Transgender Trend shares a heartbreaking and enraging letter to Rishi Sunak from five teenage girls asking for single-sex toilets in schools.

Five teenage girls from schools across England have got together to write to the Prime Minister asking for the re-establishment of single-sex toilets in schools, for the privacy, dignity and safety of girls, and to state this unequivocally in the forthcoming trans schools guidance. The girls have used pseudonyms to protect their identities, which we also think sends a strong message about the situation for girls now in schools, that they are too afraid of being ostracised or bullied for holding gender-critical views [to make this reasonable request openly].

Dear Rishi Sunak

Single-sex facilities are an essential safeguarding feature,

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on A seven-page dossier.

I’m glad the Free Speech Union is defending Colonel Wright. I recently ditched my little canvas New Yorker tote bag for a little canvas Free Speech Union bag that I proudly carry every time I go to the market.

I’m not entirely surprised the army is so hostile to gender-critical views, considering the military is lousy with crossdressers. For reasons still not quite understood, military men are far more likely to become transvestites than men in any other profession. The trope of the secretly-crossdressing general has been around since at least the 18th century. It’s incredible how many of the most famous trans activists of the 20th and 21st … Read the rest

All perfectly normal.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk appeared in a Twitter post to endorse the idea of taking the right to vote away from people without children.

Yet again, where are the editors? Musk didn’t appear in a Twitter post. That’s silly: nobody can appear in a Twitter post. But anyway – Musk said the thing.

The billionaire Tesla co-founder replied “Yup,” to a series of posts from Twitter user @fentasyl, which argued “democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents.”

Yo Eelzee baby, maybe it’s the other way around. Ja ever think of that? Maybe it’s parents who shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because they’re so likely to favor their children over everyone … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Are you now or have you ever been a diversity statement?

If you do think that the different men/women ratios in roles such as primary-school teaching and nursing, versus, say, construction work, being a lumberjack and computer coding, are all about socialisation and very little to do with biological differences, then, well, I think you’re wrong.

It would help things immensly if we were looking at this in an environment where socialization was neutral, but we’re not. I think it’s far too early to rule out socialization. Horribly naive in fact. Even without the subtle (and not so subtle) coaching and influence of even the most well-meaning and enlightened parents, there’s … Read the rest

Even the Army?

A colonel has claimed he was forced to quit the Army after he was criticised for stating that “men cannot be women”.

Dr Kelvin Wright, 54, had been a Reservist commanding officer with 14 years’ unblemished service, including two tours in Afghanistan, before his “honour was attacked” with a transphobia complaint and an investigation he described as “hellish”.

In May, he shared a post on his private Facebook account from Fair Play for Women, a campaign group that works with governing bodies to preserve women’s sport for those born female, which consisted of a quote from Helen Joyce, a feminist campaigner backed by the author JK Rowling.

The quote, shared without any additional comment, said: “If women

Extremely rich man who pays no taxes gets extremely expensive new sword paid for by people not as rich as he is.

A new sword will be presented to King Charles when he receives Scotland’s crown jewels at a ceremony in Edinburgh.

The King will be presented with the Honours of Scotland at a service in St Giles’ Cathedral on 5 July.

Named after his late mother, the Elizabeth sword was commissioned because the existing 16th Century sword is too fragile to handle.

So don’t handle it then. Skip the sword-handling, or use another sword from the cupboard.

The Elizabeth Sword cost £22,000 to make and was designed by Mark Dennis and worked on by a number of expert

Huh. I thought Choss was supposed to be such a keen environmentalist.

King Charles’s private country estate at Sandringham in Norfolk has been linked to the deaths and disappearances of a string of legally protected birds over the past two decades, a Guardian investigation has found.

The cases include the alleged poisoning, shooting and disappearance of some of the UK’s rarest birds of prey. One of the cases involved the mysterious loss of eastern England’s last breeding female montagu’s harrier, a critically endangered species whose future in the UK is now looking bleak.

The Guardian has identified 18 cases since 2003 involving suspected wildlife offences or the alleged misuse of poisons, linked to the royal estate and neighbouring farmland

Is the heat really such a problem? Who needs fish and plants anyway?

The UK’s hottest June on record caused unprecedented deaths of fish in rivers and disturbed insects and plants, environment groups have warned. Nature is being “pounded by extreme weather without a chance to recover”, the Wildlife Trusts said.

…

“The reports of the number of fish death incidents in rivers for this time of year has been unprecedented. I would normally expect rivers to be affected later in the summer when it’s hotter and drier,” Mark Owen, from the Angling Trust, told BBC News. In one case, sea trout were found dead on the River Wear in north-east England, he said.

The deaths are partly caused by

Hottest so far.

The UK had the hottest June on record, the Met Office has confirmed. The average monthly temperature of 15.8C (60.4F) exceeded the previous highest average June temperature, recorded in 1940 and 1976, by 0.9C.

Climate change made the chance of surpassing the previous joint record at least twice as likely, scientists also said.

…

“It’s officially the hottest June on record for the UK, for mean temperature as well as average maximum and minimum temperature,” said Met Office’s Climate Science Manager Mark McCarthy.

“An increase of 0.9C may not seem a huge amount, but it’s really significant because it has taken the average daytime and the night time temperature for the whole of the UK,” Paul

A pusher of the dogma tells us how to push the dogma, which is to say, Helen Webberley says

Saving trans lives is simple:

Believe them.

Yes, that is simple, but it can’t be a general rule, for reasons that ought to be obvious if you think about it at all.

It can’t be a general rule that you must believe X brand of people, because people can be mistaken and people can lie.

Webberley is using the fact that, socially speaking, we generally do believe what people tell us if there’s no obvious reason not to. If we ask a stranger where the nearest grocery store is, we assume she’ll tell us the truth, because why wouldn’t she? … Read the rest

So can men breastfeed infants or no?? Some say yes; some even say yes of course they can and you’re a bigot for saying no.

Suzanne Moore says

Stunningly obvious that ‘lived experience’ matters. Many women here are talking about babies/breastfeeding and how difficult it can be. Then a load of ideologues telling us that men can breastfeed who clearly have never done it or ever looked after a baby? Latch on. To reality.

James Esses says

The NHS actually has official guidance on ‘Dads and breastfeeding’.

You know what it says? “Some men really like the changes in their partner’s breasts during breastfeeding”.

You know what it doesn’t say? “Men can breastfeed”.

Why?

Because they can’t.

Michael Eric Dyson writes:

This is the face of a man who climbed the ladder of affirmative action to his present perch of power only to help destroy the very ladder on which he ascended. This is not only the mark of deep ingratitude & disavowal of history, but a withering betrayal of justice & democracy.

The face belongs to Clarence Thomas.

To be fair, I think you can accept a benefit while thinking the benefit is a bad idea, without necessarily being a hypocrite. I also think you can accept a benefit and then over several decades develop views on why the benefit is a bad idea without being a hypocrite.

But I also think Dyson has a … Read the rest

The Chronicle of Higher Education looks closely at the DEI orthodoxy-sniffing at UCLA:

Yoel Inbar, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, was up for a job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the psychology department there decided not to proceed after more than 60 graduate students in the department signed an open letter urging the university not to hire him.

At issue, the students wrote, were Inbar’s comments on his podcast expressing skepticism about the use of diversity statements in hiring, as well as about other efforts intended to make the academy more inclusive.

But his skepticism wasn’t (and isn’t) about the value of diversity, it was simply about the efficacy of diversity statements. … Read the rest

Now people who know that men are not women are having their bank accounts closed.

Wings Over Scotland:

Well well. The head of “financial tracking” at HSBC, the bank that just closed all my accounts for no reason, isn’t just a transwoman, but he and his transman partner are the top two names on the list of Patrons of controversial under-investigation trans “charity” Mermaids.

We’re done.

The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.

As envoys gathered in Bonn in early June to prepare for this year’s annual climate talks in November, average global surface air temperatures were more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for several days, the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.

These “climate talks” are a weird charade when we can all see that nothing is being done and nothing will be done.

Though mean temperatures had temporarily breached the 1.5C threshold before, this was the first time they

Still refusing to report the subject accurately:

A woman who lost out on a job after tweeting gender-critical views is to get a £100,000 payout after a decision from an employment tribunal.

She didn’t “lose out on” a job; she lost the job she had. She lost her job.

Ms Forstater, the founder of campaign group Sex Matters, believes biological sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.

She doesn’t “believe” sex is immutable, she knows it is. Knowing that people can’t change sex isn’t a “belief”; it’s just awareness of a reality. [Yes, philosophically speaking knowledge is justified true belief, but the BBC isn’t speaking philosophically, to put it mildly.]

Casting it as “belief” isn’t … Read the rest

But this never happens and never will happen.

A boy has been arrested by police investigating reports of serious sexual assaults in a gender neutral toilet at a school. Essex Police said it was working closely with the school and local authorities while inquiries continued.

The boy, under the age of 16, has been bailed with conditions. Essex County Council confirmed it was working with police and relevant authorities on a “safeguarding matter” at a school.

No, on a series of sexual assaults. The kind which never happen.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by James Garnett on It’s not about being a disruptor.

Sort of a side-note, but: it’s practically a truism among those of us who are involved in dangerous activities that it’s “never the gear that fails”. That is, it’s human miscalculations that lead to accidents and death. It’s not snapped ropes or slipped gear or failed parachutes, it’s almost always a bad decision somewhere along the line. Of course, yes, sometimes it’s failed gear, but it happens so rarely in our highly regulated and tested worlds that the exceptions just serve to prove the rule. There’s an entire publication dedicated to analysis of climbing accidents in North America that is published each year, “Accidents in North … Read the rest

Here’s why Elon’s cunning plan is so stupid:

Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk has said.

In a tweet of his own, Mr Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts a day.

If you don’t use Twitter that might sound reasonable, like the Guardian and the Washington Post and similar saying you can read X number of articles for X price. (They don’t do that, but they could.) But Twitter doesn’t work like a newspaper, because what you see is what Twitter decides to show you. It mostly works because what Twitter decides to show you is shaped by what … Read the rest

The New Yorker has an in-depth piece on the recklessness of the amateur Let’s Make a Submersible guy. It’s like reading an in-depth piece on why the Challenger exploded. Spoiler: he was determined to go ahead, safety be damned.

Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But, to McCallum, Lahey, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design flaws for more than five years, filing complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut