Just when you think Jolyon Maugham can’t get any lower (not least because Earth is in the way) he does…

I’ve never read any of J K Rowling’s books. They aren’t part of my imaginative universe. But I know she is and has been a generous philanthropist for women and girls, and that she has received opprobrium and death threats for her views. Even for Halloween, this is nasty, not cute pic.twitter.com/Oqf8RAEo1m

— Barbara Rich (@BarbaraRich_law) October 31, 2025

Jolyon is not 9 years old. He’s not even 39 years old. … Read the rest

Bash Back bashes again.

Radical trans-led direct action group Bash Back targeted the headquarters of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in London this morning, amid growing tensions over the Commission’s controversial interim guidance on single-sex spaces.

The group, which gained notoriety earlier this month for vandalising the Brighton Centre ahead of the FiLiA feminist conference, posted a statement on social media platform BlueSky before posting videos and photographs from this morning. The statement read: “The EHRC is a hate group. This month, the Good Law Project forced the EHRC to dump their transphobic ‘interim guidance’.

“Last week, six human rights groups demanded the EHRC have their A-status revoked due to an ‘obsessive campaign to strip trans people

Oh but it’s all so complicated, we don’t know how to deal with it.

Rules that would ban transgender people from using facilities that do not match their biological sex could be delayed for more than a year, it has emerged, as ministers were accused of “undermining the law” by demanding extra checks.

Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, received statutory guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) eight weeks ago, setting out how gyms, clubs and hospitals must judge single-sex spaces based on biology.

The document has not yet been laid in parliament and many organisations, including some NHS trusts and the civil service, said they were waiting for the guidance before implementing changes after

A friend sent this for our viewing pleasure:… Read the rest

More dawdling and stalling and delaying because hey it’s only women so we really can’t be bothered.

Rules that would ban transgender people from using facilities that do not match their biological sex could be delayed for more than a year, it has emerged, as ministers were accused of “undermining the law” by demanding extra checks.

Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, received statutory guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) eight weeks ago, setting out how gyms, clubs and hospitals must judge single-sex spaces based on biology.

The document has not yet been laid in parliament and many organisations, including some NHS trusts and the civil service, said they were waiting for the guidance before implementing

I welcomed The Cambridge University Society of Women to the fray a few days ago. Today the student paper Varsity explains how naughty those women are.

Students launch women’s society excluding trans women

Students launch women’s society excluding men. You don’t say! Mind you, feminists have been launching women’s societies and parties and so on for more than half a century, but let’s all disapprove of these women anyway. How very dare they.

Students have launched the first women’s society at the University of Cambridge to be restricted to those defined as “female at birth,” a move that has been criticised by other groups as “an assault on the trans community”.

Which is stupid. It’s not an assault on … Read the rest

After a bit of exploration it looks to me as if the serious news outlets are cautious about calling gender magic “medical treatment.” NPR may be an outlier in calling it that.

The Boston Globe came the closest in the selection I was offered:

Under federal pressure, Fenway Health ends gender-affirming medical care for trans patients under 19

But of course “affirming” that a patient is the gender/sex she/he is not is not medical care. The Globe should stand with NPR in the corner.

But it’s good to see that not all news outlets make that mistake, at least not every single time.… Read the rest

Which is it, NPR? Medical care or gender affirming care? They are NOT the same thing. More like opposites.

Title:

Trump pushes an end to medical care for transgender youth nationally

Lede:

Access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth will be dramatically restricted by the Trump administration under new proposals by the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Gender-affirming care” is not medical care. It may be carried out under medical auspices, but it’s not medical. It doesn’t treat any illness or injury, it doesn’t repair or mitigate any handicap, it doesn’t make recipients more healthy, it doesn’t inoculate against any disease. It’s arguably medical malpractice.

It does apparently make some people happier than they were, and being happier is … Read the rest

There it is! Spotted in the wild. Spelled out for all to see. Women are not in any way a despised or neglected or excluded or ignored or disadvantaged group; women are of the ruling class, women are the dominant and domineering sex, women are the privileged sex, women are invulnerable tyrannical exploiters.

NF there doesn’t seem to be one on women
AM at the time we focused on other groups. We have asked for chairs including for a women’s group, but from an intersectionality pov women are in the other groups as we have a 80 % women .

— Tribunal Tweets (@tribunaltweets) October 30, 2025

From an intersectionality point of view women are in the other, privileged, more … Read the rest

Oh good, Trump is restarting the doomsday machine.

Trump ordered the U.S. military on Thursday to immediately resume testing nuclear weapons after a gap of 33 years, minutes before beginning a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

…

“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately,” Trump posted.

“Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years.”

Trump appeared to be sending a message to both Xi, who has more than doubled China’s nuclear warhead arsenal over the past five years, and to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tested two

Put your hands together for The Dolls.

They’re all men. The women of the year are all men.… Read the rest

The language of this dispute is so corrupted and twisted and inside-out that reporting on it is inevitably a tangle of weeds and thorns. The Telegraph does not escape this trap.

The Liberal Democrats are at war over trans rights after the leadership defied its members and banned biological men from taking women’s posts in the party.

But what are trans rights? Who says? What happens when they cancel the rights of other sets of people? Specifically, the rights of half the population? How do we know the purported rights are rights at all?

On Tuesday, the party banned trans women from taking women’s positions following the Supreme Court’s ruling on biological sex.

Because trans women are men. Men … Read the rest

Sinister

Two federal prosecutors were informed Wednesday that they will be put on leave after filing a legal brief that described the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as being carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,” sources familiar with their removals told ABC News. 

So they were put on leave because they filed the brief?

The two prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, were locked out of their government devices and informed Wednesday morning they will be placed on leave, just hours after they filed a sentencing memorandum in the case of Taylor Taranto, the sources said.  

Were they told why? Were they told it was because they filed the brief?

It’s unclear

Police Scotland ignore the criminal and charge his victim with a crime. You’ll never guess which party is a man and which is a woman.

Parliamentary police officers have ordered a director of For Women Scotland to attend a police station to face vandalism charges over a broken brolly after a complaint by a trans activist.

Susan Smith, one third of the feminist group who took the Scottish Government to the Supreme Court on the definition of a woman and won, has been accused of minor damage to an umbrella at a rally outside the Scottish parliament last month.

But the incident, which could result in Mrs Smith, 54, appearing in a criminal court, has provoked fury and Police

Cracking down on the crackdown.

U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, the face of “Operation Midway Blitz” cracking down on illegal immigration, must report daily to a federal judge after reports of combative enforcement, including using tear gas.

I don’t think “combative” is the right word. It’s what you say when someone is getting a little too intense when arguing over a newspaper headline or similar. I think the word should be “aggressive” or “violent”. If we’re talking about tear gas versus shouting, we need a less emollient word than “combative.”

Bovino appeared Tuesday for a tense hearing before U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in downtown Chicago. She questioned him about reports of aggressive

The Guardian words this so carefully, and dishonestly.

At least 11 states and two territories are capitulating to a recent demand from the Trump administration to strip references to gender identity and the existence of transgender and non-binary people from a federal sex education program, officials confirmed to the Guardian.

…

Prep aims to educate adolescents on healthy relationships and how to prevent pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted infections. In April, the Trump administration demanded all states and territories that receive money for Prep to send a copy of their curriculum to HHS and its agency the Administration for Children and Families for a “medical accuracy review”.

Four months later, the administration sent letters to 46 states

Lordy how people give themselves away.

You call whoever whatever you want whenever. But free speech means we can look on and think you are an ignorant, bigoted cow who is deeply unkind.

— Darren Styles OBE (@bydarrenstyles) October 25, 2025

There you have it. Women repeat that we are allowed to call men “men” and a man responds by calling a woman a cow. That’s balance! … Read the rest

What ever happened to due process?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that the U.S. military has carried out three strikes in the eastern Pacific Ocean against boats accused of carrying drugs, killing 14 people and leaving one survivor.

This was the first time multiple strikes were announced in a single day. Carried out Monday, the strikes mark a continued escalation in the pace of the attacks in South American waters, which began in early September and had been spaced weeks apart.

…

Hegseth said “the four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes, and carrying narcotics.”

The Trump administration has shown no evidence to support its claims about the boats, their connection to drug

Wat?

Someone get him a Doctor. He’s barking fucking mad. pic.twitter.com/uK0azezvhA

— Stuart Macintosh (@stueymaco) October 27, 2025

Erm…who is it we’re supposed to be grooming? What are we supposed to be grooming them into?

And if we’re “grooming” what is it that people like Jonathan Willougby are doing? Surely urging credulous teenagers and young adults to mutilate themselves in order to pretend to be the other sex is more like grooming than not doing that is.

Oh well. Brush your hair, all of you.… Read the rest