All entries by this author
Nov 10th, 2025 2:09 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Another pillar goes splat.
The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.
So they finally figured that out, eh? Well done, but we already knew about those there permanent physical advantages of being born male. We knew and we said, over and over.
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4 comments
Nov 10th, 2025 10:30 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The BBC is beginning to sound oddly like Pharyngula…
As calls for reform mount, two former BBC employees have spoken to The Telegraph on condition of anonymity, offering a rare glimpse into the culture at the corporation.
Former employee #1
“There was something of a Left-wing cabal – and if you were more centrist in your politics, your opinion wasn’t appreciated. Eventually, you just stopped speaking up. They would absolutely talk about diversity of voices, then shut down anybody who didn’t agree with them.
…
“There was also this clamouring for diversity that made a bit of a mockery of it. They had a diversity scheme, but when they couldn’t find enough external candidates they just put internal people
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6 comments
Nov 10th, 2025 9:54 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The fix goes on.
President Donald Trump has pardoned a long list of his political allies for their support or involvement in plans to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin.
The individuals listed in a proclamation, which Martin posted on X late Sunday, include high-profile figures like former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and the president’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, among dozens of others.
Filth. We’re in the filth up to our eyeballs. A filthy corrupt kleptocratic state, with no escape open.
“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,”
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4 comments
Nov 10th, 2025 6:11 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Transgender women to be banned from all female Olympic events
They never should have been allowed. Obviously.
The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.
Come on. They didn’t need a science-based review. They’ve always known about the permanent physical advantages. Everyone has. Letting men who pretend to be women compete against women was always a terrible idea. Everyone knew that, but way too many people were happy about it anyway.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
8 comments
Nov 9th, 2025 4:58 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
I recommend playing the clip.
At 1:04 Tim Davie gets passionate and says we have to be kind and caring in this – and in context it seems pretty clear that he means kind & caring to the men, not the women. We have to be kind & caring to the men because they struggle under the burden of being the sex that can beat up women if it chooses to. Women are just the boring bitches who … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Nov 9th, 2025 3:00 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Hadley Freeman on the witchfinders:
In 2021, when lockdown was driving people insane, Clanchy’s 2019 book about working with children, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was suddenly derided on social media as racist, because she used physical descriptions like “chocolate-coloured skin”. The charge was led by three women: Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, all middle-aged, middle-class writers, like Clanchy. Pan Macmillan, Clanchy’s publisher through its Picador imprint, abjectly apologised to them and parted ways with its writer…
…When The Sunday Times interviewed Clanchy in 2022, Rajesh tweeted, “Jesus f***ing Christ. Picador have just emailed to let us know that @thesundaytimes will be running an interview with Kate Clanchy this weekend.” She then
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2 comments
Nov 9th, 2025 1:20 am |
By Ophelia Benson
For once the police back down.
Police have apologised to one of Scotland’s most prominent gender-critical campaigners for threatening to prosecute her over claims she vandalised a trans activist’s umbrella.
Susan Smith, one of the three directors of For Women Scotland, had earlier been informed she would have to accept a formal warning or face court action over an altercation with Tom Harlow, who attempted to drown out speakers at one of the group’s rallies with amplified music.
And by doing so harassed those speakers and attempted to deprive them of their right to protest being erased by people like…him.
…following a major backlash to news that Smith was facing prosecution, the national force said it would launch a
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Nov 8th, 2025 5:23 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The thing about this is the air of confident certainty and enlightenment – in short the staggering vanity. She talks the most unmitigated bilge and she carries herself as if she were Hannah Arendt and Nelson Mandela combined.
No, kid. All that horseshit you’re reciting is complete horseshit. You’re just repeating your generation’s chosen mythology, which happens to be a particularly stupid and fantasy-laced one. You’re not brilliant, you’re not wise, you’re not enlightened. You’re a gullible patronizing twerp. And no the beret does not make you look like a Paris intellectual.
… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
9 comments
Nov 8th, 2025 4:28 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on And producers let them.
Prescott notes an in-built censor: instead of a story on, say, the side-effects of puberty blockers being covered by health reporters, or the legislation by the political team, all gender stories were routed through an LGBT desk.
They need to find out who decided on this “routing” and fire them. It’s like giving control of editorial content to a bunch of astrology activists, who are going to present everything they cover through thei filter of their pseudoscientific world view, and who are never going to allow astrology-critical stories to see the light of day. All the while, the reputation and cerdibility of what was supposed to … Read the rest
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Nov 8th, 2025 10:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
BBC gender correspondent tried to block coverage of trans criticism
The BBC’s “gender and identity correspondent” sought to block coverage of a campaign group aiming to protect women-only spaces, The Telegraph can reveal.
Megha Mohan, who has held the specialist role since 2018, emailed a co-worker raising concerns about their plans to film a debate by the group Woman’s Place UK.
Apparently women are not part of the genner ann idenniny beat. I guess only men have genner ann idenniny?
In the email – sent months after she started her role – Ms Mohan wrote: “There’s some concern from LGBT+ about giving this group a platform, they are seen as a more extreme organisation that we would be legitimizing (sic).”
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1 Comment »
Nov 8th, 2025 9:42 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Janice Turner on The Eyeroll That Shocked a Nation:
The BBC executive complaints unit was spot on. When the newsreader Martine Croxall had to utter the words “pregnant people”, her facial expression — as she added, for clarity, the word “women” — did convey “disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation”. Because whose face doesn’t when confronted with the idiotic, ideological terms that dog the NHS and erase women even from motherhood?
I know the answer to that one – the faces of the people who have bought into the ridiculous destructive trans ideology and its Core Command that Everyone Must Tell the Lie. There are still lots of them, including many who work for major news media.
Back in 2019,
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5 comments
Nov 8th, 2025 8:14 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The current state of play in Trump’s campaign to starve us into submission:
The Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to withhold about $4 billion in funding for food aid for 42 million low-income Americans this month, as the effects of the longest government shutdown in history continue to ripple across the country.
Oh good. How nice of the court to let Trump starve people.
The court’s ruling, known as an administrative stay, came after the Trump Administration appealed a federal judge’s order to fully fund the program by Friday.
The administration had previously agreed to a judge’s order to partially fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP or food stamps, by about $5 billion from a
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6 comments
Nov 8th, 2025 7:15 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump is doing his No YOU’RE the racists number again.
Donald Trump has said the US will not attend the G20 summit in South Africa over widely discredited claims that white people are being persecuted in the country. The US president said it was a “total disgrace” that South Africa is hosting the meeting, where leaders from the world’s largest economies will gather in Johannesburg later this month.
South Africa’s foreign ministry described the decision by the White House as “regrettable”. None of South Africa’s political parties – including those that represent Afrikaners and the white community in general – have claimed that there is a genocide in South Africa.
Ah yes “the white communinny” – who knew there … Read the rest
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4 comments
Nov 7th, 2025 9:23 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.
The Trump administration on Friday asked a federal appeals court for an emergency pause on a federal judge’s order to fully fund SNAP benefits this month.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell ordered the administration on Thursday afternoon to deliver payments in full to states by Friday, chastising it for delays that he said have likely caused SNAP recipients to go hungry.
No no no please don’t make us pay for poor people to eat food!
“People have gone without for too long. Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable,” McConnell said, adding: “This should never happen in America.”
This is the first time SNAP benefits have lapsed because
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16 comments
Nov 7th, 2025 7:16 am |
By Ophelia Benson
More on the “Shall we erase women? No let’s not” controversy.
And along with that, it occurs to me, there’s the having to say out loud (to an audience of millions) such a stupid clumsy false thing would be intensely grating. The phrase “pregnant people” is childish in addition to everything else. It’s baby talk. It’s as if some BBC rebel had sneaked “poopoo pants” into a script. Plus there’s … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Nov 7th, 2025 6:45 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Telegraph reports:
The BBC’s “gender and identity correspondent” sought to block coverage of a campaign group aiming to protect women-only spaces, The Telegraph can reveal.
Sorry to interrupt but what tf is a “gender and identity correspondent”? A correspondent in meaningless but trendy abstractions? Did the BBC have an actual women correspondent at all?
Megha Mohan, who has held the specialist role since 2018, emailed a co-worker raising concerns about their plans to film a debate by the group Woman’s Place UK.
In the email – sent months after she started her role – Ms Mohan wrote: “There’s some concern from LGBT+ about giving this group a platform, they are seen as a more extreme organisation that we
…
Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments