JK Rowling’s support centre for female sexual assault victims – Beira’s Place – has been labelled an “anti-rights” group by Amnesty International UK.
Beira’s Place was founded in 2022 by the Harry Potter author to provide trauma-informed support service to women survivors of sexual abuse. The organisation labels itself as “women-only” and does not include transgender people.
It doesn’t include giraffes, either; what’s your point?
Amnesty updated its report this month to include 51 gender critical groups, including For Women Scotland and Beira’s Place.
It warns the UK had experienced a “significant decline” in protections for LGBT+ rights, with the nation falling from first to 22nd place in the ILGA-Europe (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association).
Wait. ILGA has to mean International Lesbian, Gay Association. ILGA is not ILGABTI. Somebody here is hiding something.
In a published list of 117 UK organisations, Amnesty International mentions Beira’s Place under “gender critical” in the anti-rights categories.
Amnesty International also condemns For Women Scotland – the group of women who took the Scottish Government to court over policies which allowed transgender women – born male – to take up female-only spaces on public boards.
The group has also recently had a successful legal victory over the Scottish Government and the Scottish Prison Service’s placement of trans people in the female prison estate.
The Scottish Government confirmed it would not appeal the decision and has removed all trans women from staying in the female estate, however further clarity is sought on whether transwomen are restricted from accessing women’s-only services in prisons.
If they’re not they should be. Enough already. Stop pretending it’s progressive to force women to share everything with men.
As we’ve all noted a million times, they can’t make their case without lying constantly. The Nation:
The Supreme Court upheld anti-trans athlete laws in the recent Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ decisions, declaring that Title IX, the bedrock of gender-based protections in public schools, does not extend to transgender student athletes.
The laws are not “anti-trans”. The laws are pro-equal rights for women and girls. The issue isn’t trans, the issue is that male people are male and thus can’t be in women’s sports because being male entails many physical advantages. It doesn’t matter what flavor of ideology tries to get around that fact; it’s only the fact that matters. Women have their own sports because otherwise they would have no sports. It is unfair, unsporting, unreasonable for men to try to infiltrate women’s sports on the grounds of being “trans”.
The court’s decisions are part of a global campaign to legislate and litigate trans people out of public life. This was made clear during oral arguments back in January; attorneys and justices alike scrutinized the bodies of trans girls, debating the size and shape of their organs, muscles, and bones. Yet the banality of the scene—procedural buzzwords, shuffling papers, cordial back-and-forths couched with honorifics—almost obfuscated the violence of it all.
Violence my ass. The violence is men slamming into women in the football game.
Alan Hurst, then Idaho’s solicitor general, said transgender girls pose “a real threat” to safety and fairness in women’s athletics. “We cite Your Honors to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report that says 600 women have lost 890 medals in 29 different sports,” he said, arguing that ( presumed) cisgender women are losing en masse to transgender ones and that trans women and girls don’t belong in women’s spaces.
The United Nations official in question is Reem Alsalem—the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She filed an amicus brief with the court supporting trans-exclusionary laws. This comes after years of pushing reports at the United Nations that painted trans women as a danger to their peers. The court’s final opinion echoed the language in her brief.
Of course “trans women” i.e. men are a danger to women in contact sports. What is the Nation doing publishing this lying manipulative garbage? Why doesn’t the Nation give a damn about women?
Hurst’s comment about Alsalem’s work has a few problems. Among them: The numbers are not particularly meaningful or accurate. But facts have never stopped Alsalem. Through her writings to the United Nations, she has become a leading mouthpiece for far-right propaganda and misinformation about trans people, propelling untruths into policy and law and declaring war, in her words, on the concept of “gender equality” itself.
Bordering on libelous if you ask me. Also rude, tendentious, inaccurate, manipulative. The Nation should be embarrassed.
As they juggle ongoing U.S. military operations against Iran and a host of other national security challenges, senior Pentagon officials have also been pressing ahead on a far different priority: tightening the grooming, fitness and appearance standards of the American service members.
Military officials have recently taken steps to address troops who fail to meet hair, weight and physical fitness standards, nine months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a blunt message to a room full of admirals and generals at Marine Corps Base Quantico, declaring there would be “no more beardos” and “fat troops.”
Because appearance is everything, troops. After all, would Hegseth be in charge of the military if he looked like, say, Trump? No he would not.
The renewed emphasis comes as Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News host, has privately complained in recent days about seeing service members with facial hair and has expressed frustration over lapses in physical training and violations of military height and weight standards, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
And he is the expert. He’s a tv guy, and he knows tv stuff. Appearance is everything.
One official told CBS News that Hegseth believes his message has not been fully embraced by the military’s senior leadership despite his repeated public and private calls for stricter enforcement. The military official, who is not authorized to speak publicly and talked with CBS News under condition of anonymity, said the defense secretary was frustrated that his speech to the top brass gathered from around the world at Quantico last year did not produce the rapid change he expected.
Is he sobbing himself to sleep every night? I hope?
The military is overhauling how they measure body composition following Pentagon guidance to all the services issued in December in an effort to restore the “warrior ethos” demanded by Hegseth and has rolled out guidance that frames shaving as a matter of military readiness rather than appearance.
Erm, what? How is a requirement to shave a matter of military readiness as opposed to its opposite? “I’ll be with you in just a few minutes, sir, I have to shave first, I hope the invaders don’t overrun our position beforeoopsaarghboom…”
Over roughly 18 months as defense secretary, Hegseth has repeatedly argued in speeches, policy directives and public remarks that relaxed appearance standards are symptomatic of a military culture that has drifted away from discipline and combat readiness.
Of course he has. He’s a tv guy, and he’s not bright.
Sanitary products will no longer be referred to as female following a complaint which said “not all people who have periods are women”.
Except, of course, they are. That’s kind of the whole point. It’s kind of the whole point with cows and ewes and hens and mares and it’s kind of the whole point with women. Without that whole point there are no women or men. We’re animals first of all, and we’re divided into the egg-havers and the fertilizers. Without that we don’t exist at all.
The section rebrand came after an internal complaint said it was “disappointing” that sanitary products were referred to as “feminine care”.
Well, frankly, it’s also disappointing that the Telegraph is silly enough to use the vague meaningless “sanitary products” instead of, say, menstrual products. “Sanitary products” could just mean bottles of floor-cleaning liquids and similar. The issue here is menstruation, not some vague nameless detergent.
A movement to defend women’s rights is not an anti-rights movement.
Amnesty is pretending that men have a right to be seen and treated as women if they claim to be women, and that women have no right to tell such men to stay out of women’s organizations and spaces. Amnesty has lost its tiny mind.
The very headline is bad. Sanitary products? So you’re talking about stuff you put on floors to clean them, and stuff you pour down toilets and stuff you sprinkle in garbage cans and stuff you sprinkle on the sinks and bathtubs to scrub away the unsanitary slime and whatnot? But no; of course that’s not what they mean at all. “Sanitary products”=the wads of absorbent cotton women of childbearing age use to soak up the monthly shedding of the uterine lining. Isn’t it odd that those products are labeled “sanitary” as if to reassure us that the disgusting unholy taboo trayf nasty stuff that feeds new humans as they develop from fetus to baby will be soaked up and thrown away without disturbing the fastidious. We’re already on weirdly squicked-by-women territory, and it doesn’t get better from here.
Anyway. Let’s get to the really important stuff: supermarket chains that pwodwy suppowt the alphabet soup communidee. Who cares what faction of demanding men Waitrose supports? Is it men who do most of the Waitrose shopping?
They want their shops and workplaces to be places where people can be themselves without fear of judgement. They say. Do they? Does that mean they want their employees to be grumbling and swearing whenever they’re in a bad mood, telling customers to fuck off, helping themselves to an occasional luxury item? I doubt it. I strongly doubt they care at all about employees “being themselves without fear of judgement” – they care about employees doing their jobs and not demanding higher wages.
Oh well don’t be so literal, they might tell me if they were here. They didn’t mean all the time and about everything – they meant about trans people. What about them? Um…that it’s required to declare solidarity with them in one way or another at least once a month? Something like that.
So they do. “We celebrate Pride, we talk about inclusion, but ah ah ah watch out, inclusion isn’t just about rainbows once a year. No indeed. That’s why we have to stop calling sanitary products (the stuff meant to soak up filthy womany goo, you know) ‘Feminine Care’. It’s so disappointing that we do that, as if women were the only people who spill filthy goo once a month.”
Wouldn’t it be simpler to skip the women or women and men part and just call it Filthy Goo Care? Wouldn’t that just be so inclusive and inclusive?
There’s more.
Yet the language we use still suggests that these products are exclusively for women and femininity.
[sound of screeching brakes]
What?? That these products are for femininity? What does that even mean?
It doesn’t mean anything unless you interpret it through the lens of morbid envy and suspicion of women, and you thus have a resentful idea that women horde womanyism for themselves out of sheer spite and won’t share it with men because they’re that bitch back in 4th grade who had nicer sweaters than little Pauly did.
To some people, that might seem like a small detail. To me, it isn’t. Words matter because people matter.
Well, yes, without people there wouldn’t be any words to matter, and if there were any, they wouldn’t matter to anyone, because there wouldn’t be any anyone. We can swap tautologies all day long, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere.
The bill defines “conversion practice” as any conduct with the intention of causing the individual to have or not have (or to believe that they have or do not have) a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity.
If you look at it a certain way, the sex realists should not have anything to fear from this statute. The key thing to remember is that sex is different and separate from “gender” or “gender identity.” The genderists scream at us all the time that we’re the ones mixing everything up, when in fact they are the ones constantly and conveniently equivocating sex and gender.
Mostly, nobody is interested in gay conversion any more, except (1) the traditional religionists who think homosexuality is sinful, and (2) now, the transgenderists who are persuading gay kids that they are not really gay, but transgender, born in the wrong body.
The transgenderists had better watch out, lest conversion therapy charges be levelled against them, and prosecution brought by intervening busybodies.
Anyhow, on the “gay conversion” prong, the sex realists shouldn’t have anything to worry about, because we don’t care if someone is gay, and we are not interested in talking anyone into or out of being gay.
On the transgender prong, the sex realists also should generally not have anything to worry about, because, again, we don’t care about the fantasies in their heads. What we care about is the reality of sex. If we correctly-sex a transgender person, we don’t have any “intention of causing them to have or not have … a gender identity.” They can claim whatever gender identity they want. That’s not important to us. Sex is what is important in a lot of contexts, and we are only talking about sex. We are only guarding against people lying about their sex.
Having “G” gender identity does not give that person license to lie about their sex. That’s our issue, not whether or not someone claims a gender identity.
Following his grotesquely public arrest by a carload of cops for…writing words.
Mr Linehan was detained at Heathrow airport last September by five armed officers after a transgender activist complained about remarks posted on X months earlier.
Five armed cops at the airport would make sense for a possibly armed and dangerous murderer or terrorist or similar. For a writer with opinions, it makes no sense at all – it makes anti-sense, it makes a fragment of the universe where sense goes to die.
In a letter seen by The Telegraph, a senior Met officer wrote: “Whilst there can be no doubt that all officers acted in good faith throughout and were seeking to do their best in the circumstances, the investigation identified shortcomings in both the investigation, arrest and imposition of bail conditions.”
No actually let me contradict you there: there can very much be doubt that all officers acted in good faith. Whatever officers decided to send FIVE armed cops to Heathrow to collar him in public did not act in good faith. They wouldn’t send five armed cops to Waitrose to arrest a shoplifter would they? But writing words is somehow five armed cops-worthy? That’s not good faith, bro.
Parents who are found guilty of “abusively” trying to change their child’s sexuality or gender identity could be jailed under new legislation, a minister has confirmed.
Olivia Bailey, the minister for equalities, said parents would not be given any “carve-out” from the government’s planned ban on “abusive conversion practices” that cause “serious harm” to the victim. Those found guilty of breaching the proposed law could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
Amid concern from religious and gender-critical campaigners that the draft Conversion Practices Bill could undermine parental autonomy, Bailey insisted the legislation will not prevent parents from choosing how to raise their children, as the courts will only convict people guilty of practices which meet strict thresholds for abuse.
Ok, so…why make it about “conversion practices” at all? Why not just make it about abuse? I think it’s possible there’s already a law against abuse, so why not just rely on that? There’s no need to pass separate laws for every possible cause of abuse is there? Abuse is abuse; it shouldn’t matter what the reason for it is.
The minister told The House magazine: “This is about abuse; it is about a very specific form of abuse. It is not about policing opinions, it is not about policing how parents parent, and it is for the courts to determine, not politicians, but – rightly – for the courts to determine what meets that threshold of abuse.”
But why is it about a very specific form of abuse? Why isn’t it sufficient to have a law against abuse?
The bill defines a conversion practice as “any conduct” carried out with the intention of causing another person to have or not to have, or to believe they have or do not have, a particular sexuality or transgender identity.
Any conduct, eh? So talking to the male teenager about why he thinks he’s a girl equals abuse? Do you pause to think you might be widening the definition of abuse a little too far?
The “impact” the Code will have on trans people is that the male ones will find it more difficult to shove women aside in their own spaces and organizations. Apparently Whittome wants to see women shoved aside.
The problem, as I see it, is the “identity” part of “gender identity”.
The debate focuses so much around the word “gender”, that “identity” tends to slip right under the radar. Which is weird when you think about it, because the gender part really isn’t an issue.
Debates about gender expression are long gone. No one cares anymore about women wearing pants and not shaving their arm and leg hair, or men wearing blouses and painting their fingernails, or whatever. The difference between the past and the present is that now we’ve hitched people’s fluid and diverse modes of personal “gender expression” to a rigid collection of distinct, sacred & holy “gender identity” categories.
(To boot, we then convinced everyone that some of these categories necessitate supposedly life-saving medical “treatments”, and then we declared that no one is allowed to question anyone’s vibes about their magic “identity” categories.)
In the sense that “gender identities” are socially constructed categories whose relevance is derived from a cultural system of belief rather than any material basis of distinction — the difference between a man and a “trans woman” is purely a matter of tribal/identitarian feelings — they have a lot in common with the religious/cultural/ethnic concept of castes.
And we’ve always known that it’s a bad idea to mix such concepts with legislation.
The UK has explicitly grappled with this issue over the past decade and a half. Discrimination against people based on their perceived “caste” is obviously bad and should be prohibited by law. But the problem is, by explicitly naming caste as a freestanding protected characteristic, the government risks making the category of caste look official, stable, and administratively real.
Following a landmark 2014 employment tribunal over caste discrimination — Chandhok & Anor v. Tirkey — Parliament undertook a public consultation to determine if caste should be addressed solely through case-law under the existing anti-race and anti-religion discrimination framework, or if it should instead be promoted to its own explicit legal protection category within the UK’s definitive anti-discrimination guidebook, the one we’re all familiar with by now: the Equality Act 2010.
In 2018, the results of the consultation were released, and the response was overwhelmingly opposed to reifying “caste” as a legislatively salient category separate from existing case-law surrouding ethnic, religious, and racial discrimination. The reasons cited were that caste is almost impossible to define, and that naming it might perversely incentivize employers, universities, landlords, and other agencies to explicitly ask people about their caste status.
(Arguments about caste are taking place across North America, too. For one example, in 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that attempted to add caste as an explicit protected characteristic, and he cited more-or-less the same reasons for opposing it.)
Another argument for keeping caste out of legislation is that it essentially associates South Asians with the caste system whether they like it or not. Which is why the overwhelming majority of Hindus and South Asians who responded to the UK consultation opposed reifying it in the language of law.
Many LGB people feel exactly the same way about the government reifying “gender identity” in law: it’s a hazy concept that is strongly associated with us, but which many of us don’t want to be forcibly associated with. Gays who oppose the whole gender identity ideology are in many ways a lot like Hindus living in the UK who oppose the caste system: they are a subgroup within a minority group, who are at risk of discrimination because the majority fails to recognize and protect them.
There’s one big difference between caste and gender identity, though: “gender identity” proponents want to see the label reified in law beacuse it confers advantages to its believers at the expense of everyone else — they benefit from it. There is a sizeable activist group who want their identity to be forced on everyone else. Whereas with caste, it’s the opposite: there is a sizeable activist group who want out of the discrimination they face because caste is imposed on them against their wishes. It’s lower castes who have it imposed on them, whereas with gender activists, it’s everyone else, ordinary men and women not involved in gender world and just trying to go about their business, who end up losing their rights.
The draft bill to “ban conversion therapy practices” is a trojan horse campaign, mounted by extremist “gender identity” true believers, whose primary objective is to insert their mystical concept of gender identity into law, thereby reifying it and making it “official” and “real”, and forcing everyone else in the country to play along with their personal way of dividing and organizing and categorizing and grouping society.
Those who oppose this legislation should be bringing forward the parallels with caste legislation, and driving home the point that this is a quasi-religious activist group that is motivated to impose its own discriminatory worldview on everyone else.
The government has published a draft bill to ban “conversion practices”.
While there are improvements on previous drafts of this law, it remains an attempt to shift “Stonewall Law” – now slowly being driven out of workplaces and services – into homes and classrooms.
It puts parents, therapists, teachers and partners at risk of being subjected to investigation if they do not affirm that someone is “male” or “female “ (or both, or neither) based on their personal declaration rather than their biology.
Um. That’s an incredibly low bar for being investigated. Terrifyingly low.
It also hands the power of private prosecution to organisations like the Good Law Project and Nancy Kelley’s Trans Solidarity Alliance.
So Jolyon Maugham will be empowered to punish people for not pretending a man is a woman.
The bill defines “conversion practice” as any conduct with the intention of causing the individual to have or not have (or to believe that they have or do not have) a particular sexual orientation or transgender identity. The question of whether conduct amounts to an abuse is a question of fact “to be determined by reference to all the circumstances of the case”.
Hey you know what else is a question of fact? The whole idea that men can be women. The relevant fact is that they cannot. Many other relevant facts flow from this one. Will the courts be keeping that in mind?
The offence of carrying out an abusive conversion practice on an individual is defined in terms of causing “serious harm” to the individual’s physical or mental health, or “serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities”. This could potentially mean a wife telling her husband to stop wearing her clothes, parents telling a child they will not pay for puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, or a school insisting on referring to all children accurately as girls or boys, in line with its safeguarding responsibilities.
And the potential is all the greater because of years of catastrophizing about “transphobia” and genner idenniny.
More solemn discussion of the massively complicated and nuanced and sensitive fact that men are not women.
The president of the US’s top administrator of collegiate sports on Sunday said his organization does not anticipate adjusting its rules on transgender athletes after a recent federal supreme court decision allowed states to ban them from participating in school athletics.
In an interview with CBS News’ Face the Nation, Charlie Baker, the NCAA president, alluded to how his organization in late January 2025 had effectively banned transgender athletes from women’s sports by closing off those programs to athletes who were assigned male at birth or were taking testosterone therapy. There are no restrictions for participation in NCAA men’s sports, which Baker referred to on Sunday as “the open network”.
Gosh, really? Now why might that be? Does anyone know? Could it possibly be because women playing in men’s sports do not have an advantage but rather its opposite, a disadvantage?
The Guardian, of course, doesn’t bother to say. The Guardian pretends it’s just one of life’s funny little anomalies.
The supreme court majority’s ruling essentially said that banning trans women and girls from competing in female sports does not run afoul of Title IX, a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination in education.
It overturned prior judgments issued by lower courts in relation to two trans students – one in college and the other in high school – who had sued after being barred from competing in West Virginia and Idaho.
Look how carefully the Guardian avoids saying why it’s males who are banned from women’s sports and not females who are banned from men’s sports. Look how carefully the Guardian avoids even admitting that the two “trans students” in question are not females. The Guardian goes to great lengths to conceal the truth of what they’re reporting on.
The supreme court majority’s ruling essentially said that banning trans women and girls from competing in female sports does not run afoul of Title IX, a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination in education.
It overturned prior judgments issued by lower courts in relation to two trans students – one in college and the other in high school – who had sued after being barred from competing in West Virginia and Idaho.
Oops! It stumbles and admits the truth for a few seconds with “banning trans women and girls from competing in female sports” but then it hastens to pull the curtain again with “two trans students”.
The reporting here carefully and with malice does everything it can to hide the fact that males have large physical advantages over females and that is why they should not force their way into women’s sports. It’s all framed as women who object are Trump fans and the poor banished trans gurls are their shattered abused victims. It’s vomitous.
President Trump made two glaring mix-ups Wednesday while speaking to the press at a NATO summit in Turkey.
“We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan. They were shot at the aircraft carrier,” Trump said, inventing a new government and confusing Japan with Iran.
A few minutes later, sitting alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and pointing to him directly, Trump asked reporters, “You have a question for President Putin, please?” The assembled press chuckled, and some tried to correct Trump, who then tried to spin his mistake by claiming that’s what he meant.
Trans people deserve dignity and respect. I've written to the Women and Equalities Minister, urging her to listen to calls from myself & other MPs to disapprove the draft EHRC Code. Read my letter below 👇 pic.twitter.com/cLYjcQf9Gq
The wording of the draft code will exclude trans people from services they have long used – in other words, trans people have long been helping themselves to services meant for other people, which is at best rude and at worst a crime. It is, of course, as we know all too well, especially obnoxious and/or criminal when it’s women’s services that men are helping themselves to. It’s hair-raising to see a working MP cheering on men who grab women’s spaces and services for themselves, especially when that MP is herself a woman. What about women, god damn it?!
On and on it goes, hand-wringing over trans people and completely ignoring the needs and risks of female people, even though she is a female person herself. It’s utterly disgusting and contemptible. I hope she gets voted out at the earliest opportunity.
He’s like the annoying kid in the back seat who keeps asking for ice cream.
Trump said on Tuesday that Greenland should be controlled by the United States, not Denmark, reaffirming a stance that has caused tensions among NATO allies just as leaders of the alliance gathered for a summit in Turkey.
Trump’s assertions that the U.S. must acquire or control Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory, have long strained relations between Washington and Copenhagen — both founding NATO members — and more broadly U.S. ties with Europe. The issue has since moved to a diplomatic track.
Trump should be controlled by jailors, not Republicans.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she expected allies to respect the sovereignty of the Danish kingdom and accept that Greenland was not for sale.
“It is a well-known position of the United States that it wants to own and take over Greenland. I hope that it is equally well-known everywhere that this is not going to happen,” Frederiksen said.
Now of course if it’s just a question of who has the power, that’s not true, but it’s not just a question of who has the power. If things go badly it will end up that way, but so far it’s not that simple. We can only hope it remains not that simple until his presidency ends or he drops dead.
