Jawad Iqbal in the Times last week:

Is the prominent Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran a suitable choice to chair the highly influential Commons health and social care committee? She belongs to a party that has responded with deafening silence to the landmark Cass review, which recommended sweeping changes to the way the NHS treats under-18s who are unsure about their gender identity.

Moran is also on record as believing that “trans women are women” and said she was “disgusted” when Kemi Badenoch, who has pushed for single-sex spaces, was made women and equalities minister under the previous Conservative government. Would campaigners for same-sex healthcare to help safeguard women and girls feel confident that she can be open-minded and

… Read the rest

The Taliban says listen listen listen what we’re doing is fine because it’s Islamic law.

In the three years since the Taliban takeover, it’s become clear that even if edicts aren’t strictly imposed, people start self-regulating out of fear. Women continue to be visible in small numbers on the streets of cities like Kabul, but nearly all of them now are covered from head to toe in loose black clothes or dark blue burqas, and most of them cover their faces with only their eyes visible, the impact of a decree announced last year.

“Every moment you feel like you’re in a prison. Even breathing has become difficult here,” said Nausheen, an activist. Until last year, whenever new restrictions were

… Read the rest

The Respectable Meeja continue to pretend Trump is normal.

Journalist Parker Molloy recently detailed the media’s extensive efforts to “rationalize Trump’s incoherent statements,” tracing back to his catastrophic covid response. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote back in June about the media’s “bias toward coherence” when covering Trump. But the question still remains why the press insists on covering Trump like a normal politician.

Legacy media bristles at the accusation that they treat Trump more generously than past presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican. New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger claimed in a recent self-serving Post op-ed that Democrats want his paper to “cast aside neutrality and directly oppose [Trump’s] reelection.“ But that’s a strawman argument. The

… Read the rest

Officer Diddums on the job:

The police are recording too many hate crime incidents and getting involved in disputes that include “hurt feelings”, the police watchdog has warned in a new report.

Selectively though. Always selectively. The hurt feelings of men who call themselves women matter; the hurt feelings of women do not.

The report was commissioned in September last year by Suella Braverman, when she was home secretary, after she said officers were pandering to politically correct causes, such as taking the knee.

And such as pretending that men who claim to be women are in fact women.

She ordered a new code of conduct, which came into effect in June, that introduced a higher threshold for the

… Read the rest

Tom Nichols on that guy:

Here is part of what he posted early Saturday evening over at his personal rantatorium, Truth Social:

CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that

… Read the rest

What is a woman?

Anneliese Dodds, the Minister for Women and Equalities, has said in response to a written question asking whether the government plans to amend the legal definition of what a woman is:

“We are proud of the Equality Act and the rights and protections it affords women. The Government does not plan to amend legal definitions in the act.” 

Hundreds of women are coming to Parliament on Wednesday on a mission to change her mind as part of the Stand up for single-sex services campaign.

If “women” no longer means “women” then how can women have rights specific to women?

They are going to tell her, and other MPs, how the Equality Act is failing to protect

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Oh how sad, people in Canada have to pay for some of their Magic Gender Care.

A new gender-affirming care provision under the federal government’s employee health plan — a change touted as a major win for transgender plan members — has turned into an ongoing struggle for some trans workers who say they’re rethinking future surgeries because they’re already running into walls getting claims reimbursed. 

I have to wonder why the government pays for mutilations in the first place.

Gender-affirming care encompasses a number of treatments, including mental health counselling, hormone replacement therapy, genital surgery, breast augmentation, pectoral implants and even something as basic as a haircut.

Genital surgery, they say cheerfully, when what they mean is amputation/mutilation.… Read the rest

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

After seeing the beauty of these Games defaced by the spectacle of Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old father-of-two, taking semi-final places in female sprinting from two women barely half the Italian’s age, you might have expected Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, to commit – at the very least – to a review of the ridiculous policy that let this happen. Instead he seemed, at his closing press conference, almost to celebrate it as a watershed.

…

Parsons began these 11 days by spelling out his ambition for an “inclusion revolution”. Include everybody: that is the mantra. Even if it now means excluding women from their own category. This is not some

… Read the rest

Women are such a damn nuisance, you know?

Surrogate mother wins access to her biological son in landmark case

She’s not actually a surrogate mother, she’s a mother.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, won the case after the gay couple for whom she carried the baby for nine months tried to stop her seeing her own biological child and erase her from his life. The two men claimed that the little boy would be confused if he saw his mother because he lived with them in a ‘motherless family’ and was being raised within the LGBT community.

The couple told her there was ‘no vacancy’ for her ‘just because [he] has same-sex parents’ – even

… Read the rest

Continuing the theme, Jacky Davis in the Observer on Saturday:

he British Medical Association is both a trade union and a professional organisation. Professional activities such as its successful campaigns around seatbelt legislation and smoking have added weight to its standing as a union. It is not noted for drama and histrionics.

So there was significant surprise when its governing body, the BMA council, recently voted to reject the recommendations of the Cass review…

BMA members were genuinely outraged. Letters to the BMJ accused the council of bringing “the BMA and the medical profession into disrepute”. One correspondent said they were “more shocked than anything I can think of in 40 years of practising medicine”. Some members, aghast

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When doctors clash:

The British Medical Association has threatened the reputation of all UK doctors by rejecting the findings of the landmark Cass review of transgender healthcare, a leading member of the BMA has told the Observer.

Dr Jacky Davis claims that the doctors’ union’s stance on the Cass review is “irrational”, has created a “fracture” between its leadership and the grassroots doctors it represents, and left the medical profession “in an uproar”.

What is that stance? Fingers in the ears shouting NONONONONO

The BMA refused to endorse the findings of Dr Hilary Cass, whose review was published in April and was widely welcomed. It claimed the review contained “unsubstantiated recommendations” and its council called on

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Labour brushes off women yet again:

The Government will not carry forward plans to rewrite the Equality Act 2010 that were aimed at protecting single-sex spaces, the Minister for Women and Equalities has confirmed.

Anneliese Dodds said there were no plans to update the existing legislation, which the Conservatives had promised to reform ahead of the general election.

Because women don’t matter. Men matter, and men who pretend to be women really matter, but women are so much lint on the sweater of life.

The Tories planned to rewrite the Act in order to make it clear that “sex” in the legislation means “biological sex” instead of the gender with which a person identifies.

This would have allowed

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Originally a comment by Alan Peakall on Vice n virtue.

Certainty of paternity may be the ultimate material basis of the imperative for sexual control, but it does not account for religious taboos on non-procreative sexual acts. Possibly they are Gouldian spandrels emerging from cross firing of the supposed exchange instinct asserted to be disclosed by evolutionary psychologists’ study of Wason test experiments. Once humans have acquired the intellectual sophistication to recognise sexual pleasure as an inducement to reproduction, non-reproductive sex becomes a potential trgger for guilt/shame at cheating nature or Nature personified as a god. Religion as an institution then seizes on that guilt as a means of social control and incorporates it into a meme matrix. This … Read the rest

Saeedullah Safi in the Irish Times on the demolition of women’s rights in Afghanistan:

“My voice is now a crime,” says Mariam, a teacher from Kabul province. Speaking over a shaky WhatsApp connection, Mariam (whose name has been changed for her safety) describes her life as a woman under new Taliban rules. “I am terrified to leave my house,” she says. “Not because I fear the violence in the streets, but because I fear my own voice might betray me.”

Last week, the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, approved new “vice and virtue” laws, which include a total ban on women’s voices in public and further restrictions on their presence outside the home.

Because, you see, if a man … Read the rest

Speaking up for the women of Afghanistan.

And still NZ have no issue playing male cricket against them. Sports boycotts only ever get enacted when it affects men! https://t.co/pL1bot73YX

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) September 8, 2024

‘Ghosts in our own country’. A reminder, in a week when other atrocities have taken the spotlight off this one, that we need to keep pressing for this situation not to be normalized or forgotten about https://t.co/f4QDqeLP7D

— Debbie Cameron (@wordspinster) September 8, 2024

… Read the rest

Wow, what a funny joke.

https://twitter.com/ACBofficials/status/1832765832612520344 Bet you thought that was some stupid slag of a woman under there, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU??… Read the rest

Trump issues threats:

Former President Donald Trump, who makes frequent false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through rampant fraud, warned Saturday that he would attempt to imprison anyone who engages in “unscrupulous behavior” during the 2024 race results.

No he didn’t threaten to attempt to imprison, he said he would imprison. Trump never tempers what he says with an awareness of limitations on his power, he just issues the threatyest threats he can come up with.

The threat was issued in a post on Truth Social, his social media website, and repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, accusing Democrats of “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.”

“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started

… Read the rest

How sweet.

Notice anyone missing?

https://twitter.com/ACBofficials/status/1832666909562593733… Read the rest

Urrgghh I did not know this – Trump has been campaigning in sundown towns.

Howell, Michigan. LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Mosinee, Wisconsin.

These relatively small cities — spread across midwestern swing states and far from dense metropolitan areas — all have one thing in common: They are former “sundown” towns, where threats of Jim Crow-era violence enforced racial segregation.

After a series of rallies in major cities to kick off his general election campaign, the Republican presidential candidate zeroed in on a handful of cities with familiar pasts.

That’s really really really disgusting.

Viral criticism across social media has argued that Trump’s latest campaign stretch isn’t a coincidence but a “dogwhistle” to racist supporters. Vice President Kamala Harris’s

… Read the rest

Oliver Brown being sly in the Telegraph:

Valentina Petrillo, the Italian father-of-two who qualified on Friday for a second semi-final of these Paris Paralympics in women’s sprinting, has hit back at being called an “out-and-proud cheat” by author JK Rowling, saying: “I’ve never even read Harry Potter.”

Nicely done. The father-of-two in women’s sprinting, who retorts to criticism with a fatuous irrelevance.

Despite the backlash, Petrillo claimed: “There is so much transphobia in all this. The most important word in Olympic and Paralympic sports is inclusion.”

No it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. How could it be? Sports are about competition, which means there are losers along with winners, and in fact there are far more losers than … Read the rest