It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know, but it’s good to see it in an actual news outlet, with a mug shot.

Smug git; steer clear.… Read the rest

Won’t somebody please think of the harrop.

https://twitter.com/CF_Farrow/status/1465810466601586688

Why should the women DOCTOR Harrop tormented care about allowing him to “move forward”? Why should they do what the GMC asks when the GMC did nothing to stop him tormenting women for years?… Read the rest

Science museum makes changes at the behest of science-denying loonies.

The Science Museum is set to alter its Boy or Girl? display following complaints over a “lack of mention of transgender”.

The museum in question is the science museum, just as it says in the name, the one in South Kensington, inspired by Dear Albert in the wake of the Great Exhibition. It matters, the way the one on Central Park West matters.

Curators will make changes to a gallery covering human biology in order to “update (the) non inclusive narrative”, it can be revealed. 

But science has nothing to do with being “inclusive” at the expense of being accurate. Science isn’t a club or a gang or a … Read the rest

The Supreme Court knows who is a woman and who isn’t. Women are those people the government gets to force to bear children against their will. Women are those people who can’t make their own decisions about their own lives. Women are those people whose bodies belong to the state.

Until now, all the court’s abortion decisions have upheld Roe‘s central framework — that women have a constitutional right to an abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb, until roughly between 22 and 24 weeks.

But Mississippi’s law bans abortion after 15 weeks. A separate law enacted a year later would ban abortions after six weeks, and while

… Read the rest

So I searched the posts archive and found the last time I had occasion to mention Matt Dillahunty: it was in February and March 2018 and it was about the fact that he and Sam Harris were booked to do an event with Lawrence Krauss despite accusations of sexual harassment against Krauss.

It makes me tired all over again, just reading the posts. The whole idea of going anywhere – even from one room to another – to listen to those three wowing us with their giant male brains makes me want to hibernate. The one from February says why:

I suppose this is a built-in hazard of having these all-male Celebrations of All the Brain Things That Women Can’t

… Read the rest

The ego-dogmatism soup here is something to behold.

Biologically female isn't relevant to being a woman.

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) November 29, 2021

Loud domineering guy tells the world that being biologically female isn’t relevant to being a woman. Not his to give away, yet again.

https://twitter.com/wwwritingclub/status/1466008583385006085

Correct. And?

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) November 30, 2021

And, those people who have wombs, those people without whom none of us would exist, are women. That’s the word for them. If the Matt Dillahuntys and Adrian Harrops succeed in their efforts to make that word not mean “the ones with wombs” then we’ll just have to get a new word which will mean the same thing. What’s the point of that? We … Read the rest

We’re not the ones who have “bought into the confusion.”

I'm sorry that you've bought into the fear mongering and confusion. Trans-women are women. Period.

Nothing about this is REMOTELY like believing in bread transforming to the literal body of christ. Trans people aren't claiming to be Cis. THAT would fit your analogy.

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) November 30, 2021

A stupid counter-factual assertion doesn’t become less stupid or less counter-factual because you add a “Period” to it. Matt Dillahunty is Lauren Boebert’s second-best espresso machine. Period. See? It doesn’t work. Trans women are men who say they feel like women inside. That’s what “trans women” means. It’s the word “women” that means “women”; the phrase “trans women” means something … Read the rest

Harrop was worse than I knew. Graham Linehan and ripx4nutmeg share some revolting details of what he and Stephanie Hayden did to Caroline Farrow:

Not your average caring GP.

Caroline’s husband is a Catholic priest at two parishes and in 2019 Harrop asked Stephanie Hayden for a game of golf, using a picture of one of her husband’s churches. Hayden famously has a conviction for attacking a man with a golf club.

Taunts and “jokes” that went on and on, and more. Targeted sadistic relentless harassment of a woman he disagrees with over trans dogma. One month really doesn’t seem like enough after reading all that. (The worst harassment shown here was by someone else, but Harrop’s was only … Read the rest

The BBC picks up a very long pair of tongs to talk about [whispers] hijab.

Europe’s top human rights organisation has pulled posters from a campaign that promoted respect for Muslim women who choose to wear headscarves after provoking opposition in France.

See it? The very long pair of tongs? It’s the “choose to” bit. It’s tendentious to talk about Muslim women “choosing to” wear hijab when in fact women are forced to wear it, and tortured or even killed for refusing to wear it, in many places where Islam has not liberalized even slightly.

It’s probably the case that many Muslim women in Europe do have a choice, but it’s also well known that many of them don’t… Read the rest

The Times quotes Stonewall:

A Stonewall spokesperson said: “It is not true that Stonewall looks to shut down debate. Meaningful, constructive debate and discussion around complex policy ideas are at the heart of what we do as a charity. The one thing we do not debate is whether trans people exist. They do, and what we need to discuss is how to make a world where all LGBTQ+ are free to be themselves.”

Even if it’s true that Stonewall doesn’t look to shut down debate, it sure as hell does muddy it. That spokesperson spokement is some very wet sloppy mud.

Nobody is saying “trans people don’t exist.” That’s not the issue at all. We all know there … Read the rest

Such a nice man, and (as he doesn’t mind saying himself) such a feminist.

You mean the people who called out her transphobic remarks? I call them "correct".

There is no canceling, just accountability.

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) November 29, 2021

Biologically female isn't relevant to being a woman.

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) November 29, 2021

Huh. Tell that to a woman giving birth. Tell it to a woman in her 35th week of pregnancy. Tell it to a woman who’s been raped. Tell it to the women who lost medals to Veronica Ivy and Laurel Hubbard. Tell it, as another person on Twitter said to him, to the Taliban.… Read the rest

So as you’ve seen Harrop received a one month suspension.

Decision was handed down privately – 1 month suspension.

— Tribunal Tweets (@tribunaltweets) November 30, 2021

That sounds like nothing but word is it’s not. It’s on his record and will limit his career from now on.

2/ Suspensions are generally rare and this will have an effect on career prospects / insurance and reputation.

It's not the sort of thing anyone with any sense would celebrate as an outcome.

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) November 30, 2021

It’s on the record that he engaged in inappropriate, insulting and at times intimidatory communications on Twitter – in short that he’s a bully. … Read the rest

There’s an odd thing about Matt Dillahunty’s trans dogma though.

I'm sorry for you. Because I am smart, sassy and clear sighted – I'm just not a bigot and I'm able to tell the difference between biological sex and gender, which is a social construct.

My critical faculties are fine, thank you.

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) November 30, 2021

Ok so trans women are women in the sense of having (or being or living or some other verb) female gender, but not in the sense of being of the female sex. But in that case, what makes it ok for trans women “to access spaces where women and girls are undressing, such as changing rooms?” How does gender, a … Read the rest

From the Shut Up I Win files:

https://twitter.com/FemmeLoves/status/1465492195901906947 https://twitter.com/FemmeLoves/status/1465489711825408003 https://twitter.com/FemmeLoves/status/1465505512334708736

I feel lucky that I never wasted any admiration on Matt Dillahunty. Never listened to the podcast, only ever heard him speak once, at the American Atheists jamboree in Austin, and found him obnoxiously macho-loud and overbearing. Stamped CONFIRMED.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on All the rights.

There is only one trans “right” being asserted by activists, and that is the “right” to have everyone else in the world affirm their particular religious beliefs, at all times and in all places.

The incoming government of Germany has recently signed an agreement in principle on their governing priorities, which must now be referred to the coalition parties at large for approval before that government can be put into effect. When the agreement is approved, the measures within it will not automatically become law, but they provide a roadmap for what the government wishes to accomplish during its reign.

Many of the proposals are undoubtedly an improvement over … Read the rest

The stars of Activism are really on fire today. Not entirely in a good sense.

https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1465392439322103823

Spaces set aside for other people aren’t a “right.” Puberty blockers and elective amputations aren’t “health care.” “Legal protections” that endanger other people aren’t “protections.”

He summoned the troops.

https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1465397550287106049

Well, really snarky, at least.… Read the rest

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

On a visit to Paris earlier this month, Harris reportedly spent more than $500 on cookware at E Dehillerin, a shop near the Louvre museum. 

Well, yes, that Le Creuset stuff is expensive.

Republicans and rightwing media outlets seized on the purchase, attempting to use it to show that the vice-president, a former California attorney general and US senator, was out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Ahhhh yes because 500 whole dollars, in sharp contrast to Donald Trump.

That’s his very own tasteful understated man of the people living room. … Read the rest

Points of view.

https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1465390135676125187

Oh what was that? thought I, and it didn’t take much hunting to find out.

https://twitter.com/IndiaWilloughby/status/1465377334362574848 https://twitter.com/IndiaWilloughby/status/1465379296021725190

It was on PM on Radio 4, so I’ll be listening later.

https://twitter.com/TVpsychologist/status/1465379464838369291

Well that’s a stupid question for a psychologist, even a TV one. Of course we can debate what people claim to “know” and “feel.” If we couldn’t there wouldn’t be much debate about anything.

Surely one of the first and most basic things you learn in psychology is how very fallible human knowing and feeling are. It’s even a bromide – “the easiest person to fool is yourself.”

That is in fact one of the things that irritates me the most about this idiotic movement, the … Read the rest

I don’t understand what their point is, the people who write this kind of thing, whether in the Telegraph or on Fox News or on Twitter.

The PM says these measures are designed to prevent a lockdown, but I am utterly convinced they’re the beginnings of one. If they are necessary because the omicron variant’s mutations mean it travels fast, and it has already been spotted nesting in the UK, logic suggests that cases will jump – which means more pressure on the NHS and on ministers to act. How many times have we been told “thus far and hopefully no further”, only for the PM to appear on television days later and admit, with regret, that we have

… Read the rest

Other news:

At the hearing of Dr Harrop. A private session was held to hand down a decision. The decision found that Dr Harrop is presently impaired. Hearing adjourned until 1.30 for the next stage.

— SafeguardWomen&Girls (@safeguardwomen) November 29, 2021

After final submissions given by the GMC & AH Counsel on what they recommend; hearing now suspended until 2pm tomorrow whilst the tribunal makes their decision.

— SafeguardWomen&Girls (@safeguardwomen) November 29, 2021

The tribunal is deciding whether or not to suspend him.… Read the rest