Mara Yamauchi in The Guardian a few days ago:

Why does the female category in sport exist? It exists so that those born female – women and girls – can participate, compete and excel in sport that is fair and safe. Without the female category, women and girls would be nowhere in sport because of the massive physical advantages that those born male enjoy.

…

The fact of you reading this article right now is due to the female category existing. Without it, I would be a complete nobody. When I set my personal best, 2:23:12 in 2009, I was ranked second in the world in women’s road running. But 2:23:12 is, being frank, nothing special by male standards.

… Read the rest

The Mail wasn’t wrong about that “we’ll call the cops on you” page at Halifax. Home Who we are Inclusion and diversity.

Halifax: What we stand for

Ensuring an inclusive environment

At Halifax, we put our customers and colleagues first. We want to make sure we do all we can to champion every type of person, so we are working hard to create a fully-inclusive environment for our customers and colleagues, one that acknowledges all people and is representative of the communities we serve.

Part of this means we will act if we feel something is wrong. We don’t think it’s enough to simply not be racist. We will be actively anti-racist and stand alongside all of our people

… Read the rest

Ooops.

Halifax customers are closing their accounts en masse today after its social media team told them to leave if they don’t like their new pronoun badges for staff in what is being branded one of the biggest PR disasters in British business history.

One account holder told MailOnline they have already pulled out investments and savings worth £450,000 while many more said they are closing ISAs, cutting up credit cards or transferring balances to rivals after they accused the bank of ‘alienating’ them with ‘pathetic virtue signalling’.

It’s Andy M, you see. He told them to close their accounts if they don’t like Halifax’s Pronoun Religion, so they said we’ll do that little thing.

The Mail adds the … Read the rest

Apparently Twitter thinks this is ok.

My family’s address (covered), a pipe bomb and a picture of a bomb-making handbook. The account remains active, naturally. #BeKind pic.twitter.com/IoEkHzpmpd

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 1, 2022

Updating: Actually I just looked and the account is now gone. Apparently it just took them a couple of weeks.… Read the rest

They just never stop.

… Read the rest

Glinner reports a win:

The Information Commissioner has ordered the University of Oxford to disclose the scores and feedback it received from Stonewall as part of the lobby group’s controversial Workplace Equality Index scheme.

Of course their scheme isn’t about equality at all. Saying men are women has nothing to do with equality.

Following a Freedom of Information appeal undertaken as part of the “Don’t Submit to Stonewall” campaign initiated by Legal Feminist and Sex Matters, the Information Commissioner’s Office has written a hard-hitting decision that strikes at the secrecy of the scheme.

Thank you Legal Feminist and Sex Matters!

Stonewall requires organisations to sign a contract forbidding them to reveal either the feedback it gives them, or the

… Read the rest

One terrible idea got shot down:

A group of educators in Texas proposed referring to slavery as “involuntary relocation” in second-grade classes — before being rebuffed by the State Board of Education.

The nine educators made up one of many groups tasked with advising the Texas board on changes to the social studies curriculum, which would affect the state’s almost 9,000 public schools.

…

Aicha Davis, a Democrat representing Dallas and Fort Worth, said during the meeting that the wording was not a “fair representation” of the slave trade, according to the Texas Tribune, which first reported the story.

Part of the proposed draft standards for the curriculum, the Tribune reported, directed students to “compare journeys to

… Read the rest

Rhys McKinnon talking to Trevor Noah part 2:

Noah asks if trans women couldn’t compete against men instead of women.

So, like I said, this boils down to, are trans women really women [pumping fists up and down], are they really female. Because if you think yes, then we belong competing with other women. So it’s an extreme indignity to say, “I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.” Right? So you can’t single out one of the most important facets of our society, we are obsessed with sport, athletes are some of the most highly praised highly paid people on the planet, so you can’t say that like I believe you and I support you but not for

… Read the rest

Et tu Trevor Noah?

Full interview with @SportIsARight: https://t.co/gs30lzxl5s

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 1, 2022

I’m going to have to watch all 13.37 minutes of misery.

Noah starts with oh oh it’s so hard to talk about trans issues, people tense up, that’s why it’s good you’re here: we can talk about it.

Well, yes, they can talk about it, but here’s why its bad that Rhys McKinnon is on The Daily Show: it’s because he’s a cold-blooded ruthless liar and a bully who cheats women in cycling.

McKinnon starts with the Olympics motto that sport is a human right, then says people say it’s complicated, it’s a complicated issue, but he thinks it’s not.

It all

… Read the rest

The mobster vibe continues.

Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson received at least one message tacitly warning her not to cooperate with the House January 6 select committee from an associate of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

…

“[A person] let me know you have your deposition tomorrow. He wants me to let you know that he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal, and you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition,” read the message. The redaction was Meadows, the sources said.

The message was presented during closing remarks at the special hearing with Hutchinson by the panel’s vice-chair, Liz

… Read the rest

Oh you thought men had been banned from competing against women in cycling? Hahahaha no there’s a clause that gets around that, which you can find in the archives in the filing cabinet in the basement behind the boxes of old tank parts.

https://twitter.com/janedougallbbc/status/1542557084495011840… Read the rest

The Telegraph has taken up the Wings Over Scotland story.

Women who question transgender ideology have been branded ‘farts’ as part of equalities training offered to civil servants in Nicola Sturgeon’s Government, it has emerged.

Doesn’t sound great, put that way, does it.

Workers who attended a workplace “trans 101” course were told the term was an acronym for “feminism appropriating ridiculous transphobe” and that women who oppose inclusivity measures were part of a “trans hate group”.

Staff who attended the training session, run by the Scottish Government’s taxpayer-funded LGBTI+ internal staff network, were also urged to study claims that biological sex is a “falsehood” invented by the medical profession to “reinforce white supremacy and gender oppression”.

The … Read the rest

Wings Over Scotland shares an item via a training course civil servants are being sent on by the Scottish Government. The obedient civil servants who attended got a followup “thank you and here is a long list of further reading” from one Jonah Coman; the item Wings shares is on that long list of further reading.

As you can see, one of the sites that staff are directed to is something called The Trans Language Primer. We thought you should see some of its content.

So Wings shares a lot of that content. It is, of course, grotesque. The grotesquery is amping up all the time, I guess because it has to. The demands and instructions have to keep getting … Read the rest

Oh and also let’s all just jump off a tall building.

The Supreme Court on Thursday curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, one of the most important environmental decisions in years.

That’s great. Global warming is spreading across the global sky like the eruption of Vesuvius as seen from Pompeii, and the Supreme Court says yeah let’s have more of that.

I wonder if any of them are at all bothered by thoughts of their children and grandchildren.

In a setback for the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change, the court said in a 6-3 ruling the EPA does not have broad authority to shift the nation’s 

… Read the rest

The Times drags Halifax:

Halifax has suggested that customers close their accounts if they oppose a policy allowing staff to display their personal pronouns on name tags.

Or, more accurately, if they oppose the absurd ideology behind posturing about “displaying” “personal” “pronouns.” We don’t actually care what banks allow employees to put on their name tags, but we do care about the idiotic truth claims such banks make in bragging about their Name Tag Pronouns Policy.

The bank tweeted a picture of a name badge with the pronouns she/her/hers and the caption: “Pronouns matter.” In response to complaints the social media team said that Halifax wanted to “open the conversation around gender identity. We care about our customers and

… Read the rest

The author of that revolting piece in the Independent about the chop shop in the woods was written by Io Dodds, who is – can you guess? – a man who says he’s a woman.

We’ve met him once before, a few months ago, when he wrote another piece for the Indy, this one explaining why it’s perfectly fine for Lia Thomas to cheat women out of prizes.… Read the rest

Where the hell have all the adults gone? Isn’t it supposed to be adults running institutions like universities and health services and councils and newspapers? Not reckless moody children?

‘Never ask permission’: How two trans women ran a legendary underground surgical clinic in a rural tractor barnhttps://t.co/deFJIZ0wRi pic.twitter.com/eEIPqL2yoV

— The Independent (@Independent) June 29, 2022

ExCUSE me??? “Legendary”? A “legendary” “underground” “surgical clinic” where they mutilated people’s genitals? Which The Independent is flattering in public? Are they drunk?

And, if you had entered that tractor barn between 2004 and 2006, you would have found a secret underground transgender surgical clinic run by two trans women with an autoclave and a cauterisation machine bought on eBay.https://t.co/deFJIZ0wRi

— The Independent

… Read the rest

But don’t try to tell these sadists that there’s no way to know who is a predatory male and who is a man who wants to live as if he were a woman.

https://twitter.com/laureningram/status/1541693928860172288

It makes her angry, more angry than she can say, that a woman who is a rape victim wants a women-only support group.

https://twitter.com/laureningram/status/1541699988190904320

Yes that’s nice but explain to us how you know that the man in question is not a predator. Saying “she is a trans woman” does not count as such an explanation.

Thank God that male born people will still be able to access spaces with the most vulnerable and victimised women who have been subject to the worst of violations at

… Read the rest

Can women have anything for women? No.

A woman who is suing a rape crisis charity says she felt unable to speak at a support group after a transgender woman began attending the same meeting.

“Sarah”, who says she was raped in her 20s, stopped going to the sessions, saying she became uncomfortable sharing details of her past with the group.

She says the centre could have offered separate groups, telling the BBC: “I think my case is about women’s rights.”

The charity, Survivors’ Network says it plans to vigorously defend the claim.

It says male victims of sexual violence are referred to neighbouring services, but trans women “are welcome into all of our women-only spaces”.

They shouldn’t be. Trans … Read the rest

Also Renato Mariotti:

7/ Courts have routinely set this bar very high in the context of political speech because the First Amendment broadly protects speech of that type.

A political statement by the President of the United States would be presumptively protected by the First Amendment.

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) June 28, 2022

9/ The DOJ will understandably be concerned that the Supreme Court (particularly the current court) would find that Trump's speech was constitutionally protected by the First Amendment. But this evidence should be enough to make them consider an incitement prosecution.

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) June 28, 2022

The thing about the “they’re not here to hurt me” admission that I hadn’t fully taken in is that it … Read the rest