Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Yet another refusal to report accurately.

Trans murderer ‘sexually assaulted female inmate in prison’s hair salon’

Wtf is a trans murderer? Someone who pretends to be a murderer but isn’t one?

If you’re already in the know, of course, you can tell from the “female inmate” bit that they mean a male murderer – but why the hell do they not say so? Why obfuscate in the headline?

A transgender murderer housed in a women’s prison has been charged with sexually assaulting a female inmate.

A male transgender murderer. The word “transgender” does not tell us what sex you’re talking about.

Alexandria Stewart – previously known as Alan Baker – is accused of attacking a woman in the hairdressing salon of the female-only wing of HMP Greenock.

Stewart has been held as a woman at the prison since 2016. The 38-year-old changed gender after being jailed in 2013 for the knife murder of dad-of-two John Weir.

It’s almost funny at this point. Still adamant refusal to spell out that Stewart is a man. What, do they think they’ll be arrested if they say the violent man is a man? Why do they go along with this dishonest manipulative refusal to call a man a man?

The allegation, first reported by the Daily Record, has put renewed pressure on Scotland’s prison chiefs to rethink their “dangerous” policy of allowing biological men to be housed in women’s jails.

There it is at last. In the fourth paragraph. Don’t bury the lede.

Under current guidelines, transgender women are allowed to be housed in female jails unless they pose an “unacceptable” risk of harm to fellow inmates – even if they have a history of violence against women.

And the Telegraph does its bit to help by going to absurd lengths to avoid calling a man a man…but anyway, it is quite the horror that Scotland’s prison chiefs think it’s ok for women to face an acceptable risk of harm from men in female jails. Acceptable to whom, one wonders. Acceptable in what sense. Acceptable why.

SNP ministers are in court fighting to keep the guidelines after campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) launched a legal challenge arguing the policy was “inconsistent” with the court’s judgment.

Susan Smith, an FWS director, said: “It has been a dangerous and stupid experiment to allow prisons to be mixed sex, and it’s having a severe impact on the human rights of the women in the prisons.

“Maybe now the prison service and the Scottish Government can wake up and realise that what they’ve been doing presents a clear and constant risk of state-sanctioned sexual assault – no matter what the outcome in this case it should sharpen minds to that reality.”

But clearly it won’t, and they’ll go right on allowing prisons to be mixed sex because women just don’t matter.

Julie Burchill at Spiked on smug men v JK Rowling:

But the trouble – and the real fun, the sadistic rather than the sporting kind – happens when a bad writer thinks they can ‘take on’ a good writer. It makes it especially entertaining if the first is a man and the latter a woman, due to the element of ‘mansplaining’, which we will see magnificently quashed.

…

There’s been back and forth on X this week, but it seems increasingly likely at the time of writing that Campbell has retired to lick his wounds. He is humourless, like most dry drunks and all on the ‘progressive’ side (just listen to any Radio 4 ‘comedy’ show), whereas Rowling – who once seemed something of a po-faced swot – has become funnier the more successful she is. An early sign that she was determined to enjoy herself – and hopefully offend haters into the bargain – was when she pictured herself in April last year, drinking a cocktail and smoking a cigar on a yacht with the words, ‘I love it when a plan comes together #SupremeCourt #WomensRights’.

Well yes but an even earlier sign was that first surprise photo of the famous lunch in Hammersmith.

After years of refusing to interact with any of us ‘unkind’ types on the gender-realist team, as is characteristic of people who know that they are doomed to lose any sensible argument, Campbell recently indicated that he and Rory Stewart would be ‘happy’ to welcome JKR to their podcast, The Rest Is Politics, just in case she could use the publicity, one supposes.

Just in case he’s stupid enough to think she would say yes when he has ignored all the non-JKR women who have objected to his daughter’s disgusting insults and mockery. Whaddya know, he is that stupid!

More in sorrow than in anger (the same way he must have punched that journalist who dared to mock Robert Maxwell, his former employer), he added that ‘previous attempts’ to get her on the pod ‘have been rebuffed’.

Why would they not be rebuffed? If Campbell is even 10 percent as obnoxious as his daughter that is reason enough to refuse any invitations for public chat.

A million memes bloomed showing unattractive men pressing their clammy attentions on attractive women who wanted none of it. And then JKR herself landed a sucker-punch: ‘That’s because I wasn’t interested in being used to boost the viewing figures of a pair of exceptionally arrogant men whose understanding of this issue drips with classism and misogyny.’ The three women known as For Women Scotland, who were in London last week marking the anniversary of their legal triumph at the Supreme Court, offered themselves up for a ‘grilling’ on The Rest Is Politics instead. ‘We are still in London’, they said on their X account. ‘He can ask us on the podcast and call us toxic to our faces. If he has the guts.’ Answer came there none.

In short he is a shameless sleb-chaser and a disgusting little toady. No wonder his daughter is a giggling sadist.

God chat at the Atlantic:

Though I continued to attend church as usual, I privately wondered whether the entire enterprise might be rooted in nothing more than a misunderstanding.

This steady diminishing of faith probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for one brisk autumn afternoon in 2011 when, standing alone at a bus stop, I happened to witness the presence of God.

The unevenly paved lane where I waited was a quiet one-way street tucked away in a clutch of trees. I gazed down the road, preoccupied with other things—midterm exams, campus-club minutiae—and expecting the bus to trundle around the bend. A sudden icy wind tore around the corner instead, sweeping into gray branches and climbing ivy to send a spray of golden birch leaves spiraling into the sky, taking my breath along with them. And I knew that my soul was bared to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed me with the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. What I saw, I felt, also saw me.

Hmm. Gonna hafta question that “unmistakable” there. I think the sensation was indeed mistakable. Don’t get me wrong, I think the sensation itself is glorious, it’s just interpreting that form of glorious as unmistakable eye contact that I dispute. Be cautious when people sneak in an “unmistakable” where it doesn’t belong.

But that’s not my real issue with this piece.

The latest evidence suggests that God most likely exists, argues a big recent book by Michel-Yves Bolloré, a computer engineer, and Olivier Bonnassies, a Catholic author. Tracts that aim to prove the reality of God are hardly novel. What makes this endeavor unique, say the French writers behind God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, is the scientific nature of their work. Medieval monks toiling away at poetic meditations on the divine have their place, the authors allow, but their own arguments are meant to surpass mere abstract justifications for belief. Instead they assert that cutting-edge empirical proof observable in the natural world makes a firm case for God.

But what is God? How is that short word being defined?

Many sentences later:

The route to durable faith in God often runs not through logical proofs or the sciences, but through awe, wonder, and an attunement to the beauty and poetry of the world, natural and otherwise.

But what is “God”? It still hasn’t been defined, which surely makes it laughably easy to “believe” in it without having to give any reasons at all.

After that brisk autumn afternoon, life went on unremarkably, though I continued to mull over what the experience could mean. That it meant something at all was another strong intuition that I could not entirely account for. There were plenty of ordinary and dismissive explanations for what had happened, all related to the vagaries of the brain. Surely I had just been tired, bleary-eyed, suggestible, available—highly sensitized, in other words, to typical seasonal splendor. That made sense to me, but I didn’t believe it. The natural beauty wasn’t the cause of what I had felt, but rather an invitation to pay attention to what I felt.

But what does that have to do with “God”? What, exactly, is this God? A person who drifts around the planet shaking trees as invitations to other people to…pay attention to what they feel?

It’s nicely written enough but it’s piffle.

The Australian on the new adventures of Doctor Upton:

Australia’s medical regulator has registered as “female” the transgender doctor at the centre of a landmark UK legal dispute over women’s spaces, allowing the emergency medic to work in two NSW hospitals.

Beth Upton, 30, who began transitioning from male to female in 2022, gave sworn evidence to the UK Employment Tribunal of an intention to treat patients who had specifically requested a female doctor.

Under oath, the medic also described the concept of biological sex as a “nebulous dog whistle”, claiming to be “biologically female” on the basis that “I’m not a robot, so I am biological and my identity is female”.

But idenniny isn’t the relevant category. Idenniny can be anything or everything, but reality is more stringent than that. He can believe he feels like a woman all he wants, but in the real world the reality is that he’s a man.

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency registered Dr Elisabeth Ruth Annikki Upton as an unaccredited emergency medicine trainee on April 9, listing the medic’s sex as “female”.

AHPRA defines a “female” as any individual “whose biological sex is that of a female” and anyone whose “gender identity or gender expression is that of a female”.

So what kind of regulation is that? You’d think a regulation agency would seek to be reality-based, wouldn’t you?

The Australian has put questions to AHPRA over whether the regulator believes it is appropriate to register biologically male medical practitioners as female, and allow them to treat potentially vulnerable patients who have specifically requested a female doctor.

This masthead has also asked, given the relevance of biological sex to the treatment of many medical conditions, whether AHPRA believes it is appropriate to register a medical doctor who claims the concept of biological sex is a “nebulous dog whistle”.

I get the feeling AHPRA hasn’t answered.

AHPRA and the Medical Board of Australia in March effectively gagged Queensland psychiatrist Andrew Amos, banning him from making online statements about gender medicine and barring him from having direct clinical contact with any patients.

Fellow Queensland child psychiatrist Jillian Spencer is also being investigated by the regulator for sharing on social media an article from The Australian that quoted her concerns about gender-affirming medical treatment for children.

Is it the fox has taken over the henhouse or the lunatics have taken over the asylum? Or is it, tragically, both?

Women’s Forum Australia CEO Rachael Wong said it was “deeply alarming” that AHPRA had registered Dr Upton as “female”.

“(It) raises serious and unresolved questions about the protection of women’s sex-based rights in Australia, particularly in healthcare,” Ms Wong said.

“This exact scenario has already caused serious conflict, distress and legal action in the UK, including a finding that a female nurse was harassed by the NHS after being forced to share a female changing room with Dr Upton. It is extraordinary that AHPRA appears to be importing the same risks into Australia.

Yes but it harms mostly women, so it’s ok.

Ms Wong said Dr Upton was “not only male, he is a male who has openly disregarded women’s boundaries, privacy and consent”.

“He refused to respect his female colleagues’ privacy in their own changing room, and gave sworn evidence that he would treat female patients who had specifically requested a female doctor,” she said. “That is a direct threat to the dignity and wellbeing of the women he will now work alongside and treat in Australia.”

It’s what they want. Who are women to argue?

Ms Wong accused AHPRA of having been “captured” by gender ideology.

“In addition to its ongoing witch-hunt of doctors speaking out about the harms of youth gender medicine, the regulator – whose core job is protecting patient safety – has prioritised a man’s belief about himself over the truthful information women need to give informed consent. That is not regulation. That is coercion dressed up as inclusion,” she said.

That’s a good point. What about informed consent you absolute fiends???

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at UK sex-based rights charity Sex Matters, said: “Male doctors should never practise as female and medical organisations should never, under any circumstances, record doctors as the sex they are not.”

“Doing so sets the scene for patients’ rights to be breached, since some patients may consent to a procedure only if it is carried out by someone of the same sex as them, or require a chaperone of their own sex if they are seen by a doctor of the other sex,” Dr Joyce said.

Doctoring is all about bodies – real bodies, not imagined ones. Doctoring is absolutely not the place for fantasy to run riot. Will these fools ever grow up?

There’s a statement.

From Kezia Dugdale, incoming Chair of Stonewall:

“In my first interview as incoming Chair of Stonewall, I was asked a question about JK Rowling. In answering, I should have been absolutely unequivocal that I would never condone behaviour from anyone that seeks to or causes harm to anyone in our community. That is a red line for me and should be for all of us. I understand the interview has caused worry, anger and upset and I am truly sorry about that.

In a world that is increasingly polarised and in which trans people have been under continuous attack for the last decade or more, I was excited to be appointed Chair of Stonewall. I applied for the role because Stonewall works for the whole LGBTQ+ community. I would not have applied or have wanted to lead a charity that was not inclusive of the whole community because my feminism is and has always been trans inclusive.”

Wait wait wait. Slow down. If you’re going to put out a statement, make it a clear statement. What is this “community” you’re talking about? What is “the whole LGBTQ+community”? What makes it a community? What are the criteria? What are the borders? How do people know? How do members know, how do outsiders know? How is it decided?

All of that needs to be clear before you talk about “a charity that was not inclusive of the whole community” in a way that’s obviously disapproving and hostile.

In other words, the issue here is of course that a lot of people who are normally part of the community in question do not agree that trans people are part of that community. A lot of lesbians and gay men do not agree that trans people belong in groups for lesbians and gay men, not to be mean but because lesbians and gay men need groups for lesbians and gay men. Do you see what I’m getting at? The short version is of course “forced teaming”.

You’re putting a very heavy thumb on the scale by simply assuming that “the community” always and everywhere covers trans people as well as lesbians and gay men, when that assumption is not correct. And it’s no good trying to paper it over by saying “the whole community” as if that were universally agreed. You’re not going to change the minds of people who consider trans ideology a different thing from same-sex attraction by waving “the whole community” in their faces.

Inclusion is a buzzword, but we don’t always want or need inclusion. Labor unions don’t need to be inclusive of bosses, and women don’t need to be inclusive of men. It’s pretty simple once you pay attention.

Trans inclusion is at the heart of Stonewall’s strategy, published last year. That will not change. My term as Chair starts in September. Over the coming months, along with the current Chair Ayla Holdom, the CEO Simon Blake and the rest of the team I look forward to having conversations with as many of you as I can. Together, we want to seek new ways to make progress and push for equality, building on progressive dialogue and starting – always – from a place of inclusion. 

But inclusion of what? Straight people? Homophobes? Members of Trump’s cabinet?

You can’t do both. You can’t organize and persuade and campaign as a particular group and include everyone in that group; you have to pick one.

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on Time’s up.

Ugh, here’s the Alliance Defending Freedom again, putting itself at the centre of the gender-critical arena, because no one’s pushing it out. For those who don’t remember, the ADF is the theocratic, Christian Nationalist hate group that, among other odious doings, lobbies to criminalize and imprison gays and lesbians around the world. They work tirelessly across continents to stop governments from decriminalizing homosexuality or tolerating us in any way.

The gender mess on the left is doing catastrophic damage to the causes that need the left’s protection from the nastiest goons on the right. Because it’s alienating so many erstwhile allies, they’re all joining ranks with the goons.

It really doesn’t make the “gender critical” movement look good, that virtually everyone within it is turning a blind eye to the kinds of people who are jumping into the fray and aligning their brands (and the ideologies behind them) to this issue, no matter how much money these dubious organizations have to pour into the battle.

I wonder, if it were the Ku Klux Klan that filed these threatening legal letters rather than the ADF, would they have garnered the same endorsements from Davies and Edwards? Would Women’s Sport Union have been so quick to team up with them? Or would people have realized much sooner that no matter how much they may agree about the gender issue, their differences are far too grave, and some bedfellows are just not worth having at any cost? That it might have been better to tell the ADF to buzz off and stay out of it?

This looks to me like an obvious and terrible strategic mistake. But I’ve seen so, so, so, so many people’s politics turn to the dark side over this issue, it’s just another in a long line of sorrowful disappointments.

PS: and I can never repeat this enough times: the ADF are the ones who succeeded in killing Roe v. Wade.

Horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible bedfellows. Arrgh, wake up, people! *screams into pillow*

Douglas Murray at the Spectator:

People who do not follow the dementing debate about the meeting point of trans rights and women’s rights may not be aware of the name Grace Campbell. For anyone not in the know, she is the daughter of the celebrated podcaster and lunatic Alastair Campbell. Inevitably enough, she has a podcast of her own, a clip of which has resurfaced this week. It made some impact online thanks to a riff – alongside a male-to-female trans guest – in which Campbell ridiculed J.K. Rowling and other feminists. The two had a grand old time explaining that the women who disagree with them (many of whom happen to be older than them) are – on top of all their thought-crimes – also ugly.

Well it was more than that. Worse than that. They both gleefully shouted “ugly ugly ugly!!!” at each other, in a frenzy of malice and mistaken hilarity. It was a truly nauseating display. Maybe you have to be a woman to really get the intended sadism.

It is not possible to provide a transcript of the conversation because it would test my sanity to type it out. But the gist of it was that these women were not the sort of people younger, cooler women should aspire to be. The two agreed, among other things, that their feminist opponents had bad hair. Adding a nice dose of misogyny as well as ageism into the mix, Campbell’s trans guest chose to argue that if the hair on top of the women’s heads was dry and ugly, imagine what it was like ‘down there’.

Add that to “ugly ugly ugly!!!” and you’ve got yourself a picnic.

Trump can’t do arithmetic.

President Trump has claimed that he has secured discounts of 400 to 1,500 percent on prescription drugs. A price discount cannot be more than 100 percent because that would lower the price to zero.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Trump’s frequent incorrect calculations of percentages when talking about discounts on prescription drug prices, arguing on Wednesday that the president “has a different way of calculating.”

“If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600 percent reduction,” Mr. Kennedy said during a congressional hearing.

Hahahahaha no it’s not.

Mr. Kennedy is mathematically incorrect. A price reduction from $600 to $10 would be a discount of more than 98 percent. A price discount cannot be more than 100 percent, because that would lower the price to zero — or suggest that the company was giving you money for buying the product.

Which they don’t do. That’s not math or arithmetic, but it’s true anyway.

The remark came while Mr. Kennedy was testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, had asked Mr. Kennedy about the price of Protonix, a prescription drug available on the federally run TrumpRx website, compared with the price of the generic version of the drug at Costco. Ms. Warren pointed out one of many cases in which Americans using the TrumpRx service were still paying much more for drugs.

Ms. Warren took a jab at Mr. Trump’s frequent hyperbolic and mathematically impossible claims that the TrumpRx website offered prescription drugs at discounts of 400 to 1,500 percent.

Listen, Trump got a PhD when he was in first grade, so he missed percentages. He got it from his genius uncle who taught radiator repair at MIT.

Mr. Trump has been making mathematically impossible claims about drug pricing for as long as he has been promoting the TrumpRx service, which began with deals announced last year with pharmaceutical companies to reduce some drug prices. He soon lashed out at the media for not repeating the claims or for pointing out that the claims were impossible. “I got the biggest price reduction in history on drugs, pharmaceutical, and I can’t get these guys to talk about it,” he said in January.

Eventually, Mr. Trump began to insert some uncertainty into his claims, saying that the discount depended “on how you want to calculate it.”

“You could say it’s an 80 percent reduction,” Mr. Trump said in January. “Or you could say it’s a 1,000 percent reduction. You could say whatever you want.”

That’s not so much “injecting uncertainty” as it is blithering nonsense.

“We have lowered the price of drugs by 50, 60, 70 and 80 and 90 percent,” Mr. Trump said. “And there’s another way of figuring, you could also say, depending on the way you phrased the statement, 400, 500, 600, 700 percent. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

Indeed Nobody ever has.

Honoring women in sports…er…sort of…

Trump "honoring" the University of Georgia women's tennis team with a photo that featured only men in the foreground. pic.twitter.com/VATTVxzjPx

— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) April 22, 2026

The Guardian has details:

A White House photo celebrating a champion women’s sports team has drawn backlash due to the positioning of Donald Trump and a group of men, who overshadowed the female athletes by lining up in front of them.

No no, the men are standing in front of the women to shield them from bears.

The University of Georgia women’s tennis team was one of several collegiate teams to visit the White House on Tuesday to mark a recent NCAA championship win. In a photo shared by press aide Margo Martin, Donald Trump and five Georgia staffers and coaches took up the front row of a stage setup, with 11 women standing in the background on a riser.

Because bears. The White House is full of them, as everyone knows.

In a video shared by Martin, Trump approaches the group and shakes the hands of the five men, but does not do the same to the women.

Because he didn’t want to rile the bears. Bears think women should stay home and be modest.

Before 2019, no women’s championship team had made a solo visit to the White House under Trump. Some had participated in events celebrating men’s and women’s teams. Four of the teams honored at Tuesday’s event were women’s sports teams, plus one mixed-gender rifle team.

Earlier this year, the US women’s hockey team declined an invitation to visit the White House after winning gold at the Milano Cortina Olympics. The team cited scheduling and previous commitments, but the decision came after Trump joked about needing to invite the women’s team while on a phone call with the gold-winning US men’s team. The men’s team visited the White House and attended the State of the Union as Trump’s guests.

Hilary Knight, the captain of the women’s team, later called Trump’s remark a “distasteful joke” that had overshadowed the Olympic success.

Oh come on, where’s your sense of humor?! That’s a hilarious joke! The bears pissed themselves laughing!

The image at Tuesday’s event drew comparisons to previous instances in which men have dominated photos at events focused on women’s issues. In 2017, a photo of Trump signing an anti-abortion bill surrounded by eight male staffers in the Oval Office was met with outrage.

Ok ok ok. Women are stupid. Trump leaves them out when he can get away with it, and hides them behind the men when he can’t get away with leaving them out. You win: he does it on purpose, because women are stupid and weak and there only for sex. Ok?

The bears have been relocated to Lafayette Park.

They want us to get Covid.

Covid-19 vaccines roughly halved the chances that a US adult would need to visit the emergency room or be hospitalized with their infections last fall and winter, according to two sources familiar with the findings of a new study. But you won’t hear about it from the agency that led the research: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The current head of the CDC, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s also director of the US National Institutes of Health, blocked the publication of those findings in the CDC’s flagship journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, according to the sources.

The authors of the study received an official rejection letter from the journal on Tuesday, one source said, even though the study had cleared internal reviews and had been scheduled for publication.

…

The rejection of the new study is “pretty problematic in general, because it’s a very standard, well-established study design that has been used for a long time,” said Dr. Fiona Havers, who resigned as senior vaccine policy adviser at the CDC in June over changes to the agency’s vaccine policy made by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She used to be part of the team that worked on studies with VISION data.

“It’s not perfect, but it is a reasonable way of measuring real-time vaccine effectiveness during the season and getting data that can be tracked over time,” she said.

Liberal propaganda! Don’t trust them or their vaccines or their findings! It’s all liberal espionage and stealth warfare!

Covid-19 vaccines have been a particular target of the HHS under Kennedy.

In June, he announced that Covid-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for pregnant women and children, a move that blindsided and alarmed many agency scientists.

Kennedy has no medical training of any kind.

See you in court.

Parkrun and nine sports bodies have been threatened with legal action by Sharron Davies over their refusal to ban those born male from their female categories.

The Football Association of Wales, Irish Football Association, Swim England, British Gymnastics and Royal Yachting Association (RYA) have also been targeted a year after the Supreme Court ruling that only those born female should be considered women under the Equality Act 2010.

Only women are women; men cannot be women; stop letting men invade women’s sports. It’s not that much to ask.

Baroness Davies and Tracy Edwards MBE have co-signed letters from the Women’s Sport Union and legal advocacy organisation ADF International to each of the sports bodies.

Seen by Telegraph Sport, the letters warn legal action will follow if the bodies continue to refuse to join the likes of the Football Association, Scottish FA, Rugby Football Union and England and Wales Cricket Board in protecting their female categories.

“Any governing body that continues to permit biological males to compete in the female category contravenes the Equality Act 2010 as interpreted by the Supreme Court. This exposes the organisation to immediate and substantial legal liability,” the letters state.

But it’s worth it for the sake of ruining things for women, right?

Last week, Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, said EHRC guidance on protecting women’s spaces would not be published until after Scottish and Welsh elections on May 7, despite the fact that the draft guidance was submitted for review last September.

The delay was criticised by Baroness Falkner, former head of the EHRC, and Reem Alsalem, the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, who said the guidance should be published “without further delay”.

Aka without further obstinate pig-headed determined contempt for women and gross favoritism for men who call themselves women.

Edwards was the world-renowned sailor who skippered Maiden, the first all-female-crewed boat to sail around the world. She said: “When I stood outside the Supreme Court on 16 April 2025 as For Women Scotland won their case, I celebrated the return of sanity. Little did I know that a year later we would still be fighting for the female category in sport, and that over 30 UK sports governing bodies would be shirking their responsibility to women and girls.

“Sharron and I set up the union to ‘support, protect and grow female participation in sport’ but we knew that getting males out of the female category would be job number one. I have written to the RYA on a number of occasions and the disappointment I feel in their reluctance to protect women and girls is profound. I have spent my sailing career promoting and facilitating women and girls into sailing and yet the misogyny 37 years after ‘Maiden’ hasn’t gone away, it has just changed shape.”

It’s true and it’s unbelievably depressing.

David Leask at the Times:

Engaging in a war of words with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart of The Rest Is Politics, the Harry Potter author posted a meme of Scooby-Doo and his pal Shaggy shivering in terror. 

The image, she joked on X, was “live footage” of the pair. “Mmmm. Bit weird,” responded Campbell, still the master of the dark arts of political spin. “But hey ho.”

Rowling, a prominent gender-critical feminist, and the socially liberal Campbell have been sparring over trans issues.

Rowling is a good deal more socially liberal than Campbell is.

The latest row has focused on The Rest Is Politics not inviting For Women Scotland (FWS) on the podcast, the group behind the UK Supreme Court judgment decreeing that sex, in terms of the UK Equality Act, is biological. 

It comes after Campbell and Stewart hosted Sarah McBride, America’s first transgender member of Congress.

In other words these two men have not invited gender critical feminists on their podcast but they have invited a man who claims to be a woman and is a member of Congress. Ignoring women while fawning on men who pretend to be women is not the height of “socially liberal”; it what’s technically known as adding insult to injury.

But the friction goes back further and is all the spicier because Campbell’s daughter Grace, a comedian, once called the FWS women celebrating their victory “freaks” and “ugly with the worst hair, the worst clothes and the worst views”.

Oh do stop giggling, god damn it. It’s not “spicy”. It’s not some trivial by the way that Campbell’s horrible daughter spewed all those insults to please yet another man pretending to be a woman. None of this crap is funny.

Campbell rejected criticism that he would not host gender-critical spokespeople on a spin-off of their podcast called The Rest Is Politics: Leading. 

“For all those claiming we won’t listen to people who share JK Rowling views, we have in the past asked JK Rowling, who said no. She is a leading voice and therefore we would happily talk to her on Leading. Previous attempts have been rebuffed,” he said.

What he means is she’s an extremely famous voice and therefore he and his mate would happily have her on their poxy podcast. Yes of course you would, you patronizing piece of crap, because that would be good for you, but the women you should be talking to are the ones your putrid daughter mocked and dismissed on her ass-kissing fame-chasing podcast.

Rowling responded: “That’s because I wasn’t interested in being used to boost the viewing figures of a pair of exceptionally arrogant men whose understanding of this issue drips with classism and misogyny.

“If you’re genuinely interested in a debate, I’m at a loss to understand why you’re uninterested in interviewing FWS, who secured the Supreme Court victory and are therefore THE leading voices on this issue. But perhaps your charming daughter has adequately represented the entire Campbell family’s view, by describing them as ‘ugly’ women, with whom she wouldn’t ‘want to be in a room’?”

It doesn’t pay to mess with JKR.

Susan Smith, co-director of FWS, said the group would still meet with The Rest Is Politics. But she added: “We have always said that we would engage with Mr Campbell. However, he has made it clear that he thinks anyone other than Ms Rowling is below his touch.

“We do not know if this is because he really is this arrogant, or if he fears that he would be humiliated should he attempt to debate any of the many qualified women who have studied this issue and he feels safe in the knowledge that JK Rowling will turn him down. 

I think I’ll go with both? He really is this arrogant – that’s obvious – and he doesn’t want to talk to those intelligent women who know far more about the subject than he does.

“Insultingly, he has now told feminists that they should listen to his interview with the trans politician Sarah McBride, something which suggests he has crossed from political commentator to online troll.”

I did listen to a few minutes of it and was unmoved. McBride chats well enough but he’s no JK Rowling.

Rowling, meanwhile, referring to McBride as male, posted: “What better way could there be of repudiating accusations of misogyny than recommending an episode where three men instead of two discuss which rights women should be fine giving up — without, of course, mentioning the words ‘women’s rights’?”

Four men? A hundred? A few billion?

If only someone had thought to make Trump president in 1965.

Trump boasted that he “would have won Vietnam very quickly” had he been president during the decades-long conflict, as the U.S.-Iran peace deal hangs in the balance.

The president joined CNBC’s Squawk Box by phone Tuesday morning where he spoke for more than 30 minutes about the Iran war, his pick for Fed chair Kevin Warsh, oil prices and the White House ballroom.

The Vietnam digression came as Trump compared the Iran conflict, which began nearly two months ago, with the length of other wars that America has been embroiled in.

Well it’s not really fair to call it a digression, given the fact that he’s incapable of saying anything without digressing every few words. He doesn’t think, he blurts.

Unlike most American men of his generation, 79-year-old Trump avoided military service in Vietnam despite the U.S. having a mandatory draft at the time. The U.S. was involved militarily in Vietnam from about 1954 until 1975 and over 58,000 American service members were killed in the armed conflict.

Wait, what? Most American men of his generation served in Vietnam??? That can’t be right.

I looked it up. It’s not right; not even close. Do better, Independent.

Moira Donegan at the Guardian:

Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that transgender women athletes would be barred from competing in all Olympic events in the women’s category – but not the men’s events.

Er, yes, because they are men. What part of that is hard to understand?

In addition to trans women athletes, cisgender women with conditions known as DSDs – differences in sexual development – will also be banned from competition. The new rules effectively redefine womanhood – but not manhood – as a novel and previously unrecognized category consisting only of those with a specific set of genetic prerequisites.

Yes of course “womanhood” and not “manhood”: because it’s women who are harmed by letting men idennify into their sports, while men are not thus harmed. It’s really not that difficult to grasp.

To comply with this new requirement, women athletes – but not male ones – will be made to submit to genetic testing, to determine whether their womanhood meets the committee’s standards.

See above. It’s the pretend women who are a problem, not the pretend men.

The move comes as increased political and media attention to the issue of trans rights and visibility over the past years – along with pressure from the Trump administration – has led athletic federations to ban trans women from sports competitions, a demand that has largely not been made for transgender men in women’s or men’s sports.

Because it’s asymmetrical you damn fool.

The vitriol and intensity of this controversy has been acute. Twenty-eight states ban trans girls and women from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity; last year, the NCAA announced a ban on trans athletes competing in women’s collegiate leagues.

What’s vitriolic and intense about knowing that sports are based in bodies and not in “gender identity”?

No stupid is too stupid for this ideology.

Not quite Monty Python level.

The BBC has commissioned another comedy about drag queens. The Dickie Show is a chat show in which a drag queen interviews celebrities. The first two episodes were only put on YouTube, not the iPlayer, and secured less than 5,000 views between them in their first 24 hours 1/2 pic.twitter.com/afiTw8c7UP

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) April 22, 2026

Just don’t forget, Trump is keeping track.

The White House has developed something akin to a “naughty and nice” list of NATO countries, as the Trump administration looks for ways to punish allies who refused to back the Iran war.

…

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth floated the broad idea in December. “Model allies that step up, like Israel, South Korea, Poland, increasingly Germany, the Baltics and others, will receive our special favor,” he said. “Allies that still fail to do their part for collective defense will face consequences.”

It’s not collective defense though, is it. It’s Trump’s personal war, launched and continued without consulting purported allies. Trump doesn’t have any allies, Trump does what Trump feels like doing.

The White House made its frustration with allies clear. “While the United States has always been there for our so-called allies, countries we protect with thousands of troops have not been there for us throughout Operation Epic Fury,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly, referring to the Pentagon’s name for the operation. “President Trump has made his thoughts on this unfair dynamic clear, and as he said, the United States will remember.”

But nobody asked him to do any operation epic tantrum; it was all his idea.

But there is little precedent for taking such steps to punish allies, and such notions already face push back on Capitol Hill.

“It is not helpful when American leaders speak of our alliances with derision,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said Tuesday before a hearing on U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region. “We must be clear about the numerous political, strategic and moral benefits that country receives from its alliances.”

But without slavish obedience what use are those strategic and moral benefits?

Seen on social meeja just now:

Whatever you think about her books, what J.K. Rowling is doing right now matters more.

She’s one of the most successful authors alive. She could have stayed quiet, protected her empire, and avoided the mob.

Instead, she chose to speak up for women for sex-based rights, for single-sex spaces, for safeguarding.

It gave me pause. I had to think about it. Could she have?

I’m not so sure. I don’t say that to challenge her courage, but to look more closely at the nature of the situation. I’m not sure she could have put up with it forever, for the simple reason that it’s intolerable. Sitting back and staying silent while purported adults talk the most ridiculous destructive nonsense adults have talked since about the 11th century is no picnic, let me tell you. It’s itchy. You want to scratch it. Trying to ignore it gets more difficult every day.

I think she would probably say the same. It’s keeping shtum that would have been the torture, not slapping the challenge onto the table and refusing to budge.

Alastair Campbell has seen the error of his ways at last!

Kidding. Totally kidding.

For those in the middle of the @jk_rowling conversation I strongly recommend you listen to @RestIsPolitics LEADING interview with @SarahEMcBride – you could not wish to hear a more compelling, passionate and measured advocate of trans rights and human rights.…

— ALASTAIR CAMPBELL (@campbellclaret) April 21, 2026

Fantastic. Three men chatting about…trans rights. Women? What are those? What good are they? Who cares?

This went well.

Hi, there! We understand your daughter informs your views. Do you agree we are ugly, ugly FREAKS?

Thanks

— For Women Scotland (@ForWomenScot) April 20, 2026

There are many many pointed references to the Iraq war and many many pointed suggestions that he invite For Women Scotland on his podcast and many many reminders of the disgusting things his daughter Grace said in that skin-crawling interview with a poisonous man who pretends to be a woman. So far he’s ignored all of it. Not a good man.

This isn’t the Guardian or the BBC, it’s the Times. Why does even the Times do this?

Trans doctor at heart of NHS gender row to work in Australia

The transgender doctor who was at the centre of a legal dispute in Britain over the use of women’s spaces has been given permission to work in Australia.

Beth Upton, 30, left NHS Fife after the A&E nurse Sandie Peggie took her to court over the latter’s suspension due to a heated exchange at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy in 2023.

Took HER to court – why do they do that?? The whole point is that he’s a he, so why does even the Times lie about it and confuse, trick, mislead readers? Why does even the Times obey the rules of this idiotic destructive women-hating ideology?

Upton has now been registered as an emergency medic by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, which has allowed her to work under supervision at hospitals on the north coast of New South Wales.

She was registered on April 9, and her sex was listed as female. It was not immediately known whether she had started work. 

Yes, HIS sex was listed as female, which is a lie. Doctors shouldn’t be lying about their sex. The Times shouldn’t be helping doctors lie about their sex.

The decision has outraged some women’s rights advocates in Australia. Rachael Wong, the chief executive of Women’s Forum Australia, said it was “deeply alarming” that the regulation agency had registered Upton as female.

She added that Upton was “not only male; he is a male who has openly disregarded women’s boundaries, privacy and consent”.

Which is true, and a matter of public record, so why is the Times lying about what sex he is?

The regulation agency defines a female as someone whose “biological sex is that of a female” and whose gender identity or gender expression is that of a female.

That’s deranged. Idenniny and expression have nothing to do with it. Fantasize and play let’s pretend all you like, but not on the job, especially when that job is being a doctor. Who the hell wants a deranged lying giant bully of a man for a doctor?