The UK has issued new guidance for schools on sex and relationships teaching. One passage in particular has drawn praise from people with sane views on children and “gender”:

We are aware that topics involving gender and biological sex can be complex and sensitive matters to navigate. You should not reinforce harmful stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender based on their personality and interests or the clothes they prefer to wear. Resources used in teaching about this topic must always be age-appropriate and evidence based. Materials which suggest that non-conformity to gender stereotypes should be seen as synonymous with having a different gender identity should not be used and you should not work

Welcome to the theocracy of the country called The Savior, where women are harshly punished for having miscarriages and stillbirths.

A woman sentenced to 30 years in jail after a stillbirth that was judged to be her fault has been released from jail in El Salvador.

First rule of theocratic misogyny: it’s always a woman’s fault. “It” means anything and everything.

Cindy Erazo, 29, from San Salvador, was granted conditional freedom on Wednesday after six years in jail.

Morena Herrera, head of the Citizen’s Group for the Decriminalisation of Abortion, said that Erazo, who has a son aged 10, had an obstetric emergency when she was eight months pregnant. She was accused of attempting to end the

Navalny is out of the hospital.

Navalny, who has built a huge following on social media, described his condition in an Instagram post featuring a photo in which he is staring into the camera from a Berlin park bench. He wrote that sleeping is still his biggest problem and that doctors decided the best treatment is a return to “normal life.”

Navalny said he is taking walks and spending time with his family and that his plans are “simple”: daily physiotherapy sessions so he’ll be able to stand on one leg again and regain full control of his fingers. He joked that he’ll find out if he can get a prescription for the PlayStation 5.

Colleagues of

This guy is fascinating. He just can’t stop telling women what to do.

It seems there was a Mumsnet thread discussing surrogacy that included harsh remarks about him, and Justine Roberts of Mumsnet took it down after he complained about it.

Btw this was just replaced with a topic about how awful surrogacy is in all circumstances. Is this the official view of @MumsnetTowers @Justine_Roberts ? https://t.co/YBOIgHSbFm pic.twitter.com/bLQvK3Dg8e

— Benjamin Cohen (@benjamincohen) September 23, 2020

Well is it? Justine?! I’d like an answer please!

Who the hell does he think he is? It’s no wonder Pink News is so awful, when he’s the CEO of it.… Read the rest

Speaking of Trump’s refusing to accept the election result…

President Donald Trump on Wednesday would not commit to providing a peaceful transition of power after Election Day, lending further fuel to concerns he may not relinquish his office should he lose in November.

“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said when asked whether he’d commit to a peaceful transition, one of the cornerstones of American democracy.

As if “American democracy” is something to boast of at this point.

His reluctance to commit to a peaceful transition was rooted in what he said were concerns about ballots, extending his false assertion that widespread mail-in voting is rife with fraud.

“You know that I’ve been complaining very

So, about this election…

If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.

As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a

Well you see it’s like this…

Male same-sex couples can’t reproduce. It’s that simple. They don’t need reproductive healthcare services because of the not being able to reproduce thing. Female same-sex couples can’t reproduce on their own either, but the fix for that is technologically quite simple and quick and entirely non-invasive. It’s very different from pregnancy that way. The obstacles that exist for male couples that don’t exist for straight couples are all about the presence or absence of a uterus. That’s not because of unfair laws or homophobia, it’s just how female and male bodies work.

Harrop puts it the way he does because he wants us to think that access to female reproduction is there for … Read the rest

Newsweek reports:

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has defended 17-year-old Illinois double murder suspect Kyle Rittenhouse as a “little boy” who was merely “trying to protect his community” during the shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin last month.

Bondi appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to discuss new video footage released by Rittenhouse’s attorney which paints the suspect in a favorable light and suggests his actions were justified in the “war zone” which had broken out in Kenosha in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

“You have got a 17-year-old out there trying to protect his state,” Bondi said, despite the fact the teenager traveled from his hometown in Antioch, Illinois, to attend the protests on

Ah you see it’s a long-term relationship, not at all a rent a woman’s uterus situation.

These people genuinely seem to believe that Surrogacy in the UK is us “demanding” a random woman is our surrogate. Instead it’s building a long-term relationship with someone as a friend and a member of our extended family who does so for altruistic only reasons pic.twitter.com/1bRYDV6qr8

— Benjamin Cohen (@benjamincohen) September 23, 2020

(First of all, the inelegance of the grammar – “us “demanding” a random woman is our surrogate” – ick. Should be “our ‘demanding'” because gerunds are nouns, but much more…demanding a woman is our surrogate? Come on. That’s what the subjunctive is for. Demanding that something is just makes no … Read the rest

The discussion continued.

They are also claiming that I don’t want to pay “an adult female to rent a uterus”. Doing what they are asking for, would be illegal as commercial surrogacy is not allowed in the UK (2/3)

— Benjamin Cohen (@benjamincohen) September 22, 2020

Oh look, he said the Forbidden Words – adult female. He said it in quotation marks, but he forgot to tell us the words are forbidden, and transphobic, and terfy, and deserving of punishment.

And I’d add because the transphobes are deliberately spinning things. I don’t think that I have a right to a specific surrogate. I do think that I should have the right to things like a F**king BLOOD TEST on the

Oh no, a reporter asked him a question about the more than 200 thousand deaths. How dare she.

Trump is in Chynah did it mode:

Tensions between the US and China came to the fore of the annual UN General Assembly in New York, with US President Donald Trump blaming China for the spread of coronavirus.

He called for China to be held “accountable” for the pandemic.

The one he calls “the China virus.”

[A]s often is the case for speeches to the assembly, President Trump used his address to tout his achievements and tear into a rival.

It’s all he knows how to do – say how magnificent he is and pick fights with other people. He’s not a talented guy.

But Laura Trevelyan explains that it’s a campaign move.

This was a stump speech by

Cory Booker is not impressed by Trump’s move to whip up his audience by saying the words “suburbia” and Cory Booker!!” together yesterday. Oooooooh Cory Booker gonna move into your suburbia and make it all SCARY and not white so be afraid be very afraid.

Sen. Booker responds to Pres. Trump's comments about him: "I'm tired, I really am exhausted, at the end of this man's time as president, he has pushed every racially divisive nerve possible in this country." pic.twitter.com/Cap4CINquP

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 22, 2020

… Read the rest

Trump was out flapping his lips yesterday.

"I turn on NBC w/Lester Holt, another beauty, & they start w/a hurricane, & then they went to something…I'm saying, 'First Lady, this is getting a little embarrassing…they haven't mentioned the Nobel'"- Trump whines that NBC covered a hurricane instead of his Nobel nomination pic.twitter.com/C3jRDy5NH1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2020

https://twitter.com/ava/status/1308430557550837760 … Read the rest

Oh look at that now, it turns out women are needed for some things.

(This guy is the CEO of Pink News, scourge of ‘TERFs.”)

How casual is his “for gay male couples starting a family through surrogacy” – that is, for gay male couples renting a woman’s body to gestate a baby for them. It doesn’t sound quite so tidy and clinical and impersonal now, does it. “Through surrogacy” is such a brisk way of dismissing a woman’s nine months of increasing discomfort and fatigue ending in X hours of extreme pain.

And he says “if we were straight” but that’s not the issue. The issue is that they are both men, and two men can’t produce a … Read the rest

Speaking of “a woman” with accompanying ( ) gesture to explain what a woman is, this is not the most intelligent headline I’ve ever seen.

Via Sister Outrider… Read the rest

This guy.

Check the gesture at 11 seconds.

(There’s also the bizarre riddle of why he says the same thing 4 times in 15 seconds, but that’s a distant second to that gesture.)… Read the rest

John Roberts has opposed voting rights for decades. It was a lost cause for the first 3 decades and more, but now he’s getting somewhere.

Among other things, Roberts dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and he’s joined decisions making it much harder for voting rights plaintiffs to prove they were victims of discrimination. On the basic question of who is allowed to vote and which ballots will be counted, the most important issue in any democracy, Roberts is still the same man who tried and failed to strangle the Voting Rights Act nearly four decades earlier.

…

As originally enacted, the Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with a history of racist

The Post on TrumpBarr’s provocation:

Following a memorandum that President Trump issued earlier this month, the Justice Department published a list of cities that the White House wants to get more aggressive on civil unrest in the wake of police shootings and killings.

“We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted,” Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement. “It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.”

He’s an enforcer for the guy who has failed to protect us by failing to deal with the pandemic responsibly, to the tune of many … Read the rest

Wait a minute though.

If your criticism about a potential Supreme Court nominee is her religion, can I kindly suggest that you look in the mirror and think about when you decided that religious discrimination is okay.

— Carissa Byrne Hessick (@CBHessick) September 21, 2020

Wait.

Religion is about beliefs. It’s also about practices, rituals and so on, but beliefs are important. Beliefs influence how people think, and what people think – high court justices included.

How can we evaluate Supreme Court nominees if we’re not allowed to evaluate their beliefs?

It’s a nice little racket the religions have worked out for themselves in the US: their freedom (of religion) is inscribed in the Bill of Rights, so Catholic bishops … Read the rest