Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Persuasion

    Helen Webberley asks, with characteristic venom, “What do you mean ‘dignity for trans people’?”

    “How ever,” she goes on, “do you think it might be dignified for a trans woman to be placed on a male ward?”

    Stop right there.

    How do you, struck-off former doctor Helen Webberley, think it might be dignified for women to have a man on their ward? How do you, Helen Webberley, think it might be dignified for women to be forced to share all their spaces and organizations and prizes and competitions with men? How do you, Helen Webberley, think it might be dignified for women to have nothing of their own any more, because they are required to share everything with men?

  • Only a few

    People are bailing on Trump.

    Trump has said musical performances celebrating the country’s 250th birthday should be called off after several artists dropped out, citing the event’s affiliation with the White House.

    “Cancel it,” he said in a post on Truth Social, calling the slated performers “overpriced” and “boring”.

    Well if they’re overpriced and boring, Mister Sir, why did you invite them?

    As of Sunday, only a few musical acts were still scheduled to perform out of nine featured artists originally announced on Wednesday. Martina McBride, The Commodores, Young MC and Bret Michaels dropped out.

    Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli are still on for 26 June, as is Flo Rida on 2 July. Trump said he is now considering replacing the event with a “Make America Great Again rally”.

    Ya that’s a good idea. One, it’s so novel and original. Two, it will absolutely make everyone forget about all those people who backed out. Great face-save!

    Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he had heard artists were getting “the yips” – a term used in golf for involuntary spasms or freezes that [affect] a swing. He said he was thinking of appearing himself at the same time and location.

    “I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, DC, same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited,” he wrote, calling himself the “Number One Attraction anywhere in the World” and saying he “gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime”.

    It’s a grand old tradition for US presidents to compare their audiences to those of Elvis. It’s not called the Elvismeter for nothing.

    He later doubled down, saying he wanted to replace the planned fair altogether with a rally.

    “We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” he said.

    No wait, wait – let’s quadruple down. Make it a rocket launch to Mars. No overpriced singers there! Nobody who does nothing but complain there!

  • Specify the values

    Lib Dems shout that women don’t matter.

    Civil war has broken out among the Liberal Democrats after Sir Ed Davey pledged to oppose official guidance protecting female-only spaces.

    Earlier this month, Bridget Phillipson finally published the long-awaited advice from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). It tells businesses and public bodies to bar trans women – biological men – from women’s toilets and changing facilities.

    The Liberal Democrat leader has written to Ms Phillipson to demand she withdraw the guidance, saying it was not “fit for purpose”. He said the guidance was not clear enough, did not protect trans people from discrimination and harassment, and was not “compatible with long-standing British values”.

    So, protecting women from discrimination and harassment is not necessary, but protecting men who pretend to be women is necessary. Why is that exactly?

    Also what are the “long-standing British values” that require pampering and soothing of men who say they are women while not requiring any such anxious concern for women?

    Sir Ed’s statement drew stinging criticism from Dr Zoe Hollowood, chairman of the women’s rights campaign group within the Lib Dems.

    She accused him of ignoring the views of women and prioritising the views of trans people.

    “Polling consistently shows that Lib Dem voters and members believe single-sex spaces should be protected based on biological sex,” she said. “Ignoring this reality is a betrayal to women everywhere, including in our own party.”

    But men like Ed Davies seem to be quite happy to betray women everywhere.

  • Understandable impatience

    Jenny Lindsay in The Scotsman on Nicola Sturgeon:

    Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister and SNP leader, presided over the worst period of profound misogyny in Scotland in my lifetime. Women’s right to any spaces and services of their own, won historically on the basis of sex, came within a whisker of being obliterated, with her full, ongoing, ‘I will never apologise’ approval.

    Any woman opposing this erasure – the end result of her ‘self-ID’ policy push, where even male double-rapists must be viewed as women if they want to be – were punished and hounded, including women inside her own party.

    It has therefore provoked understandable impatience that Sturgeon and her acolytes have spent much of the last week crying ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ as she faces questions over her estranged husband, Peter Murrell’s, admission of appropriating SNP party funds when Chief Executive.

    She really ticks all the boxes, doesn’t she.

    Sturgeon’s handling of Murrell’s guilty plea last week on the charge of embezzling £400,000 of party funds has been graceless. It’s also surprising, given she must have known such a plea was forthcoming.

    Instead of clearing the diary, preparing a statement to the effect she was taking time to deal with the – perfectly understandable – feelings of betrayal as a spouse, she has gone on defensive mode very publicly.

    Speaking at the Hay-On-Wye literary festival, Sturgeon raged she was being ‘held responsible’ for the actions of her husband. ‘It is the age-old cry of when a man does something wrong, well, the woman must have known about it, somehow it’s her fault,’ she snapped, when questioned.

    Well, think of it this way. His doings hint at a certain kind of character. She was married to him. You do the math.

    This is crass. It’s neither ‘sexist’ nor ‘misogynist’, as Sturgeon supporters have wailed this week, to question the incuriosity about luxury items turning up in her own home. Her justifications she was busy, wasn’t home much, she and Murrell had large enough salaries to justify £2k designer salt and pepper pots and various £500 Montblanc fountain pens are, in fairness, plausible. They’re beside the point, though.

    Now you know where the luxury fountain pens question came from.

    She presided over a regime where questioning her led to bullying and many subsequent resignations, while she and ambitious, younger colleagues pushed the maddest, misogynist ideology – gender identity – while turning a blind eye to excessive abuse of women, including party colleagues.

    Her attempts to claim she’s judged by different standards from men is an absurdity; a cynical attempt at dodging responsibility from a highly-skilled mistress of spin.

    A highly-skilled mistress of spin who threw women overboard.

  • Next up: luxury toilet paper

    I just saw a reference in a news article to “luxury fountain pens” so I felt the need to find out what a luxury fountain pen could possibly be. I mean, what is a fountain pen? A thing you write with. It holds some ink, and you write with it, and every now and then you get to refill it with ink. Where does “luxury” come into it? It’s not silk or mink or soft leather or any other bit of an endangered animal, it’s just a small tool for writing. Where does luxury find an entry?

    I learned there’s a pen that sells for $1,270.

    People are weird.

  • He accepts the difference

    So the ground is beginning to shift?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Oh yes? Why didn’t you do it sooner?

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

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

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

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

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

    Funny what a hard time they have perceiving the obvious.

  • 18 new letters

    Wait a second.

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

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

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

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

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

    Enough already.

  • Guest post: It’s a Japanese anime thing

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Knock-knees.

    Ah, yes, uchimata.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Knock-knees

    Look at his feet.

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

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

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

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

  • Posty McPosterson

    Trump has been working hard today.

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

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

    A totally normal Saturday for a totally normal president.

  • Which yips?

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

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

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

  • Try again in 20 years or so

    Sigh.

    No women’s museum for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Right. Of course half the population is not important.

  • Tourist does what?

    Northern news:

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

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

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

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

  • Guest post: Flattery will get you everywhere

    Originally a miscellaneous comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.

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

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

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

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

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

    Here’s its take on me:

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

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

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

    /miscellany

  • Crystal clear

    Yesssssss!

    Court Orders Trump’s Name Stripped From Kennedy Center

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

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

    No, bonehead, you should be ashamed of yourself.

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

  • BBC attempts ontology

    What a display.

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

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

    Idiot man continues.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Go back to headline school

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

    What a headline!

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

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

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

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

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

  • Rank amateur does what now?

    If it ain’t broke why fix it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So why change it?

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

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

    They’ll be eating our faces any minute now.

  • 2 Minutes

    Bari Weiss, yet again.

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

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

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

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

    Trump and his minions are now in charge of journalism.

    We are in deep shit.

  • Speaking of real life impact

    Union says what?

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