When oh when oh when will adults stop talking this childish nonsense?

One, that “There’s no rationality” is laughable. JKR makes rational arguments, and she’s damn good at it. Rationality is exactly what there is. It’s highly eccentric to announce that there’s no rationality and then immediately talk about men who “feel” they are women with the implication that we should all agree with such men.

Two, that is not hate.

Knowing that a man is a man is not hate.

Women need to know who is a man. It’s not hate to know that and it’s not hate to say it.

I’ll tell you what I do hate though: I hate this mindless formulaic drivel pouring out of the mouths of people in government. That’s what I hate.

Originally a post by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.

This is strange. WaPo: Boston NWSL franchise apologizes for ‘Too Many Balls’ team reveal campaign

Subhead: “Fans and players disliked the slogan, leading the team to issue a statement acknowledging the “hurt we caused” the LGBTQ+ and transgender communities.”

In the launch, the club unveiled its brand through its “Too Many Balls” campaign, a product of Boston-based ad agency Colossus meant to be a pun referencing the number of famous men’s teams in the city and the need for more women’s franchises. In an accompanying video, a narrator says: “Yeah, Boston loves its balls, but maybe there are too many balls in this town. So let’s add a new chapter to our city’s legacy. With new idols, new dreams and a new league to cheer for: the National Women’s Soccer League.”

That sounds quite funny and apropos. But it was deemed “transphobic”, so it must be shut down and an apology issued.

The apology references the hurt they caused “to the LGBTQ+ community and to the trans community in particular”. But of course there was no hurt to anything other than the T part, and perhaps they were even standing up for the L part. There shouldn’t have been any hurt to the “trans community” either, except for those men who insist they are women and that they or other men should be allowed to play on this women’s team; can’t mention the fact that these men possess male genitalia, or used to possess male genitalia, nor make any reference to genitalia at all, except perhaps for phrases intended to insult women.

There was also some complaint about the team name, “BOS Nation”. I have no idea why. BOS is the code for the main Boston airport, and “BOS Nation” is an anagram of “Bostonian”. Seems clever to me.

When you can’t choose your roommates:

Female inmates at the women’s prison in Shakopee, Minnesota have come forward to report disturbing behavior from the trans-identified males housed at their facility. Former inmate Rebeca Warmbo alerted Reduxx to the situation and has been communicating with women inside Shakopee, who reveal the male transfers are making them feel “unsafe” and “scared” for their lives.

Well, sorry, but that doesn’t matter when men want to pretend to be women and be up close and personal. Sucks to be you.

As Reduxx reported last month, a total of five male convicts have been transferred to a Minnesota’s women-only prison following the adoption of a gender identity policy by the Department of Corrections in January of 2023. Two of the men who are now being held at MCF-Shakopee are sexual predators serving sentences related to the abuse of children.

Ah good choice. Couldn’t be something like stealing or fraud, no, has to be violence and abuse, so that the women will feel really unnerved. How nice people are.

The prison policy was altered following a June 2022 lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Corrections which ultimately resulted in the implementation of measures permitting male convicts to be housed in the female estate.

The discrimination claim was filed by the trans activist non-profit organization Gender Justice on behalf of Craig ‘Christina’ Lusk, who was serving a five-year sentence for the possession of methamphetamine at the Moose Lake correctional facility for men. In order to aid their legal fight to have violent men placed into the women’s prison, Gender Justice was granted nearly $500,000 in taxpayer funds from the administration of Governor Tim Walz.

The glorious fight to put violent men in women’s prisons.

Rachel Wong again:

Fundamental rights? Fundamental rights?? Are you serious? Do you have the adults locked in a closet somewhere?

It is indeed a sign of respect for gender idenniny, and that’s another reason I wouldn’t do it in a million years.

I can’t (and of course won’t) “respect people’s pronouns” because there’s no such thing as “people’s pronouns.” There are only pronouns. We don’t have our very own adjectives and we don’t have our very own pronouns, either. Geddoverit.

Aaron Rupar says Trump is rapidly crumbling, with clips that show Trump indeed crumbling.

On Monday night, Trump held what was easily one of his most bizarre campaign events ever — a failed town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, that ended with him bobbing and weaving on stage for nearly 40 minutes to a soundtrack that ranged from funereal opera to Guns N’ Roses.

Then, following his Economic Club of Chicago event on Tuesday, Trump traveled down to Atlanta for a low energy rally where he seemed to have trouble stringing together cogent sentences when he wasn’t reading from the teleprompter.

…

These rallies may energize his base, but beyond that they mostly end up providing fodder for damaging video clips like the ones above. Trump, however, reliably gets help from a mainstream press that too often sanewashes his speeches for readers and viewers who aren’t watching them live and may not spend a lot of time on social media.

The New York Times, for instance, described Trump as “swaying soberly” during his musical “detour” in Pennsylvania, adding that he’s known “for improvisational departures.” The WSJ’s headline about the event read “Trump’s Pennsylvania Town Hall Ends in Concert,” as though the plan all along was to have Trump behave like a maniac. ABC News’ TV report on the bizarre spectacle was even worse, with a reporter praising the “almost intimate” atmosphere and noting “people were having a good time. It did not seem out of the ordinary.” (It was very much out of the ordinary.)

So the question is whether enough of his fans will notice in time.

New South Wales Labor and Greens display their contempt for women.

The speeches from @NSWLabor and @GreensNSW in support of Alex Greenwich’s “Equality” Bill have been atrocious.

The level of blind adherence to radical gender ideology and utter disregard for the safety of women and children is astounding. And that’s to say nothing of the blatant lies.

Greens MP @jennyleong chose to wear a t-shirt that says: “NO TERFS ON OUR TURF”.

No TERFS – AKA those who support women’s sex-based rights – but no issue with men who say they’re women (including autogynephiles – look it up) intruding on female-only spaces like toilets, changing rooms and refuges with women and girls. p.s. I have just realised I’m blocked by NSW Greens so feel free to tag them.

That photo is blood-chilling. The hatred of women among “progressives” – including women – is a non-stop horror.

BBC Sport pokes women in the eye again.

BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year nominees revealed

You know what’s next. This is the BBC after all.

Traitors and bullies.

The University of Nevada has issued a statement rebuking its women’s volleyball team for forfeiting a match against a team that includes a transgender player. In recent weeks, several schools have canceled matches against San Jose State, whose roster includes transgender redshirt senior Blaire Fleming.

Monday, players on Nevada’s women’s volleyball team issued a statement to OutKick announcing their decision to forfeit their Oct. 26 match, overriding a previous decision from their university.

“We, the University of Nevada Reno women’s volleyball team, forfeit against San Jose State University and stand united in solidarity with the volleyball teams of Southern Utah University, Boise State University, the University of Wyoming, and Utah State University,” the statement said, referring to the other teams who have forfeited their matches.

And the University scolded them.

“The players’ decision and statement were made independently, and without consultation with the University or the athletic department. The players’ decision also does not represent the position of the University,” the school’s statement said.

“The University and its athletic programs are governed by the Nevada Constitution and Nevada law, which strictly protect equality of rights under the law, and that equality of rights shall not be denied or abridged by this state or any of its subdivisions on account of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry or national origin.”

Well guess what: if you force them to play against a team with a male member you are abridging their equality of rights. Including “gender identity or expression” in that list cancels “sex” in that list. You can protect women’s rights or trans rights but you can’t protect both.

“The University is also governed by federal law as well as the rules and regulations of the NCAA and the Mountain West Conference, which include providing competition in an inclusive and supportive environment.”

But not for the girls, you dumb fux. It’s not an inclusive and supportive environment for the girls. You might as well say one competitor in a marathon can ride a bike instead of running.

Smart move – admitting guilt in writing in public.

6 of us released about 6,000 crickets into hate group LGB Alliance’s annual conference. The result of the conference, if it had gone ahead as planned, would have been an acceleration of transphobic hate and misinformation, which drives much of the attack on our healthcare and our dignity.

We are so proud of ourselves for ending their spewing of violent hate…

Couple of things.

One, why release 6 thousand crickets? To disrupt the conference, yes, but why that way? It’s such a bad look, in so many ways. Squalid, stupid, cruel, messy, farcical, random…

I don’t know, maybe that makes it a good fit. Trans itself is random. It’s not like other uprisings of subordinated people. Knowing what sex people are isn’t a form of subordination, and neither is refusing to pretend people are the sex they’re not. Recognition of reality isn’t a form of oppression or injustice. The demands of trans ideology are random so maybe the methods of enforcement might as well be random too.

The second thing is just the usual obvious “No, wrong, no, that’s not what it is.” It’s not “transphobic hate and misinformation” to say that men are not women; there is no attack on their healthcare or their dignity (they attack their own dignity); there is no “spewing of violent hate.” Formulaic babble is formulaic babble, and persuades only the terminally credulous.

There’s an interesting pattern here.

Beira’s Place and Rape Crisis Scotland warn of a growing number of cases of women being choked during sex

Possibly you see the pattern already.

K Rowling’s charity has warned that sexual violence has become normalised, with growing numbers of young women seeking counselling after unwanted choking during sex.

…

[Chief Executive Isabelle] Kerr, who has worked with abuse survivors for more than 40 years, said: “It would appear that it’s something that is becoming very normalised, because not only are young men thinking that they should be doing it, but young women are expecting it to be done — even though they don’t necessarily want it or like it in any way. For many of them it’s frightening.”

See the pattern? Men do it to women. What a very interesting and unusual and surprising pattern.

Beira’s Place is supporting women who have been strangled in long-term relationships or brief sexual encounters. It does not hear about men asking to be strangled, suggesting the trend is more about men enjoying power.

Ya think?

Linda Thompson, national co-ordinator of the Glasgow-based Women’s Support Project, which works to tackle violence against women, said girls involved in prostitution were particularly exposed to strangulation risks as men played out scenarios before attempting them in the bedroom at home or were seeking experiences that their partners refused.

…

“We are going to have more reports coming through about strangling,” Thompson said. “It is moving into intimacy, it is moving into relationships, it is more of an expectation placed on women.”

She said girls could be branded “vanilla” for refusing, and quoted lines used to persuade them, such as: “My old girlfriend did it, why can’t you?”

Thompson added: “We have allowed pornographers and the porn industry to write these sex scripts for us.”

Let’s pause to think about the drawbacks to doing that.

Now there’s a vision of hell.

Trump meanwhile took questions from voters at a town hall in Philadelphia, but was twice interrupted by medical emergencies in the room. The former president then called for the event to be turned into a “musical-fest” and it continued with Trump standing on stage for 40 minutes, swaying to hits from his campaign playlist – including Hallelujah, November Rain and Nothing Compares 2 U – before walking off into the crowd.

Oh god. 40 minutes of watching Trump “sway to” music.

Rape Crisis Scotland continues to insult and betray women.

[Roz] Adams is also calling on the tribunal to make a series of recommendations after claiming that support services overseen by Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS) are still failing women.

A remedy hearing heard on Monday that despite Sandy Brindley, the chief executive of RCS, claiming that work was underway on a shared definition of women across its network in October 2023, the wording was yet to emerge.

A year later, and they still can’t figure out what “woman” means?

Ms Wadhwa stood down as ERCC chief executive in September, after a damning report ordered on the back of Ms Adams’ tribunal ruling found that the centre had failed to protect single-sex spaces. Ms Brindley, who had previously backed Ms Wadhwa as an “amazing sister” and a “warrior for women’s rights”, has resisted widespread calls to resign from her own post.

A definition of woman is crucial as ERCC and RCS have operated self-ID policies, meaning a male who claims to identify as a female could gain access to women only spaces and services.

Ms Adams claimed that deliberately “muddy” language and policies around the issue meant that women seeking help could not make an “informed choice” about accessing services. “I don’t know how any organisation can claim to have women only spaces or services while not defining what a woman is or what female means,” Ms Adams said. “A survivor can’t give informed consent if they don’t know what they’re giving informed consent to. Rape Crisis Scotland were fully aware they [ERCC] weren’t following women only spaces. Sandy Brindley, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, also won’t define women.”

And she won’t leave.

She was ten years old, and made to wear a smothering hijab that left only a small bit of central face unmuffled…but even then her father and/or stepmother hated her so much that they tortured her to death over a period of weeks.

The father of 10-year-old Sara Sharif called police from Pakistan and admitted he killed her at their Surrey home, a court heard. Urfan Sharif made the confession in an eight minute-call about an hour after his family’s flight had landed in Islamabad on 10 August last year, before Sara’s body was found.

Did he conclude with “Nyah nyah you can’t touch me”?

Prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones KC told the court Sara had been the victim of violent assaults for “weeks and weeks, at least”, before he listed a series of injuries she had suffered. He said Sara had external and internal injuries, including extensive bruising, burns and broken bones, old and new. She had burns to her buttocks, caused by a domestic iron, and six “probable human bite marks” to her arms and legs, the prosecution said.

She was tortured to death…but hey, at least they kept her pure with that black tent over her head.

Sara also suffered injuries to her ribs, shoulder blades, fingers and 11 separate fractures to her spine, as well as signs of a traumatic brain injury, the prosecution added.

She suffered agonizing pain for months and months, perhaps years and years.

It seems Allah hates little girls.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room.

Interesting article at Slate about the internal conflicts in abortion funding groups.

Summary: an organization that helps fund abortions in the DC area started making pro-Palestinian posts on social media following October 7. That drew some angry responses and loss of donations from some supporters, which accelerated after a Jewish employee left the organization and published an article about her frustrations.

I’m posting this not because I want to talk about Israel-Palestine. I really, really don’t, as I have nothing to say about that conflict. I’m posting it because it’s an interesting insight about “mission creep” at left-leaning organizations, a subject that has come up here repeatedly in other contexts.

As the article puts it:

The falling-out at DCAF is emblematic of a much larger clash currently roiling the worlds of philanthropy and nonprofits. Employees at left-leaning, mission-driven organizations have increasingly adopted a worldview that sees all issues of injustice as interconnected, making many less satisfied to contain their advocacy to any single issue. This doesn’t always cause internal disputes: Often, a new position added to a group’s platform will be broadly agreed upon, such as a commitment to ending police brutality, and will function more as an expression of solidarity than a programming priority. But nonprofits that attract staffers and funders of reasonably diverse political leanings are finding it difficult to broaden their messaging in ways that please the full spectrum.

As a result, coalitions that have worked toward similar goals are fracturing over issues only tangentially related to their core missions, threatening their ability to make progress on areas of common ground.

The head of the organization is

still struggling to come to terms with the sudden abandonment of donors with whom she thought she was politically aligned, over a disagreement on an issue that has nothing to do with the service the organization provides: funding abortions in the D.C. area. “I didn’t really understand our supporter base the way I thought I did,” she said.

Yes, she is shocked, shocked! to discover that her simplistic worldview of:

1. Abortion rights are a good cause.

2. People who support abortion rights are good people who support other good causes.

3. Therefore, people who support abortion rights will support this Other Thing that I think is a good cause

has proven not to be true.

Frankly, I find this whole attitude to be selfish. People who work in the private, for-profit sector understand that, notwithstanding the occasional HR blather about “bringing our whole selves to work,” the world doesn’t work that way. You don’t jeopardize your company’s business just so you can use its platform to promote your own personal causes; you can do that on your own time (and maybe not even then, if you’re a high-ranking employee). But folks in the charitable/nonprofit/advocacy world seem to think that their job and their organization’s platform is there to be used to just Do Good generally however they see fit, and fuck the donors and supporters if they don’t agree. Even if that compromises the actual mission, and achieves nothing of substance on the other issue. As Slate notes:

Therein lies the big dilemma at the heart of this situation. Whatever influence an abortion fund’s Instagram account might have on the well-being of Palestinians in Gaza is small: It relies on the hope that playing a small role in shifting the cultural conversation might eventually change U.S. policies around Israel. Likewise, the withholding of funds from a pro-Palestine abortion fund will do little, if anything, to protect Israelis or Jews.

The people hanging in the balance here are abortion-seekers who cannot afford the cost of terminating a pregnancy, and everyone involved in this story wants them to get the money they need to make their own reproductive choices. In the last fiscal year, DCAF helped more than 3,000 people living in or traveling to the D.C. area get abortions. Is it worth it to make a political statement—in an Instagram post or with the withdrawal of one’s money—if it comes at their expense?

I should note that Korman, the Jewish employee who left, is hardly beyond criticism here. (Again, putting aside whatever your feelings are about I-P.) She involves a lot of the classic tropes about feeling “unsafe” and accusing her former colleagues of not acknowledging “her humanity.”

It seems Stanford Medicine doesn’t know what a woman is.

Update: That said, I can’t find the page on the Stanford Med website…

Update 2: Marcy Jane xirself stepped up to help me.

Ah yes, there it is, in the glossary – the special bespoke LGBTQ+ glossary. Along with other dubious definitions. The stuff on there is not…how shall I put this…medical. It’s identityical, not medical.

How are adults managing to do this first week at university routine still?

The madness persists, as was made clear last week with news that an NHS hospital – the James Paget University Hospitals Trust in Great Yarmouth – has told people working in obstetrics and midwifery to refer to new babies’ gender as having been “assigned female/male at birth” which it claims “accurately depicts the situation of what happens at birth”.

Yes, youngster, it’s true that we name things and that that’s a human activity as opposed to something carved into the cosmos. It does not follow that the things we name are not real.

Please move on now. Failure to do so will result in failing the course.

We keep bumping into the black box issue. It is, of course, one of the core problems with this ridiculous ideology/mooovement – pinning down wtf it’s about, what it expects, what in hell it’s talking about. What, exactly, do you mean by “trans rights”? What do you mean by “equality”? How do you know any of the claims you make are true or reasonable or compatible with other people’s rights? Where do you get all this?

Case in point:

What, exactly, are these “trans rights” that people are stripping away?

Until we’re informed, I suppose we have to assume it’s the usual nonsense about being “affirmed” as what they are not. But that’s not a right. I know I’ve said that several billion times, but it doesn’t get said enough by other people. There is no such thing as a right to be “affirmed” as X with X being “whatever you say you are.” I don’t have any right to say I’m a tree or a piano or a bag of tortilla chips and force everyone else to affirm what I say. That’s not a right; it bears no resemblance to a right.

Maybe he means also, or instead, the rights that would flow from that affirmation? The right to be hired for jobs that only women can do, the right to go into places that are reserved for women, the right to enter contests for women, the right to compete against women in swimming and volleyball and cycling and above all boxing.

But that putative right would depend on the authenticity of the first right, the right to be “affirmed” as the sex you’re not, and that is not a right.

It’s odd that so many people pretend it is a right. Maybe we just haven’t talked about it enough yet. How is it a right for men to force everyone to agree that they’re women? (It applies with the sexes reversed too of course, but the violations of real rights are much less glaring and grotesque when it’s women claiming to be men.) Seriously: how is that a right? Please explain.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on Under the influence.

we should be able to give informed consent to our own treatment – just as any cisgender young person already can

Yeah, but no. It’s more complicated than that.

First of all, define “young person”. Since we’re talking about puberty-blockers, then that’s going to be someone who is at most in their early teens. So can – let’s say – a 12-year-old consent to treatment? Sometimes. it depends on the treatment, and on the child.

Importantly, though, consent doesn’t mean demand. Too many people think that it does. Consent is a negative thing: it’s about my being able to tell you what you not do to me, not about my being able to tell you what you should. Or, perhaps, we could say that the default is that treatment should not be given, but consent lifts the barrier.

In effect, it means that the doctor comes up with a suggestion that is expected to serve the child’s (or any other patient’s) best interests, and the child (or adult patient) agrees to it. Sometimes, there’ll be more than one option, because treatment modalities have up- and downsides. Sometimes there’ll be more than one option, because what counts as “best interests” is open to debate: medical, social, in keeping with the patient’s account of the kind of life they want to lead, and so on. To give a hackneyed example, the JW might sincerely believe that it is in her best interests not to have the blood transfusion, and given a sufficiently strong commitment about the kind of life she’d find tolerable, then that’s all fine and groovy.

That, in essence, is what Gillick v West Norfolk was all about. And I think that some people get misled by that because, superficially, it lends itself to the fallacy that consent is the same as request or demand. But presumably the doctor in that case thought that prescribing the pill was in the girl’s best interests; had he not thought that, he ought not to have been offering it. In a way, it was fortuitous that she asked for it; but her having asked for it wasn’t really the driving force behind its prescription being permissible.

And so: can these kids give consent? Possibly some can, though since PBs are most use to the very young, the more useful they are, the less likely it is that consent would be possible. But all that rides on there being a medical consensus that they should be offered to begin with. Keira Bell had argued that as a matter of fact, she could not give consent to gender-treatment because not enough was known about them. As we know, she lost. But post-Cass, I’m not sure that a parallel case would be lost, because we now know that there’s not really evidence that it serves anyone’s interests. Therefore they shouldn’t be offered. Therefore consent is neither here nor there.

News from the world of film-making:

Lilly Wachowski, co-director of The Matrix and trans filmmaker, is set to adapt Manhunt, a 2022 dystopian horror novel by Gretchen Felker-Martin.

Trans filmmaker – so not a real filmmaker then?

What the Star Observer (“Star” meaning sleb, I take it) means of course is that Wachowski is a man pretending to be a woman, aka a trans woman. Funny how it carefully doesn’t put it that way. Why not? When that’s the whole point? Manhunt is the one that’s about torturing women (aka “terfs”) to death for knowing that men are not women.

The adaptation promises to bring Felker-Martin’s brutal and gripping narrative to life on screen, a story that centres around trans women surviving in a post-apocalyptic world where testosterone transforms people into feral, zombie-like creatures.

It centers around Felker-Martin’s disgusting fantasies about slaughtering women.

Fans of trans horror are eager to see this ground-breaking story brought to the screen, especially given the novel’s unique take on a post-apocalyptic narrative, which diverges from the usual cisgender lens.

In Manhunt, trans women Beth and Fran are on the run, not only from these feral men but also from a group of murderous TERFs.

Subtle, right? It’s not men who are violent, it’s women who know that men are not women who are violent. Those women are in fact murderous. Get ’em!!

The narrative goes beyond mere survival, as the women struggle to continue their transitions amidst the chaos, a literal fight for life in the new world gone mad.

How is struggling to continue “transition” from man to woman a literal fight for life? Pretending to be a woman is not the same thing as life. Life does not depend on pretending to be a woman.