Brighton and Hove News reports:

A targeted campaign against a philosophy professor accused of transphobia has been condemned as harassment by the University of Sussex.

Posters demanding the university fire Kathleen Stock appeared on campus this morning, and smoke bombs were set off as a masked protester held a banner saying Stock Out at the entrance to campus.

The protesters say Professor Stock seeks to exclude and endanger trans people by, for example, supporting female-only spaces and sport and questioning the safety of puberty blocking drugs prescribed to minors.

In other words she seeks to support the safety of women and of minors who want to harm themselves by halting puberty. She doesn’t seek to endanger anyone, and she … Read the rest

yatakalam has been reading the ruling so that we don’t have to. It’s quite remarkable.

https://twitter.com/yatakalam/status/1445876701649686533

Nelson says she gets “misgendered” when she gets coffee or goes to the grocery store. Nonsense. Commercial transactions don’t work that way. The only pronoun likely to come up is “you.” Nelson seems to be a bit of a liar on top of everything else.

https://twitter.com/yatakalam/status/1445882128533647360

These clips are sickening to read.… Read the rest

More pronoun gibberish from the BC human rights tribunal:

A former server at a Gibsons, B.C. restaurant has been awarded $30,000 after a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal decision found they were unfairly terminated for asking managers and co-workers to call them by their proper pronouns.

That’s the lede and already we’re in the woods. Who were unfairly terminated? The tribunal? The restaurant? One of the advantages of non-customized pronouns is that they convey information – that’s what they’re for. They don’t always convey all the necessary information, for instance when there is more than one she or he involved, but they’re better than a vague “they” that could refer to anything, including a group of objects.

The whole article … Read the rest

No, “preferred pronouns” are not a human right. A Canadian human rights tribunal thinks they are though.

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled in favor of Jessie Nelson, a British Columbia restaurant server who is biologically female but identifies as nonbinary. Nelson, who asked colleagues to use “they” and “them” pronouns, was repeatedly called “she” and “her” by former colleague Brian Gobelle, who also called Nelson nicknames such as “sweetheart,” “honey,” and “pinky,” the tribunal’s ruling said. After Nelson unsuccessfully asked Gobelle to stop, the employee went to management, who declined to intervene right away, the court said. Nelson and Gobelle then got into a heated discussion about the issue, and Nelson was fired four days later for

… Read the rest

First, a news item from the Toronto Star August 21 [warning: graphic violence]:

Rhoderie Estrada went to sleep likely around 10 p.m. after folding laundry, watching Korean dramas and putting her three young daughters to bed in their two-storey East York home.

In the early hours of May 26, 2018, her husband came home to a nightmare — Estrada lying bloodied on their bed with head injuries too severe for him to perform CPR.

Now, after five days of deliberations, a jury has found Yostin Murillo and David Beak guilty of the first-degree murder and sexual assault of Estrada, a 41-year-old long-time dialysis nurse at St. Joseph’s hospital who adored — and was fiercely protective — of her children.

Fast … Read the rest

No, his shirt needed no improvement.

Abortion Access Front explained:

No matter who you are, if you have a uterus, abortion is only and always YOUR choice. We are sure @DaveBautista will approve of our fix to his shirt! #AbortionAF

No matter who you are, if you have a uterus, you are a woman or girl. It’s women who get pregnant, not people in general. Women are subordinated and dominated and denied basic rights for exactly that reason, so no, it’s not a generic “you” who needs abortion rights, it’s women.

H/t Sackbut… Read the rest

Rewire News is also avoiding the word “women” when it reports on abortion and the campaign to make it illegal again.

“Even though the legal question doesn’t have to do with abortion, the stakes here are still incredibly high, especially for people in Kentucky,” said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, who will argue the case on October 12.

But Kolbi-Molinas doesn’t mean people in Kentucky, she means women in Kentucky.

If Cameron is able to intervene and the law gets upheld, it could effectively ban abortion after 15 weeks in a state that has just two clinics and multiple restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period and bans on insurance coverage

… Read the rest

On both sides.

Dominic Raab has rejected the idea that misogyny should become a hate crime in the wake of the Sarah Everard murder, but then appeared confused about its meaning as he suggested it could apply to abuse against either women or men.

You can’t make misogyny itself a hate crime – that’s just stupid. You can point it out and fulminate against it and try hard to convince people to get rid of it, but you can’t make it a crime. It would be like making atheism a crime, or theism, or belief in reincarnation, or not liking grapefruit.

Perhaps the idea is to make it an aggravating factor in crimes against women? That would make … Read the rest

Graham Linehan tells us that David Lammy told a whopper about the silence of his constituents on the trans issue. It’s quite a startling whopper.

Speaking to Rachel Burden on Radio 5 Live, 29th September, Lammy criticised the BBC for focusing on  “identity issues” and denied that voters are concerned about gender ideology, saying to Burden “you have chosen to ask me about an issue that has never, ever been raised on the doorstep”.

He took an almost identical line while talking to Nick Robinson of BBC’s Today programme on the same day. “Nick you are deliberately asking me about an issue which you know does not come up on the doorstep. It’s a bit of a trap to get

… Read the rest

Apparently the hospital situation is as bad as ever.

NHS trusts are “gaslighting” patients over the inclusion of transgender patients on single-sex wards, a whistle-blower nurse has warned.

Dr Sinead Helyar said that in at least one trust if patients question why there is a male-bodied person on a female-only ward, medics have been told to “reiterate… that there are no men present”.

I don’t know why the Telegraph calls her a nurse and then a doctor, but anyway, we’ve heard this story before, and it’s pretty sick-making that it hasn’t been fixed.

Official NHS trust policy documents also compare patients who ask for single-sex spaces to racists and label them “transphobes”, “offenders” and “perpetrators”, she said.

Staff who

… Read the rest

The Catholic church knew and did it anyway, Facebook knew and did it anyway.

Facebook’s internal research found that Instagram, which it acquired in 2012 for $1 billion, makes eating disorders and thoughts of suicide worse in teenage girls, whistleblower Frances Haugen said in a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday.

Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, gathered internal documents as she grew frustrated by the company’s prioritization of growth and user engagement over its negative impacts, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.

Well, look at it … Read the rest

Maybe it’s something about the Catholic church? Is that possible?

An estimated 330,000 children were victims of sex abuse within France’s Catholic Church over the past 70 years, according to a report released Tuesday that represents the country’s first major accounting of the worldwide phenomenon.

The figure includes abuses committed by some 3,000 priests and other people involved in the church — wrongdoing that Catholic authorities covered up over decades in a “systemic manner,” according to the president of the commission that issued the report, Jean-Marc Sauvé.

Of course they did. They’re the church, God’s own representatives on earth, so obviously they get to decide. Raping children is just God’s reward to all these goddy celibate men for managing his … Read the rest

You know…if most of your police despise women, then your police are not going to be very good at pursuing cases of violence against women. They’re more likely to decide it was actually her fault, or a “sex game,” or a misunderstanding, or too trivial to bother with.

The father of a woman who died after being choked by her abusive partner has accused police of paying “lip service” to the protection of women and girls and called for a public inquiry into the culture of UK policing.

West Midlands police apologised last month for a number of failings in the case of Suzanne Van Hagen, 34, who suffered months of domestic abuse before she died in February 2013.

… Read the rest

Owen Jones:

Who are the voices on the police and institutional misogyny that need to be amplified right now (obviously exclusively women)?

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) October 1, 2021

Also Owen Jones:

Watching the horror of the Sarah Everard murder being derailed to further stigmatise and attack trans people is frankly beyond belief.

To those responsible: do you know the damage and hurt you're inflicting particularly on young, scared trans people? Do you even care?

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) October 3, 2021

… Read the rest

Speaking of Dillahunty and dogmatism and the infallibility of personal beliefs…from last year:

Nearly headless nick is now brainless and heartless, as well. Sorry that you can't change and grow and learn…and be supportive of the people who are actually being threatened. https://t.co/eUk6ygQtWY

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) September 30, 2020

No, it's not. She is transphobic, did say transphobic things and the fact that two things CAN be true doesn't mean they are.

We ARE condemning misguided hate. You're excusing it. Bye.

— Matt Dillahunty (@Matt_Dillahunty) September 30, 2020

… Read the rest

Jonathon Van Maren writes:

French clinicians are also now taking a stand. In an open letter published four days ago on the L’Express website (and covered almost nowhere in the international press), over fifty medical professionals and prominent academics, including doctors, legal experts, educational experts, philosophers, sociologists, psychiatrists, judges, and psychoanalysts, excoriated transgender ideology and condemned “sex reassignment” in children. Published in association with the Observatory of Ideological Discourses on Children and Adolescents, the letter is worth reading in full:

The link doesn’t work, but we can read the translation JVM shares.

We can no longer remain silent about what appears to us to be a serious drift committed in the name of the emancipation of the “transgender

… Read the rest

Where vaccine-resistance gets us:

The United States surpassed 700,000 deaths from the coronavirus on Friday, a milestone that few experts had anticipated months ago when vaccines became widely available to the American public.

An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered broad access to shots, were unvaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an ample supply of vaccines.

Why? Because we also have one of the highest rates of stupid.

The new and alarming surge of deaths this summer means that the coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest in American history, overtaking the toll from the influenza pandemic

… Read the rest

More calls to fire and shun people who don’t believe men are women:

AN SNP politician has retweeted a message calling for Joanna Cherry to be expelled from the party.

Kirsty Blackman, the MP for Aberdeen North, appeared to endorse the post amid an ongoing row over trans rights.

Or trans “rights.” The issue gets wildly confused because of the chronic failure to specify which “rights” we’re talking about. Just saying “trans rights” makes it sound as if the issue is basic human rights, when in fact what is contentious is the claim that men who identify as trans have a “right” to invade women’s spaces and take women’s prizes and jobs with no questions asked. It’s not a basic … Read the rest

Meghan Cook at Insider informs us that contestants on Survivor have just one set of clothes, so they can’t change into dry clothes after swimming. That’s not healthy.

Insider has previously reported on the potentially life-threatening consequences of wearing the same clothes and underwear for an extended period of time.

(Mind you, they could wear underwear and dry their clothes, then wear clothes and dry their underwear. But never mind, that’s a tangent.)

Gynecologist Dr. Mary Jane Minkin also previously told Insider that sitting around in damp clothes can create “a wet, moist, warm environment” that can lead to unwanted bacteria and yeast.

Specifically, competing in wet clothes for extended periods of time puts players with vaginas in an

… Read the rest

Who are the voices on the police and institutional misogyny that need to be amplified right now (obviously exclusively women)?

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) October 1, 2021

Oh dear. That would be all the feminist women he’s blocked.

What a question from a guy who is so determined to ostracize and silence women who defend our own boundaries and our very definition. He wants to amplify our voices now after all these years of obsessive de-amplification? And he finds it obvious that he’s talking exclusively about women?… Read the rest