The Times version of the Martine Croxall/pregnant people clash:

A BBC News presenter who corrected the phrase “pregnant people” to “women” while live on-air has had 20 complaints about her upheld.

Martine Croxall, 56, was introducing a news item in June about a study into protecting vulnerable people in hot weather conditions when she made the change to the wording contained in the report and appeared to roll her eyes.

Not roll exactly. More do that thing where you twitch the skin around the eyes – it’s more a glare than a roll. She definitely doesn’t turn her eyes up toward the ceiling like a teenager. If you blink you miss it. If she hadn’t also uttered the word “women” … Read the rest

The Telegraph starts its article on the libel suit against Owen Jones with a hilariously absurd photo of him shouting into a microphone and brandishing a posh fist. It sums him up nicely.

A BBC editor has sued Owen Jones, the journalist, over an article claiming the corporation is biased towards Israel.

The article about coverage of the conflict in Gaza has caused the BBC’s online news editor for the Middle East to receive death threats, documents in a High Court libel claim allege.

Raffi Berg, who joined the BBC in 2001 and has been Middle East editor for its news website for 12 years, is suing Mr Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published

Now there’s a headline – and a BBC headline at that.

Martine Croxall broke rules over ‘pregnant people’ facial expression, BBC says

You might wonder what a pregnant people facial expression even is, but it’s the BBC saying, so it must be true.

The BBC has upheld 20 impartiality complaints over the way presenter Martine Croxall altered a script she was reading live on the BBC News Channel, which referred to “pregnant people” earlier this year.

Croxall was introducing an interview about research on groups most at risk during UK heatwaves, which quoted a release from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

The presenter changed her script to instead say “women”, and the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit

No you may not ask that question.

A woman has been blocked by Bristol city council from asking Green Party leaders whether “predatory men” could enter single-sex female spaces by posing as trans women.

Helen, a university academic in the city, submitted a question to ask at the full council meeting on Tuesday evening but was told it was “offensive” and would not be allowed.

I’ll tell you what’s offensive. City councils telling women we can’t ask questions about men in women’s spaces is offensive. Why is it offensive? Because it makes it so blindingly obvious that women just don’t matter and that our safety is overruled in favor of men’s determination to intrude on us against our will. … Read the rest

BBC Middle East editor sues Owen Jones for libel at High Court over Gaza article

An article by journalist Owen Jones about the BBC’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza has caused the corporation’s Middle East editor to receive death threats, documents in a High Court libel claim allege.

Raffi Berg, who joined the BBC in 2001 and has been Middle East editor for its news website for 12 years, is suing Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published on the Drop Site website in December last year.

The claims in the article, which Berg denies, include that BBC staff told Jones that Berg “plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’”.

I can’t help feeling just a little … Read the rest

Gordon Rayner at The Telegraph:

The BBC’s trans coverage is subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters who refuse to cover gender-critical stories, one of the broadcaster’s own advisers has warned.

BBC staff have expressed concerns that the LGBT desk – which is shared by all the corporation’s news programmes – has been “captured by a small group of people” promoting a pro-trans agenda and “keeping other perspectives off air”.

This has led to “a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories … celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”, a leaked internal BBC memo concludes. It said it reflected a “cultural problem across the BBC”, which treats issues of gender and sexuality as “a celebration of British

Trump does a magic.

Trump: Now, I’m bringing prices down 600% 700% 900% 200% pic.twitter.com/qysmXeLJoU

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 21, 2025

We’re in good hands.… Read the rest

Slowly slowly slowly the disavowals trickle in.

Pan Macmillan has taken the unprecedented step of apologising to its former author Kate Clanchy four years after it parted company with the writer. Clanchy left her publisher Picador in January 2022 after her book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was accused of perpetuating racial stereotyping, an accusation she denies.

The statement put out by Joanna Prior, CEO, Pan Macmillan – who took on the role in 2022, a year after the controversy flared – read: “This was clearly a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past. I’m sorry for the hurt that was caused to Kate Clanchy and many others.” 

Jeezus. If you’re going … Read the rest

Ripple effect. Pink News excitedly reports

The parents of transgender teenagers in the UK have denounced the effect the ban on puberty blockers is having on their children.

According to North West Bylines, the parents of children receiving gender-affirming care at GP surgeries in East Sussex, have described life as “horrific” and “inhumane”, in the wake of the indefinite ban on new NHS prescriptions for puberty blockers for anyone under the age of 18, imposed by health secretary Wes Streeting last December.

But North West Bylines has withdrawn that article by “Sophie Molly” so your source is currently not a source.

They identify as journalists.

… Read the rest

Hahahahahaoops

Via Occupy Democrats:

Donald Trump gets publicly humiliated as his takeover of the renowned Kennedy Center results in a total collapse in ticket sales — with tens of thousands of seats left empty at the primary performance venues.

So much for making the center “hot” again. And of course it gets even more embarrassing…

“This downturn isn’t just about pricing or programming — it feels directly tied to the new regime’s leadership shift and the broader political climate,” one current staffer told The Washington Post. “I’ve heard from ticket buyers who say they’re choosing not to attend because of what the Kennedy Center now represents. The brand itself has become polarizing, which is unprecedented in my experience.”

43% of

For some reason I find myself thinking about Brown v Board of Education today.

On May 17, 1954, a decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case declared the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. The landmark Brown v. Board decision gave LDF [Legal Defense Fund] its most celebrated victory in a long, storied history of fighting for civil rights and marked a defining moment in US history.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education occurred after a hard-fought, multi-year campaign to persuade all nine justices to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine that their predecessors had endorsed in the Court’s infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This campaign was conceived in the 1930s by Charles

The years and years of childish meaningless tantrum continue.

It has been just over 200 days since the Supreme Court ruled that a woman was defined by biological sex alone. This landmark judgment sought to end legal and practical uncertainty, particularly on protecting single-sex spaces for women such as changing rooms. After the ruling, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it would issue guidance for organisations to implement that welcome decision. Many arms of the state, such as the civil service and NHS, have been awaiting it before taking action.

What “guidance” do they fucking need? This isn’t a new surprise law that everyone must learn a new language overnight or fly a 747 from New York … Read the rest

Pamela Paul at The Wall Street Journal on the gender rebellion:

But when [Benjamin] Appel later enrolled at Columbia University, eager to learn about the theories behind his activism, the rhetoric he encountered felt more like dogma than inquiry. “According to queer theory, if you’re a man who behaves in ‘unmasculine’ ways or wears eyeliner you must be a woman inside, which I thought was regressive,” Appel, who graduated in 2020, recalled. “Saying that those superficial attributes are what make women women, and that any variation on the rough he-man stereotype means you’re not a man, reinforces these rigid sex roles, and I thought we were supposed to be against those.”

In his book “Cis White Gay: The Making

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.

Matthew Yglesias writes at The Argument magzine:

Bigots in the tent

The article serves mostly as a rejoinder to a sentiment common on the US political left, “Some people don’t want a tent so big that it includes bigots”. Yglesias points out, correctly, that Americans are divided in inconvenient ways on certain topics, and demanding ideological purity on every issue tends to alienate almost everyone.

He ends up concluding: “Yes, I do want a tent so large it contains a lot of bigots. That’s the only tent that ever wins.”

However, nowhere does he ever question the whole wisdom of calling all people who disagree with you “bigots”. He doesn’t consider … Read the rest

Well you can’t do both. Pick one, or pick the other; you can’t pick both, just as you can’t be both here and gone, both alive and dead, both a rabbit and a snake.

It’s trans inclusion or women only. Not both.

(But what about women who claim to be men? If they claim to be men then they don’t belong in a women’s college. Quislings.)

Cambridge University’s oldest women-only college is allowing trans women to enrol.

Newnham College opened in 1871 and first allowed trans women students to join in 2017. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, it has decided to continue with its pre-existing policy.

…

Campaigners have pledged to report the college to the

It’s simple: the more items you pile on the less meaning there is. Adding more doesn’t make a claim more true, it makes it less so.

A row has broken out after a council rejected a motion to support the county’s LGBTQIA+ community.

Wiltshire Council’s councillor Helen Belcher, who transitioned several years ago, said rejecting the motion that would have ensured LGBTQIA+ people felt represented was “disgraceful”.

But there are no LGBTQIA+ people. Obviously. People can’t be both lesbian and gay male. What is Q supposed to mean? I is a medical condition, not a sexual orientation. A is just nothing – we don’t talk about disliking books or Portugal or horses as an idenniny so why pretend not liking … Read the rest

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist on the ministerial foot-dragging:

Regulatory impact assessments are normally carried out in order to assess the effects of a proposed change in the law. The government should not need to be told that an EHRC Code of Practice does not change the law. Neither should it need to be told that a Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of a 15-year-old act of parliament does not change the law. In For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers, the Supreme Court has authoritatively interpreted the Equality Act 2010; that means it has told us what the Act meant ever since 2010.

…

A code of practice that is demonstrably erroneous (as the EHRC’s 2011 Code,

Wonkypolicywonk points out that it’s fatuous to do an Impact Statement on…obeying the law.

Women & Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson is in town, and – having already lost the Labour Party deputy leadership election – she’s now lost her moral compass.

Yep, rather than lay before Parliament the revised Code of Practice that the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) delivered to her two months ago, Bridget the Moral Midget, the Queen of the Transgender Blues, has instead demanded that the EHRC produce a Regulatory Impact Assessment – an analytical tool used by government departments to quantify the costs and benefits of proposed new legislation – on the revised Code.

…

But even it only took one month, one week

Daniel Sanderson at the Times has background on Tom Harlow.

When Tom Harlow launched the Cabaret Against the Hate Speech at the start of 2023, it was badged as a symbol of “queer joy”, which aimed to inject a bit of fun into politics and even tempt opponents to “dance along”.

Two and a half years on, however, the Glasgow-based drag queen has rapidly become one of the most polarising combatants in the crowded field of Scotland’s culture wars.

Except of course that one whole side of that particular “culture war” is not a combatant at all. It’s not rival gangs squaring off, it’s one gang trying to demolish the rights of half of all human beings. We – … Read the rest