All entries by this author
Oct 9th, 2025 6:07 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Talk about bad journalism…
‘This will not happen again’: Vancouver Park Board apologizes for hosting Harry Potter event
A motion calling on the Vancouver Park Board to officially apologize for hosting an upcoming Harry Potter attraction passed Tuesday in a unanimous vote.
Members of the city’s transgender, gender diverse and Two Spirit communities had expressed concerns about the decision to partner with the event this holiday season due to its association with J.K. Rowling, author of the seven Harry Potter novels.
Some spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, include Rob Hadley, a member of Vancouver’s S2LGBTQ+ advisory committee—and someone who previously read the books to their own children.
A motion where? Passed in a unanimous vote where? Expressed concerns to … Read the rest
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4 comments
Oct 8th, 2025 3:30 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Scottish government is refusing to pay its bill.
A women’s campaign group has condemned the Scottish Government for failing to settle a legal bill six months on from a crushing Supreme Court defeat.
For Women Scotland won the landmark case in April when the UK’s highest court ruled that the definition of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act referred to biological sex.
A subsequent court order ruled that the Scottish Government must pay at least some of For Women Scotland’s legal cost during the lengthy court battle, which ran to a total of around £417,000.
But no payment has yet been made – leading to claims ministers are stalling so that the money isn’t used for further
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40 comments
Oct 8th, 2025 10:48 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Ok so it seems that Australia has the great good fortune of a Sex Discrimination Commissioner who doesn’t know who is which sex.
Let’s pause to think for a moment.
Done?
Ok so how do you be a Sex Discrimination Commissioner IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SEX PEOPLE ARE?
What’s the job then? Just shrugging? Is that it? Eight hours of shrugging, five days a week?
Meet Dr Anna Cody, the Australia Sex Discrimination Commissioner.
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2 comments
Oct 8th, 2025 9:22 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Jolyon loyally sticking to his project of forcing men on women no matter how strongly the women object.
https://twitter.com/GoodLawProject/status/1975601512501157987
What he means, of course, is that women are trying to ban men from Hampstead women’s pond. He says it’s time to fight women who are trying to keep men out of the women’s pond. He’d love to punch them right in the face, wouldn’t he.… Read the rest
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2 comments
Oct 8th, 2025 8:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Michael Goldfarb in a public post on Facebook:
Are you tired of the Germany 1933 comparisons? I’m tired of the Germany 1933 comparisons. Let’s shift to the China 1966 and the Cultural Revolution comparison with Chairman Don instead of Chairman Mao and MAGAts in place of Red Guards. The liberal elites across media and the academy being purged and forced publicly to admit ideological errors and bend the knee to the new dispensation.
It’s not a completely farfetched analogy. An aging and increasingly senile Chairman Don makes cultural, economic and increasingly physical war on American society and is aided and abetted by his own Gang of Four: Stevie Miller, Russ Vought, Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth. The rest of
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7 comments
Oct 8th, 2025 5:09 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The next great battle – HRT for men!
https://twitter.com/LindadeCourcy/status/1975573601089683541
It is genuinely hard to believe any adult could actually write this, let alone a sitting TD: “I want to prioritise the issue of access to the free HRT scheme. It is completely unacceptable that trans women are being excluded from the scheme. There can be no excuse or justification for this decision. I and others have been raising this with the Minister for a couple of weeks now and I am disappointed with the response. Instead of accepting that the exclusion of trans women is wrong and changing course, the Minister has dug in, further disadvantaging one of the most marginalised groups in society. It really is simple. Trans women
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2 comments
Oct 7th, 2025 4:05 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Where we are now.
Pam Bondi had a heated and contentious hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee where she refused to answer questions, made personal attacks against Democratic senators, and got extremely defensive and angry whenever the subject of Jeffrey Epstein came up.
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Ranking Member Dick Durbin’s opening remarks to Bondi: “You disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and the National cryptocurrency enforcement team, despite the growing threat of foreign election interference and the drastic rise in cryptocurrency crimes. You forced out almost 75% of the Civil Rights Div’s career attorneys while hate crimes are on the rise. You fired more than 100 immigration judges. While the immigration case backlog is more than 3 million. You
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Oct 7th, 2025 10:50 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Divoosity training hits another bump in the road.
Since its creation in 2020, the [Free Speech Union] has handled over 2,500 individual cases and queries relating to free speech. Of our free speech cases, 46% are in some way associated with the workplace and, among these, approximately one fifth concern EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) training (approximately 230). In practice, this means that our members are asking whether they’ll get into trouble if they refuse to do the training, or seeking our help because they’ve already got into trouble for challenging it.
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In some cases, EDI training extends to telling employees and professionals how they should behave outside the workplace, such as the insistence that employees should use
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6 comments
Oct 7th, 2025 9:24 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Times:
The House of Commons has been forced to apologise after allowing a transgender woman to use female-only lavatories on the parliamentary estate despite the recent Supreme Court ruling that protects single-sex spaces.
I do wish the news media would not bow to the trans rules and thus mislead readers/listeners. The reality is he’s a man, who claims to be trans, and thus a woman. The basic fact is that he’s a man, and he has no right to bounce into the female-only lavatories.
Robin Moira White, a trans barrister who is a biological male, was directed to use the ladies’ loos in Portcullis House last week after attending a meeting of the women and equalities committee in
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6 comments
Oct 7th, 2025 4:47 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Now look here, if you’re going to call yourself an LGBT station you had damn well better be an LGBT station. You can’t just idennify as one and then kick back and relax, you know, it simply won’t do.
The head of a Belfast LGBT radio station has called a ruling that it does not broadcast enough programmes for the LGBT community “truly baffling”.
The broadcasting regulator Ofcom found Juice Radio to be in breach of some of its “key commitments” of service.
Ofcom said Juice Radio aired “a very limited amount of specialist programming for the LGBT+ community, rather than a service specifically for that community”.
Being on the other side of the planet, I don’t quite see what’s … Read the rest
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4 comments
Oct 6th, 2025 4:57 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Snippets from a dialogue:
Judith Butler said it, therefore it is true.
Honestly it’s so pitiful. Because she seems (to the naive) to be saying something technicalish and difficult, therefore she is a genius and to be believed without question. It’s smoke and mirrors, people. It’s pseudo-difficult. It’s bullshit dressed up in fake profundity.
Updating to add another choice snippet of bufoonish hero-worship.
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11 comments
Oct 6th, 2025 11:01 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Now why would Trump hate Chicago in particular?
The state of Illinois and Chicago on Monday sued the Trump administration over its move to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago as the White House targets Democrat-led cities amid weeks of protests against the federal government’s immigration enforcement campaign.
The lawsuit opens a new front in the legal battles the White House is waging against state and local officials, coming just hours after a federal judge blocked a similar deployment of the guard to Portland, Oregon.
“Defendants’ deployment of federalized troops to Illinois is patently unlawful,” the lawsuit says. “Plaintiffs ask this court to halt the illegal, dangerous, and unconstitutional federalization of members of the National Guard of the United States,
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Oct 6th, 2025 9:16 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Today in Trumpofascism:
A federal judge on Sunday night blocked the Trump administration from deploying hundreds of out-of-state National Guard troops to Oregon, even as President Trump turned to the Texas guard in a widening hunt for military forces to send to Democratic cities.
The Trump administration had tried to send hundreds of California National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., while mustering hundreds more from Texas, despite a stern ruling from Judge Karin Immergut of U.S. District Court in Oregon just Saturday that sought to block military forces.
Judge Immergut, an appointee of President Trump, called an emergency hearing Sunday, then broadened her restraining order to cover “the relocation, federalization or deployment of members of the National Guard of
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Oct 6th, 2025 8:50 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Owen Jones is not what you’d call a sharp thinker.
“Muslim” is not a race.
It’s not legit to pretend it’s a race and just go on from there. It’s not legit and it’s a very bad idea. Why? Because Muslims are not a race but adherents of a religion, and religions have content, and religions tell believers what to do. That matters.
Why does it matter? The … Read the rest
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17 comments
Oct 5th, 2025 6:01 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Lynsay Watson in the news some more.
Last month, the comedy writer Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow airport by five armed police officers for comments he had made on social media.
At the time of his detention, Linehan was returning to London from his home in the US to defend himself in court against accusations by a young trans campaigner of harassment and criminal damage, both of which he denies.
In an entirely separate case, The Times reported that a retired police superintendent had discovered that Lincolnshire police had recorded a “non-hate crime incident” against her without her knowledge.
Cathy Larkman had been flagged for tweets rejecting the idea that trans women were the same as biological women and
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6 comments
Oct 5th, 2025 5:35 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Fascism spreading like a fire.
Sirens blared and orange flames audibly crackled as a thick plume of black smoke streamed out of Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein’s Edisto Beach home during a fire that blazed on Oct. 4, video shows.
The home, located off Planters Retreat in the Jeremy Cay Community, is partially surrounded by trees and a marshy area of Edisto Island. That made it particularly difficult to rescue Goodstein’s husband, a former state senator, after he jumped out the back of the house to escape the blaze, a neighbor said.
Resident Tom Peterson was near the couple’s home midday on Oct. 4 when he noticed a plume of smoke that was visible in a video of
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Oct 5th, 2025 9:16 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Wait what? I seem to be in the wrong species. We’re told that queuing for hours = pleasure.
It’s just before 06:00 on a Friday morning and on a busy central London street a queue is growing by the second. It’s dark and chilly, but I’m told the people at the front of this line have been here since 20:00 last night.
Christina Spence is waiting with hundreds of other people who want to be the first shoppers at Korean cosmetics retailer Skin Cupid’s first store. The 16-year-old, who is here with her sister and mum Cheryl, could just buy the products online – but she wants to be part of the queue.
You what? People started to line up … Read the rest
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15 comments
Oct 5th, 2025 8:47 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The lust for public humiliation continues.
An FBI agent has reportedly been suspended because they refused to participate in a “perp walk” of the bureau’s former director James Comey, US media reports. The agent was suspended for insubordination, according to the BBC’s news partner CBS, after the agent found the plan to be inappropriate.
Mr Comey was indicted in Virginia on two federal charges days after Donald Trump called on law enforcement to more aggressively investigate his political adversaries, including Mr Comey.
FBI leadership has discussed sending “large, beefy” agents in Kevlar vests to bring Mr Comey to his court arraignment in Alexandria next week, CBS reports.
Trump is so ungrateful. It’s possible that without Comey he wouldn’t have … Read the rest
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3 comments
Oct 4th, 2025 5:03 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The ACLU talks maudlin nonsense on its pet subject yet again and does it dishonestly yet again. The author is one Gillian Branstetter, communications strategist. I would say her strategy is crap.
Over the last five years, politicians across the country have targeted transgender people and our families.
Ah. “Our” families; so Gillian is trans; so he’s a he.
To the point: it’s not “targeting” men to tell them to get out of the women’s toilets and stop taking women’s jobs and prizes. If anybody is “targeting” it’s men who pretend to be women and take all the women’s stuff.
They’ve banned our health care, censored our speech, and made schools less safe for transgender students. One of the most
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11 comments
Oct 4th, 2025 11:25 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Zack Polanski really is a horrible man.
Newman: Well you said the Greens should be a broad church, but that all churches have walls, I mean your walls are potentially keeping women out of your conference aren’t they?
Polanski: Well I think they’s lots of women, including thousands of women who are inclusive feminists, who reconnize that trans rights are human rights –
Newman: So feminists are not welcome, only … Read the rest
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3 comments