@Girlguiding tweeted:

1 in 3 girls told us they don’t want to be leaders, as women who speak out are harassed. The women standing in the election are doing so despite the abuse female MPs receive. We need a world where girls feel confident – and safe – using their voices.

Linking to a Guardian article headlined “‘I’m not going to be bullied into silence.’ The women defying abuse to stand as MPs.”

Hmm. Bullied into silence, eh. A world where girls feel safe using their voices, eh. Another Guardian article, this one from last year:

The Girl Guides have spoken out against claims they are putting girls at risk by introducing a policy to allow transgender people

Who is John Solomon?

Top diplomats have repeatedly linked President Donald Trump’s posture toward Ukraine to John Solomon, the journalist whose reports gave false credence to a number of Ukraine-related conspiracies that have found a receptive audience in Trump and some of his closest allies.

Solomon, 52, had been working until recently as an opinion writer at The Hill and is now a Fox News contributor. His columns were cited three times in the whistleblower complaint that helped spur House Democrats to open their impeachment investigation into Trump.

He sounds like more of a trans journalist than a real one.

On Nov. 19, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., opened the second week of public impeachment hearings

Where Congress failed, FOIA succeeded.

An ethics group late Friday published nearly 100 pages of previously unreleased State Department documents that the group says shows “a clear paper trail” between President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before a Ukraine ambassador was abruptly recalled.

The documents were published by American Oversight, which calls itself a non-partisan and nonprofit ethics watchdog and Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump administration.

And they’ve been litigating away like mad while we’ve been watching Trump yammer at everyone, and they have virtual warehouses of documents.

They appear to show two calls between Giuliani and Pompeo in March, around a month before former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, an

Metaphors and slogans are all very well, but it helps if they get it right.

Dawn Butler:

I think I would replace pie with cake. @UKLabour

EQUAL RIGHTS

FOR OTHERS

DOES NOT MEAN

LESS RIGHTS

FOR YOU.

IT’S NOT PIE.

Fewer rights, they mean, but never mind that. Pie or cake, whichever, it’s still not true. It’s not true because it depends. Anything can be called a right, and it’s not difficult to imagine purported rights that would indeed mean fewer or no rights for other people. Look at US history for example – the ruling class in the South and much of the rest of the white population thought the federal government was violating their “right” to … Read the rest

gender is harmful tweets:

It seems, the promotion of violence against women is, quite literally, ‘in Vogue’… at least in visual form, in an article for @voguemagazine.

This is how emboldened, patriarchal violence against women has become folks. Here it is in plain sight for a Vogue article. 👀

The article is not about baseball.… Read the rest

Yet again, Meghan Murphy tries to explain.

In Canada, famous for niceness, feminist Meghan Murphy is a woman whose words are weapons — or such is the cry from activists for trans­gender rights who see nothing odd about using threats of violence to try to silence her.

Murphy has no quarrel with trans people having rights or freedoms. “Really, it’s about public policy and legislation,” she says.

“It’s one thing to live your life the way you want, it’s another thing if you’re going to start forcing people to say you’re literally ­female when you’re male and that means you should be allowed to enter women’s and girls’ spaces (such as toilets, change rooms, shelters, refuges or prisons).”

And … Read the rest

Trump in his long conversation with Fox News repeated his lie that Ukraine blah blah blah.

Trump called in to “Fox & Friends” and said he was trying to root out corruption in the Eastern European nation when he withheld aid over the summer. Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president is at the center of the House impeachment probe, which is looking into Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate political rivals as he held back nearly $400 million.

But he repeated his assertion that Ukrainians might have hacked the Democratic National Committee’s network in 2016 and framed Russia for the crime, a theory his own advisers have dismissed.

“They gave the server to CrowdStrike, which is a company owned

Jane Clare Jones has more on the Labour are they or aren’t they question.

I think we all have a right to be wondering what the hell is going on. As I tweeted earlier, from my perspective – and based on conversations with people who were involved in getting the pledge into the manifesto – what is going on is the surfacing of a fundamental split inside the party, which mirrors the basic division over the debate. That is, I believe that those who were instrumental in getting the pledge put into the manifesto did so with genuine intent, and that the TRA-faction lost the debate on this point at the ‘Clause V’ meeting when the manifesto was formulated

Anti-intellectualism, indeed anti-thought, flourishing in the University and College Union, the UK trade union and professional association for academics, lecturers, trainers, researchers and academic-related staff in higher education:

UCU’s Equality Groups Conference is meeting in Birmingham today – members are currently hearing from General Secretary Jo Grady about the wide range of work the union is doing to tackle inequality in FE and HE and beyond 1/

…

Jo also reaffirmed the union’s unequivocal support for trans rights and trans inclusion 4/

And for not asking what it is we’re supporting:

“We need to shift our focus away from definitions and abstract debates about competing rights, and try to quantify and understand the real violence and discrimination that

The Guardian live is startled by Trump’s performance on Fox “News” this morning.

Donald Trump has had quite a morning of it already. The president called into Fox & Friends for an extraordinary, at times bizarre, 55-minute interview during which Trump:

•Reiterated the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election

•Said his own EU ambassador’s sworn testimony was “total nonsense”

•Called Nancy Pelosi “crazy as a bedbug”

•Suggested he wanted to be impeached, saying: “I want a trial”

•Complained that former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch took too long to hang his picture in the Ukraine embassy

•Said people praised Yovanovitch – a highly regarded official – because “she’s a woman, you have

There is much confusion right now about Labour and its position on women and what exactly it is trying to say.

Yesterday @Womans_Place_UK tweeted:

WPUK is pleased to see that @UKLabour recognises the importance of the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act is committing to upholding them. https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Real-Change-Labour-Manifesto-2019.pdf 1/2

But now there is waffling, or there isn’t but there is the appearance that there is.

Dawn Butler, Labour Women & Equalities Secretary, says nothing has changed.

.@UKLabour will reform the GRA to introduce self-declaration for trans people.

We will remove outdated language from the Equalities Act.

And there is no way spaces will be permitted to discriminate against trans people. That is illegal and it will stay illegal.

In other news, the event involving Kathleen Stock went ahead.

Happy to report that talk went ahead without incident. Turns out 6.3k likes for no-platforming campaign translates to 5 individual emails sent against me; meanwhile 3 emails were sent in support, one of which had over 300 signatures. (Thank you so much to all who wrote & signed).

I did. There were over 300 I think.

Being Human Festival has details on the subject matter and participants:

Diversity has become a divisive issue in today’s society. In this debate philosophers at the front line will be picking at its complexities and difficulties. What are the different forms of diversity? Why do they matter? Should we be promoting or managing

A thread by Sarah Phillimore on the Fair Cop judicial review:

Home again after a hectic two days at #FairCopJR. Feel a lot more optimistic tonight than I did this morning. It’s hard to pick favourite moments out of so many but my Top Three have to be:

1. Judicial recognition that TERF is a slur
2. Both College of Policing and Humberside making it clear they didn’t understand the Equality Act
3. The carefully redacted document that was hiding the fact that the ‘victim’ had used hateful language herself

But the – possibly unseemly – glee provoked by watching someone stuff up their own case, line by line is tempered by the growing realisation that the Government have

About that custody battle over the kid whose mother wanted to trans him while his father did not –

The Younger case has gained much media attention, in the U.S. and beyond. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC all seem to cast the father as the villain, in particular for his refusal to agree that his child is transgender. Rolling Stone opines that the Younger story has become a “terrifying right-wing talking point.” Vox is worried about Republican state legislators’ trying to introduce bills prohibiting chemical and surgical interference with the sexual development of children who say they’re transgender, and “what [this] could mean for families nationwide” when “legislators want to have a say

A side note in Fiona Hill’s testimony at the impeachment hearing is of interest:

This is a bit of a sidebar to her testimony but Hill’s low estimation of the professional environment in the UK has not gone unnoticed.

“Years later, I can say with confidence that this country has offered for me opportunities I never would have had in England,” Hill testified. “I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent.”

Julian Borger tweets:

Unfortunately, it’s worse than that. She’s saying even in 1980’s 1990’s, you couldn’t get recognition for your talent and expertise if you had a working-class accent.
It was an indictment of Britain. https://twitter.com/RobbieGramer/status/1197538764731629568 …

Robbie Gramer
✔
@RobbieGramer
In new testimony, Fiona Hill

The White House issues a statement:

Shifty Schiff thinks he hasn’t gotten enough camera time. So during a brief break, he’s doing a press conference.

New hoax. Same swamp.
8:12 AM · Nov 20, 2019· TheWhiteHouse

Not a hoax.

… Read the rest

Things from the past:

Many centuries ago, a cat walked over an Italian manuscript, leaving its paw prints on the document forever. 1445

You’re welcome.… Read the rest