Author: Ophelia Benson

  • A reminder that up is down

    On and on and on it goes. Not taking no for an answer is the new “You’re not the boss of me!!”

    …on how to ensure everyone in our borough, no matter their gender identity, can live a safe life, free to express and be themselves.

    But it’s not about being themselves, is it. It’s about being not themselves. It’s about pretending to be those other people. In particular, it’s about men being not themselves, and in doing so, putting women in danger and/or taking what belongs to women. Bromides about being themselves are not useful when the entire issue is about being other people and taking their stuff.

    The Guardian explains:

    The guidance from the EHRC, the equality watchdog for England, Scotland and Wales, provides practical advice for services, public bodies and associations on how they should interpret the 2010 Equality Act.

    It applies to organisations as diverse as cafes, leisure centres, public toilets, domestic violence shelters, bowls clubs and many more.

    The code says where it is proportionate for facilities, such as public toilets and changing rooms, or services like a rape crisis centre, to be single sex then only those of the same biological sex should use them.

    This means, for instance, a trans woman, a person born a biological male who identifies as a woman, should not use women-only facilities. And a trans man should not use men only facilities.

    That’s not really a “for instance”; it’s the whole thing. Yes, boys, this means that a man who claims to be a woman does not get to bounce into women-only facilities. The end. It’s really not complicated.

    But the code also says it could amount to discrimination against a transgender person if they were forced to use services related to their biological sex. It says gender-neutral spaces are an alternative.

    Then the code is bonkers. It’s not discrimination against, it’s just reality. Men are men. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.

    Transgender people argue they should be able to use services that align with the way they identify and live their life, rather than their biological sex.

    In response, campaigners including some women’s and gay rights groups say this undermines sex-based protections, particularly for women.

    The way people live their lives is their business. The way women live their lives entails some precautions when it comes to men. The two sexes are not in the same place when it comes to life-changing events like pregnancy, rape, enslavement, and violence. It is not safe for women to agree that men can be women at all times and in all circumstances.

    Many organisations have already made changes they say comply with the law and are in line with the code, such as the Women’s Institute and Girl Guiding, which had already said membership was for females.

    But the deputy leader of Lambeth Council in London says the authority may refuse to implement the guidance, if advised it’s lawful to do so.

    Green Party Councillor Natalie Kane told the Today programme: “For us it’s about people accessing services, and we’re worried people won’t feel they can”.

    But she doesn’t mean people, does she. She means men. She means men who are pretending to be women. It’s interesting that she says “people” when she means men; it suggests that she knows it sounds bad if you say men. Saying “people” in this context is a red flag for demolishing women’s rights.

  • A wider research project

    Ah yes, the old “if someone says your research looks shady, call the police” gambit.

    Cambridge University’s embattled “academic superstar”, Professor Jason Arday, reported a fellow academic to the police after being challenged over apparent inconsistencies, errors and possible plagiarism in his work – raising troubling questions about the use of harassment law as a shield against awkward scholarly scrutiny in an increasingly litigious, low-trust society.

    Troubling questions indeed. We heretics who don’t subscribe to trans ideology are well familiar with such questions.

    The academic was Dr David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University and one of the first scholars to raise concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and several subsequent peer-reviewed publications on race, inequality and education, including his treatment of concepts such as structural racism, whiteness, decolonisation and racial microaggressions.

    Concepts which may possibly be more trendy than conceptual.

    It was not Harris’s first encounter with institutional hostility arising from his scrutiny of critical theory and related intellectual traditions, including Critical Legal Studies, Black Studies and strands of Marxist and Frankfurt School thought. Last year, Marjon revoked the emeritus title he had held since retiring in 2011 after he published a monograph critically examining the body of ideas now commonly described as critical race theory. Internal emails later obtained through a Subject Access Request showed senior administrators describing his research as “controversial” and suggesting that the University should “probably sever ties” with him. Following an intervention by CAF, however, the University reversed its decision and restored the title earlier this year.

    Daaaamn. That’s blatant. “This guy doesn’t subscribe to the trendy branch of scholarship therefore we’d better wash our hands of him.” Hello senior admins: isn’t the criterion supposed to be scholarship as opposed to controversy?

    Harris’s opening email to Arday, sent on 4 May 2023, was almost absurdly polite: unmistakably scholarly, but also courteous and measured. He explained that he was reviewing Arday’s work as part of a wider research project and attached a detailed document setting out concerns about what he described as “puzzling similarities” in the reported data, repeated passages and possible failures of attribution. The covering email concluded simply: “I would welcome any response.”

    When none came, Harris sent a brief follow-up a week later.

    Arday replied that same day but did not address the substance of Harris’s concerns. Instead, he recast Harris’s intervention as little more than pettifogging criticism of spelling and grammar, and as evidence of a failure to appreciate the structural racism and ableism which, in his view, such scrutiny helped to perpetuate.

    You know…I’m sorry to say it but the truth is, “ableism” is a rock bottom necessity in academia, and in quite a few other professions as well. In fact that’s what makes them professions: you have to know some stuff. You have to know quite a lot of stuff. You also have to understand the stuff you know. Those are indeed barriers to the professions, and they do screen out people who can’t afford years of higher education. The ableism is still essential though.

    Arday berated Harris for asking his questions.

    “Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism,” Arday added, “you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes.”

    Harris was, he said, “a monument to the fact we live in a society where grammar is valued above equity”. He ended with the warning: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

    Harris nevertheless replied, prefacing his remarks with an expression of admiration for Arday as someone who had overcome considerable personal and professional adversity, before returning to the academic issues and correcting what he regarded as an inaccurate and damaging account of his own disciplinary history.

    What followed is now a matter of public record. Arday contacted the Metropolitan Police to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris. Because Harris is based in Plymouth, the matter was referred to Devon and Cornwall Police, which declined to pursue it.

    Gosh. Doesn’t that sound familiar. “Officer, officer, that woman over there doesn’t believe that men can be women!!”

    As an organisation that defends academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law, CAF takes no view on the ultimate merits of the allegations concerning Arday’s work. We are, however, deeply concerned by what appears, on the evidence available to us, to have been an attempt to use the criminal law to suppress legitimate scholarly scrutiny.

    And that, I think, is quite obviously the product of “trans activism”. I think the trans activists have created a giant precedent for calling the cops on people who dispute a trendy ideology.

    In taking no further action, Devon and Cornwall Police got the decision right. But as the recent cases of Maxie Allen, Darren Brady, Julian Foulkes, Kellie-Jay Keen, Markus Meechan, Jennifer Swayne, and David Wootton demonstrate, police forces have not always covered themselves in glory when deciding whether lawful but contentious expression warrants arrest or investigation under broadly framed communication offences.

    Indeed they have not.

  • Guest post: Even the most well-intentioned sexologists and clinicians

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Special.

    In all honesty, I feel some pity for Isabella.

    I actually started using [the ladies’] only later on during my transition.

    The thing is, he made the choice to become a “transgender woman” because he thought society was moving towards a genuine offer, that if he invested enough in a trans identity and body, that society would buy into it, and together they’d have made a successful bargain: he and the female population would be truly integrated.

    He didn’t do any of this in a vacuum.

    It was a tragic decision he made, and it wasn’t really just one decision, but a long series of steps strung out over time, as you can see here, when he says that at one point he was in some halfway state — at least visibly gender-bending but still using men’s toilets. He’s clearly moved further along the transgender tragectory since then.

    This is where I save some blame for even the most well-intentioned sexologists and clinicians who participated in this game, including people I am personally acquainted with, who I’d almost consider friends.

    The mistake these clinicians made was to perpetuate a sort of tango, a dance in steps, a pas-de-deux between the patients and the cultural environment they inhabited — between the individuals and the zeitgeist. One partner took a step forward, then the other in turn, and this was gently prodded along in no small part by the clinicians.

    The clinical environment of “trans medicine” prodded its patients step-by-step, further and further towards “artificial womanhood”, and it matched that by prodding society, step-by-step, further and further towards accommodations for these artificial women. Those baby steps added up, and it went from teensy little exemptions to a wholesale collapse of women’s rights fairly quickly.

    The ugly truth is, if these patients had been told flat-out, bluntly, upfront, that their future lives as “transwomen” did not come with a guarantee that society would continue to dance along to the transgender tune, that there was a distinct possibility that the music would stop and they’d be left to contend with the wreckage of their bodies all by themselves, most of them would never have ventured so far into the trans fantasy.

    These male patients took these steps, one by one, because by themselves, each little step felt small enough for female society to absorb them. Each one was a quiet transaction, a small debit away from women’s rights, towards men’s. In many ways, it was the clinicians who told both sides that each of these little transactions, these little concessions — little debits — was too small to matter.

    But, as anyone who’s wrestled with an ever-increasing monthly stack of media subscriptions can tell you, all those little debits add up to big money very quickly. In a sense, the trans movement undermined the women’s movement by nickels and dimes.

    Here, Isabella is left holding the bag: he’s had all this cosmetic surgery and hormone surgery and psychological conditioning to help him imagine he’s a female, and now female society is saying, NO, we’re pulling out, we never agreed to any of this.

    Well, that’s tough. But it’s also tragic. I don’t think he quite realized he never had a written deal with women. And it was probably his clinicians who glossed over that fact as they approved each successive step in his medical and psychological “transition”.

    If you ask me, they (the clinicians) bear quite a lot of the blame. Even the so-called “good ones”, the pragmatists who never denied the reality of biological sex and who fully acknowledged the homosexual/autogynephile distinction.

  • Theft

    How dare he.

    Jim Crow. Jonathan Willoughby is not, repeat not in any way comparable to the people who were victims of Jim Crow laws. (Crow. Not Crowe. Crow. Think about it.)

    Jonathan Willoughby has freedom and rights. People subject to Jim Crow laws had neither. Jonathan Willoughby is in no way comparable to the people enslaved by Europeans in the US over many generations.

  • Der schönen blauen Donau

    As the globe warms

    Relentless heat and a dearth of rain are having a punishing effect on some of Europe’s most vital rivers. The waterways have tumbled to record lows in places, in a crisis so severe it can be seen from space.

    Stark satellite images reveal dramatically shrunken waterways weaving through parched landscapes. Low water levels have exposed vast stretches of riverbanks, as well as long sandbars usually hidden deep beneath the surface.

    …

    Europe is the planet’s fastest-warming continent, and its summers are becoming ever more extreme as the human-caused climate crisis drives unprecedented high temperatures. Successive, brutal heat waves have sucked moisture from soils and waterways and continued drought has meant little relief.

    The impacts are huge; Europe’s rivers are vital arteries transporting goods, cooling power plants, generating hydroelectric energy, drawing in tourists and providing a vital habitat for wildlife. As they shrink, people, economies and ecosystems are suffering.

    Europe’s rivers frequently plunge to low levels in summertime — but this year they have reached unprecedented levels in places. Two of the continent’s most critical waterways, the Danube and the Rhine, have been particularly badly affected.

    This CNN piece includes those comparative aerial photos of the river then versus now – green on one side and dusty brown on the other.

  • Gonna fight back is he?

    It seems Jolyon is raising money for a campaign that can’t possibly succeed. Onlookers are saying he knows damn well it can’t succeed, so he’s basically cheating people out of their cash.

    There are many replies in that vein.

    I suppose he could say he’s taking the long view, that he’s raising money to keep on campaigning against the law in the hope that the government will withdraw it. It’s still quite a taking candy from babies approach.

  • Special

    Extraordinary that they don’t see it.

    He will never be safe in a men’s toilet, he says, so his solution is for him to make women unsafe by using our toilets. And Channel 4 is too stupid or too ideological to point out this obvious flaw.

  • The most egregious

    Why Evolution is True on the Arday matter:

    This is the most egregious example I know of someone advancing to a high position in academics while constructing an apparently fraudulent past, as well as having committed multiple instances of plagiarism. The amazing thing is that Cambridge University is apparently not investigating sociology professor Jason Arday despite a complete lack of evidence for his unbelievable claims about his past.

    …

    The story or Arday, and how his claims unraveled (or now look unbelievable) has been told widely in the press. The fact that the Guardian has the most comprehensive summary of his apparent behavioral fabulism (e.g., apparent lying) is telling, for the Guardian, being very woke, would be the one “mainstream” paper I would expect to defend Arday, or at least to avoid reporting on the issue. To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, “If you’ve lost the Guardian, you’ve lost the progressives.”

    The progressives, I keep pointing out, should not be defending lies and bullshit, whether it’s gender ideology or massive plagiarism.

    H/t Peter N

  • No matter how big the box is

    Evidence shmevidence, am I right?

    The top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital carted a box full of evidence to the White House on Monday, in a bid to prove to President Trump that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by shoddy construction and not by vandals, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News on Tuesday.

    U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, a staunch ally of the president, made the case in a sometimes heated private meeting in the Oval Office Monday, hours after Mr. Trump had publicly rebuked her for dropping criminal charges against Olympic canoeist David Hearn. 

    Well she does know who he is, right? He doesn’t give a single fuck about evidence. Hearn is guilty because Trump says so, and that’s supposed to be the end of that.

    Trump earlier in the day had accused Pirro of folding “like an umbrella,” after her office on Friday filed a motion dismissing the felony case against Hearn.

    Paying attention to the evidence=folding. You’re not supposed to pay attention to the evidence, you’re supposed to do what Trump tells you to do.

    In the motion, prosecutors blamed the Interior Department for holding back critical evidence that they claimed they did not see until after they had secured the indictment from the grand jury in D.C.’s Superior Court. They said new information they had received indicated that the damage was caused by a “botched installation” by a contractor, not vandalism, as the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed. 

    The feds hid the evidence. That’s a crime right there.

  • Hallucinatory megalomania

    There’s a saga going on about a Cambridge academic named Jason Arday who claims a lot of things about himself that…shall we say, strain credulity.

    An item today:

    See, long before we get to the last three credulity-straining paragraphs, I’m cringing at the writing of the first three. It reeks of phony to me. All of it. It doesn’t read like genuine autobiography or memoir, it reads like a public relations pamphlet. It’s stiff, it’s self-conscious, it’s imitative, it’s grandiose; above all it’s straining to be Fine Writing and failing completely. That kind of writing makes my hackles go up. I probably look like a dog snarling as I read it.

    In short he comes across as both fake and pretentious. Not a charming combination, in my book.

  • Narrative shmarative

    The Great Reflecting Pool Saga has taken an awkward turn.

    Trump met with Jeanine Pirro at the White House on Monday, hours after saying that she had “choked” when she concluded that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was not the work of vandals, as the president has claimed.

    …

    The decision to drop the charges set Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally and loyal appointee of a president — on a collision course with Mr. Trump, who has made sure to inflict consequences on people within his orbit who contradict his claims. In her filing, Ms. Pirro openly undermined Mr. Trump’s narrative that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives.

    Trump’s narrative. To us peasants, that means he’s lying. One doesn’t tell stories about how Person X committed a crime – not when Person X is real and the stories could result in prison time. Trump doesn’t have the right to sit on his fat ass and tell lies about us peasants leaving footprints in his marble throne room.

  • Fiat justitia ruat caelum

    Trump is all bent out of shape because an underling is refusing to prosecute someone without evidence.

    The top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital carted a box full of evidence to the White House on Monday, in a bid to prove to President Trump that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by shoddy construction and not by vandals, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News on Tuesday.

    U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, a staunch ally of the president, made the case in a sometimes heated private meeting in the Oval Office Monday, hours after Mr. Trump had publicly rebuked her for dropping criminal charges against Olympic canoeist David Hearn. 

    She was later photographed leaving the White House carting a large white box and other bags, which sources said contained all of the evidence collected from the Interior Department that exculpated Hearn and several others from criminal vandalism.

    Boxes, evidence, bags, evidence – who cares??? It’s not about “evidence”; it’s about punishing The Enemy.

    Trump earlier in the day had accused Pirro of folding “like an umbrella,” after her office on Friday filed a motion dismissing the felony case against Hearn. 

    In the motion, prosecutors blamed the Interior Department for holding back critical evidence that they claimed they did not see until after they had secured the indictment from the grand jury in D.C.’s Superior Court. They said new information they had received indicated that the damage was caused by a “botched installation” by a contractor, not vandalism, as the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed. On Saturday, Burgum said in a post on X, “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”

    The U.S. attorney’s office has also since moved to dismiss criminal charges against three others accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool.

    Goddam lawyers. Evidence evidence evidence blah blah blah nobody cares. Just pin it on some shmuck who didn’t vote for Trump and be done with it.

  • Even this one

    Huh. The Observer didn’t publish it, so the rest of us will have to.

    The full letter.

  • Even this one

    The Observer didn’t publish it, eh?

    Well then how about everyone else publishes it. I’ll start.

  • Where’s Quality Control?

    The Guardian hosts another snotty bashing of Sophie Cunningham.

    Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham is now in the act, accepting the role as the right’s anti-Black, anti-transgender culture war ambassador, the role originally intended for Caitlin Clark.

    The writer is one Howard Bryant, who is in the US and has written several pieces for the Guardian. He seems to be simply lying about the “anti-Black” part. Google turns up nothing about Cunningham and “anti-Black”. He cites one guy writing about Fauci, and then pivots via Trump.

    Apropos of nothing, President Trump publicly surmised that LeBron James might be a racist. Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham is now in the act, accepting the role as the right’s anti-Black, anti-transgender culture war ambassador, the role originally intended for Caitlin Clark.

    What act? The fact that Trump said something idiotic about LeBron James does not support the claim that Sophie Cunningham is the right’s anti-Black culture war ambassador. It doesn’t even come close to supporting it.

    Wouldn’t you think a halfway decent and/or conscious Guardian editor would have caught that? “Wait a second, Howard, you haven’t given us anything to support your claim that she’s anti-Black aka racist. Maybe it’s still in your pocket?”

    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.

    Why white?

    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.

    Easy for a man to say keeping men out of women’s sports is “specious”. It’s a good deal less specious when it’s your sports that are being ruined.

    There’s a lot more random abuse and pseudo-profundity; it’s not worth reading.

    Updating to add:

    Ex-actly.

  • A thpathe of incloojun

    ESPN reports:

    Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve reiterated her support for transgender athletes on Saturday, a day before Sophie Cunningham and the Indiana Fever visit Minneapolis for a showdown between two of the WNBA’s top teams.

    “I come from a space of inclusion,” Reeve told reporters. “The narrative that I think is problematic is to suggest that transgender athletes are the biggest problem in women’s sports. This is what’s bothersome. There is a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.”

    Define “inclusion”.

    If “inclusion” means including men in women’s sports then there is no longer such a thing as women’s sports. If women can’t have their own sports then they can’t have any sports at all. Is that the goal? Are all women happy with that plan?

    In a July 21 story on ESPN.com, Cunningham said she supported restricting transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s sports. Cunningham’s statements have brought significant attention to the issue within women’s basketball.

    Of course “transgender girls and women” should not be in girls’ and women’s sports. That’s because they’re boys and men. No matter how much they fantasize themselves as girls or women, they remain boys or men.

    Reeve said she had no objections to people voicing their opinions.

    “I don’t think these demonstrators are not being peaceful,” she said. “Everyone has a right to peacefully assemble. That’s whether you agree with them or not.”

    Reeve added that she thought the topic required “nuance,” especially when looking at competitive and elite sports beyond puberty.

    “That’s where I say common-sense people get together and you find common ground,” she said. “To find a way to be inclusive. The answer isn’t ‘no.’”

    Yes it is. That’s exactly what it is. The answer is, precisely, no.

    We already have the common ground. The common ground is that men are not women and boys are not girls. Finding the common ground can’t entail endorsing silly conspicuous lies.

    The 2026 collective bargaining agreement signed in March states that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” There is no further definition of a woman or any publicly available policy governing transgender or intersex athlete eligibility. The WNBA did not respond to multiple requests this week for clarification of the league’s policy.

    There’s no need for further definition. The definition is what it’s always been and always will be. Look around you. What do you see? A world full of people. How did the people get there? By connecting one woman and one man to produce a new person, times millions. See also: cows and bulls, mares and stallions, hens and roosters, ducks and drakes, does and stags.

    Twenty-seven states, including Indiana, have passed legislation barring transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s school and collegiate sports. The NCAA enacted a policy last year that bars transgender women from women’s competition. The International Olympic Committee and U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee also have banned transgender women from the women’s category.

    Better late than never.

    On Thursday, the WNBA suspended Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton for five home games after she confronted two fans wearing XX-XY shirts when Seattle hosted Indiana on Tuesday. The Storm apologized for the incident Wednesday.

    Storm majority owner Ginny Gilder said the team is “committed to creating an inclusive environment where every fan is treated with respect.” One of the fans confronted by Keaton, Ahnaleigh Wilson, told Fox News Digital she had competed and lost to transgender girls in middle school track and high school cross-country.

    Again: it’s not “inclusive” to let boys compete against girls.

    H/t J.A.

  • The infighting

    Senate Republicans are annoyed that Trump makes everything so difficult.

    Were they thinking he wouldn’t?

    “The infighting is not really productive,” said GOP Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, making clear that he supports the president’s agenda, but acknowledging the limits of a narrowly divided Senate. “There’s no point in going round and round and round.”

    And if the leaders can’t get on the same page, Justice warned: “If you don’t watch out, you’re gonna make things much, much, much worse because we’re gonna lose seats and that will make it worse for the president.”

    …

    “We need to be talking up the wins, talking about how crazy Democrats are, and instead we are knifing each other,” the senator said.

    Trump likes drama.

  • Often in the sense of never

    No.

    Transphobia is very often sexual harrassment.Think about it, it draws inappropriate attention to someone's genitals.

    — Sophie Molly (@sophiemolly.co.uk) 2026-08-02T18:30:11.566Z

    No it doesn’t. “That’s a man” does not draw inappropriate attention to anyone’s genitals.

  • Wrong wrong wrong

    Always punish the woman.

    The conduct of a detective who said “all men” were rapists and should be given a curfew to stop sex attacks has been found to be gross misconduct. Detective Constable Rachel Fletcher, of Northumbria Police, has been subjected to a misconduct hearing.

    She was accused of saying “all men” were rapists and they should be given a 9pm curfew to stop sex attacks at night. Det Cons Fletcher, who worked in safeguarding, was also accused of describing transgender women as “c**ks in frocks”.

    A panel, sitting at Houghton-le-Spring police station, has found that she made all of the comments and had breached the Standards of Professional Behaviour in relation to Discreditable Conduct, Authority, Respect and Courtesy and Equality and Diversity.

    Chair of the panel, Assistant Chief Constable Andrew Hill, told the hearing that each proved allegation amounted to gross misconduct and they collectively amount to Gross Misconduct. The panel will now need to decide what disciplinary action she will be given.

    The action they decided on was kicking her out.

    During her evidence, Det Con Fletcher said she hated male violence and that some of the things they deal with in protection are “abhorrent”. She said: “But I have not said I hate men.”

    She went on to say: “I have been labelled as a man hater because I call out misogyny and I’m a feminist. The atmosphere is, if you call out misogyny, you hate men. That’s what I have been told repeatedly at work – I hate men.”

    …

    Detective Sergeant Damon Hall said he witnessed Det Cons Fletcher make the comment about a curfew for men to another colleague while they were all working at Gateshead Police Station. He said Det Cons Fletcher said: “The only way to stop night time rapes is to put a 9pm curfew on all men.”

    Det Sgt Hall said that, although she was known for her dry sense of humour, he did find the comment offensive. He said: “It was offensive to me as a male as it presumes that everyone is capable of rape.”

    Or you could understand what she said as a matter of what to do in a situation of incomplete knowledge. Rapists don’t wear labels saying they are rapists, so the only way to be sure would be to lock up all the men. It could be a point about epistemology as opposed to a literal recommendation or an insult.

    Det Cons Barbara Callaghan told the hearing how Det Cons Fletcher made the derogatory comments about transgender people during a conversation about new search guidance. She said Det Cons Fletcher had become very upset at the suggestion that female police officers would have to search transgender women, if that is what the individual wanted.

    Oh no, how dare a woman get upset at the news that she might have to search a man’s body if he claimed to be a woman.

    Det Cons Callaghan said she challenged her fellow officer when she said that transgender women were “cocks in frocks”. In her statement she said: “Although Rachel had a right to her views sometimes she would go to far. She said she would refuse to search transgender women as they are cocks in frocks.”

    Why is that to or even too far? It is after all true that transgender women are men.

  • What a pack of liars

    Something called New Socialist tells us how awesome Bash Back is.

    An interview with the trans liberationist non-violent direct action group BASH BACK.

    If it’s non-violent why is its theme-image a snarling man in a mask aiming a hammer at us? Are we supposed to think he’s in the middle of putting together an Ikea bookshelf?

    The trans-led non-violent direct action project BASH BACK emerged almost exactly a year ago when they took action against the then Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s constituency office, in response to “huge backpedals in the healthcare rights afforded to trans people — and young people especially — in an NHS system that was never kind to us in the first place.”

    By “took action” they mean they smashed the windows and painted graffiti all over the office. That’s not non-violent. It can be called non-violent in the sense of not physically injuring people, but only in that sense. It’s not non-violent to smash other people’s windows or vandalize other people’s offices. It’s a threat, for one thing, and it’s physical material harm for another thing. It’s intimidation. They do not get to dress themselves up as Gandhis.

    There is, as BASH BACK have said, little hope that the Andy Burnham administration will choose to change direction without considerable pressure.

    And by “pressure” they mean…you know…smashing up offices and so on. Non-violent “pressure”.

    BASH BACK have been extensively demonised by the state and by a press that seeks to portray them as a violent mob, or as thugs. Yet they have a serious strategy based on a rigorous analysis of the situation which trans people face in Britain today.

    It’s not the state or the press that keeps issuing images of Bash Back snarling through a mask and brandishing a hammer. Those are their images, not ours. They are most definitely advertising their threats of violence, so they absolutely do not get to sit back and say they’re not violent at all in any way. Violent threats are not a branch of non-violence. To put it as clearly as I can, that image of the snarling man with the hammer is intended to make us imagine it smacking us in the face. Not likely to by accident or as a by-product but intended to.