Author: Ophelia Benson

New Manchester mayor refuses to commit to implementing trans guidance

The Mayor of Greater Manchester has refused to say whether she would adopt new guidance on single-sex spaces.

Bev Craig, who replaced Andy Burnham as mayor last month, twice refused to commit to imposing Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance which says transgender people should use either gender-neutral bathrooms or those intended for biological sex.

So in other words the mayor of a large important city refuses to commit to protecting women from men who want to perv on them in places like bathrooms.

Asked whether she would oversee the “full imposition” of EHRC’s guidance, Ms Craig told Times Radio: “I am working through what the guidance means in terms of the transport services that I am in control of.”

Asked a second time whether this meant with the intention of implementing the single-sex guidance, Ms Craig replied: “Well, with the intention of understanding what would be different to what we do now.

“Actually many of our services are compliant. The reality here is that we are probably talking about a handful of public toilets. Am I as the Mayor going to be checking people’s bits on the way into the toilet? Absolutely not.”

That wasn’t the question. Of course. This is part of the playbook – pretend the questions are outrageous and absurd when in reality they are not. The question was not about the mayor delving into people’s underpants.

Last week, a coalition of Left-wing councils in London pledged to defy the new rules because they were “an attack” on transgender and non-binary residents.

The leaders of Lambeth, Hackney, Haringey, Lewisham, Southwark and Waltham Forest councils made a joint commitment to keep their services “inclusive”.

Which being interpreted means they made a joint commitment to keep their services hazardous for women.

During the by-election campaign to replace Mr Burnham, the former leader of Manchester city council said she had “fought for LGBT rights” throughout her career and would not “pit minority against minority”.

She said: “I believe in a world where the two can go hand in hand. I’ve shown that you can stand up for single-sex spaces, like women’s refuges that are important, but also not throw our trans communities under the bus.”

Under Ms Craig’s leadership of the council, it passed a motion in 2022 which declared “trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people are non-binary and trans rights are human rights”.

So the council passed a motion telling two major lies. Whoopee.

The Telegraph chats amiably with an actor, and then suddenly there’s a plot twist.

Powley will soon be playing Petunia Dursley (Harry Potter’s Muggle aunt) in HBO’s forthcoming TV adaptation of the Harry Potter books. It is a project that also presents serious issues, albeit of a very different nature. Is she worried about how her career might be affected by such association with JK Rowling and her gender critical views? It seems that she – quite sensibly – has her statement ready on that one.

Oh my god!! Serious issues!!! So serious!!!! Association! Such association!! How can she stand the filth, the contamination, the impurity?!!!!

What a good thing she has her statement ready. Whew. It would have been Armageddon if she hadn’t. Hooray she’s so quite sensible.

Wtf. This is the Telegraph, not the BBC or the Guardian. Why is the Telegraph coming over all queasy and censorious about JK Rowling? Does the Telegraph think men belong in women’s rape crisis centers? Does the Telegraph think men are women if they say they are?

“I strongly disagree with JK Rowling’s views on gender,” she says. “I think that the trans community deserve safety and dignity and respect and total acceptance [Rowling, in fact, would agree with that, but argues that biological sex is real and immutable]. But,” she throws up her palms. “I love Harry Potter. I grew up with the books. I am from that first generation of readers and, again, I love magic and spookiness.”

So one minute the Telegraph is screaming in horror because it has to mention Rowling, and the next minute it’s inserting an explainer that Rowling is not in fact a monster who wants to eat trans people with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Confused much?

Reflecting

You’d be forgiven for thinking the saga involving Donald Trump’s vile prosecutions of innocent people over his Reflecting Pool fiasco has finally come to an ignominious end. On Thursday, a judge officially threw out felony charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who’d been falsely accused by Trump of vandalizing his disastrous renovation of the landmark.

…

But this is not the final chapter in this story—not by a long shot. And what happens next will help settle whether we are capable of dispensing real justice to all those Trump accomplices who are helping make our slide into authoritarianism possible.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are set to launch an investigation into the decision to criminally charge Hearn and others over the Reflecting Pool fiasco, I’m told. Although Democrats are in the minority, their probe offers a blueprint for what they’ll pursue with subpoena power if they control the House in six months.

It would be nice to know more about this ludicrous bit of petty tyranny.

This week, Representative Jamie Raskin—the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and potentially its future chair—will formally demand that the Justice and Interior Departments turn over a wealth of documents related to the charging decisions made in this case.

“Judiciary Democrats will investigate who lied, who buried the evidence, and who decided to threaten an American citizen with prison simply to protect Trump’s wounded feelings and continuing corruption,” Raskin said in a statement to me. “Participants in this frame-up will be held to account.”

At the center of this saga is Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. and a longtime Trump confidante. Pirro’s office eagerly indicted an innocent man after the ailing despot in the Oval Office, embarrassed over reports of algae and other problems plaguing his Reflecting Pool renovation, raged that his underlings must produce a scapegoat to spare him from humiliation. Pirro did subsequently move to dismiss the case. But there’s a ton we still don’t know about all these corrupt machinations.

Corrupt and at the same time absolutely ludicrous.

Indeed, none of Pirro’s excuses explain why her office brought the indictment when it did. After all, her office hadn’t yet gotten a full accounting from the Interior Department of how the damage had been caused. Heck, the government’s own sole witness testified to the grand jury that this damage was visible before Hearn ever touched it, and it was obvious to the naked eye that something far more than vandalism had marred the project.

“The notion that they did not know that there was a botched, rushed renovation of the Reflecting Pool does not hold water,” Norm Eisen, a lawyer for Hearn, told me.

It doesn’t hold water or pieces of blue pool lining.

Sigh

An NHS trust has told staff that trans people can still use women’s bathrooms and wards in spite of new guidance over single-sex spaces.

Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (MPFT) told staff on Wednesday that there would be “no immediate changes” to its policies or practices while it awaited further guidance from NHS England.

What. fucking. further. guidance? They’ve already had the guidance – and anyway what kind of “guidance” is necessary? It’s very simple: no men in women’s bathrooms and wards. Seven words, all of them familiar to people who work in hospitals. What’s to guide?

Patients can access single-sex facilities, including hospital wards, according to their gender identity rather than biological sex, under the Trust’s Trans Inclusion and Single Sex Accommodation policies.

Staff are also allowed to use toilets and showers based on their gender identity.

Which being interpreted means men can continue to terrorize and humiliate women despite the law.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) revised Code came into force on Wednesday, more than a year after the Supreme Court ruled “sex” in equality law means biological sex rather than gender identity.

It says single-sex services must be provided based on biological sex. Transgender people should use facilities intended for their biological sex or separate or mixed-sex alternatives.

Must. Not “should” but “must”. The word ought to be must. It’s all this shuffling and hemming and cringing and replacing “must” with “ought” that encourages people to keep ignoring the law in order to make women’s lives hell.

An email from MPFT to staff this week said: “We understand this may be a difficult and anxiety-provoking time for our trans, non-binary and gender-diverse colleagues, service users and communities, and we want to reassure you that we stand by you, and remain committed to being an inclusive organisation.”

But no email saying that to women, I take it. Women don’t matter, it’s only our trans, non-binary and gender-diverse colleagues, service users and communities who matter. Women are just so much tiresome mud.

Female MPFT employees told The Telegraph they were upset by the decision to leave the policies unchanged.

One said: “The email lists a range of groups that the Trust stands by, but there is no mention of women or people who think sex matters.

Exactly so. What the hell is wrong with everyone?

Terry Stock, a public governor at MPFT, told The Telegraph he was disappointed but unsurprised by the Trust’s failure to update its policies.

Documents seen by The Telegraph show Mr Stock has repeatedly challenged the policies since becoming a public governor in late 2024, warning of risks to vulnerable female patients and staff.

After raising concerns about transgender activism and women’s rights, he was told colleagues had been left feeling “hurt or excluded” and was discouraged from attending an LGBT+ staff event because it was “not an appropriate forum for questioning the legitimacy of trans identity or debating trans rights”.

Which being translated means it’s not an appropriate forum for defending women’s rights.

The Trust agreed in April 2025 to examine the lawfulness of its policies. However, a freedom of information response confirmed in June that the policies and guidance were unchanged.

Again: there’s nothing to “examine”. Just stop letting men invade women’s spaces.

“The Trust appears to be ideologically captured,” said Mr Stock. “Senior officials have repeatedly failed to address the conflict between these policies and the law. Nothing changes. They show a complete disregard for women’s privacy, dignity and safety.”

The dispute comes amid wider uncertainty over the NHS’s response to the new Code.

NHS England has declined to set out a timetable for replacing national guidance that allows transgender patients to be accommodated according to gender identity, saying only that updated policies will be published “shortly”.

Why shortly? Why not right this minute? It isn’t rocket science. No men in women’s spaces: five words.

Every hour of every day we’re reminded how easy it is for people to trash women’s rights for the sake of a tiny minority of men who like to pretend to be women. I’m tired of it.

It’s very simple. The job is to prosecute the people the boss tells you to prosecute. It’s not to run around saying there is no case – it’s just to follow orders.

Jeanine Pirro swept into Washington last year as a camera-ready prosecutor and staunch ally of President Donald Trump. Suddenly she was everywhere: crime scenes and community forums, court hearings and TV interviews, TikTok-style videos and black-tie dinners.

But after more than a year in office as U.S. attorney in the nation’s capital, Pirro now finds herself at odds with Trump — with her job at risk — over scraps of blue liner that peeled off the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Well at least it’s about something important.

Pirro, who left her job as a Fox News host to become the top federal prosecutor in D.C., immediately began seeking the toughest charges possible for violent crimes. She launched criminal probes of more than a half-dozen public officials who had drawn Trump’s ire — then punted the blame to judges and juries when those efforts collapsed.

But her moves to drop several cases of alleged vandalism at the newly renovated pool contradicted Trump and blamed the administration’s handpicked contractor for botching a project the president had championed.And in the end, they exposed a crack in Pirro’s ability to balance Trump’s demands with her legal responsibilities.

Ah yes a crack. I suppose it’s that crack where the absence of evidence breaks away from Trump’s determination to harm everyone he dislikes. From where Trump sits, Pirro is not there to go after the baddies when the evidence is solid, she’s there to go after anyone Trump tells her to go after, evidence or no evidence. This sounds sarcastic but it’s obviously just the plain truth. He expects her to use the law as a weapon, and reality, truth, facts, evidence have nothing to do with it.

Trump claimed vandals had torn up the pool’s “beautiful facade,” and Pirro initially filed criminal charges against four people, including a former Olympic canoeist who was indicted on a felony count of destruction of property. In her booming New York brogue, Pirro castigated that defendant at a news conference and said her office was “committed to protecting our national resources, our monuments, and our parks from vandals.”

But Pirro abruptly dropped all four cases weeks later, blamed the Interior Department for misleading prosecutors into filing unsupported criminal charges and wassoon inside the Oval Office to explain herself.

Of course she was, because “unsupported” is neither here nor there. Her job is to prosecute the people Trump tells her to prosecute. The end. It’s not to look for evidence or support or facts or witnesses or anything else.

The rift between Trump and Pirro, over peeling bits of paint at a national monument, came after she had launched criminal probes into six Democratic lawmakers who criticized the administration’s military actions, as well as the Federal Reserve chair at the time, Jerome H. Powell, who refused Trump’s demands to resign or institute lower interest rates.

So she’s perfectly willing to use the law to torment people at Trump’s behest so why didn’t she just oblige him this time? Who knows.

Pirro’s office said in the Reflecting Pool court filing, prosecutors were voluntarily dismissing the charges. Trump said Pirro “folded like an umbrella.”

“I just think she was totally wrong,” Trump told reporters Wednesday, noting that National Park Service employees had told authorities they saw vandals in action. He described problems with the contractor as “a couple of little things” and said he hadn’t made a determination on whether to keep Pirro on the job.

Trump continued his criticism Friday, saying on social media that “U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro should revisit her hastily made decision.”

Trump never makes decisions hastily.

In Trump’s second term, Flood said, some U.S. attorneys in key offices have discovered that being a responsible prosecutor is sometimes a fireable offense. He noted that Erik S. Siebert, whom Trump had appointed as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was forced out last year after declining to seek criminal charges against former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Career prosecutors in both cases had said the evidence was too flimsy to take to court.

“The reality is if you’re an ethical U.S. attorney, and you won’t be bent to Trump’s will, you’re gone,” Flood said. Of Pirro’s decision to drop the Reflecting Pool cases, he added: “She gets some credit for standing up to Trump.”

Judges have also criticized Pirro’s office for wiping out the most serious convictions from the Jan. 6 riot — the seditious conspiracy cases against the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Members of the extremist groups stockpiled firearms and led the charge into the Capitol, according to the evidence presented at their trials. Pirro this year signed on to key court filings to clear those charges as a matter of loyalty to Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. But she declines to take questions about those moves, even as federal judges bemoan the historical consequences of undoing convictions for crimes against the country.

Dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty. There’s just no end to the filth.

Joan Smith wrote the book on this subject. The literal book.

My mind inevitably goes back to the Yorkshire Ripper murders. West Yorkshire police interviewed Peter Sutcliffe 9 times, didn't search his house & accepted alibi evidence from close relatives.

What happens to women, then & now, isn't a glitch in the system. It is the system.

— Joan Smith (@polblonde) August 8, 2026

Vikram Dodd at the Guardian doesn’t mince his words.

Catastrophic errors left a persistent and proven sex offender free before he murdered two women in London, it can be revealed.

On Friday, an Old Bailey jury found Simon Levy, 40, guilty of murdering Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo in March 2025 and Sheryl Wilkins five months later.

Levy was on bail as a suspect for the first murder when he committed the second, after police said they lacked sufficient evidence to charge him.

Months before the first killing, police arrested Levy for sexual assaults of women on trains but made errors that delayed charging him. While on bail, he carried out further attacks, taking the total to 10 across London. Although charged with most of the offences, Levy remained free and went on to commit his second murder.

Prosecutors also admitted to bungling efforts to have Levy remanded in custody, by failing to provide three court hearings with key information demonstrating the full extent of the danger he posed to women.

Yet even before the attacks on women travelling by train, police and prosecutors knew Levy posed a serious risk.

He was first jailed for a sexual offence in 2021. While in prison, he sexually assaulted a female prison officer.

After his release, he carried out a series of sexual assaults on trains across London between 2023 and 2025. He was also the prime suspect in a rape investigation.

In January, March and August 2025, Levy, from Tottenham in north London, savagely attacked three women who provided sexual services, killing two and leaving one seriously injured.

Maybe the police were too busy hunting for terfs to bother with men who abuse and murder women.

The Crown Prosecution Service, the Metropolitan police and British Transport Police have admitted making errors.

Kevin Southworth, a deputy assistant commissioner at the Met, which investigated the killings, described Levy as a “predatory monster”. He said Wilkins, the second woman murdered by Levy, would probably have been alive were it not for what he described as “collective system failures”.

And how interesting it is that the collective system failures are at the expense of women as opposed to…anyone else.

The failings come despite decades of promises from police chiefs, senior prosecutors, courts and government that the criminal justice system will better protect women from male violence after a series of scandals.

Too busy going to Pride parades?

Were the cops too busy being trans allies to notice?

A British man was convicted on Friday ​of murdering two sex workers after sexually assaulting multiple women in London, with police and prosecutors accepting ‌they made errors which allowed him to continue his escalating offences.

Simon Levy, 40, was found guilty of the murder of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo in March 2025 and of Sheryl Wilkins in August 2025, as well as the rape and serious assault of a third woman in January that ​year.

Police had arrested Levy on suspicion of murdering Valencia-Trujillo, 53, in April 2025 but released him – after which ​Levy sexually assaulted five women on trains in London before he killed Wilkins, 39.

…

Levy was convicted on Friday after a trial at London’s Old Bailey of murdering Valencia-Trujillo and Wilkins and counts of rape, causing grievous bodily harm with intent, and ​intentional strangulation in relation to the third woman.

He had also been convicted in February after ​a separate trial ⁠of sexually assaulting 10 women on London trains between October 2023 and May 2025, with six of those attacks occurring in early 2025.

…

Britain’s crime and policing minister Sarah Jones welcomed ​the IOPC investigation into Levy’s case.

“The fact that Levy was able to inflict such devastating harm after being freed by police and the courts is ​deeply concerning,” Jones said in a statement. “It raises serious questions that require urgent answers.”

It does rather. Like for instance “Do you see women as just not worth the trouble? Or what?”

Hmmm.

Imagine if someone Blacked up or got in a wheelchair, says the man who Womans up and verbally abuses women who object.

He’s not really a very clear or sharp thinker, is he.

It’s on a spectrum, you see.

A trans Green MSP has claimed rape exists on a “spectrum”.

Q Manivannan said the “demonisation of rape” led to an overly simplistic idea about what kind of people committed the offence.

The act, the Indian-born poet and academic argued, instead exists on a “spectrum” and is dependent on different “contexts”. Anyone, he said, can commit the offence – including women.

Well, no, because “rape” means what it means. If you want to talk about sexual misconduct that’s not rape then you need a different word. Rape means rape in much the same way women means women.

Isn’t it interesting that it’s the words women need that are getting all this chin-scratching over do we really mean rape when we talk about rape my dear chap?

Rape is rape. Consensual sex in which one person gets violent without consent is something else. Rape is still rape.

Manivannan said the remarks were intended to highlight how society has too narrow a definition of what counts as rape and of the people who are likely to commit it.

No, because if you want to talk about abuse or violent consensual sex or a host of other variations you can, but you don’t need to change the meaning of “rape” to do that. Also, men aren’t the ideal sex to do it.

Susan Smith, co-director of feminist campaign group For Women Scotland, said: “We were very disturbed to hear the comments from Manivannan which betrayed such utter ignorance of the trauma and violation of rape.

“This will be a test of the determination of the Greens to ‘queer’ all boundaries.

“Having decided that gender is fluid and that ‘women’ can have penises, will they now defend the notion that consent and sexual violence are fluid, mutable concepts and that women have to accept rapists’ self-assessment that they are great lads and not to be ‘demonised’?”

This is why Manivannan is not the right person to talk about this. At all.

Now what’s all this fuss about rape?

A Scottish Green MSP has come under fire after claiming “rape is a spectrum”.

Q Manivannan, a transgender Indian migrant who was elected while only holding a student visa, faces a barrage of criticism after a short 23-second video circulated on social media.

In the clip, the 30-year-old said: “There definitely is a demonisation of rape, in the sense that it is a spectrum.”

However, he says that the clip was taken out of context.

Q Manivannan added: “If we are to tackle rape and sexual violence we need to tackle wider issues in society, including the ways boys and men are socialised, the communities or lack thereof they’re in, and how they’re raised.

“When talking about a spectrum I was making the point that laws often take a narrow definition of what rape and sexual violence is, which often allows it to continue without consequence.”

If that’s what he was saying then he’s not wrong.

Wut?

Last week, the cafe toilets were marked "ladies" and "gents" – today they were labelled "his" and "hers.'

Not sure of the legality, but certainly a novel try to stay trans inclusive and say "no" to gender-critical ideology.

— Steph Richards: (She/her) – Say NO to hate. (@PompeySteph) August 7, 2026

I don’t get it. Why is one more “inclusive” than the other? Unless he’s pretending that ladies/gents refers to class and thus excludes everyone below the upper class, which of course is not what ladies/gents means (not least because real gents don’t call themselves gents).

Anyway. Public toilets are not meant to be inclooosive in every sense. They’re for everyone, so inclooosive that way, but they are separated/segregated by sex, because of the whole Territory Between the Legs aspect. Women should not be forced to accept Mr Richards in the cafe toilets.

Department of Hilarity.

Cambridge losing Priya Gopal is really, absolutely, incredibly perfect. pic.twitter.com/OoizElRQ7M

— Yuan Yi Zhu (@yuanyi_z) August 6, 2026

Awww no. When even Priyamvada Gopal thinks you messed up, you are toast.

I think this stuff is part of an attempt to regain the discourse by arguing that the Arday issue arose because Cambridge isn't committed enough to real EDI.

— Yuan Yi Zhu (@yuanyi_z) August 6, 2026

She’s the Donald Rumsfeld of pseudo-academic bullshit. Bahahahaha

On and on and on it goes, never getting any closer to making sense.

The Labour MP behind a campaign for a “summer of sex” has criticised tougher guidance for trans people from her sun lounger.

In a video recorded on her summer holiday, Samantha Niblett said she was “unbelievably ashamed” of new rules on single-sex spaces, which force transgender people to use lavatories corresponding to their biological sex.

So she’s ashamed of rules that tell men to stay out of women’s toilets, as opposed to being ashamed of rules that tell men to go right ahead and barge into women’s toilets despite the fact that women won’t like it.

And she’s an MP.

A revised code of practice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) came into force on Wednesday, a year and a half after the Supreme Court ruled that sex in the law referred to biological sex, not gender identity.

A year and a half after. Because women are such a pointless nuisance that it’s really not necessary to enforce rules that protect them.

Dozens of Labour MPs objected to the new guidance. Among them was Ms Niblett, who told her Instagram followers on Wednesday: “Today is also Aug 5, which is a s— day. It’s a s— day because today is the day that the ‘guidance’, which is as clear as mud, comes in… All it does is dismiss the lived experience of trans people and protects nobody. This new guidance protects nobody.”

Well, nobody except women, so yeah, that’s nobody.

“All it does is cause more division and hatred towards trans people that just want to have their life, like minding their own business”

Wait wait wait. They don’t “just want to have their life, like minding their own business” – that’s the opposite of what they want. They want to have women’s lives, and they want women to shut up and go away. Minding their own business is absolutely the last thing they want.

Ms Niblett was one of more than 90 Labour MPs who signed a parliamentary motion in June that called on the Government to reject the draft EHRC code of practice.

Elected to the Commons at the 2024 general election, she remained in relative obscurity until this April, when she launched a campaign to make 2026 the “summer of sex”. She said that she hoped to set up a sex-toy exhibition in Parliament as part of her efforts, and was planning to chair a Westminster Hall debate on sex education this autumn.

Yes well she’s clearly the expert, not knowing what women are and all.

Ms Niblett’s remarks on the trans guidance were denounced by Tonia Antoniazzi, a fellow Labour backbencher and one of the party’s few MPs to have openly criticised gender ideology.

In a reply on X, Ms Antoniazzi told Ms Niblett: “Have a good break, MPs deserve it. Today, we have clarification, not more confusion. Women and girls need protection from men.

“Stop using trans people as an argument for your pro-sex work, pro-porn agenda.”

Well where’s the fun in that?

An excellent article by Stella O’Malley at Spiked:

…the trans issue is a prism through which almost every major cultural, political, ethical and psychological question of our age is refracted. The debate around transgender identity exposes problems that extend far beyond medicine or mental health. That’s why I no longer define trans as an ‘unfolding medical scandal’ but an ‘unfolding medical and institutional scandal’.

To name just a few areas:

Medicine and healthcare

‘Gender medicine’ has revealed what happens when medicine becomes consumer-driven. Technical advances have made possible a growing number of elective medical interventions – gender medicine, commercial surrogacy, assisted dying, some forms of abortion – which are increasingly presented as ‘healthcare’ simply because they are medically possible. The distinction between treating illness and fulfilling consumer demand has become dangerously blurred.

And pseudo-lactation in men so that they can “feed” an infant a cocktail of hormones.

Then there’s the mess currently being created by the mental-health industry, which is never more prominent than within the trans debate. A culture of over-medicalisation, over-diagnosis and affirmation has transformed healthcare from what was once a process of exploration, uncertainty and psychological growth into little more than emotional validation. Therapy has shifted from helping people understand themselves to helping them feel affirmed and supported. 

Which shouldn’t be a need or desire in the first place. It’s too much. It’s expecting too much and ends up in demanding too much. We don’t get to be affirmed and supported by the whole world just because we exist.

Academia and education

Like healthcare, universities increasingly resemble consumer-driven businesses, anxious to keep their customers happy. I had always imagined universities as places whose purpose was to move us from darkness into light through the pursuit of truth. The poor quality of much research on gender medicine exposed just how vulnerable academia has become to ideology.

I’m glad she uses the i-word. I talk about it as ideology all the time, but I don’t see a whole lot of other people doing so. Understanding it as an ideology explains a lot.

The startling speed with which transgender ideology became embedded in education systems across the Western world exposed just how easily a new orthodoxy can become accepted, taught and defended by entire institutions. 

Seriously. One minute we had a bunch of friends who were skeptical, secular, open to questions, and the next we had an army of fanatical believers.

The decision of the left to swap class politics for identity politics has been both maddening and fascinating to watch through my splayed fingers. The unanticipated – and, let’s face it, largely unfathomable – swerve of large sections of the contemporary left towards advocating for the lifelong medicalisation of children who will one day become infertile and sexually impaired has yet to be fully analysed. Nobody yet knows why this movement that once championed the downtrodden, the importance of fair economics and equal rights now embraces self-reported identity, subjective truth and moral certainty, but it is important to reflect on it.

We’ve been reflecting on it. For years and years we’ve been reflecting on it.

My experiences of being cancelled, censored and censured for speaking truthfully about trans issues have shown me that modern censorship isn’t like Soviet Russia or the East German Stasi. There are no jackboots ensuring everyone stays in step. Instead, contemporary censorship more closely resembles the culture I experienced growing up in the Catholic Church, where public shaming made the policing of acceptable thought remarkably effective. Today’s censorship is led by relentless finger-wagging moralism from the new left and reinforced by professional regulators, social media moderation, reputational threats and institutional pressure.

And blog networks.

Over-policing and nanny-state officials have led to children being removed from home, just because parents have informed their daughter that she was not really a boy. While this may seem far-fetched, it is important to know that the UK government’s new Conversion Practices Bill promises to criminalise parents who insist on speaking the truth to their trans-identified children. Within this new culture, identity has become the new secular religion, and ‘identifying as’ has become one of its central and sacred rituals. In this context, parents are regarded as ‘dangerous’ if they don’t affirm the child’s new identity.

Bullseye again! “Identifying as” is another one of my targets for disdain.

Thank you Stella O’Malley.

In climate news: oops we’ve passed the line already.

…there is one type of rare, gargantuan, towering lie that makes all the other mass lies throughout human history seem like frightened, scurrying, little adorable fibs.

It is a lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually—as the deception entered mainstream culture—even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day…

This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.”

To be clear, we are not talking about the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President. And we’re not referring to cartoonish hucksters and “climate skeptics” like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson.

Polling shows only 14.8 percent of Americans deny the basic sixth grade science behind global warming. To put that in perspective, as much as 10 percent of the population still believes the Earth is flat.

No, the monstrous, misshapen garden colossus lie we’re referring to is subscribed to by most of the U.S., has stopped and slowed climate action far more than outright denial, and keeps growing and growing. Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.”

Or to put it another way, “global warming is real and urgent but let’s ignore it anyway.”

I read a thing in some local outlet last week about why we keep doing something as colossally stupid as having fighter jets zoom around by way of entertainment for a few days every August. The climate toll is massive. Why do we keep doing it? Oh you know, people like it. Shrug shrug. It’s not that we say it’s not urgent, it’s that we say it’s fun and we like it.

Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it.

It’s the old joke about the guy who fell off a tall building and said “So far so good.”

And with a bump coming next year from a growing, historic El Niño up to 1.7 degrees celsius average warming, likely to cause agricultural failure and food shortages, we are staring right at the vaunted 2C number.

Why is 2C so vaunted?

Let’s do the context thing again: 2C will mean we have completely left the stable climate period known as the Holocene. This is the 11,000-year-old era that has given us large-scale crop and livestock agriculture, which gave us cities, written language, modern science and medicine, and warm beds and showers.

Before that, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other.

What we grow up with is what we think is normal. It’s hard to wrap our heads around the fact that all this can go away, and that in the meantime all this can get very unpleasant indeed.

A joint study by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter suggests that a 2C temperature increase by 2050—which we are hurtling towards, with no plans of slowing down—could result in two billion deaths. And that is virtually the best-case scenario, as temperature rise predictions have worsened and put 1.5C of warming out of reach. According to the United Nations, in order to limit warming to 2C, we would need “emissions to drop around 35 per cent by 2035.” Even if “current national commitments” were fully implemented they “would cut emissions only 12 to 15 per cent by that date.”

The other scenario, which scientists now say “recent data aligns more closely with,” is 3C of warming. At that level, the Exeter authors warn of up to 4 billion deaths. Four billion. That is half the planet. In 26 years or less. Even for those lucky enough to survive the worst weather events, life as we know it would cease to exist due to war, involuntary mass migration, and “catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.” According to the lead author of the report, there is no realistic plan in place to avoid this scenario.

But…so far so good.

Will Trump be allowed to destroy the evidence, or no?

A group suing the Trump administration over renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has accused federal officials of taking steps that could destroy evidence at the center of an ongoing legal dispute over damage to the landmark.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), one of the plaintiffs challenging the project, asked a federal judge this week to allow experts access to the Reflecting Pool to assess its condition before additional work is carried out. The group argues that National Park Service plans to perform further repairs could alter or eliminate evidence relevant to determining what caused problems with the newly resurfaced pool.

If Trump has anything to do with it that “could” should be “will”. If Trump can get the evidence eliminated, he will. This is Trump we’re talking about.

In a filing submitted on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, attorneys for the organization wrote that federal officials have made repeated claims about the cause of damage to the pool while also preparing to change conditions at the site.

“Defendants also have undertaken to destroy some of the very evidence that could shed light on the veracity of Defendants’ claims,” the filing states. The attorneys pointed to a declaration from a National Park Service official indicating that additional work was planned at the Reflecting Pool.

See above. If Trump can bury the evidence, he will.

The damage is central to an ongoing lawsuit brought by the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), which originally sued the Department of the Interior in May, alleging that work on the Reflecting Pool violated federal historic preservation laws. TCLF argued that replacing the basin with a blue-colored synthetic liner altered a defining historic feature of the nearly century-old landmark without the reviews required under the National Historic Preservation Act and other federal laws. According to the organization, the Reflecting Pool’s dark gray basin has been a key design element since it opened in 1923.

Yes but you see Trump has to change everything so that everything reflects him as opposed to anyone or anything else.

New evidence of DOJ lawyers citing construction failures is key to the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s latest filing, which quotes DOJ lawyers as saying a “rushed and botched installation” was responsible for the problems and that the “most likely explanation” for the damage was faulty installation rather than intentional acts of vandalism.

The group’s attorneys argue those findings undermine previous representations made by Interior Department officials and raise new questions about what happened during the renovation. They also pointed to a DOJ court filing accusing Interior Department components of providing “less than fulsome information” about the resurfacing project and the issues that followed.

No no, not fulsome. Complete or generous or just plain full, but not fulsome. Wrong word alert. “Fulsome” modifies words like praise and flattery. It doesn’t mean “full” or extra extra full.

“Subsequent developments strongly suggest that some of Defendants’ assertions to date about the state of the Pool are false,” the filing states.

Yuh huh. They do.

Notice anything missing?

A reminder that yesterday, today, tomorrow and always: trans women are women and trans men are men.

Proud to represent a Borough that recognises that protecting women doesn't need to come at the expense of trans people's safety and dignity. pic.twitter.com/0X4uJuYboK

— Emily Thornberry (@EmilyThornberry) August 6, 2026

What’s missing: any hint of awareness that “inclusion” of men in all women’s spaces without exception is “inclusive” of men at the expense of women.

Emily Thornberry is a woman herself, I take it, yet she blithely drives a tank through women’s rights while babbling wildly about “inclusive services for all our residents”.

It can’t be done. If you include men in all women’s spaces without exception, then you’re not providing inclusive services for women.

You’re also not being inclusive of women in your worldview, your politics, your awareness, your thinking. On the contrary: you are systematically ignoring women and their needs. So odd, when you’re a woman yourself.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Der schönen blauen Donau.

If the last decade should have taught us one lesson, it’s that “the way it’s always been” in the past (or the tiny fraction of the past that each of us can remember from within our short lifetimes) is not a reliable indicator of what to expect going forward. As I have mentioned a few times already, in (what we used to think of as) a “normal” year here in Norway, the water-flow in our rivers would increase something like five-fold, and our hydropower reservoirs (i.e. lakes) would rise several meters above the “highest regulated water level” roughly during the 2nd half of may due to snowmelt in the mountains. By that standard 2021 still stands as the last somewhat “normal” year so far. The once so reliable “spring flood” has now been completely absent 3 times in the last 5 years, i.e. in 2022, 2025, and again this year. And despite how some people still like to spin it, the fact that 2023 and 2024 were the wettest years on record doesn’t mean the extremes “cancel out”, leaving everything “normal” on average.

I spent a few days in Berlin back in June, but it felt more like Athens with temperatures around 34 °C (according to some of the weather forecasts temperatures were expected to reach 39 °C the day after I left!). As a Norwegian I have always thought the main problem facing homeless people was exposure to the cold. In this case, however, the local media were reporting on homeless people suffering from heat strokes and dehydration. Not that it’s been very different in South-Eastern Norway where I live. A few weeks ago just a few kilometers from my home hundreds of homes were destroyed by probably the worst fire incident in modern Norwegian history. I’m not sure how the fire got started, but the bone dry conditions after weeks of baking sun and no rain sure as hell didn’t help the firefighters gain control over the situation.

All this and more (shorter and milder winters, longer and hotter summers, lethal heatwaves, catastrophic wildfires, severe droughts and floods, shrinking lakes and rivers and glaciers that hundreds of millions of people on this planet rely upon for drinking water, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, catastrophic hurricanes and tropical storms etc.) is after human emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly in the form of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, have raised average global temperatures by a little more than one degree Celsius. The same models that predicted this was going to happen (many different models, working independently of each other, using different algorithms, different input data etc.) are now telling us that unless governments all over the world start immediately and colliectively phasing out fossil fuels far more rapidly and aggressively than any of them is currently even considering, we’re looking at something like 3-4 °C of global warming by the end of this century (and of course there is nothing magical about the end of the century, global temperatures are only going to continue rising after that). And, yet doing anything about the problem that has any chance of working is about as fringe a position as you’re going to find.

We may never get to that point, though. If I hear another word about a “fertility crisis” (unless the crisis in question is fertility itself), I’m going to drown the planet in a tsunami of vomit that is going to make Noah’s Flood look like a drought.

A guy called Howard Bryant (apparently a columnist at the Guardian, despite the fact that he can’t write) has lofty disdain for women who don’t want men replacing them.

Invoking a wounded innocence that their desire for sports to be simple, just like they used to be, conservatives for a decade and a half have dreaded the word “politics”. Now they cannot get enough.

Wut? The first clause of the first sentence doesn’t even make sense.

Never mind; he moves on to Sophie Cunningham.

Largely anonymous politically or otherwise during her eight-year career, Cunningham – she of the viral finger-point which has been adopted as a symbol of the white animosity toward the WNBA culture – is in her moment. Her comments in a lengthy 21 July ESPN profile stating her opposition to transgender athletes has earned her hero status of the specious “Protect Our Girls” movement, even though you’d need a microscope to find any critical mass of transgender women participating in sports at any level.

Excuse me? Why does it have to be a critical mass? Why isn’t one enough to object to? We don’t nod cheerfully if just a few people cheat in sports or elsewhere, so why should women nod cheerfully if less than a critical mass of men take women’s places in sports?

If a burglar dropped in at Howard Bryant’s house and took only some of the silver, a few books and paintings and bottles of wine, would he shrug and move on with his day? And what does a purported “white animosity toward the WNBA culture” have to do with anything? Just say you hate mouthy women, Mr Bryant; it will save us all a lot of time.