Meanwhile Trump

The arrest of a US army veteran who protested against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has raised alarms among legal experts and fellow veterans familiar with his service in Afghanistan.

Bajun Mavalwalla II – a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations mission in Afghanistan – was charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers” after joining a demonstration against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Spokane, Washington.

We are allowed to demonstrate. Presidents are not allowed to punish us for demonstrating. We are not the criminals here.

Legal experts say the case marks an escalation in the administration’s attacks on first amendment rights. Afghanistan war veterans who

Well there is an easy solution…

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif appeals World Boxing ban over mandatory sex testing

Algeria‘s Olympic gold medallist Imane Khelif has appealed to sport‘s highest court against a World Boxing decision barring her from upcoming events unless she undergoes genetic sex testing, Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said on Monday.

Why? Why is he doing that? Why doesn’t he just take the test?

The appeal seeks to overturn the ruling and allow Algeria’s Khelif to compete at the 2025 World Boxing Championships without having the test, the Court of Arbitration for Sport said in a statement, adding that it had dismissed her request to suspend the decision while the case is heard.

But … Read the rest

Well this is horrific. Glinner writes:

The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets.

He shares the tweets. One concludes with “if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Another captions a demo with “A photo you can smell.” The last one says “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.”

At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to

Trump administration offers military funeral honors to Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt

The U.S. government is offering military funeral honors for Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was killed at 35 by an officer in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Babbitt was a U.S. Air Force veteran from California who was shot dead wearing a Trump campaign flag wrapped around her shoulders while attempting to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.

Offering military honors to one of the Capitol rioters is part of President Donald Trump’s attempts to rewrite that chapter after the 2020 election as a patriotic stand, given he still denies he lost that election. Babbitt

Originally a comment by Enzyme on Crucial.

I wouldn’t want to speculate on what the GMC’s rationale its decision about HRT prescriptions might have been; but let’s allow for the sake of the argument that it was buffoonery. Still: there might be an upside to that – or, at least, there might have been a bullet dodged.

Had the GMC said that it was a specialist area, requiring special training, then who would have undertaken such training? Since doctors are not assigned to specialisms by lottery, the answer to that would have to be that the training would only or overwhelmingly be sought by True Believers in the gender cause. And, in turn, that would have given heft to … Read the rest

But do not call him Ted.

Dr Beth Upton’s birth name will be redacted in official Sandie Peggie documents, the tribunal judge has ruled. The case has restarted for a third time with final submissions being put forward by each legal team before a decision will be made towards the end of the year.

…

Born Theodore Upton, the name was used on the General Medical Council register before he was re-registered under his new name, Dr Beth Upton. His legal team claimed that publishing his birth name would be against his human rights and would out him as a trans woman.

Judge Sandy Kemp ruled in his favour, confirming that the submissions can be published but Theodore Upton

The NY Times on grinding the proletariat:

Trump is the most ruthlessly antilabor president since before the Great Depression.

If the labor movement does not fight harder than it has since Mr. Trump regained the presidency, its future will be dire.

Mr. Trump and his administration have unilaterally stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, 400,000 workers, or 2.8 percent of America’s unionized workers, have lost their collective bargaining rights because of an executive order that will eventually affect more than one million federal workers. Mr. Trump ushered in Labor Day weekend on Thursday by continuing his assault of federal unions, adding the Patent Office, NASA and the

Um…happy Labor Day.

Federal employees have had the right to join unions and collectively bargain over working conditions since the 1960s. Unlike private sector workers, government employees cannot negotiate wages or strike. But through collective bargaining, they do help shape disciplinary procedures, parental leave policies, how overtime is managed and much more.

Giving workers a say in workplace policies, the thinking goes, leads to less friction in the workplace and more effective government.

But President Trump has abandoned that idea. Instead, he’s argued that federal employee unions pose a danger to the country. In March, he issued an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for more than one million federal workers at about 20 federal agencies. Almost immediately,

Oh really?

That first bullet point is just so much blather, unless what they are sneakily doing is pretending that the rules and expectations around gender are the same thing as the categories female and male. I think that probably is what they’re doing, and it’s both pompous and deceptive. Of course “understandings of sex” have always been binary, which is not to deny that views on how women and men have to behave are contingent and various.

Yes of course the rules around gender are “open to political manipulation”; we know that; it does not follow that men can be women.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A quiet senior.

Ms. Gaines’s approach to activism involves a weaponization of names, pronouns, physical descriptions and other language to undermine the legitimacy of transgender people’s mere existence in the world.

JFC. It was Thomas who was weaponizing all of that in order to undermine women and rob them of their safety, dignity, and awards.

In other words, she often seems to go out of her way to provoke those who are not already fully on board with her mission.

JFC. Anyone mentioning reality provokes these people. Gaines is not any different in this regard. Thomas is male; always has been, always will be. Maybe Gaines was just tired of … Read the rest

Now Trump is kneecapping Voice of America.

VOA was established in 1942, during World War II. Building on American use of shortwave radio during the war, it initially served as an anti-propaganda tool against Axis misinformation but expanded to include other forms of content like American music programs for cultural diplomacy. During the Cold War, its operations expanded in an effort to fight communism and played a role in the decline of communism in several countries. Throughout its operations, it has aimed to broadcast uncensored information to residents under restrictive regimes, even airing behind the Iron Curtain.

Ah; that will be the problem then. Trump doesn’t want anybody messing with his restrictive regime.

The

The Independent breathlessly reports:

Transgender men and women are increasingly having crucial hormone treatment withdrawn by NHS doctors, an investigation has found.

Trans patients and staff at NHS gender services have said that cases of people being refused hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or having the medication withdrawn are on the rise.

That’s one way of putting it. Another would be “Some men and women who think they’re the opposite sex are no longer able to get opposite-sex hormones on the NHS.”

In other words the Indy is very much stacking the deck by calling cross-sex hormones “treatment” and “medication”. Delusions about what sex one is are not a good reason to harm patients by fiddling with their hormones.

HRT

Disastrous Kennedy’s demolition of the CDC continues.

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) immunizations chief Dr. Demetre Daskalakis said Sunday that he’s concerned with the direction the agency is going and worried about public health going forward.

Daskalakis, who served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, submitted his resignation from the CDC on Wednesday in protest following the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removing CDC Director Susan Monarez from her position. In his resignation letter, Daskalakis denounced HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership of both the HHS and the CDC.

“From my vantage point as a doctor who’s taken the Hippocratic Oath, I only see harm coming. I may

The Telegraph:

A disabled child was banned from summer camp after his mother expressed gender-critical views, The Telegraph can reveal.

The eight-year-old was preparing for his first residential trip in July organised by Over the Wall (OTW) – a Derby-based charity that runs getaways for disabled children and their families. But he and his mother, 52, were turned away after she insisted, during a heated discussion with an organiser from the camp, that people could not change sex.

So now children have to believe in Magic Gender in order to go to summer camp?

But internal papers documenting the incident state that the eight-year-old was barred after the summer camp concluded that the mother’s “views on gender and inclusivity”

That doesn’t sound good…

Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood

The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models

An odd way to put it.

That night, the atmosphere in the arena was charged with a tension distinct from the usual intensity of athletic competition. “I’ve never felt a crowd root against anybody before,” said Dan D’Addona, who covered the meet for Swimming World Magazine.

The target was Lia Thomas, a quiet senior from the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Thomas swam competitively for years as a member of the men’s team, before beginning estrogen treatment to transition in 2019, and later switching to racing with the women. Over the course of the 2021-22 season, she became national news, an avatar for churning unease about gender, power, safety, sports, politics, feminism and biology.

First of all, what is a … Read the rest

Ok so let’s read SEEN in Journalism’s letter to the BBC.

We call on the BBC to embrace accuracy in its coverage of ‘transgender’ issues and adopt an editorial policy of accurately describing sex.

The BBC has a unique responsibility to deliver accurate, impartial, and transparent reporting to its diverse audience. The current default, of using preferred pronouns and the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ according to a person’s ‘gender identity’ is at best highly misleading and at worst a betrayal of the BBC’s public service remit.

And it does have that public service remit, not least because people are required to pay for it via the license fee.

Biological sex is an objective reality defined by gamete size, determined

Golly gee whaddya know, there are actually reasons women don’t want men in our toilets with us.

POLICE have swept Scottish Parliament toilets for hidden cameras after a suspended Labour MSP was charged with possessing indecent images and banned from the premises.

MSPs and workers in the Edinburgh Parliament were given an update on Friday after news broke that Colin Smyth, who has had his access suspended amid a police investigation, was accused of having installed recording devices in the toilets.

Huh. But we’ve been repeatedly assured that nothing like that ever happens so shut up.… Read the rest

Helen Joyce is pissed off at the BBC.

In May, shortly after appearing on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, I wrote about what a depressing experience it had been. I mentioned that I would be putting in a formal complaint about the way the show misrepresented me in an interview the following week with Sacha Deshmukh of Amnesty, formerly of Stonewall, and predicted that my complaint would get nowhere.

And sure enough it got nowhere.

I’m really not joking when I say that I would like the BBC to be defunded – on my specialist subject, sex’n’gender, it has been nothing short of a propaganda arm. It’s directly responsible for much of the social contagion that has seen trans identification

Hey is it suddenly 1950 again? Did I miss the alert?

Aggressive energy is for men only. Women are supposed to have the Goddess energy, not the real kind. Them’s the rules.