Author: Ophelia Benson

  • So white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life

    The Times interviews Sandi Toksvig:

    Toksvig certainly boasts the widest-ranging CV imaginable. Her most recent achievement was officiating at the Abba star Björn Ulvaeus’s third wedding last month in Copenhagen. She and Ulvaeus, it transpires, have been friends since 2015, when she organised a Scandinavian-themed Women of the World festival at the Royal Festival Hall, where an all-female orchestra played Waterloo and Ulvaeus appeared. “You can be feminist and fun, you see.” More recently they collaborated on writing the interactive show Mamma Mia! The Party.

    “BjĂśrn is a very gentle, not divaish person; he and I are both humanists,” she says…

    I knew that about BjĂśrn. That time I went to Stockholm when Hatar Gud Kvinnor? was published, his daughter picked me up at the airport. I pretended not to know.

    But that’s not why we’re here. This is why we’re here:

    “I’m easygoing, but I’m also keeping an eye on things. The world is still full of people who take against your life. Homophobia’s increasing. The only good thing about lesbians is they titillate men so it’s marginally less aggressive towards us. I don’t know what they think Deb and I are doing. Mainly we’re discussing if the tomatoes have gone off.”

    The hostility, Toksvig continues with quiet fury, is fuelled by “intemperate language on social media around the trans discussion. That’s opened the door to people thinking it’s now fair to have a general go at diversity, that the world is too woke. I don’t know how you can be too woke — woke means being awake to the dangers that are around you. Mental health within the LGBTQ community is not good and that’s not because you’re not comfortable with who you are. It’s the way society treats you.”

    She is especially angry by [about] how many “radical feminists” attack trans people. “How could you be so white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life yet you decide to punch down on people?”

    Excuse me? Excuse me???

    Who tf says we’re all privileged? Who says we’re all heterosexual? Who says we’re all never marginalized?

    What utter bullshit. Women are not privileged in the sense of seen as and treated as better than the other sex. That’s rather the point of feminism. We have to fight to be seen as and treated as not the worst, the stupid, the weak, the sly, the whoreish, the disgusting sex. We have to fight to be seen as not inferiors. That doesn’t suddenly stop being true just because some men pretend to be women and berate us when we say they’re not.

  • All I said was

    Behold: a dishonest fool.

    Yesterday:

    Today:

    Calling JK Rowling “the worst person in the UK” is not equivalent to “I don’t agree with JK Rowling’s views.”

    Thus: a dishonest fool.

  • A stark reminder

    From Inside Climate News, a discussion of the implications of Helene and North Carolina.

    From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood with Abrahm Lustgarten, author of “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.”

    …

    Helene’s huge size and speed are linked to increasingly hotter water in the Gulf of Mexico, and a stark reminder that with global heating, weather forecasts based on history are becoming [worse] guides to present dangers. Hurricanes have usually weakened when they make landfall, but to the surprise of many, Helene’s impact was just as devastating in the inland mountains of western North Carolina as on the Gulf Coast of Florida. 

    …

    CURWOOD: Preparing for that worst case costs a lot of money—and people think that is a waste of money.

    LUSTGARTEN: I talk about this a lot, and it’s one of the more depressing elements of the climate adaptation story for the United States: The costs of adapting to climate change are going to prove so unfathomably expensive that I don’t think we collectively, or our governments, can really wrap their minds around that yet. 

    The flip side of what that investment will require is what I believe is the reality, the truth, that certain places will never be able to afford that adaptation. This may be a very long way into the future, and it depends on the frequency of disasters, but there will become places that are unprotectable, where we cannot afford to rebuild, where we cannot afford to build in the way that is truly resilient, because it is too expensive. We’re more likely as a society to spend that money and make those investments in the larger urban places where there’s a collectivization of the services and community support for the population that lives there. 

    We’re trending into the science-fiction realm here—or at least my imagining of the future—but when I try to imagine what a community that is failing on the far end of this transition looks like, the researchers that I talk to tell me to expect the disappearance of publicly provided services like garbage pickup, 911 service and emergency services, and the availability of insurance and those basic community fundamentals first. That might follow the decrease of a tax base that dwindles as the population shrinks, which also precipitates a drop in the quality of schools and a drop in the quality of infrastructure. 

    All of these things start to self perpetuate and spiral downwards, and then once you lose that consistency of services and economic stability, I think of it as communities kind of de-evolving back into what we would call a rural state, where eventually you have people who have to be self-sufficient and self-dependent in order to live there. 

    So, basically, going back to what human life was like 5 or 10 thousand years ago.

  • Law is one thing and reality is another

    Another turn of the screw:

    What is a woman? This now highly controversial issue will be decided in November by the highest court in the land.

    No it won’t. It’s not the kind of thing that can be decided by a court, however high. The question would have to be “What will we all be required to call a woman?” or some similar wording for the claim to be true. Courts decide law; they can’t decide reality.

    The justices — three men and two women — will be led by Lord Reed of Allermuir, 68, president of the court and the UK’s most senior judge. He is undaunted by the task. “When we hear cases … we are not trying to decide what social policy ought to be. That’s not our function. What we are trying to do, generally and in this particular case, is to interpret a particular statute or provision.”

    What I’m saying. The Times really should have worded it that way. This business of confusing “what we are going to tell you to say” with truth or reality is the fundamental trick that gender ideology has been using and getting away with all this time.

  • Jumpfortrump

    Weirdness report:

    A number of Donald Trump critics have mocked Elon Musk over his appearance alongside the former president at a Pennsylvania rally.

    What, just because he jumped up and down like a lunatic?

    Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly Twitter, and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, joined Trump onstage in Butler on Saturday to show his support for the Republican and state that he is “not just MAGA — I am Dark MAGA.”

    After Trump introduced Musk to the stage, the tech mogul enthusiastically jumped in the air several times while supporters cheered. Musk, who wore a black Make America Great Again cap, warned in his speech that “this will be the last election” if the former president does not win in November while urging people to vote.

    That is an idiotic thing to say.

    I’m so tired of the clown show.

  • Oligopoly

    Billionaires unite to trash everything.

    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1842679008791581140

    We’re doomed.

  • Enby credit report

    Shit just got real.

    Financial services firms have been forced to pay hundreds of pounds in compensation to non-binary customers over “discriminatory” application forms. 

    MoneySuperMarket (MSM), the comparison website, and Transunion, a credit union, were hit with separate complaints because their application forms did not include options for non-binary customers in their gender section.

    But…that’s not a thing. It’s not real. It has nothing to do with realities like credit. You might as well say credit applications should include options for witches.

    According to the complaint, MSM argued that changes to their website are bound by the information their insurance partners ask for and that many of them have not made provision for customers who identify as non-binary.

    Why would they, when it has nothing to do with anything?

    Transunion argued that the title Mx is not legally protected under the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and that the individual’s title has no bearing on their ability to gain access to credit.

    What I’m saying. It has nothing to do with credit so why make a fuss about it? The usual, no doubt: for attention.

    The ruling said: “Mx E has told us that the events surrounding the complaint made them feel they had to justify their non-binary identity and go through a process of ‘proving I exist’. It was (or should’ve been) foreseeable to Transunion that this was potentially offensive and distressing. Having listened to Mx E’s account, I’m persuaded that they experienced both stress and upset as a result of this matter.”

    Self-induced stress and upset. How about telling Mx Ex that applying for credit is not about Mx Ex’s fascinating personality so grow up and shut up and go away?

    A spokesman for MSM said: “Many of the insurers and financial services providers that we work with have systems that currently only refer to a binary concept of gender. We’re actively working with our partners to make non-binary options available.”

    Why? Why on earth? Surely insurers and financial services want to know applicants’ sex for reasons of verification and/or risk level and the like? Knowing applicants are “non-binary” is not useful for anything…unless being a self-absorbed buffoon affects your credit rating.

    Anna Dews, a solicitor in Leigh Day’s human rights team, said: “Although there is currently no statutory legal recognition of non-binary gender identities in the UK, it is completely fair and reasonable that a non-binary person should be able to refer to themselves using the correct pronouns as a customer in the online space.”

    But the only correct pronouns for people referring to themselves are “me” and “I” – which are already “non-binary.”

    This crap gets stupider every day.

  • Yes they can

    If only we could have not-idiots. Never mind nice things, that’s too much to ask, but just not…this…

    Marjorie Taylor Greene challenges YOU to prove Hurricane Helene wasn’t an inside job.

    As the death toll from one of the worst U.S. storms in recent memory topped 200 on Friday morning, the Republican congresswoman and noted conspiracy theorist posted a timely reminder on X that “yes they can control the weather” and that “it’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

    I wonder who “they” are. The Jews? The Dems? People with some brain cells?

    The Georgia Republican drew widespread mockery and derision in 2021 after it was revealed she’d previously suggested devastating wildfires in the state of California had been sparked by laser beams controlled by the wealthy Rothschild family from outer space.

    Who knew the wealthy Rothschild family lived in outer space??

    Greene’s apparent belief in the existence of these so-called Jewish space lasers reared its head again earlier this year with the congresswoman’s proposed amendments to an Israel funding bill amid the war in Gaza.

    The MAGA representative wrote in her proposal that “by the funds made available by this Act, such sums as necessary shall be used for the development of space laser technology on the southwest border”—an apparent bid to turn the nefarious fictional weapons toward the perceived good of vaporizing vulnerable migrants attempting to enter the U.S.

    “America needs to take our national security seriously,” she said at the time.

    America needs to take voting seriously.

  • How can people talk such crap?

    It seems the hot new thing is to claim that the Feds are ignoring the hurricane victims.

    Yeah good question except that that’s not what’s happening.

    I did a little exploring and, of course, found that it’s the usual bullshit – baseless claims being amplified by fools.

    Ok due warning, this is the Washington Post, which of course is in on the sinister plot to kill us all with hurricanes and then throw a big party, but anyway – the Post tells us:

    The Federal Emergency Management Agency has deployed more than a thousand personnel and millions of meals and liters of water to the communities hard hit by Helene, but is struggling to reach some communities deep in mountainous and remote areas of North Carolina that were most affected by the storm.

    I’ve been to that part of North Carolina. I’ve been up a mountain in a car in that part of North Carolina. I can testify: it is not easy terrain on a good day, let alone after a lethal hurricane.

    FEMA has deployed more than 1,500 personnel to respond to Helene. As of Friday, the agency had shipped more than 11.5 million meals, more than 12.6 million liters of water, more than 400,000 tarps and 150 generators to the affected region. The agency sent a similar number of personnel — roughly 2,000 — to Florida and the Southeast a week after Hurricane Ian struck there in 2022, according to a news release.

    About 6,700 National Guard members from 16 states were involved in relief operations as of Thursday, said Maj. Gen. Win Burkett, director of domestic operations and force development for the National Guard Bureau, along with roughly 1,000 active-duty troops.

    Is that “sending no help”?

    But the sheer scope of the disaster area, which stretches across six states in the Southeast, has presented an enormous logistical challenge. And as federal officials help state and local agencies respond, they are battling significant misinformation — only underlining and adding to the challenges of the mission that has no immediate end in sight. As of Friday, at least 221 people have died in six states as a result of the storm.

    Several Republican governors and senators from storm-battered states that could prove pivotal in the 2024 election have praised FEMA’s response. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Friday offered a robust defense of the federal recovery efforts so far.

    “I’m actually impressed with how much attention was paid to a region that wasn’t likely to have experienced the impact that they did,” Tillis told reporters, adding, “I’m out here to say that we’re doing a good job, and those who may not be on the ground, who are making those assessments, ought to get on the ground.”

    Or even just have some idea of the ground. There is no swift easy access to much of the area pounded by the hurricane. There is only slow difficult access. That’s part of why the disaster is such a disaster, as the news media have been saying from the outset.

    FEMA is at the center of a number of debates about the administration’s ability to respond to the crisis — fueled in part by the agency’s comments but also by mischaracterizations or incorrect information repeated on social media about the agency’s response.

    Politicians and others have spread false information about the response to the storm on social media. For example, some have claimed that the agency has run out of disaster response money and that storm victims can only receive $750 in federal assistance.

    Several right-wing influencers have used their large online followings to amplify these claims on X, which has declined to remove these posts or label them as misleading. The trend underscores how election-year politics — combined with lax misinformation policies by major tech platforms — are complicating efforts to keep communities safe.

    And KJK is being one of those right-wing influencers, from thousands of miles away in a comparatively flat and small country.

    It’s annoying.

  • Guest post: Scientific fact AND philosophical belief

    Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on These rococo claims.

    Maya Forstater won her landmark employment case in the UK Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) on Thursday, June 10, 2021. The UK EAT is a high court, so she won a binding precedent for lower court cases (e.g. in the more recent case of Elizabeth Pitt that the FSU reported above).

    Later that day, Freddie Sayers interviewed Maya about her case, and Ophelia posted the interview video here. In my comment #6 there, I transcribed part of the video, where Maya explained that her legal position had two parts to be taken together:

    (1) The scientific FACT that â€œsex is real” â€” as her shorthand for “binary, immutable”, and “a scientific fact”.

    (2) Her philosophical BELIEF that â€œsex matters” â€” as her shorthand for “it’s a social and political, and economic, salient, important thing.”

    In my comments on my transcript, I noted my relief that her legal position did not claim the fact of sex to be a belief. My transcript is a good reference to read her explain this more.

  • Fun with engineering

    On a brighter note, meet the Falkirk Wheel. It joins two canals that are at different heights. They used to be joined by 12 locks that took almost an entire day to go through. Now the joining takes minutes.

    Adding another, filmed by a drone.

  • If, during any of your events, a speaker shares an opinion

    Cheltenham Literary Festival is in a panic because – oh my god – people might have unpopular thoughts which they might utter aloud.

    Cheltenham Literature Festival has come under fire after issuing a warning notice to speakers comparing gender-critical views with racism and homophobia.

    The festival, which begins today, sent an email to people who are hosting talks at the event, asking them to follow new guidance “in order to protect both yourselves and the [festival] from complaints”. It said: “If, during any of your events, a speaker shares an opinion that could be deemed controversial, please reinforce that everyone is entitled to express an opinion, however Cheltenham Festivals [the organiser] does not endorse the views shared on stage. By controversial we mean those views that may be harmful to an individual or group of people, particularly those who have been historically marginalised or oppressed.”

    So what did they lead with? I’ll give you one guess.

    It gave a list of examples headed by “gender-critical views”. 

    First item on the list, knowing that men are not women. That’s their peak historical marginalized and oppressed. Not women. Not women being treated the way the Taliban treats women. Not indigenous people, not enslaved people, not workers, not immigrants, not Jews, not Uighurs, not lesbians and gay men, but people who pretend to be the “gender” opposite their own. They lead the list; they are the most oppressed.

    The list went on to include “misogyny; extreme political views including on migration, sexuality, gender, and military action; potentially problematic views on race, religion, or ethnicity; homophobia, including opinions linked to religion; extreme views on abortion and female reproductive health; widely disputed conspiracy theories”.

    So, what does the festival want people to talk about then? Chocolate? The weather? Plums? Sealing wax? Tree houses?

    Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at the human rights charity Sex Matters, said: “Heaven forbid that a book festival should allow mention of biological reality without immediately distancing itself.

    “It is of course outrageous to compare gender-critical views to racism or conspiracy theories. But Cheltenham Literature Festival is only revealing publicly the degree of hostility routinely suffered in private by gender-critical women in literary circles.

    And political circles, and artistic circles, and sporting circles, and all the other circles, except the ones that form around men who claim to be women.

  • No more fluffy bunnies

    Yebbut that’s not what competitive sports does. That’s not how it works. The whole point is that somebody wins, which entails that somebody loses. It’s not about “being kind”; it’s about being the best.

    San Jose State volleyball played its first game on Thursday night since three Mountain West schools announced they would forfeit rather than play the Spartans and transgender starter Blaire Fleming. 

    After the match, Spartans head coach Todd Kress said he was “disappointed” that his team was “losing opportunities to play” but did not reference why, exactly, schools don’t want to face San Jose State. 

    Well, Coach Kress, people are “choosing not to play” your team because your team chooses to roster a biological male. You’ve made a choice, so they’ve made their own choice. 

    That’s kind of how this works. 

    Colorado State head coach Emily Kohan also bemoaned that politics were involved with collegiate women’s volleyball…”I don’t have a strong desire to be a politician in the future. But I do have a strong desire to raise critical thinkers in my program.  And for them to understand their own selves and what’s important to them, and be able to make really conscious and mature decisions out of that. And to always make those decisions out of kindness, right?” 

    No. Not right. Not in the sense you mean. Kindness is not relevant here. Fairness is relevant here. Women being “kind” by letting men cheat them in their own sports is not even “kindness”; it’s masochism, it’s surrender, it’s letting bullies win.

    Kindness is not always appropriate or useful or right. It’s not good to be kind to people like Trump, for instance. It only encourages him to be even worse. People like Trump need to be told No, with no warmth or charm or apology or kindness to soften the blow. It’s the same with men who want to ruin women’s sports. No.

  • Such a puzzle

    Gee, why don’t female athletes want to go up against teams that include male players? I just can’t figure it out.

    San Jose State volleyball played its first game on Thursday night since three Mountain West schools announced they would forfeit rather than play the Spartans and transgender starter Blaire Fleming. 

    That is, rather than play the Spartans, who have a male player.

    After the match, Spartans head coach Todd Kress said he was “disappointed” that his team was “losing opportunities to play” but did not reference why, exactly, schools don’t want to face San Jose State. 

    …

    “It’s not just us that are losing opportunities to play,” Kress continued. “It’s the people choosing not to play us, and that’s very unfortunate when it comes to these young women who have earned the right to step on the court and play.” 

    Well, Coach Kress, people are “choosing not to play” your team because your team chooses to roster a biological male. You’ve made a choice, so they’ve made their own choice. 

    That’s kind of how this works. 

    “And so I just think that we’re in a position where it appears that government and politics have kind of intertwined itself with college sports,” Kress added. 

    Including the politics of letting a man play on the women’s team.

  • Shit in your own soup why don’t you

    I guess Cheltenham Literary Festival identifies as disdainful of literature. Seems odd, given the name.

    The lit fest isn’t just words on a page – ew, how gross would that be? Words on a page are for snobs and toffs and probably terfs. Ew.

  • These rococo claims

    A win…but how grotesque that there was ever a contest. Frederick Attenborough at the Free Speech Union underlines how grotesque it all is:

    A gender critical social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled. Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender critical views at an online meeting.

    The background to Ms Pitt’s claim is that she made various comments during a Zoom meeting of the county council’s LGBTQIA+ Group in January 2023. The meeting began with a male colleague claiming that his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog “to prompt debate about gender”. No doubt feeling that there’s only so much of this sort of thing anyone can reasonably be expected to put up with, Ms Pitt and a lesbian colleague of hers, who was also in attendance, went on the offensive, expressing their belief that sex is binary and immutable, and pointing out that there are two sexes and people cannot change sex.

    It was, after all, a meeting for lesbians and gay men. Lesbians ought to be free to say that men are not women in meeting for lesbians and gay men. Wouldn’t you think? But no, apparently that’s too boring now, the only interesting people in LGBT alphabet soup are the ones who claim to be the sex they are not. All make-believe all the time.

    The reaction of Ms Pitt’s colleagues to hearing perfectly lawful views that they disagreed with, but were apparently intellectually incapable of rebutting, was to accuse her of “symbolic violence”. One attendee described Ms Pitt as having “a really aggressive tone,” and said he found it “quite inappropriate” that she and her colleague had commented on “transwomen participating in women’s sports and sharing women’s spaces”.

    Wawawa. The women are talking. Make them stop. Wawawa.

    Following receipt of these rococo claims, the council’s management wrote to Ms Pitt to tell her a “formal concern” had been received in relation to “some views” she had expressed during the Zoom call, which were “perceived to be of an inappropriate and offensive nature”.

    It’s “inappropriate” to say that men are not women, so lesbians just have to shut up and take dick it.

    Management then prepared a report claiming Ms Pitt’s “comments… were perceived to be non-inclusive and transphobic”, had “caused significant offence”, and had been “particularly inappropriate and ill-judged”. It said they had “a detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being” of the complainants”.

    It is not reasonable, or fair, or just, to try to force women to be “inclusive” of men in the category of women.

    Four months later, in October 2023, Ms Pitt took the local authority to an employment tribunal, pleading harassment related to sexual orientation and her philosophical belief that gender is immutable.

    Her tribunal had been due to commence on Monday 29th July 2024, but after making their former employee wait around for 10 months, Cambridgeshire county council decided to back down at precisely 8:38am on the morning of the hearing. Having accepted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of Ms Pitt’s gender critical beliefs amounting to a philosophical belief within the meaning of section 10 of the Equality Act 2010, it agreed to pay her compensation.

    Hostile work environment much?

  • You what now?

    Sometimes you just have to track down the source.

    I saw this on Facebook, posted by Jay Novella.

    So I wanted to know more, because was it really that incoherent and nothing to do with the question asked and random and babbling about an award? And the answer is yes but more so. There’s some punctuation in the version Novella shared that is not there in the reality.

  • Ooh that’s controversho

    Chelt Lit Fest puts a target on women who know men are not women.

    Watch out for opinions that could be deemed controversial, folks.

    Of course, that’s all opinions, so maybe you should just stay home, with all the doors locked and all the windows covered.

    Also, notice that Chelt Lit Fest puts awareness that men are not women right at the top of the list. It seems that the most potentially controversial opinion one can have is that men are not women. I wonder if it occurs to CLF that they’re saying basically all people hold an opinion that is The Most Potentially Controversial aka evil evil evil. All people know that men are not women, even the trans ideologues. The game is to pretend not to know that, so that men who pretend to be women can have double the fun: pretending to be women and bullying actual women.

    Chelt Lit Fest should rename itself. Department of You Can’t Say That perhaps?

  • Unleash the scare quotes

    Hmm. Pink News:

    The founder of a social media app designed for “females” is appealing against a finding that it discriminated against a transgender woman.

    For “”females””? Really? Scare quotes on the word “female” because there’s no such thing? A man is a transgender woman, but women are “””females”””? The male category exists but the female one is just a sad pathetic joke?

    Duly noted, Pink News. By the way you can’t have pink. If we can’t have female, you can’t have pink.

  • Sabbath blabbath

    Project 2025 even wants to reimpose the sabbath on us. Annie Laurie Gaylor has the details:

    Today, we take for granted that you can do many of the things on Sunday that you can do on other days, perhaps reduced hours notwithstanding. Will this still be the case if Project 2025 becomes a reality? Not if the Heritage Foundation gets its way. Let’s turn to page 589 of Project 2025, to a subsection titled “Sabbath Rest.”

    “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day,” states the document. “Moreover, a shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals, and provides a healthier cadence of life for everyone. Unfortunately, the communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism, especially for low-income workers.”

    Project 2025 assures us that churches, naturally, would, in most instances, be exempt from this rule! It pretends to care about workers, but clearly the real goal is to get more bodies back into churches because of less competition.

    The document continues: “That day would default to Sunday, except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time (e.g., Friday sundown to Saturday sundown); the obligation would transfer to that period instead.”

    The project calls for Congress to encourage “communal rest” (sounds kinky!), by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to require time-and-a half pay for working on “the Sabbath” regardless of whether someone is truly working overtime. It concedes this would “lead to higher costs and limited access to goods and services and reduce work available on the Sabbath,” but after all, “the proper role of government in helping to enable individuals to practice their religion is to reduce barriers to work options and to fruitful employer and employee relations.”

    Like hell it is.