Remember that BBC article by Caroline Lowbridge about the pressure on lesbians to pretend trans women are lesbians too? Jo Bartosch reports (in the Daily Mail because the Quality papers won’t) that Nancy Kelley tried to get the piece spiked.

The BBC won much praise for its investigation, which prompted some lesbians to express their anger at how they felt ostracised for wishing to form relationships only with women.

Campaigner Kat Howard wrote that she was ‘incredibly grateful to Caroline Lowbridge, and the BBC for this article’, adding: ‘We need help protecting young lesbians everywhere from an LGBT community that would rather see them silenced than stand up to the male perpetrators of assault.’

Yet now it has emerged that

Anti-vaxxing has consequences.

Of course, there are people who have their vaccinations but still get sick. These people may be elderly or frail, or have underlying health problems. Those with illnesses affecting the immune system, particularly patients who have had chemotherapy for blood cancers, are especially vulnerable. Some unlucky healthy people will also end up on our general wards with Covid after being vaccinated, usually needing a modest amount of oxygen for a few days.

But the story is different on our intensive care unit. Here, the patient population consists of a few vulnerable people with severe underlying health problems and a majority of fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice. Watching the mix of patients coming in with

March 31 this year, Essex Police were busy marking and commemorating and making aware:

And yesterday was trans day of remembrance, with another round of social media announcing and posing for photos and Raising Awareness.

But women? Bah. Karens, all of them; Essex Police can’t be bothered with them.… Read the rest

Remember: Be Kind.

You are not the victim here and an apology to the woman you put at risk wouldn’t go amiss would it? #hatewontwin https://t.co/vxlfWL56j6

— LesbianLabour (@LesbianLabour) November 21, 2021

Utter bullshit. A very large number of people pointed out that you were engaging in misogynistic targeted harassment. Your narcissism led you to make a bad call, own it and apologise to the woman you have been harassing.#WarOnWomen #SexNotGender https://t.co/9B6ggIzbSW

— Ian McNee (@IanSMcNee) November 21, 2021

… Read the rest

This is just childish.

Debating whether it's wrong to declare your pronouns is like debating whether blackface is wrong. Trans and black people are both (rightly) protected under the Equality Act. I don't understand why the BBC thinks inclusion of trans people is a matter that should be debated. https://t.co/Zw4AknLxz1

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) November 20, 2021

No it’s not like that! Of course it’s not!

“This thing that’s not like this other thing is like this other thing.”

Blackface is not comparable to using ordinary pronouns, so debating the two is also not comparable. The two things are just not similar enough to make a useful comparison. “Inclusion” of trans people doesn’t rely on forcing everyone to use mix … Read the rest

It’s “Trans Day of Remembrance.”

Today we commemorate members of the transgender community who died as a result of anti-transgender hatred & violence. We will continue to act against those who target someone because of their religion, race, sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity #tdor2021 pic.twitter.com/xbeI5qqY4p

— Essex Police (@EssexPoliceUK) November 20, 2021

But there haven’t been any. Not this year and not last year.

Do the police ever celebrate Women’s Remembrance Day? Do they ever get photos taken of themselves standing up and looking serious about the many murders of women that are committed every year?

Notice they don’t include sex in their “We will continue to act against those who target someone because of their religion, race, sexual … Read the rest

Is Stonewall’s face red?! Of course it wouldn’t dream of erasing mothers from the language. It was a typo.

Stonewall has dropped guidance advising groups on its workplace schemes to remove the word “mother” from their policies.

The lobby group said that it would no longer reward higher ranking scores to employers who replaced “mother” with gender-neutral alternatives.

Nancy Kelley, the Stonewall chief executive, denied in an interview that such a policy existed. “We’re not interested in removing or erasing the word ‘mother’,” she said. Kelley, who has two adopted children with her wife, added: “I’m a mum. I’m married to another mum. It’s a deeply emotive term. I would be really upset if my children didn’t call me Mum.”

One or two items from Janice Turner’s conversation with Kathleen Stock:

Although Sussex had a radical history, the philosophy department was an outlier: relatively conservative, less prone to fashionable thinking. Her argumentative father had inadvertently prepared her for “lots of rude, bolshie men who just would sneer at you if you said something stupid”, but who, she adds, “are still the cleverest people I’ve ever met”. The English and gender studies departments thought the philosophers very dull. “We were laughed at because we believed in things like truth and objectivity. Philosophy at Sussex has never been trendy. Thank God – that’s the way I like it.”

Especially that kind of trendy. “Hahaha you believe in truth” – from people … Read the rest

Jurors said they had voted to acquit Rittenhouse, 18, of homicide, attempted homicide and other charges related to the August 2020 shootings in Kenosha, Wis. https://t.co/MEjTsQ1x61 pic.twitter.com/E3EecBHrq0

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 19, 2021

All counts. Not even reckless endangerment. I’ve seen sober explanations that he had a good case for self-defense, but…not even “but you shouldn’t have been there with an assault rifle in the first place”?

I got nothin’.… Read the rest

Today, like every day, is trans day of something. This one is remembrance. Tomorrow is biceps and the next day is wood lice.

Cllr. Peter Kavanagh, Mayor of South Dublin County Council, paid tribute today to the county’s Transgender community and spoke about how they were disproportionately affected by the global Covid-19 pandemic. Mayor Kavanagh raised the Trans flag at County Hall in Tallaght to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, when the victims of transphobic violence are commemorated.

Trans people are disproportionately affected by the pandemic? Really? More so than mothers of small children, people with no money, homeless people, mothers of slightly bigger children, people who lose jobs because of lockdowns, people with health conditions that make them … Read the rest

The Times on Project Veritas a week ago:

Hours after F.B.I. agents searched the homes of two former Project Veritas operatives last week, James O’Keefe, the leader of the conservative group, took to YouTube to defend its work as “the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism.”

“We never break the law,” he said, railing against the F.B.I.’s investigation into members of his group for possible involvement in the reported theft of a diary kept by President Biden’s daughter, Ashley. “In fact, one of our ethical rules is to act as if there are 12 jurors on our shoulders all the time.”

No, I’m sure Biden’s daughter gave them her diary of her own free will.

Project Veritas has long

Return of prior restraint:

A New York trial judge has temporarily blocked the New York Times from publishing some materials concerning the rightwing activist group Project Veritas, a rare step that the newspaper said violated decades of first amendment constitutional protections.

The order by Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester county supreme court covers memos written by a Project Veritas lawyer and obtained by the New York Times.

Remember the Pentagon Papers?

“This ruling is unconstitutional and sets a dangerous precedent,” Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, said in an emailed statement.

“When a court silences journalism, it fails its citizens and undermines their right to know,” he added. “The supreme court made that clear in the Pentagon Papers

It’s an outrage!

Richard Segovia’s house is as loud as the Latin rock music he teaches children to play in his basement studio. With colors ranging from jungle green and royal blue at the pavement to a red and yellow sunburst at the ridge, the otherwise modest Spanish-style home is essentially one enormous mural, a crowded portraitof long-gone musicians, Segovia’s family members, social activists, various psychedelia, and the odd jungle animal.

Segovia has lived in San Francisco’s Mission district since 1963, and he sees himself as a custodian of the neighborhood’s culture, specifically as the birthplace of Latin rock. (Carlos Santana, a family friend, grew up nearby.) But increasingly the 68-year old “Mayor of the Mission” finds himself face to

The Daily Mail has a useful reminder of some of Adrian Harrop’s nastiest work. (Reading the piece also gives me an unpleasant awareness of the Mail’s conspicuous persecution of Meghan Markle via the sidebar – two headlines about her doing some unremarkable things but presented with hostile contempt. Ugly…and in fact quite similar to Harrop himself. Both Harrop and DM are relentless persecutors. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that they both target women.)

None of the GP’s alleged cyber victims were named. But in the case of A, he posted her full name and details of her job, and continued to do so even when she asked him to stop due to concerns for her safety.

He warned

They what?

Yesterday it emerged the Labour Party had suspended the membership of Gil House pending investigation for allegedly engaging in prejudicial conduct that was “grossly detrimental to the party”. Gil’s crime? Insisting that “only women experience the menopause”.

Perhaps the Labour Party was confused by the name? Perhaps they think it’s only men who experience the menopause because look it says it right there, men o pause. It’s a pause that men do. Could that be what the Labour Party was thinking? Because that would be less stupid than…

So the Labour Party has decided to be the Stupid Party. It’s impossible to dignify this insulting nonsense with anything less crude than STUPID. Punishing someone for saying only women … Read the rest

On today’s Woman’s Hour Emma Barnett asked Nancy Kelley, CEO of Stonewall, a lot of probing questions, and pushed for non-evasive replies. It’s the first segment and it lasts about 35 minutes. It’s good stuff.… Read the rest

Jo Bartosch on the BBC’s Politics Live comedy hour yesterday:

The moment of hilarity arrived when Ellie Mae O’Hagan, director of the think-tank CLASS, was asked by presenter Jo Coburn about the definition of ‘woman’. In response she said: ‘You know, I actually don’t know why some people are women and some people are men.’

After claiming her view was shared by most women (though who knows if they were women), O’Hagan then said that those who claim to be able to tell a person’s sex are ‘liars’.

And that’s why the human race has proved unable to reproduce over the past 300,000 years.

O’Hagan’s nonsensical comments were made during the course of a wider discussion on gender self-identification with

Why Adrian is in the hot seat.

Look at that second one. “I did it because I’m so compassionate, unlike you, Karen!”

You wouldn’t want him handing you an aspirin, let alone anything more intrusive.… Read the rest

Maya Forstater welcomes the end of No Debate:

“No debate” has been the longstanding position of Stonewall since it took up the cause of overwriting sex with by self-identified gender. It has refused all invitations to take part in discussion with those who disagree with its “trans women are women” position.

So when on Tuesday night Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley spoke alongside Naomi Cunningham, Chair of Sex Matters, and answered questions from members of the LGB Alliance, history was made. 

The debate was about what Stonewall calls “conversion therapy” and reasonable people call not encouraging teenagers to rush into permanent changes to their still-changing bodies.

The proposed law would make it a criminal offence for a therapist or other

David French on Kyle Rittenhouse and the self-defense defense:

The trial itself has not gone well for the prosecution, for reasons that relate to the nature of self-defense claims. Such claims are not assessed by means of sweeping inquiries into the wisdom of the actions that put the shooter into a dangerous place in a dangerous time. Instead, they produce a narrow inquiry into the events immediately preceding the shooting. The law allows even a foolish man to defend himself, even if his own foolishness put him in harm’s way.

But perhaps more so if he’s a white man, and a whole hell of a lot less so if he’s a black man. As for women, they don’t generally … Read the rest