Author: Ophelia Benson

  • As naked and/or uncomfortable as possible

    It seems there’s a thing called the Met Gala. The two words together are very slightly familiar, but I can’t say I’ve ever paid much attention to it. Hadley Freeman was caught in Manhattan last week while the Gala was galaing.

    What was once a low-key fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in Manhattan has become an annual warning about the dangers of being too rich, too thin and too obsessed with Instagram. Every year there’s a jaunty dress code “theme” — shudder — but most of the female celebrities simply do what they always do at these things, which is look as naked and/or uncomfortable as possible.

    Ya. That’s a thing that’s been bugging me forever – as in, the whole of my adult life. Why do women still do that? Feminism is a thing, and has been for decades. Why, then, do women’s clothes just get more and more insultingly impractical and torturous and sex-focused? Why do women’s clothes look as if they’re designed by pimps while men’s clothes don’t? Why don’t women refuse?

    What I couldn’t cope with was the homogeneity of the bodies and faces. Even in a year that was ostensibly meant to celebrate “diversity”, the women at the Met Ball were all shrinking to a vanishing point, their faces so smooth it’s impossible to tell anyone’s age any more. Is Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian Klan, 20 years old? Fifty? I’d believe either. Anne Hathaway looked as if she’d been drawn by AI. Demi Moore’s clavicles were more prominent than her facial features. And yet, it’s considered “body-shaming” to notice what is being thrust in front of our faces, and so, in the name of diversity, we all have to pretend we are blind and that it’s totally normal that twentysomethings are full of fillers and fiftysomethings have no body fat. 

    And we all have to pretend it’s fine that women must represent Sex while men get to represent Work or Cultivated Leisure. We all have to pretend not to notice that that divides the sexes into the consumer and the consumed, the subject and the object. Women have to dress for the male gaze, men have to dress as the sturdy male gazer. Women’s clothes might fall off at any moment, men’s clothes are firmly secured. Who agreed to this arrangement? Why didn’t it get canceled at least half a century ago?

    It’s a branch of anthropology I find peculiarly irritating.

    Once artists rebelled against old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and femininity, like Boy George, KD Lang and Madonna. Now those who don’t fit into today’s Kardashianised mould of celebrity beauty, such as Ramsey, Sam Smith, Emma Corrin and so on, describe themselves as “non-binary”, as if not having pumped-up breasts or biceps de-sexes them. The irony of the “non-binary” term is it reinforces today’s binary ideas about how women and men should look and behave.

    So women have two choices: torture-clothes or trendy bullshit.

  • More steps

    The arrests have begun.

    It all went down on Friday afternoon when Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark and Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor, was arrested outside an ICE facility alongside three members of Congress.

    While the congresspeople—New Jersey Democratic Reps. Rob Menendez, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and LaMonica McIver—were inside the Delaney Hall detention facility waiting to be given a tour, Baraka waited outside in a fenced-in parking lot as protestors gathered on the other side of the fence. He was told to leave the fenced-in part of the parking lot and, despite complying with the request, was then detained by ICE agents.

    Interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and Trump advisor Alina Habba said on X of the arrest, “The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

    Oh really? Trump has broken multiple laws, as has Musk.

    In her own statement, Rep. Watson Coleman explained that she and her fellow members of Congress were exercising their legal oversight function as they have previously done at the Elizabeth Detention Center “without incident,” she noted.

    A city mayor doesn’t have that legal oversight function, I suppose, but arresting this one still looks like massive overkill.

    Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security, called the protest a “bizarre political stunt” and described the politicians as having stormed the gate of the center.

    Oh we’re the ones who are bizarre. Not Trump’s gang of sadists but the people trying to monitor their sadism and report it to the citizenry.

    Appearing on Fox News, McLaughlin said that the people detained at Delaney Hall were “the worst of the worst” and included members of the MS-13 gang. She described the claim that the group were exercising their legal oversight rights as “laughable.”

    How is it laughable? Trump is not an emperor; Congress does have the power to monitor what he’s doing. Checks & balances.

    In a statement shared to social media, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said that he was outraged by Baraka’s arrest and called for his immediate release. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) described the scenes outside Delaney Hall as an “absolute outrage” and also called for Baraka’s immediate release.

    New Jersey Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim both released statements on Baraka’s arrest, with Booker also calling for Baraka’s release and describing his arrest as, “disturbing, unnecessary, and indicative of tactics that are undermining the safety and security of our communities.”

    Trump’s people are acting as if he already is an absolute dictator.

  • The blushing cheat

    Sweet.

    There’s just one small problem.

  • People and their experiences

    Forced teaming and Vatican rags:

    In the eyes of many LGBTQ Catholics

    I have to stop you right there. Seven words in and you’re lying already. There are no LGBTQ Catholics. There can’t be. It’s not a thing. LGB is sexual orientation, Q means nothing, T is genner idenniny which is 1. bullshit and 2. incompatible with LG.

    NBC of course found someone to explain with all due ponderous verbiageification what the new pope means to him her them us you insert chosen pronoun somewhere.

    Jason Steidl Jack, a gay Catholic and an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York, described his reaction to the election of Pope Leo, the first-ever American to lead the Holy See, as “cautiously optimistic.”

    “I do see him continuing Pope Francis’ legacy, especially of dialogue and synodality,” Steidl Jack said, describing synodality as “this idea of journeying together” and “listening to one another.” However, he said the new pope’s election “doesn’t assuage all of the fears that I have as an LGBTQ Catholic.”

    “The church’s teaching, even under Pope Francis, remains incredibly homophobic, and the church goes on inventing new ways of being transphobic as it really avoids learning about trans people and their experiences,” he said, adding, however, that the new pontiff seems “open to dialogue and inclusion” given his remarks on Thursday.

    Learning what “about trans people and their experiences”? That people continue to know the differences between women and men? That not everyone is eager or willing to change the definitions of “woman” and “man” such that they mean their own opposites? That most people still understand why women don’t want men taking over everything that used to belong to women?

  • Corrections

    I see I’m not the only one who wonders.

    …while also respecting the rights of trans women.”

    Of course.

    Plenty of irritated women were on hand to say no, you damn fool, that’s not the ruling.

  • But only where necessary

    Ok what does this mean?

    Meanwhile Labour peer and former women and equalities minister Harriet Harman, also chair of the Fawcett Society, said the verdict “correctly interprets” current legislation and ministers’ intentions when it was drafted under the last Labour government. ”

    She added: “Single sex spaces for women are important and can exclude trans women but only where necessary. The Act, and ruling, protects rights of women while also respecting the rights of trans women.”

    It’s at the end of a piece about a “trans Labour councillor” who “has resigned from the party, accusing it of having ‘“thrown transgender people under the bus.’” It’s the usual nonsense, but what I want to know is what does “but only where necessary” mean?

    I suppose it means what it appears to mean. I suppose it means “women are whiny bitches so all right they can have their precious single sex spaces but only when it’s really truly necessary and the rest of the time they just have to put up with unwanted uninvited men invading their book groups and feminist meetups.”

  • Actively looking

    Of course it is.

    White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus — the constitutional right to challenge in court the legality of a person’s detention by the government — for migrants.

    Miller’s comment came in response to a White House reporter who asked about President Donald Trump entertaining the idea of suspending the writ to deal with the problem of illegal immigration into the United States.

    Asked when that might happen, Miller responded: “The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of invasion.”

    “So, I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said.

    A number of pending civil cases challenging the Trump administration’s deportation of undocumented immigrants in the United States are based on habeas claims.

    People challenge the Trump administration because the people have rights, so the Trump administration gets to work making sure the people stop having rights. Of course it does.

    The writ has been suspended only four times since the U.S. Constitution was ratified. And in all but one of those instances, Congress first authorized the suspension.

    The idea of habeas corpus originated in English common law. “No man shall be arrested or imprisoned…except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land,” a provision in the Magna Carta, signed by King John in the early 13th Century, says.

    The U.S. Constitution, in Article 1, section 9, says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

    Miller’s use of the word “invasion” reflects the Trump administration’s argument that the U.S. faces an “invasion” of undocumented migrants.

    And the Trump administration’s eagerness to lock up and punish migrants.

  • Rolling out the red carpet

    Sigh. Of course he is.

    The first group of white South Africans who[m] the Trump administration is classifying as refugees are expected to arrive in the United States on Monday.

    President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions from most other nations when he took office. But in a February executive order, Trump said the U.S. would establish a plan to resettle “Afrikaners” and their families as refugees in the United States.

    Afrikaners are mainly of Dutch descent. The Trump administration has accused the South African “government-sponsored race-based discrimination” and pledged to cut off all aid and assistance.

    Other refugees can fuck off, but the racist ones with the loathsome history are more than welcome.

    According to the New York Times, a group of 54 Afrikaners were due to depart from Johannesburg on Sunday. The Washington Post reported that a group of 60 Afrikaners would be arriving on a State Department plane on Monday to an airport just outside of Washington.

    The State Department declined in an email to confirm the reports or say how many South Africans would be coming and when they would arrive.

    Don’t even think about giving me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The hell with them. But your uncomfortable racists? The doors are wide open!

    A spokesperson said in response to a request for comment that the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa had been conducting interviews and processing applications of individuals who have expressed interest in moving to the United States. The State Department said in its statement that it is prioritizing Afrikaners in South Africa who[m] it views as victims of unjust racial discrimination.

    Does USA Today have a rule against ever using “whom”?

  • Only the best

    Trump has given yet another Fox News “personality” an important government job.

    Trump has appointed Fox News host and former New York prosecutor Jeanine Pirro as interim US attorney for Washington DC. The announcement comes after Trump withdrew his first pick for the job after he lost key Republican support in the Senate, which votes on such positions.

    After Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden, Pirro made false statements about the election that were part of a lawsuit against Fox News by a company that makes voting machines. The case was settled for more than $787m (ÂŁ594m). Trump called Pirro “a powerful crusader for victims of crime” in a social media post announcing his selection. Meanwhile, critics described her as unqualified.

    Well sure but Trump doesn’t want qualified, he wants in the bag. He wants people who like what he’s selling.

    In the Truth Social post on Thursday night, Trump noted that she previously served as a Republican district attorney in Westchester, New York, as well as a judge. He also touted her roles on various shows on Fox News, including on The Five, which he called “one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television”.

    Yup that’s the important thing. TV fame is what matters.

    Democrats were quick to criticise the appointment of Pirro, the second Fox News host with to receive a high-profile federal job after Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, raising questions about her credentials for the role and about her career outside of broadcasting.

    “Which Fox News host will get the next federal appointment,” Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat representative from California, wrote on X.

    The Democratic National Committee wrote in a statement: “Jeanine Pirro is yet another unqualified TV personality with a history of putting Trump and violent insurrectionists above the rule of law.”

    Democrats are so boring that way, expecting government hires to be qualified and experienced and good at what they do. Pffffffff.

  • Would now be interpreted

    The Beeb reports that men are banned from women’s toilets in Holyrood. In other news, water is wet and fire is hot.

    Trans women will no longer be able to use the women’s toilets in the Scottish Parliament building.

    Facilities designated as male or female-only would now be interpreted as meaning biological sex, the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) said.

    So strange, to go by actual physical sex as opposed to the pretend fantasy in the head kind.

    Decent governments don’t do things this way. If people identify as horses, we saddle them and ride them to work. If people identify as cars we jump in and drive them to work. If people identify as chocolate we eat them on our way to work. Identifying as defeats reality every time.

    The SPCB said it had agreed “practical changes of minimal cost” to toilets and changing facilities following an interim review of Holyrood services.

    The presiding officer set out the changes in a letter to MSPs and staff. It said:

    • All Scottish Parliament toilets designated as male or female would now be interpreted as meaning biological sex.
    • A bank of three existing toilets in the public area of the building would be designated as a gender-neutral facility.
    • These will be in addition to female-only toilets, male-only toilets, an accessible toilet and a changing places facility.

    Peace in our time.

  • The mob within

    I like the title.

    The Green Party is a sinister mob. Take it from me, its former deputy leader

    Shahrar Ali, that is.

    After the resignation of Carla Denyer, the Green Party is facing a leadership contest for which the membership has had their opportunity for genuine debate about its policy platform and electoral priorities artificially restricted. No activist or spokesperson who dares to stand up for the rights and protections of women, girls and children – especially, in the context of a decade of trans rights overreach – will escape the wrath of the totalitarian mob within.

    I should know. In 2024, I won a landmark gender critical protected belief discrimination case against the Party, the first of its kind in politics, after I was unlawfully removed as front bench spokesperson for justice.

    And what’s “green” about that? No one knows.

    Not content with marginalising 52 per cent of voters, Green politicians have sought to alienate another 51 per cent. That’s the logical consequence of a political movement which resorts to identitarian flag-waving and is in thrall to queer theory luxury beliefs. In the days following the Supreme Court judgment, the Green Party leadership demonstrated utter contempt for the rights and protections of women and girls.

    On BBC’s Any Questions, parliamentarian Siân Berry – who prides herself with having a science background – described sex in humans as “not entirely binary”. On BBC Radio 4’s Today, Co-Leader Adrian Ramsay refused to answer Nick Robinson’s direct question, “Are Transwomen Women?” four times. The view that trans women are women has been the policy of the Greens since 2016. It offers up a Stonewall campaign slogan as a literal truth, and conflates sex and gender identity. For his refusal to pronounce this holy dogma, officers of the Young Greens rewarded him with calls for his resignation.

    They’re competing for who can be the most ridiculous?

    Zack Polanski, who reportedly once set himself up as a hypnotherapist for breast enlargement, has recently launched his campaign to be Leader. I would challenge him on how a party can remain credible for telling the truth on climate science but continue to tell lies about what constitutes a biological woman.

    That. Exactly. How can anyone? How can anyone for instance denounce the nonstop lying of Trump but continue to tell lies about what constitutes a biological woman? How can anyone reject the absurdities of religion but continue to tell lies about what constitutes a biological woman? How can anyone try to educate the public on global warming but continue to tell lies about what constitutes a biological woman?

  • Please to take a different approach

    Well doesn’t that just sum up the whole problem.

    MPs seek assurances from UK equalities watchdog over gender ruling

    Exclusive: transgender activists concerned that a literal approach is being taken to supreme court decision

    Boom. Literal. A literal approach. A literal approach to the law is a bad thing. What we’re supposed to do is take a metaphorical approach, a fairy tale approach, a daydream approach, a play along with my fantasy approach.

    Wrong. Wrong wrong wronigitty wrong. Life is literal. Sex is literal. Bodies are literal. Fantasy and fiction are very good things in their place, but the law is not that place. Laws need to be literal. The supreme court decision was not a bit of poetry or a chapter of a novel; it was literal. There is no non-literal approach that can or should be taken.

    A cross-party committee of MPs has written to the UK’s equalities watchdog to seek assurances that its guidance on how organisations interpret the landmark supreme court ruling on gender issues does not ignore the needs of transgender people.

    What needs are those? You mean like the need to shove women aside and steal all our rights? That’s not a need, it’s a misogynistic outrage.

    The letter from the Commons women and equalities committee to Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), also urged her to extend the two-week timetable for people to submit views on how the EHRC’s code of practice for organisations should work, saying this should be at least six weeks.

    It follows concern from transgender activists and a number of MPs that Falkner and her organisation have thus far taken an overly literal approach to last month’s supreme court decision, which ruled that “woman” in the Equality Act refers only to a biological woman.

    We have been seeing for the last ten years or more that if you don’t take a “literal” approach to this question of who is which sex then you get a grotesquely fictional approach that literally destroys women’s rights. The “literal” approach is the whole point. Men are literally not women. Next stupid question?

    While ministers have welcomed what they called the “clarity” of the ruling and guidance, a number of MPs have raised worries about the implications for transgender people, for example whether people who had lived as women for decades would suddenly have to start using men’s toilets.

    People? There’s the Guardian carefully doing the same old obfuscation. The Guardian doesn’t mean people who have lived as women, it means men who have pretended to be women. Women don’t “live as women”; women are women. It’s only men who have to avail themselves of the silly childish “live as” trope. It would be nice to see the Graun just stop the sly dishonest wording and nudging and manipulation.

    And men who “lived as women for decades” remain men. It doesn’t matter if they “live as women” for centuries; they’re still men.

    Sarah Owen, the Labour MP who chairs the women and equalities committee, has said many transgender people were “anxious and unsure about where this ruling leaves them”.

    So much for chairing the women and equalities committee, eh? Women should just shut up and sit down and let the men do the womaning, right?

  • Guest post: It didn’t take long

    Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Trump plans to buy the pope.

    It didn’t take long for right-wing media figures and MAGA provocateurs to cry out in rage over the election of Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV after it was revealed that he’d publicly criticized Vice President JD Vance and expressed sympathy for immigrants and George Floyd.

    1

    I think we all knew that just about any Pope would be antipathetic to MAGA and all it stands for. After all, the Pope holds sway over a far bigger crowd, a more beautiful crowd, the greatest crowd anyone has ever seen.

    Now, data shows American Catholics are split unlike any other major religion.

    Because for decades, the architects of the so-called religious right in the United States have been building a coalition of church-going voters.

    These Americans can be relied upon to show up on election day and to vote for the candidate who promises to uphold the idea of traditional Christian family values.

    Their politics and their faith are fused.

    2

    Of course, when asked to define “traditional Christian family values”, they usually fall back on the same old misogyny, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and an aversion to social justice. Of all those, it is only the latter that Jesus spoke of, and he was very much in favour of social justice. Assuming, for the sake of argument, there was a bloke called Jesus and he said those things attributed to him.

    Laura Loomer, the “proud Islamphobe” and far-right extremist who appears to have the president’s ear lately, spent much of Thursday afternoon raging on social media about the newly elected pontiff’s views on immigration and social justice.

    “The new Pope once retweeted a post about how we need to keep praying for career criminal & drug addict George Floyd,” she raged. “The tweet said, ‘May all hatred, violence and prejudice be eradicated.’ What prejudice? Is that another way to spell FENTANYL OVERDOSE? MARXIST POPE!”

    In additional tweets, Loomer lamented about the “WOKE MARXIST POPE” and claimed he “is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis,” adding that it’s “GROSS” that he is now in charge of the Vatican.

    While other right-wing activists and media personalities cried on social media that “they chose a globalist and woke Pope from the West ON PURPOSE” to criticize the president, the anti-pope narrative began leaking onto MAGA broadcasts.

    1.

    Because, Dog forbid, there should be a Pope who refuses to kiss Trump’s ring.

    1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/maga-woke-american-pope-leo-xiv-b2747600.html

    2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/trump-maga-want-conservative-pope-to-replace-francis/105210268

  • Trump plans to buy the pope

    Hmmm. Well, I think the vast amount of attention the news media pay to popes and all their doings is absurd and bad, but having said that…if the new guy is going to annoy Trump, I can’t help a little bit of (entirely secular) schadenfreude.

    The first American-born pope is not a fan of the Trump administration.

    Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV, has multiple posts on his X account that criticize or outright rebuke the words and policies of President Trump.

    In February, he shared an article from the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” in response to Vance’s bastardization of the concept of ordo amaris, a narrow interpretation of love that Pope Francis himself admonished.

    In April, he reposted Catholic writer Rocco Palmo, who wrote, “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to [aid] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident, once an undoc-ed Salvadorean himself, now-[Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington, D.C.] asks, “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”

    Pope Leo was also critical of Trump’s family separation policy. In 2018, he retweeted a scathing post from Cardinal Cupich: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”

    Of course there’s a lot that’s Christian about it, taking Christianity as a whole and after all these centuries, but a rebuke of Trump is a rebuke of Trump and it is some consolation for all this pope-watching nonsense.

  • The potential beauty

    Ok that is funny.

    When Trump met Carney:

    Trump, who in the meeting with Carney said he considered himself a “very artistic person”, insists that he is inspired by the potential beauty of a unified continent.

    “When you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together … you know, I said, ‘That’s the way it was meant to be’,” the president said.

    Ahhh yes, that does indeed demonstrate that Trump is a very artistic person. It works the same way with packets of hundred dollar bills, and barrels of diamonds.

    Mind you, there is some truth to the idea that the straight-line borders that appear so often in US maps are kind of irritating. We all know damn well they don’t reflect anything about the land in question, unlike all those squiggly lines that are obviously rivers as well as boundaries. They look wrong. Maps should be of the earth earthy; they should be irregular and bumpy and not drawn with a ruler.

    A glance at the map of North America reveals the clean, crisp and unbroken line that spans the Lake of the Woods and then reaches to the Pacific Ocean, neatly tracing the 49th parallel.

    That line was agreed on over the course of a string of negotiations between 1783 and 1846, when much of the relevant region had still not even been seen by European settlers.

    “It’s not like the British and the Americans had a map and they drew a ruler on it. They didn’t have a map, and they just agreed upon this imaginary line: the 49th parallel. They just projected these imaginary lines further on to a geography that they didn’t know anything about,” said Bown.

    Surveys of the lands would have revealed a far more complicated reality, which in many places makes the border nonsensical on the ground. In some place, it cuts the wrong way through mountain valleys; elsewhere, rivers wind back and forth across the frontier.

    Squiggly. Bumpy. Organic.

  • Care navigators with lived experience

    NHS Sussex has a “gender service.” Of course it does.

    About the Sussex Gender Service

    The Sussex Gender Service is staffed by an experienced multi-disciplinary team and receives clinical support from the gender identity clinic at Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health. We have care navigators with lived experience that work with people who access our services to provide support and signposting to local organisations. 

    The service follows the same service specification from NHS England as other gender service pilots, which is similar to the existing gender identity clinics.

    So come on in and let us trash your bodies and lives.

    Our values at the Sussex Gender Service

    1. Our service strives to be anti-oppressive

    We recognise and acknowledge the historical and ongoing harm that the transgender community experiences. We think very carefully about privilege, power and intersectionality and provide training on this to our team. We do all that we can to take a stand against any form of transphobia.

    What they don’t do, I’m guessing, is warn their patients about drastic changes to their bodies prompted by belief in magic switchable gender.

  • Where they could thrive

    Now for the article itself.

    For Amelia Short, Jamie Hughes, Alice*, and Anaya Bangar, women’s cricket promised to be a place where they could thrive as their true selves.

    Or to put it another way, women’s cricket promised to be a place where they could give themselves an unfair advantage by pretending to be women.

    That was before the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) extended the ban on transgender women and girls from the top two tiers of women’s domestic cricket to the third tier and recreational level last Friday.

    Though the ECB acknowledged the “significant impact” of the decision and said it would work with recreational cricket boards to support those affected, it has contacted none of these players.

    Oh yes? Did any of these players contact the women they displaced? Or the women they cheated?

    Open and mixed cricket remains available, but that provides little comfort.

    Short is a 20-year-old trans woman who has loved cricket since she was nine, as well as scoring and coaching more recently.

    This season, one year into hormone replacement therapy (HRT), she joined Lindow Cricket Club and has relished training and matches with the women’s first XI.

    Of course he has. Cheating is fun when it’s encouraged by newspapers and the government and all the rest of the trans fan club.

    “Cricket was escapism. It allowed me to relax and not worry about the real world and have fun, enjoy myself, and socialise with others. That has been taken away,” she tells The i Paper.

    “It has affected me quite heavily mentally to the point that I don’t want to be involved with cricket at all. I’m very close to turning my back. I contemplated selling my equipment, ­moving on, and not picking up any other sport.

    “Most sports are not an environment trans people want to be in. Open cricket is predominantly men and is not the nicest place for women to play cricket. It involves prejudice.”

    Hey you know what else is not the nicest place for women to play cricket? Teams that are inclooosive of men who claim to be trans women.

  • [Male]

    I’m not the only one who notices.

    Male. Male male MALE. It’s the male bit that matters, and journalism needs to stop leaving it out. It doesn’t know it needs to, but we do.

  • Back to square one

    Uh oh. Parliament has a new bill coming up that will torpedo women’s rights all over again.

    Women’s rights campaigners have been warning ministers that the bill, which is intended to introduce a new digital ID system, will play havoc with the ability of companies such as gym chains and public bodies like the NHS and police to ascertain someone’s sex – just after the Supreme Court ruling intended to bring much-needed clarity.

    The bill will allow people to prove their identity and facts about themselves by using a new voluntary Government app that is linked to what the bill calls “digital verification services” (DVS), backed by a government “trustmark”. It will draw data from a number of sources but the bodies being presented with the app won’t be able to tell which documents it is relying on.

    That means that if the app states that the user is “female”, that information could, in theory, either be based on the sex stated on their passport or driving licence – which can be changed relatively easily from someone’s biological sex – or a birth certificate, which can be changed but only if the individual first obtains a formal gender recognition certificate (which has to be approved by a panel made up of lawyers or medics.) 

    To worsen matters, says Helen Joyce, of the women’s rights charity Sex Matters, under the new system the app will have to be “treated as more authoritative than any pre-existing record – or the evidence of your own eyes.”

    It’s like a religion. Believe the magic words, not the reality you can see with your own eyes.

    On Wednesday, the Conservatives attempted to amend the bill so that sex data would be taken solely from birth certificates. The amendment was defeated by 363 votes to 97, meaning the bill will now move onto its final stage – the third reading – before becoming law.

    Tory MPs had previously warned that “inaccurate data entrenched by the Bill” could “pose a risk” to vulnerable people, but the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, was among many Labour MPs who criticised the Opposition amendment, calling it “a targeting of the trans community which is deeply regressive.”

    Aaaaaaaaaargh! Female Labour MP throws women overboard yet again! While calling the women regressive!

    Heather Binning, chief executive of the Women’s Rights Network, agrees with the Conservatives’ concerns. She says that the new law will essentially introduce gender self-identification – a system which involves the state adopting whichever gender an individual chooses to be known by – “through the back door”. “It flies in the face of the Supreme Court ruling,” she says. “It will be mayhem if it goes thorough as it is. If official documentation says a man is a female with the new system, employers and others will be inclined to accept it. This part of the Bill needs to be scrapped.”

    Scrapped and buried and forgotten.

  • Obstacle found

    Well great: they’re just going to go on enforcing trans dogma anyway.

    Women’s rights campaigners have been warning ministers that [a Government bill days away from becoming law], which is intended to introduce a new digital ID system, will play havoc with the ability of companies such as gym chains and public bodies like the NHS and police to ascertain someone’s sex – just after the Supreme Court ruling intended to bring much-needed clarity.

    The bill will allow people to prove their identity and facts about themselves by using a new voluntary Government app that is linked to what the bill calls “digital verification services” (DVS), backed by a government “trustmark”. It will draw data from a number of sources but the bodies being presented with the app won’t be able to tell which documents it is relying on.

    That means that if the app states that the user is “female”, that information could, in theory, either be based on the sex stated on their passport or driving licence – which can be changed relatively easily from someone’s biological sex – or a birth certificate, which can be changed but only if the individual first obtains a formal gender recognition certificate (which has to be approved by a panel made up of lawyers or medics.) 

    To worsen matters, says Helen Joyce, of the women’s rights charity Sex Matters, under the new system the app will have to be “treated as more authoritative than any pre-existing record – or the evidence of your own eyes.”

    Sigh. It just never ends. The most important cause in the world is making sure men can pretend to be women and force everyone else to agree and act accordingly, no matter what. The dangers and injustices this cause imposes on women just don’t matter. All that matters is the bliss of the man who gets to play Let’s Pretend all day every day.

    On Wednesday, the Conservatives attempted to amend the bill so that sex data would be taken solely from birth certificates. The amendment was defeated by 363 votes to 97, meaning the bill will now move onto its final stage – the third reading – before becoming law.

    Tory MPs had previously warned that “inaccurate data entrenched by the Bill” could “pose a risk” to vulnerable people, but the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, was among many Labour MPs who criticised the Opposition amendment, calling it “a targeting of the trans community which is deeply regressive.”

    Oh hell. The twanz communniny is more important than anyone else on the planet, the end, shut up, we can’t hear you.