Author: Ophelia Benson

Originally a comment by Lulu on Vowed to resist.

Unison invited people to email to say why the guidance was unworkable. I emailed to say why I support it and was surprised I wasn’t asked for my membership number. So – they weren’t trying to be balanced but only inviting views they wanted and didn’t check respondents were members and I’m not surprised 600 said exactly what they wanted.

Unison is 80% female and they’re in a brilliant position to find out what ordinary women workers really think about this issue, to find ways which work for everyone and to make themselves relevant. They’ve totally lost sight of how unions are supposed to work and wonder why people think they’re out of touch. It’s not as though workers’ rights no longer need fighting for and it’s a tragedy that those at the top of the union movement have betrayed their history and their membership

Jonathan dismissing women’s rights.

Just so everyone is clear: ‘Centre For Women’s Justice’ is a trans hate pop up. It has one topic, and it’s not abortion, gender pay gap, misogyny etc – it’s trans people. Don’t be tricked by the seemingly good title and corporate pic.

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) August 20, 2026

Jonathan thinks he gets to dictate what organizations women are allowed to have. Jonathan is wrong. He has no say in the matter.

Ominous.

Five years after Floridia registered Europe’s highest-ever temperature, residents ​say extreme heat is no longer measured by records but by its impact on daily life, keeping people indoors, reducing social interaction and threatening ‌livelihoods.

The August 2021 record of 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 degrees Fahrenheit) turned the Sicilian town into a symbol of Europe’s warming climate as the continent emerged from COVID-19 restrictions.

Today, increasingly frequent and prolonged heatwaves are driving people indoors, leaving streets and piazzas deserted and prompting some residents to compare the extreme heat to a new form of lockdown.

The shift is visible across the town of 20,000 on the outskirts of ​Syracuse, the ancient Greek city on Sicily’s southeastern coast. Piazza del Popolo, long Floridia’s social hub and lined with cafes, palm trees and municipal buildings, is nearly ​empty for much of the day.

…

On August 11, 2021, Sicily’s Agrometeorological Information Service (SIAS) measured a temperature of 48.8 C in Monasteri, a rural district about 5 km (3 miles) from Floridia’s centre. In 2024, the World Meteorological Organization certified it as the highest temperature ever recorded in continental Europe, a mark that still stands.

And the direction is not going to change.

Across Europe, climate change has been linked to increasingly frequent and intense weather extremes, from drought and wildfires to torrential rainfall.

Sicily has emerged as one of Europe’s climate frontlines.

In January, Cyclone Harry produced a record 16.66-metre (55-foot) wave between Sicily ​and Malta. Wildfires have taken a growing toll with the island accounting for roughly 70% of southern Italy’s burned area between January ​and July, according to ⁠a Legambiente analysis based on EFFIS-Copernicus data.

Agriculture, a pillar of the island’s economy, is increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

In 2021, more than 3,000 beehives were lost in the area of Floridia and honey production plunged by 80%. “The decline in bee populations and the number of beekeepers, together with the loss of pollinators due to climate change and the widespread use of pesticides, is ⁠leading to ​a reduction in biodiversity and lower quality and yields in agricultural production,” agronomist Francesco Bellomi said.

And it’s only going to get worse.

Meanwhile the union brags about trashing women’s rights.

What they mean by “the erosion of trans rights” is of course not letting men destroy women’s rights.

The ferocious determination to drive a tank through women’s rights continues.

Eight major trade unions representing millions of workers and students have vowed to resist new guidance on access to single-sex facilities based on biological sex.

The unions, which have a combined 3.6 million paying members, have criticised guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) following last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman.

Unison, the UK’s largest union with around 1.3 million members, has pledged to “fight” employers over policies it believes exclude transgender people.

It believes “exclude transgender people” from what?

Not from everything. Not from the world, not from life, not from mixed-sex spaces or jobs or prizes or organizations or clubs or sports. Not, in fact, exclude trans people from anything: the exclusion is solely from single-sex spaces, jobs, organizations, facilities, sports and so on if and only if they are the opposite of the single sex in question. That’s it, that’s the exclusion: the same one it’s always been. The whole point of having X for women is that women need it, so it’s a punch in the face of women to let some men have it provided they claim to be women.

But because trans ideologues have had such success in manipulating language to veil this fact, the argument goes on and on and on and on.

Unison, the UK’s largest union with around 1.3 million members, has pledged to “fight” employers over policies it believes exclude transgender people.

General secretary Ms Andrea Egan said more than 600 members had contacted the union with examples of what they claimed were problems caused by the updated guidance.

Now let’s talk about problems caused by ignoring the guidance.

Ms Egan added that she would work with Unison’s equality teams to “take the fight to every workplace to make them trans inclusive”.

By which she means make them no longer single-sex. What a disgusting thing to do.

NUS vice-president for liberation and equality Avery Greatorex accused the EHRC’s legal advice of being ideologically motivated and encouraged activists to oppose what they described as “trans-exclusionary policies”.

Ahhhh ideologically motivated is it – and legal advice that says men don’t get to barge into women’s spaces is not ideologically motivated? We’re the ones with the weird destructive ideology while claiming that some men are women is ideology-free?

Several other major unions have also criticised the guidance, including Unite, GMB, the British Medical Association and the University and College Union. Equity and the Public and Commercial Services union have also intervened.

The BMA. Yeesh.

BMA deputy chair Ms Emma Runswick told The Times that doctors wanted to provide care to patients of all gender identities, but warned the new guidance could prove difficult to apply across NHS services.

She said many services were already “ill-equipped to provide safe and dignified care for trans patients”.

Therefore those services should be allowed to demolish safe and dignified care for women? Is that her claim?

The guidance has also prompted changes from employers. Last week, the Co-operative Group watered down its trans-inclusive toilet policy, meaning employees are no longer instructed to use facilities they “feel safest in”.

That’s because the toilet policy that provides single-sex facilities is not about being “trans-inclusive” but being safe for women. Toilets are not supposed to be “inclusive” in the sense of letting men use the ones for women. The whole point of having separate toilets for women and men is to prevent that rather than allow it.

Unison said it was complying with the Supreme Court judgment and a recent ruling by the certification officer, while maintaining its position that “trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid”.

But it’s not about a “position”. It’s about reality. You can have a “position” on the subject all you like but men are still not going to be the ones who gestate all the new humans.

The union said it would campaign for a change in the law to reflect its policy, claiming the impact of the ruling and guidance on trans, non-binary and gender-diverse members had been “devastating”.

In other words they don’t like it. Too bad. They should never have been encouraged to think sex is like a costume you can put on and take off at will. Men can’t be women, end of story.

Michael Shellenberger writes:

“Gender-affirming care,” including blocking a child’s puberty, giving them cross-sex hormones, and performing surgeries on their bodies, is life-saving, according to the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the news media, Democrats, hospitals, progressive activists, and Hollywood celebrities. For decades, the most powerful people and institutions in America have said that if a child feels like they are the opposite gender, they are, and doctors should be allowed to give them drugs and surgeries so their bodies align with their true inner self.

For decades? No. For a decade, yes, but not decades plural. It’s a fad that took off 10 or 12 or so years ago. There were quacks doing it before that but it wasn’t a fad yet.

And yet the result of it all, a new report published today by Health and Human Services (HHS) confirms, is the worst medical scandal since lobotomies. Researchers have found a 12-fold higher suicide attempt risk among adults who had gender surgery, either on their chests or genitals, than among those who did not. A Swedish study that followed every “surgically reassigned patient” for up to 30 years found death from suicide ran 19 times higher.

Uh…oops.

When it’s done to harm women, breaking the law is a sacred act!

Britain’s biggest trade union broke the law by allowing a transgender woman to run for a senior female role, a watchdog has ruled.

Unison broke its own rules and defied the Supreme Court ruling on gender when it let a biological male run for a seat that was ring-fenced for women on its national executive committee (NEC) last May.

Well. You know. It’s such an unjust law! It’s so blatantly unfair! Why can’t women just put up with never being allowed on executive committees and get on with their day?!

The Supreme Court ruled in April 2025 that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 referred to biological sex.

The ruling, which applied retrospectively, meant Unison’s decision to allow a biological male to run for a female-only seat in February 2025 broke its own election rules.

But in a noble cause. Keeping women out of roles that would give them some power and influence is the noblest cause there is.

The certification officer’s ruling comes after a complaint was made about Unison allowing Ellie Waple, a biological male, to run for the disabled members’ reserved female seat during the NEC elections in 2025.

While Waple did not ultimately secure enough votes to win the seat, the certification officer ruled that candidates should be eligible at all stages of the nomination and election process.

Waple said at the time: “Unless advised otherwise by Unison, if elected I intend to take my seat on the NEC.

“The biggest threat to women’s rights is not trans people, but rather the 1 per cent of super-powerful rich, clinging to their wealth and denying real funding for housing, domestic violence services and women’s services.

“The undemocratic and unaccountable Supreme Court ruling plays to the false narrative and agenda that trans people are a threat to women and will only serve to create a climate of fear among trans people.”

What a pile of sludge. The issue here isn’t “threat” but theft. It’s men like Waple (who by the way is built like a tank) helping themselves to jobs and roles reserved for women.

The rule: if it’s anything to do with women it has to be made incloooosive so that it’s not for women any more.

In the 1990s, growing up in the small harbor town of Oban, the only place I ever saw the word lesbian was in my Oxford Dictionary.

Section 28 (the UK law that prohibited local authorities and state schools from “promoting homosexuality”) loomed large. While Oban was famous for its seafood, whisky, and scenic harbor, it certainly wasn’t known for queer women. I never met anyone openly identifying as lesbian or queer while growing up there.

Fast forward a few decades, and that same small coastal town has been named by both mainstream and queer press—including DIVA magazine and The Times—as an unlikely lesbian+ capital of Scotland.

An unlikely what now?

Every September, hundreds of LGBTQ+ women travel from across the UK, Europe, the U.S., and beyond to attend Oban Lesbian+ Weekend, a joyful celebration of community, adventure, and visibility on Scotland’s wild west coast. And in 2026, the festival celebrates its fifth year.

Ah. So that’s what the plus sign means. Lesbian plus men. So it’s not lesbian then.

But the name itself often sparks conversation. People sometimes ask: If the event is inclusive, why call it a lesbian weekend? The answer is simple: We’re reclaiming the word lesbian.

At Oban Lesbian+ Weekend, “lesbian” isn’t a gatekeeping label. It’s a banner—one that proudly includes LGBTQ+ women, trans women, and non-binary people who feel part of the lesbian+ community.

Awwwww iddn that sweet. It’s a banner, one that proudly erases lesbians in order to be inclooosive of men. As long as they say they feel part of the lesbian communinny (which part exactly?) then by golly they are part of it, balls or no balls.

Trans women have been part of the festival from the very beginning, including on our crew, and the space we create is intentionally inclusive.

At a time when the word ‘lesbian’ can sometimes be used to exclude, our festival flips the narrative. We use it as something joyful, visible, and welcoming. And in a small town like Oban, visibility matters.

In other words lesbianism is forbidden and heterosexuality is imposed. New boss just like the old boss. Brilliant move, visible chumps.

My journey to creating the festival has been shaped by more than two decades spent bringing queer women together. In fact, 2026 marks 21 years since I first launched my events business, starting with lesbian speed dating in Brighton. I’d recently moved there and spotted an advert in g3 Magazine for a lesbian speed dating event in Manchester. I remember thinking: Why isn’t there something like that in “gay Brighton”?

Yes but when you said “lesbian speed dating” you meant actually lesbian, right? You didn’t mean trans lesbian, because that would be just same old same old: women not allowed to have anything just for women. You didn’t mean that, right? Or did you?

The events sold out quickly. And I discovered something that has guided my work ever since: Queer women love spaces designed intentionally to help them meet each other. Whether those connections lead to friendships, flings or lifelong partners doesn’t really matter—the magic is in the meeting.

The meeting of lesbian women, right? That’s what you mean? But you’re afraid to say it? If you do say it you have to cancel it immediately by saying LGBTQ+?

Guests explore historic castles, take boat trips across the Atlantic waters surrounding the Inner Hebrides, and dance at our now legendary LGBTQ+ women’s ceilidh (a traditional Scottish social organized around music, pronounced KAY-lee)-which we believe is the only ceilidh in the world designed specifically for LGBTQ+ women and non-binary people.

Aka for everyone, so it’s probably not the only one in the world.

Wouldn’t it be nice if no one had to be told any of this?

Migrant advice booklet explains what rape is

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone on the planet already knew that you can’t just help yourself to someone else’s body?

Asylum seekers arriving in Britain are being handed official booklets explaining what rape is and that men and women in Britain are “equal”.

The nine-page document, published by the Home Office, tells migrants they must understand that “laws and customs here may be different from your home country”.

On one page headed “Gender Equality”, arrivals are told that women can work, study, and travel freely without needing permission from a man in the UK.

“In the UK, men and women have equal rights. This is an important part of UK culture and is protected by law,” says the booklet, which was produced for newly arrived asylum seekers.

In a section on sex and consent, they are told that if they have sex with someone without their consent, “this is called rape”.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all that were not our bizarre local custom but just obvious basic not being a shit? Wouldn’t it be nice if women were considered people everywhere on the planet?

Not a parody. Hard to believe.

Surprisingly, this is not a parody. pic.twitter.com/C9uDYUPkX6

— alexmassie (@alexmassie) August 19, 2026

Originally a comment by Whimster Gap on Baffled and concerned.

There’s a lovely – probably apocryphal – story about James I & VI and his relationship with money that’s relevant here. James could be lavish in his spending and patronage, but also had a reputation for stinginess. If he was warned about his spending on something, it’d bounce off him; and so one day he was shown how much he’d spent on a project by having the equivalent value in coin tipped on the floor in front of him.

He was horrified. Seeing the money made it real and so got around an intellectual block. Very clever though he may have been (and he was), his brain simply didn’t do money or big numbers. That’s probably true for most of us: big numbers are difficult to imagine.

Trump is analogous here. He likes things he can see and that can be put in a ledger. Does spending on security cost? Yes. Does it yield an income in a way that a double-entry bookkeeper might be able to write it down? No. And so Trump doesn’t believe it’s real.

You could try explaining to him that American military hegemony allows the US to write the rules of international trade and diplomacy, and that what we used to call the West is happy to go along with that because those rules are the continuation of a system that’s much older than American hegemony and that makes us all very wealthy.* You could try explaining this, but you’d fail, because he doesn’t have that kind of higher-level thinking. In his world, if you spend money, you get a thing in return.

Spending money to secure peace to secure law to secure institutions to secure trade to secure wealth is just too long a chain.

* Well, OK: not to write the rules, but to maintain and develop them. That was the deal at Bretton Woods. We Brits couldn’t sustain the system any more, but everyone agreed that it was a good system, and so we just moved it from London to New York, a bit like the Romans shifting power to Byzantium.

Well, this is one reason it matters.

Rachel Amery at The Scotsman:

There has been a great deal of discussion this week about how we look at rape.

Q Manivannan MSP hit the headlines after comments they made in a podcast resurfaced, where the Edinburgh and Lothians East MSP said rape is a “spectrum” and rapists are “demonised”.

There. Right there. The first two sentences of the piece, and we can see why.

Q Manivannan is a man, who calls himself “non-binary”. How very convenient! He’s a man trying to make life easier for rape, so we absolutely need to know that he’s a man and not be tricked by some bullshit about how he’s nonbinareeeee. Men have a lot more motivation to belittle the importance of rape than women do, to put it mildly. How convenient it is for manly Manivannan that he is nonbinareeeee so he gets to say rapists are demonized without getting yelled at. If he were really nonbinareee he would have at least some understanding of how women view rape, but in reality he obviously has zero idea of what it’s like to be a woman.

Good news about Sarah Phillimore’s long-running resistance to Jolyon Maugham’s campaign to punish her.

I am very pleased to find this email. I will invite Mr Maugham again to apologise for his defamatory publication and pay my legal costs to date. And I will happily settle my legal action agaisnt him.

There was never any compelling evidence for him to make his accusations, let… pic.twitter.com/osuZkSSaIQ

— Sarah Phillimore (@SVPhillimore) August 19, 2026

There was never any compelling evidence for him to make his accusations, let alone publicise them widely, to do me harm.

I hope he will reflect, particularly in light of all he has said about the tragic death of Mr Arday.

I don’t think he knows how to reflect.

It is very important donors to an unregulated slush fund under the control of one man, are not mislead. pic.twitter.com/jYS1504rXY

— Sarah Phillimore (@SVPhillimore) August 19, 2026

It will be interesting to see what Joly does next.

Jolyon punching himself in the face again.

The Guardian borrowed freely from attack lines against Jason Arday carried by the Mail, Times, Telegraph and elsewhere, says Jo Maugham:https://t.co/3gN7MoUZdD

— Good Law Project (@GoodLawProject) August 18, 2026

Pompous barrister rebuked for lying on TwitX.

Is it puzzling that humans have pets?

Pets have long posed an evolutionary enigma for researchers. We have to feed them, house them, cut their toenails, clean their teeth and scratch behind their ears. A relationship like that could be considered a poor return on investment.

“Lavishing resources on members of other species we have no evolutionary stake in seems to make no evolutionary sense,” said Hal Herzog, a psychologist and animal expert at Western Carolina University who was not involved with the research. Yet many cultures across the world have pets and cherish them dearly.

Does it really seem to make no evolutionary sense?

The many practical reasons for having pets (rodent control, guarding, protection, assistance in hunting and so on) aside, doesn’t well-being/happiness make evolutionary sense?

Maybe this is just journalistic over-simplification of what makes evolutionary sense.

“There are theories that pet-keeping began either because animals were useful for tasks like hunting and protection or because humans have a natural tendency to care for and bond with other living beings,” said Zoë Goldsborough, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior who was not involved with the research.

Or both, ffs. Your dog can help with hunting and guard the pack and be a companion.

Maybe this is just drastically oversimplified for a broad audience, but it seems simplified to the point of absurdity.

When in doubt, destroy everything.

The Trump administration on Tuesday advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

The proposal by the U.S. Forest Service would repeal the 2001 “roadless rule,” enacted during the Clinton administration to preserve the wild nature of forest land. It comes as President Trump pressures the agency to increase logging and to thin forests to reduce wildfire risk.

If thinning forests reduces wildfire risk then that’s a reason to do it. Increasing logging until all the logs are gone, not so much.

The repeal would hand a major victory to Republican-led states and industry groups that have argued for years that the prohibitions have hindered economic development. More than a dozen lawsuits have unsuccessfully sought to strike down the rule.

Well you see economic development isn’t the only good. It’s one of them for sure, and a major one, but still there are others. Forests are a good. Forests that have not been denuded of most of their trees are a good. They are pollution sinks, just for one thing.

During his first term, Mr. Trump stripped protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, only for the Biden administration to restore them in 2023.

This time, the Forest Service is eliminating protections for the nine million undeveloped acres within the Tongass, as well as millions more acres of pristine wilderness across the rest of the United States.

When in doubt, destroy. When in doubt use up something that can’t be replaced. When in doubt, create a desert and call it development.

Environmentalists said the plan would destroy untouched landscapes, including crucial habitats for migratory species and headwaters for major municipal water supplies. Multiple advocacy groups are expected to sue to block the repeal.

“By ripping protections from some of our oldest intact forests, the Trump administration is endangering the drinking water supplies of tens of millions and threatening wildlife habitats and recreation opportunities in almost every state,” said Drew McConville, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization.

Just buy bottled water.

The way to get what you want is to post an image of it.

Trump posted an image of a map on social media Tuesday that labeled the Strait of Hormuz a “new” U.S. territory.

Trump’s post — which was presented without additional comment — came after he said last week that he would “pretty soon” be “declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”

Yeh that too. Declare, and post an image.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded to President Donald Trump’s posting of a map labeling the Strait of Hormuz as a U.S. territory by saying the image amounted to a “delusion.”

But a nice delusion! A comforting delusion. A happy delusion.

Special Envoy Jared Kushner said Iran is “not showing any interest” in making a deal that makes sense for the U.S., but noted that dialogue between the two countries is more “robust” than ever.

And by “robust” he means shouty.

Absolutely classic Jolyon.

“Today of all days is very much a day for white people to listen and not to speak”

Continues to do a speech 🤦‍♂️

Jolyon Maugham was the only white person to speak at the Jason Arday vigil

Utter virtue-signalling narcissist pic.twitter.com/Pmegtz7N3i

— MrMenno 🇳🇱🏳️‍🌈🎶 (@MrMennoTweets) August 17, 2026

Check the fine print.

Some people are just a tiny bit curious about Trump’s hostility to South Korea and warm affection for its neighbor to the north.

South Korea’s president said Tuesday a solid alliance with the United States underpins national security, after U.S. President Donald Trump’s abrupt order to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises left many many South Koreans baffled and concerned.

Trump made the surprise announcement in a social media post just before U.S. and South Korean soldiers began Monday’s annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, which are largely designed to sharpen readiness against North Korean threats.

Trump cited what he said was a good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korea’s refusal to join the U.S. war against Iran.

Which is so Trump. He thinks he has “a good relationship” with Kim Jong Un (which of course he doesn’t: Kim is playing him like a fiddle) and that the imagined “relationship” with the boss is all there is to relations between the two countries. He’s mentally a child, and that child gets younger and dimmer every day.

Trump’s move was apparently taken without consultations with South Korea and meant to reach out to Kim, deepening concerns about the reliability of the U.S.-South Korean alliance forged in the turmoil of the 1950-53 Korean War.

That is, concerns about Trump’s understanding of that alliance and what his dimwitted understanding will prompt him to do.

A weakening of the U.S. defense commitment could shake South Korea’s national security as it has no nuclear weapons and is under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” protection, which guarantees a devastating American response in the event of an attack on its ally by nuclear-armed North Korea. The U.S. has about 28,500 troops in South Korea.

Confidence in the U.S. has already eroded among many South Koreans because of Trump’s tariff war and last year’s immigration raid in the U.S. state of Georgia that led to the detention of hundreds of South Korean workers.

…

In his social media post, Trump said the military exercises with South Korea are not only costly but “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which he said “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his time in the White House.

By which he means Kim Jong Un has pretended to be his buddy and he’s stupid enough to believe the pretending.

Think before you cancel.

A venue has accepted that it discriminated against a Jewish comedian when it cancelled his show at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Stand-up comic Philip Simon had been due to perform a solo show called Shall I Compere Thee In A Funny Way at The Banshee Labyrinth, on the city’s Niddry Street. However, the venue pulled his act over what it said were his views on the conflict in Gaza.

His views were too Jewish. Now what does that remind me of…?

In a statement given at the time to industry magazine Chortle, the venue said Mr Simon had expressed views on social media and elsewhere that it said “align with the rhetoric and symbology of groups associated with humanitarian violations”.

Say what? “align with the rhetoric and symbology of”? It’s a venue saying all this? Since when are venues in the business of sniffing out “views” that “align with” a string of pompous quasi-academic verbiage?

Mr Simon took legal action against the venue’s owner, Morrison Bros Ltd, claiming it had discriminated against him on the grounds of “unlawful belief-based discrimination”.

And used pompous verbiage to do so. The pompous verbiage is important here. It allows and encourages people to think they’re saying something both reasonable and important, when they’re not.