Oh zing.

There’s a new report from the UN.

Female athletes worldwide have lost nearly 900 medals to transgender-identifying male competitors who have intruded into women’s sports.

Titled “Violence against women and girls in sports,” the August study conducted by the United Nations found that by March 30, 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 women’s division events across 29 different sports were defeated by transgender-identifying men. Male athletes have taken over 890 medals from female athletes, the report said.

“The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males,” the report said.

Created by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, the report was presented to the U.N. General Assembly last week. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International was also at the U.N. with prominent female athletes to demand that the body protect safety and fairness in women’s sports. The event featured Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, U.S. collegiate athlete Lainey Armistead, ADF International CEO Kristen Waggoner, and Alsalem.

Addressing the General Assembly, Alsalem noted that male intrusion into women’s sports has raised the risk of sexual harassment, assault, and voyeurism not just in the sporting arena but in the locker room and bathroom.

Meanwhile, men who consider themselves enlightened and progressive say all this is perfectly fine.

Alsalem argued that the international and national sports governing bodies have abdicated responsibility over the issue by allowing transgender-identifying men to compete in women’s categories, with the only restriction usually being that male entrants meet testosterone requirements.

“Impunity fosters the culture of silence and injustice, and that is brought about in part by the autonomous regulatory frameworks of sports organizations that we have, which non sufficiently incorporated human rights lens or framework in the work, and they tend to prioritize reputation and winning over justice and accountability to victims, she added.

They also tend not to give a flying fuck about women.

Meanwhile across the pond –

He didn’t mean it, you see.

A 22-year-old transgender woman, accused of threatening to kill or cause serious harm to a fellow inmate and a prison officer at Limerick Prison, has been found not guilty on all charges.

Barbie Kardashian had denied three charges and told gardaí that she never intended to carry out the threats.

But he was accused of making the threats, not of intending to carry them out. He admits making them, and that’s the charge, but they found him not guilty anyway.

Over the past four days, a jury of seven women and five men have heard evidence against Ms Kardashian, who is an inmate in Limerick Prison.

Fellow prisoner, Tegan McGhee, said she threatened to rape her on a date in February last year after a row over complaints about the accused not cleaning the prison showers. Prison officer Róisín Linnane also gave evidence of threats of sexual violence against her by Ms Kardashian on two dates in June last year.

Both witnesses said they were shocked and terrified by the threats.

But they’re just women, so they don’t matter all that much.

After being questioned by gardaí the accused confirmed she did make the threats against the two witnesses, but that she never intended to carry them out, and that they were made in a fit of rage after being falsely accused of leaving the prison showers in an unhygienic condition.

But making the threats is what he was charged with.

Following the verdict Ms Kardashian smiled, clenched her fists in celebration, uttering “yes” and whispered to her legal time that she was so happy.

I bet he is.

The former (now retired) editor of the Washington Post:

The fix is in.

The Washington Post said Friday that it will not endorse a candidate in the presidential election this year, breaking decades of tradition, and sparking immediate criticism of the decision.

The newspaper also Friday published an article by two staff reporters saying that editorial page staffers had drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the election.

“The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,” The Post reported, citing two sources briefed on the events.

We are owned by right-wing billionaire bros.

The announcement came days after the head of The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board resigned in protest after that paper’s owner Patrick Soon-Shiong decided against running a presidential endorsement.

Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, is a billionaire.

What I’m saying. We’re at their mercy.

The Washington Post Guild, the union that represents the newspaper’s staff, in a statement posted on the social media site X said it was “deeply concerned that The Washington Post — an American news institution in the nation’s capital — would make a decision to no longer endorse presidential candidates, especially a mere 11 days ahead of an immensely consequential election.”

“The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial,” the Guild said in the statement, which noted the paper’s reporting about Bezos’s role in the decision.

Bezos’s “role” – that’s a good one. It is his decision. He bought it, it’s his. Billionaires get to control us.

Musk learns that it’s illegal to bribe voters in the US.

After receiving a warning from the Justice Department, Elon Musk has stopped his $1 million giveaway to swing voters from his super PAC.

The tech CEO pledged Saturday to give away the hefty sum each day to one registered voter in a battleground state who signed America PAC’s pro–First and Second Amendment pledge. Every day since then, a winner has been announced: three Pennsylvania voters and one North Carolina voter.

Trouble is it’s a federal crime to pay people to register to vote.

Then the DOJ sent a warning letter to America PAC Wednesday, and there hasn’t been a giveaway since. Musk has also been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject.

Fuck around and find out Lonners.

The way to persuade women to embrace men who say they are women is to…er…threaten them. Yeah that’s it, threaten them and grin happily while doing it. And be a state senator.

Originally a comment by Rob on Quick, hide the data.

There are days when I just wish I could tell someone to hand over their science card. There’s always been bad science (especially in medicine and social ‘sciences’ frankly), but the neoliberal trashing of universities, research institutions, and education to make nearly all science demonstrate a commercial applicability or to have regular output has been especially corrosive. Now, if you don’t publish on the regular you’re toast. If you publish negative or ambiguous results, you’re toast. If your work is interesting, but doesn’t have a commercial application, you’re toast.

It’s resulted in not just fraudulent work, but a massive rise in sloppy, poorly thought out work designed to deliver quickly produced small papers that appear to show a good or promising result, but require further study. It’s about career continuity, not quality of thought. A side effect is that there is far less fundamental and pure exploratory research being done in pretty much every field of endeavour. That’s a shame because many of our greatest leaps forward have been built on such seemingly abstract work, and then sometimes years or decades later. Knowledge does have an intrinsic value.

Eliza Mondegreen at Unherd on the hiding of the research:

In today’s New York Times, reporter Azeen Ghorayshi investigated a leading gender clinician’s decision not to publish the results of a study into the effects of puberty suppression on the mental health of patients with gender dysphoria.

At the outset of the National Institutes of Health study, principal investigator Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the most vocal advocates of “gender-affirming care” in the United States, expected that young patients put on puberty blockers would experience “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality” and “increased body esteem and quality of life over time”. But that’s apparently not what the evidence showed. Rather than revise her hypotheses and share her findings with the scientific community, Olson-Kennedy and her team decided to sit on the results. Olson-Kennedy told Ghorayshi that she worried the study’s disappointing findings would be “weaponised” by critics.

That is, critics would point out that the evidence fails to show that blockers relieve suffering and that the reason for using them was to relieve suffering so maybe just maybe doctors should stop prescribing them. That kind of “weaponising.”

Blocking puberty is a very drastic thing to do. The reason for doing it has always been about helping young teenagers cope with getting older and dealing with changes to their bodies. If it turns out that the evidence shows it doesn’t really help with that, what is the point of continuing to do it?

Researchers and clinicians have decided — in advance — that “gender-affirming care” is safe and effective, no matter what the evidence shows. At the European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Killarney, Ireland, in April 2023, researchers presented an array of discouraging findings, bracketed by statements like “as you all know, there are improved mental health outcomes following puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones” — even when the research being presented suggested the opposite.

…

Sometimes, research findings get a glossy makeover before being presented to the public, like a 2022 study that reporter Jesse Singal summarised thus: “Researchers found puberty blockers and hormones didn’t improve trans’ kids mental health at their clinic. Then they published a study claiming the opposite.”

Like Macbeth, they’re in so far they can’t go back.

Much discussion today of the NYTimes article about puberty blockers and the possibility that they…er…don’t achieve the desired goal.

The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.

Brilliant, isn’t it? The findings might motivate people to point out that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress, and we can’t have that, can we. Oh god no, we have to keep that secret, because…er…

…er…

…er…because transphobia! Yeah, that’s it! It’s all the fault of those pesky transphobes!

Keep taking the blockers, kids.

The Heritage people get to decide who hears what.

You could hear the spittle fly as the Heritage Foundation shouted out its latest intellectual assault on the Naval Academy. All over Ruth Ben-Ghiat and a lecture the midshipmen likely will never hear.

She’s a New York University historian with a book on what happens to the military when authoritarians take power. She shows up as a commentator on MSNBC, connecting former President Donald Trump to some of the dictators she’s studied.

The academy’s history department invited her to speak about her work at the annual Bancroft Memorial Lecture. Then she was disinvited. Her politics were the problem, not her lecture.

…

Deep within Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 925-page roadmap for the next Republican president, its authors say they want the service academies scrubbed of anything and anyone deemed insufficiently pure of thought — exactly what they did to Ben-Ghiat.

“Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination,” they wrote in the section on the U.S. military, “eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.”

I thought the Heritage Foundation aspired to a certain intellectual gravitas, but I guess not if it slaps a meaningless “Marxist” on any content it doesn’t like or even predicts it won’t like if it ever gets around to reading or hearing it.

Ben-Ghiat uses her newsletter to connect Trump’s actions to the autocrats she studies. The day she announced the lecture, her essay was, “The Real Reason Donald Trump Insults the U.S. Military.”

She explored the Trump campaign’s confrontation at Arlington National Cemetery, where a campaign staffer shoved a cemetery employee who tried to stop a political video shoot, and put his history of derogatory comments about the military in context.

“This allowed the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist, Rep. [Keith] Self and others to extrapolate, incorrectly, that the Bancroft Lecture would be an occasion to attack Mr. Trump,” the historian wrote.

And that it’s somehow “Marxist” to discuss Arlington Cemetery and the military codes and ethics that govern behavior there.

“Families whose sons and daughters are attending this august military institution should be outraged by the academy’s partisan indoctrination of future officers of the U.S. Navy,” Heritage Foundation mouthpieces Hans von Spakovsky and Cully Stimson wrote.

Foundation “researchers” Matthew Lee and Wilson Beaver made the connection a month after Ben-Ghiat’s announcement and simply made up the rest, assuming she planned to attack Trump.

“One can debate the hallucinations that apparently inhabit the mind of this so-called historian from New York University,” Spakovsky and Stimson wrote, “but the more important point is that her venomous, partisan attack on a political candidate involves the Naval Academy, which is sponsoring her lecture in direct violation of Defense Department rules.”

No doubt that’s because the Naval Academy is run by Marxists.

Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis ends membership of Rape Crisis Scotland

“This is not a decision we have taken lightly. We have done so to hold fast to our principles and to best serve the women and girls that need our support.

“We were created to provide support by and for women. We believe, and women have consistently told us, that single-sex services delivered by an all-female workforce are crucial to help them heal from sexual trauma. This approach remains our priority but is at odds with RCS’.”

Glasgow is the biggest city in Scotland and the 5th biggest in the UK.

Disgusting and creepy beyond your wildest dreams.

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the Football Association, has said he is “deeply concerned” that the governing body he used to lead is “not providing women and girls with fair, safe sport” because of its policy of allowing biological males to compete in the female category.

In a sharply critical letter to Debbie Hewitt and Mark Bullingham, the FA’s chair and chief executive respectively, Lord Triesman, who served as the organisation’s first independent chairman from 2008 to 2010, argues that his successors’ approach is not only compromising the integrity of women’s football but creating an atmosphere where many people feel frightened even to speak up about their concerns.

And all for the sake of men who want to trample women. Funny how that works – we don’t see the newspapers and political figures and entertainers lining up to cheer on white people who want to trample brown people, or rich people who want to trample poor people, or bosses who want to trample workers, but somehow when it’s about women the power imbalance no longer matters. Step on those bitches, guys, they deserve it.

The FA has been under significant pressure to change its stance since last December, when it received a letter from more than 70 MPs and members of the House of Lords – including Lord Triesman – demanding urgent action to protect women from the injury risks of playing against biological males. After Telegraph Sport’s revelation that at least four women’s teams in the Sheffield and Hallamshire League were refusing to play against Francesca Needham, a trans-identifying male accused of causing a season-ending injury to an opponent, MPs ordered the FA to “show leadership” and to abandon its position of allowing those born male to register to play in their “affirmed gender”.

As if “affirmed gender” means anything. We don’t have our own “affirmed species” so why should we have an affirmed “gender” aka sex?

The FA said that it was happy to discuss its policy with Lord Triesman. It has consistently defended its position, saying in a statement earlier this year: “Our current transgender policy has been in place for 10 years, and it has helped to enable a very small population of transgender women to enjoy playing football safely in the grass-roots game. This is a complex and constantly evolving area, and our review remains ongoing as we monitor and support the practical application of our policy.”

Oh fuck off. It’s not complex. Men are not women. Calling it a “very small population” doesn’t make it ok, and adding dishonest blather about “enjoying playing safely” also doesn’t make it ok. Men can’t play safely against women, and the fact that they enjoy endangering women is not a reason to let them do it.

A press release from Gov.UK:

Poor governance at Mermaids amounted to mismanagement, inquiry reveals

By “poor” they of course mean bad, not financially lacking. The word “bad” must always be euphemized, lest it frighten the horses.

In September 2022, the Commission opened a regulatory compliance case into the charity after complaints were made by the public, and highlighted in the media. Concerns were raised around chest-binding services and online support offered to young people, and alleged ties between the charity’s now former CEO and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. 

There follows a torrent of bureaucratic bafflegab that doesn’t tell us anything. This is the most informative bit:

The inquiry also found the purpose of the information about puberty blockers published on the charity’s website was unclear. Charities are by law required to ensure that information provided on an education basis is accurate, evidence-based and balanced. The inquiry provided statutory advice on this matter, which the trustees have since acted on. 

The inquiry found that the charity had a detailed policy relating to its chest binder service and demonstrated compliance with this policy, though in a small number of cases could have been more transparent with service users when declining requests. Mermaids terminated the service in October 2023. However, the Commission has issued statutory advice to the charity requiring that, should it ever resume this service, its future policy and controls should reflect the recent Cass Review, or any future NHS guidelines on parental involvement. 

Chest binding is not a “service” at all.

JKR provides some useful commentary:

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Draw your weapons.

It’s the “two kinds of experts” problem: science-minded people, polite and overcautious to a fault with their criticism, try to rationalize puberty blockers like they’re antidepressants — they only discuss them in terms of potential mood improvement.

That’s because it’s not scientifically possible to evaluate the religious belief that our sexed bodies are profane while our “gender identities” are sacred.

The cultists who’ve taken over the gender clinics don’t even care if puberty blockers have a negative impact on the children’s mood. They don’t see puberty blockers as antidepressants, they see them the way they see all “gender medicine”: as a mandatory rite of passage to bond new recruits into the group.

The media has to stop playing games and being coy about the facts: they need to report that sex is real and binary and that “transgender identity” is a non-natural kind — a social construct that emerged from within a religious subcultural group. Journalists need to ask every single “expert” they consult about “gender” whether they believe in the facts of biology or not, in order to separate out the gender cultists from the fact-based experts in this field, who have so far been far too reticent to call out the pseudoscientific metaphysical beliefs that plague the trans movement.

Ah yes…if you don’t like the findings, bury them.

Oyyy.

Uh, yeah, because that’s the whole point.

“Prominent torturer Fiendy Painmaker has refused to publish data from a study of torture, fearing that the results will be weaponized by critics of torture.”

Listen up, Johanna Olsen-Kennedy: the whole point of medical studies (as of course you know perfectly well) is to determine whether they are beneficial or the other thing. If a study finds out that X is the other thing, aka harmful, it’s not your job to hide the data on the grounds that critics of X will cite it in order to prevent further harm. You’re not supposed to want to keep perpetrating harm.

Rather late in the day, we’re having the “Trump is a genuine fascist” conversation.

(Well of course he is. It’s not as if there’s some high bar to being one. It doesn’t require erudition or physical fitness. He’s every inch a fascist, and it’s all right there on the surface where we can see it.)

John Kelly, a former four-star Marine general and former chief of staff to former President Donald Trump, hammered his old boss in a stunningly public fashion on Tuesday — just two weeks before Election Day.

Kelly, who had previously refrained from discussing his time in the White House so openly, said in expansive interviews with The New York Times that Trump’s discussion of using the military against the “enemy within” — who, in Trump’s words, included Democratic foes — pushed him to come forward. His comments come after several other prominent former administration officials, including those with military experience, expressed concern about Trump’s fitness for office.

“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Kelly said.

The former general held nothing back, arguing that Trump could fit the bill of a “fascist.”

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he told The Times.

Quite. What’s in there that doesn’t fit Trump?

Mark Milley, a retired Army general and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is a “fascist to the core.”

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” he said.

And of course not just this one. If he gets in again he’ll be a danger to many other countries. Ukraine is obviously high on the list.

Another brave courageous indomitable fierce proud man invades women’s sport.

Hundreds of female golfers have complained about the participation of Scottish-born transgender player Hailey Davidson in the penultimate stage of the LPGA Tour’s qualifying competition.

Gets it wrong the way they always do. If even the Telegraph refuses to get it right what hope is there?

The issue is not that Davidson is “transgender”; the issue is that he’s a MAN.

Davidson, a 31-year-old professional originally from Ayrshire but now based in Florida, has said that the intention is “to make Scotland proud” by earning a card on the women’s premier circuit.

Second para and still doing it. “the intention” ffs – HIS intention.

Newspapers and tv and radio news need to make it clear from the very first words that the subject is a man shoving his way into a women’s sport. They need to do the opposite of carefully hiding that fact until late in the story.

But after progressing through August’s first stage of Q-School , the former player on a US male college team was accused of acting “unfairly”…

Yet again. “the former player on a US male college team” – talk about circumlocution!

He’s a male. News outlets should be saying that up front.

…with Amy Olson, a two-time major runner-up, railing against Davidson being allowed to compete. “These women have worked too hard and too long to have to stand by and watch a man compete for and take their spot,” she said.

Finally the Telegraph allows it to be said, by someone else. It does however compensate by sneering at the woman with “railing.”

It has now emerged that this view was held by many in the field, with the International Women’s Forum revealing that 275 signed a letter sent to the LPGA, the US Golf Association and the International Golf Federation, urging Davidson’s removal from the tournament.

But the Telegraph is too chickenshit to say it up front.

“We all know there can be no equal athletic opportunity for women without a separate female golf category,” the letter, as reported by sports website OutKick, read. “Yet, the Ladies Professional Golf Association continues to propagate a policy that allows male athletes to qualify, compete and win in women’s golf, even as several national and international governing bodies of sport and state legislatures increasingly reject these unjust and inequitable policies that harm female athletes.

“LPGA policy does not explicitly state eligibility based on sex. It is essential for the integrity and fairness of women’s golf to have a clear and consistent participation policy in place based on a player’s immutable sex. There are differences between the sexes – female and male – that specifically affect our sport of golf.”

The letter goes into detail on the differences. Davidson responds with sympathy and understanding.

Joke.

Davidson, who almost qualified for the US Women’s Open in June, has remained unapologetic and instead lashed out at the detractors. “I will never understand athletes who blame a transgender competitor on their own athletic failures,” Davidson wrote on Instagram. “If you don’t take accountability for your failures then you will never actually be good enough to make it.”

How absolutely fucking breathtaking is that?