masculinity, have been humiliated, abused, and violently assaulted. Yet, in no other case did society decide that protecting vulnerable men should be achieved by shoving the men into the women’s room.

    It’s exactly the same problem:

    men beat up other men. In every other instance, the men have had to sort things out themselves. There’s no earthly reason why this case should be any different. It’s not women’s problem.

    It’s not as if there is a clear line of demarcation between the victims of men’s abuse, and the men who abuse others. There are plenty of men who have experienced both sides. Just because a man has been a victim of male abuse doesn’t mean he is not an abuser himself. Male victims of male abuse are not cleansed of all capacity to be abusers themselves. They’re not automatically “safe” non-abusive men.

    Societies are often organized by hierarchies: A is bigger, and beats up B; B in turn bullies C and D, and so on. The same could apply here. If trans women are targets of alpha-male abuse, trans women could plausibly be expected to bully weaker people in the hierarchy. Who are men always superior to? Why, women, of course. What makes anyone think that the same dynamic won’t play out between the men (trans women) and the women?

    But, is OJ’s premise even true? Is the danger for trans women in men’s spaces really that inevitable? One result of MSM’s slavish devotion to T, that a lot more people know about trans women than they did 10 years ago. T’s insistence on being the center of attention — all T, all the time — means that people are aware of what trans women look like, in all their twisted-face, angry, shouty glory. And they’ve seen Harry Styles in a glossy mag photo shoot in a dress. So men should be perfectly prepared for trans women in the men’s room.

    I don’t know if anybody has the statistics on how often trans women get attacked in men’s bathrooms. I’d like to see some data before I take it as an article of faith that trans identified men are at substantially greater risk of male violence than other men.

    The TRAs scream at women to just “live and let live!” Try screaming at the men instead. That’s who need to learn that skill: the men. Let them “live and let live” with each other.

    And, in the last few decades, I think a lot of men have learned a thing or two about coexisting with people who are different from themselves. Maybe it’s not as automatically scary as the TIMs assume.

    In any case, men have a much better chance of defending themselves against other men than women do of protecting themselves against men. If the trans women are really afraid, maybe they should take the steps commonly recommended to women:

    -take self-defense classes

    -practice situational awareness: don’t walk around with your earbuds in, maybe check the men’s room to make sure it’s empty before you go in

    -don’t dress provocatively; maybe pornified drag is not your best look for going out in public

    -carry pepper spray, or carry your keys between your fingers

    -if you’re really scared, there is strength in numbers; get another man to go in with you

    – if they are really scared, just reassure them that you are indeed a trans woman, and that you are where you belong.

  • Trap indeed

    From an article recommended by Mostly Cloudy: The Solidarity Trap.

    Young women in their teens and twenties have come of age in an institutional culture that presents support for transgender identity as the natural extension of progressive values they already hold. Feminism, as it has been transmitted to this generation through education, social media, and popular culture, has been substantially reframed around the language of inclusion, allyship, and the rejection of exclusionary boundaries. To question whether a male bodied person should have unrestricted access to women’s changing rooms is, within this framework, not a safeguarding question. It is a question about whether you are a good person.

    That paragraph is an article all by itself.

    News flash: you can’t have functioning political movements that value “inclusion” above all else. If feminist movements have to be incloosive of rapists and men who bully women and men who sneer at women and men who assault women, then those feminist movements can’t be feminist, can they. Politics is inherently about excluding some values or claims or policies or organizations. Politics is political. That means it can’t be all-embracing without ceasing to be politics.

    I suppose that’s why I mock inclusivity by spelling it wrong: because the idea of blanket unquestioning inclusion is death to any kind of Revolt of the Underlings.

  • Anyone with any sense

    Hmmm.

    Wait. So “trans women” are in danger in men’s toilets, so, therefore, for that reason, “trans women” must be allowed to use women’s toilets, because putting women in danger is fine, while putting men in danger is an outrage.

    It’s so interesting to follow the logic of how the OJs of the world view women.

  • Just two little tweaks

    Um…sir…there’s a lot more going on between those two photos than just hair and makeup.

    The tweaks are very many. The hairline is different. The eyes are very different. The mouth is different. The ears are all but invisible. The lower face and jaw are different. The length of the face is different. The Adam’s apple is deleted. The clothes are different. The black and white is made color. It’s a very very very fake photo there on the right.

    Here’s ChatGPT showing what he would have looked like if he had been a completely different person.

  • The relocation process

    Time to go.

    New Orleans is locked into a watery future which could see it surrounded by ocean as early as this century, according to a new expert analysis, which says the city must start the relocation process now to avoid chaos.

    The paper’s conclusions are stark, but it’s no secret that New Orleans is highly vulnerable to rising seas as the planet warms. Coastal Louisiana is one of the lowest lying regions in the world, and New Orleans, a city of 360,000 people, is particularly exposed. It sits in a bowl-shaped basin, mostly below sea level, in the middle of a rapidly shrinking delta.

    …

    The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.” They argue the city must seize the opportunity to develop strategies for relocation that could make it a model for places facing a similar fate.

    The thing is, though, “relocation” would be relocation of the people but not of the Nawlins. A city can’t be relocated, and that’s especially true when the site of the city is why it became a city in the first place and the reason it can’t stay where it is. N.O. is on the Mississippi and near the Gulf; there’s not going to be another city on the Mississippi and near the Gulf. See also New York City, and San Francisco, and Seattle.

    It’s possible to build new cities, far from major bodies of water, but they certainly won’t be clones of the old ones.

  • Pick your side of history

    The Times enters the ring with trans ideology. Rob Burley writes:

    When the new director-general of the BBC, Matt Brittin, introduced himself to staff last week it wasn’t long before he found himself addressing the handling of transgender issues by the corporation. “I’m not an expert,” he confessed, aware these were treacherous waters. “I’ve seen comments in the press over the weekend from Fran Unsworth [the BBC’s former director of news]. I’m not going to go into that. I don’t know the history.” Well, if you’re reading this, Matt, you’re in luck, because I do.

    Unsworth’s incendiary interview — part of my 10,000-word investigation into the capture of the BBC by trans activism, published by Unherd — was the first account of life at the top of the BBC during, for want of a better phrase, peak woke. Fran opened up about the way “progressive madness”, especially transgender rights, consumed the BBC and ultimately led her to end her 40-year BBC career.

    Only it’s not actually progressive. It puts on the skirts and lipstick of progressive but its beliefs and actions are very regressive indeed. The believers think trans ideology is progressive, of course, but they’re profoundly wrong. That’s the fight in a nutshell.

    For many of the BBC staff, if Stonewall thought something, it was probably right and supporting a vulnerable group such as trans people who were fighting for their rights was a no-brainer. If Stonewall says list your pronouns then that was the right thing to do.

    Reinforcing this was a desire not to be “on the wrong side of history”, a mantra BBC executives told me they recalled hearing time and time again from the growing number of true believers. This approach discouraged critical thinking and made the position on trans rights an article of faith, as witnessed by the repetitious insistence that “trans women are women”.

    But which was the wrong side of history? How was it so self-evident to so many people that the side of bulldozing women’s rights was the right side of history?

    As the groupthink started to be reflected in the output, numerous people refused to fall into line. People like the scriptwriter Cathy Leng, who told me how she had questioned the use of inaccurate pronouns and was ostracised by her peers and disciplined by her managers. And others, particularly women, who (anonymously) reported hatred directed at them for suggesting stories that were less than affirmative about trans rights.

    In this environment, in late 2017, Theresa May announced plans to introduce self-ID, making it much easier for people to legally change gender. The initiative enjoyed cross-party support. The women campaigners who feared that it would grant access to women’s-only spaces to biological men were largely ignored by the BBC.

    Largely ignored for ten long years.

    All of this raised serious questions for BBC management and it was frustrating that only one (Gavin Allen, the former head of programmes) would speak to me on the record. Knowing it was a long shot, I put in a speculative bid for Fran Unsworth, the former director of news. I didn’t expect her to say yes or, when she did, to be so candid. I called her in Australia where she spends part of the year and it quickly became clear that she believed she had reached the pinnacle of BBC News just as, in her view, the world went mad. “It was bullying,” she said, “but it wasn’t just the trans issue. There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view; they’d ‘no platform’ them; all that safe spaces shit.”

    When I asked her about the BBC management’s failure to get a grip on the trans problem, her first instinct was to mitigate the charge. “I think you have to remember that this wasn’t something that just affected the BBC at this point,” she said, “The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. There was a sort of progressive madness going on.” I’d heard this argument before and I didn’t buy it.

    Yeah I don’t buy it either. The BBC didn’t just fall off the apple cart yesterday. The BBC has been around the block a few times, and should know how to look at a new and peculiar ideology with a skeptical squint.

    “It’s what you might expect of arts institutions or universities,” I said to Unsworth, “but we are journalists. Journalists are sceptical people. They don’t just lie down. They’re supposed to stand up there and think about it first. And there was an absolute absence of that, and just a complete caving.” I could tell this stung. “I don’t feel I completely caved. I really don’t. But I do think that it [the trans right issue] could have done with something more robust.”

    I put it to her that some BBC News journalists, including editors, thought that there was only one legitimate viewpoint on trans issues and that everyone else was wrong. “Yeah,” she says, “that was how it was.” And it affected everybody. “There was a sea in which we all swam,” she recalled “… an atmosphere. We need to be kind to transitioning people. It’s a social phenomenon. And I think this ‘be kind’ thing was at the heart of it.”

    But why? That claim explains nothing. Why was “be kind” suddenly the job? Why, especially, when the “be kind” actually meant “be kind to men who pretend to be women”? Why is the job to “be kind” to this one particular set of people at the expense of half of all humans?

    The most extraordinary part of our conversation came when we turned to discuss the question at the heart of all this: are trans women women? Unsworth told me that “impartiality only operates when you can look at evidence and facts and point to them as the basis of your reporting”. Until the Supreme Court ruling made clear last year that a woman — for the purposes of the Equality Act — meant a biological woman, she said, “the facts at this point were incredibly disputed”.

    No they weren’t. There was a noisy political campaign to try to make them disputed, but 99% of people still knew that men are not women. Noisy political campaigns aren’t necessarily the best source of truth.

  • Undermining the vis

    The struggle to erase women continues.

    Holyrood‘s new Presiding Officer has been urged to act after the Scottish Parliament removed information about the sex of MSPs from its website.

    Kenneth Gibson was told the decision “risks undermining the visibility of women’s representation in public life”.

    In the last session of the parliament, users of the website were able to filter MSPs by male or female.

    Yes but this is now, when we have realized that female people just don’t matter. Try to keep up.

    Two Conservative MSPs have written to Kenneth Gibson asking to explain the thinking behind the change.

    In the letter, Meghan Gallacher and Rachael Hamilton said: “As female MSPs, we believe it is important that women continue to be clearly and transparently represented within the Parliament’s official records and public-facing information.

    “The removal of female as a distinct category risks undermining the visibility of women’s representation in public life and makes it more difficult to accurately assess progress relating to female participation within Scottish politics.”

    Yes, it does, and that’s why they did it. Women must be erased and stifled and ignored.

    Dr Kath Murray, of policy collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, said the change had the effect of “obscuring” female representation.

    For Women Scotland said the only way to measure progress was “to count the number of women elected”.

    But the Scottish Parliament won’t be able to hear them. Women, you see – they’re inaudible. Much too loud of course, but nevertheless inaudible.

  • Anyone with any sense knows this

    So…

    So……? So women must be subjected to humiliation, abuse and violence instead. Obviously. Women must fall on the grenades to save the men who pretend to be women. Everyone knows this. It’s what women are for.