I listened to the Trans Women in Sport segment of Today, which starts at about 1 hour 40 minutes and ends at 1:48. It’s not a conversation between “Veronica Ivy” and Sharron Davies; Ivy gets a segment and then Davies gets one.

Ivy says around 1:41: “Here’s the thing about Emily in particular: because she was a member of the British Cycling academy, they have years of her power data, they know how much her power numbers went down, so they know for a fact that she does not have an unfair competitive advantage.”

Wait. What? Emily’s numbers went down, therefore it’s a fact that he does not have an unfair competitive advantage. But we don’t know how … Read the rest

It seems BBC Radio 4’s Today program had Sharron Davies on along with…Rhys McKinnon aka Rachel McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy. How insulting.

If you listened to the @BBCr4today program can you ask them why they are still using a person who threatened on twitter (recorded by the way) that I and every person they perceive as a terf (someone who believes in biology) should die in a fat fire? The bbc must be responsible

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) April 9, 2022

This Veronica Ivy:

This Veronica Ivy you mean? Out of shape male smashing it in women’s cycling? pic.twitter.com/ZqTKB6rlJW

— Mara Yamauchi (@mara_yamauchi) April 9, 2022

That was a race at Burnaby Velodrome in March, which he won, as … Read the rest

This is horrifying.

Alabama lawmakers, she says, have been put on notice “that laws and policies preventing care that healthcare professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming healthcare for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially lifesaving.”

Just like that. So every kid who says “I’m trans” or maybe even “I think I’m trans” should be put on the path to trying to change sex? There’s no potential for harm, no risk at all?

Horrifying.… Read the rest

A very subtle thinker here.

For fuck sake. It's got "gender-critical" in the fucking title.

— Isaac Rabinovitch (@isaac32767) April 8, 2022

Meaning "read the book before you decide what it's about" is foolish and dishonest.

— Isaac Rabinovitch (@isaac32767) April 8, 2022

Jesus wept.

— Isaac Rabinovitch (@isaac32767) April 8, 2022

He’s convinced you, right?… Read the rest

I hope this gets Junior a prison sentence for sedition.

“It’s very simple. We have multiple paths. We control them all. We have operational control. Total leverage. Moral high ground. POTUS must start second term now.” – Junior’s text to Mark Meadows leading up to J6. https://t.co/Dra03pzx4r

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 8, 2022

“Moral high ground” ffs. How do you reckon?

CNN reports:

Two days after the 2020 presidential election, as votes were still being tallied, Donald Trump’s eldest son texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that “we have operational control” to ensure his father would get a second term, with Republican majorities in the US Senate and swing state legislatures, CNN has learned.

Translating “we … Read the rest

“organized transphobic violence”

She doesn’t “have to say” that of course; she chose to.

Arguing that gender is not something to celebrate but a system of oppression which should be rejected is not “organized transphobic violence.”

But this guy knows better.

This is horrifying. @OxUniPress should be rightly taken to task for publishing a book that will encourage anti-trans violence. https://t.co/R41Brz1bqG

— Matt Kopans (he/him) (@mattkopans) April 8, 2022

Reading that gender is a system of oppression will encourage violence!

What must it be like being an academic now? Can you imagine having to teach students who believe all this crap? To say nothing of having colleagues who do.… Read the rest

Oh yeah? And they’re the only ones, are they?

The Guardian reports:

The mental health of the UK’s transgender community is at crisis point, with many people “hanging by a string”, professional bodies and support groups have told the Guardian.

The stark warnings follow a week of intensified public discussion of transgender rights as the government moved to exclude trans people from a ban on conversion practices.

What are “transgender rights”? They’re so often mentioned and so rarely spelled out.

And, for the umpteenth time, “conversion” is the wrong word – the loaded word, the inaccurate word, the thumb on the scale word. It’s not a form of “conversion” to provide therapy and discussion before making permanent physical changes … Read the rest

Another meeting at the corner of Inclusion and Fairness.

“And what this UK sport document says is,” says Ed Milliband at 1:00, “look, inclusion is important in sport but so too is fairness.”

But inclusion isn’t “important in sport” in any blanket sense, for the very simple and obvious reason that much of sport is competitive, which rules out being generally “inclusive.” Competition is necessarily, inherently, non-inclusive. Competition excludes.

You can of course have “friendlies”; you can play games for the fun of it, you can decide not to keep score, you can bring everyone in and just run around and have a blast. But sport qua sport has winners and losers, so a generalized “inclusion” just is not … Read the rest

A dishonest headline:

The usual lie told in the usual way – by concealing “men who identify as women” under the blanket “transgender.” Men can’t compete against women at British Cycling elite events.

They’ve now changed the headline, no doubt in response to a torrent of furious replies to that tweet. It now says:

Transgender women no longer able to compete at elite female events run by British Cycling

Men no longer able to force themselves into women’s races. Finally.

From the story:

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said earlier this week he did not believe transgender women should compete in female sporting events – a view he conceded might be “controversial”.

In response, LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall

One day in North Dakota –

Scientists believe they have been given an extraordinary view of the last day of the dinosaurs after they discovered the fossil of an animal they believe died that day.

Awkward sentence, but you get the idea. They think they’ve found a fossil dinosaur that was killed by the asteroid that smacked what’s now the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out nearly all animal life on the planet.

The perfectly preserved leg, which even includes remnants of the animal’s skin, can be accurately dated to the time the asteroid that brought about the dinosaurs’ extinction struck Earth 66m years ago, experts say, because of the presence of debris from the impact, which rained down only

Hadley Freeman on the breaking of the spell:

The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.

There aren’t the same kind of visuals coming out … Read the rest

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg says he hasn’t given up on the Trump investigation.

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, publicly discussed his office’s investigation into Donald J. Trump for the first time on Thursday, insisting that the inquiry has continued despite the recent resignations of two senior prosecutors who had been leading it.

Did they just misunderstand?

Mr. Bragg said in an interview that his office had recently questioned new witnesses about Mr. Trump and reviewed additional documents, both previously unreported steps in the inquiry.

But citing grand jury secrecy rules, Mr. Bragg declined to provide details on the new steps in the investigation, which has focused on whether Mr. Trump committed a crime in inflating the value of

Breaking: Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the 116th Supreme Court justice. Her ascent diversifies the bench, while leaving in place its conservative tilt. https://t.co/s0Z0CnzUsX

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 7, 2022

Adding

BREAKING: Applause breaks out in Senate chamber as Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson becomes the first Black woman ever confirmed to sit on the nation’s highest court. https://t.co/EvvheYil09 pic.twitter.com/HRA8dOUsqA

— ABC News (@ABC) April 7, 2022

… Read the rest

Lavery interview part 2 (I needed a break from transcribing).

At 35 minutes: Emma Barnett: “You have written ‘I’m quite sure that women’s rights are not, have never been, and must never be sex-based.’ [Lavery says “Yeah.”] But to those women who believe that they must have sex-based rights for a variety of reasons ranging from sport to women-only spaces for different purposes – you’ll be very familiar, our listeners will be as well – how can you say that with such surety?”

Lavery: “Well again I say it on the basis of twenty years of [? access? experts?], research, and teaching in the field, I have been doing this work for a long time.”

He’s an expert, you … Read the rest

All the points missed at once.

Trans athletes – who are chronically underrepresented in sport – are being made to choose between being who they feel to their very core, and the sport they love, while being demonised as cheats.

They’re not transitioning to gain an advantage. It is who they are!

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) April 7, 2022

What does “chronically underrepresented in sport” mean? How “represented” should they be? How does Owen Jones know?

Maybe the kind of people who are trans simply tend not to be into sport. Some people aren’t, you know.

But also, clearly being trans throws up some obstacles to being “represented” in sport. It throws up some obstacles that are not incidental and … Read the rest

Ok I listened to Lavery on Woman’s Hour. I’m relieved: Emma Barnett didn’t let him get away with much. It starts at 17:25 in case you want to listen.

20:10 Lavery: “I think what we’re really talking about is do we think the category ‘woman’ designates a class of biological being, or do we think that it’s a political category whose meaning can change over time. I think reasonable people can take different perspectives on that question, but historically speaking the people who have taken the position that it is a biologically essential category have tended to be on the side of patriarchy, and those who have claimed that it is a political category that has been deployed to … Read the rest

BREAKING:
The @UN General Assembly has voted to suspend Russia from the world organisation’s leading human rights body over allegations of horrific rights violations by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
In favour: 93
Against: 24
Abstained: 58 pic.twitter.com/oYwbryFWc8

— Mikhail Khodorkovsky (@khodorkovsky_en) April 7, 2022

The word is “suspend” not “expel” or “remove” so I assume that means it’s temporary, but anyway, there it is. Of course other flagrant rights-violators remain.

The UN General Assembly has suspended Russia from the UN Human Rights Council after evidence of atrocities in its invasion of Ukraine. https://t.co/rE5b7rXh1h

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) April 7, 2022

EARLIER: Ukraine's President Zelenskiy called on Russians to protest against the war following the emergence of gruesome videos and

Who's this bloke on Woman's Hour talking about what a woman is?

— Helen Saxby (@helensaxby11) April 7, 2022

My paperback is out on May 5th. Would love to come on and talk to @BBCWomansHour about it. But radio silence (literally) https://t.co/jKuTuFPr9u

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) April 7, 2022

Did we just hear the death knell of transactivism for a radio 4 audience? Can we give Lavery more of a platform? He’s just said he wants the queen to die & that ordinarily ppl are too thick to understand that women have penises.

— Jo Bartosch (@jo_bartosch) April 7, 2022

If you want to know the real difference between men and women, just listen to the @Emmabarnett @BBCWomansHour interview with

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on If they cannot answer a simple question.

Would Labour expect to go unchallenged if it had screwed over workers rights in favour of bosses, in the process espousing a mistaken and distorted view of relevant law promulgated by the bosses themselves?

That’s… pretty much New Labour though.

I mean, even from people who support that shift, you get the criticism that pre-Blair Labour “was mired in an ossified form of unionism and leftism that refused to recognise that the world had fundamentally changed. A spent political force facing oblivion” to quote Rob.

And there is some merit to that.

The British economy is 80% service sector. Contrast with 1950, when it was … Read the rest

Scientists are trying to get people to wake up and smell the smoke.

I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?

On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the