Why are we doing the flags at half mast thing for the pope? Do we do it for the Archbishop of Canterbury? Do we do it for all religious celebrities? If so why? If not why? Why single out the pope? Catholicism is a horrible religion, especially for women.
I did ask Google but it refuses to tell me – it just keeps repeating FrancisFrancisFrancis. Yes I know, I’m asking about other popes and clerics.
I feel like going out and buying a flag just so that I can fly it. Is there a devil flag? An atheist flag? A gender-atheist flag?
What next? Pete Hegseth accidentally dropping a nuke down Trump’s pants?
As last week got underway, one of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top advisers, Dan Caldwell, was escorted from the Pentagon. Soon after, Darin Selnick, another top member of Hegseth’s team was out, too.
The same day, nearly every member of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service — described as the department’s “fast-track tech development arm” — announced that they’re resigning. Soon after, Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was also removed from the Pentagon.
Good thing it’s only the Pentagon.
Wait…
And just when it seemed things couldn’t get much worse, they got worse. NBC News reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used his personal phone to send information about U.S. military operations in Yemen to a 13-person Signal group chat, including his wife and his brother, two sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed to NBC News. He did so after an aide had warned him to be careful not to share sensitive information on an unsecure communications system before the Yemen operation, the sources said.
Ahh his wife and his brother. Nice touch. Not the next-door neighbor? The UPS guy?
In a normal and healthy political environment, Hegseth would have no choice at this point but to start writing his resignation letter and putting his belongings in a cardboard box. Then again, in a normal and healthy political environment, a president wouldn’t have nominated a manifestly unqualified, scandal-plagued television personality to lead the Defense Department, and in a normal and healthy political environment, his nomination would’ve received zero confirmation votes in the Senate.
In a normal and healthy political environment Donald Trump would never have been nominated, let alone elected.
Sir Keir Starmer has refused to stop a plot by ministers to thwart last week’s Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not legally women.
Labour ministers and MPs will this week meet to discuss how to promote trans rights in the wake of the landmark judgment. They are understood to be planning to take their demands to the equalities minister.
The plot emerged in leaked WhatsApp messages from a group chat of Labour MPs, including ministers Sir Chris Bryant and Dame Angela Eagle. Both railed against comments made by Baroness Falkner, the equality watchdog chief, who said the ruling meant trans women would be banned from women’s single-sex spaces. They urged colleagues to meet them to discuss their concerns.
Because we can’t allow women to meet without men present.
Downing Street refused to take any action against the two ministers, claiming they were not trying to undermine the judgment.
Even though that’s what they said they were doing.
While the Government has said it welcomed Wednesday’s ruling, Sir Keir has not made any statement about the ruling. Nor has he commented on Saturday’s vandalism of a suffragist statue by trans activists during a mass rally.
His stance will raise fears that Labour may introduce extra safeguards for trans people that will circumvent the ruling, which found that a woman was defined by biological sex, not gender identity.
Well, his “stance” combined with his previous complete failure to lift one tiny finger to support women on this issue.
Dame Angela warned that official guidance that would follow the ruling could be “catastrophic” for transgender people and criticised Lady Falkner, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which will publish the relevant guidance for how trans people should navigate single-sex facilities.
On Thursday, Lady Falkner had said the ruling clearly meant that trans women could not use single-sex female facilities or compete in women’s sports. Hailing it for bringing “clarity”, she told the BBC: “Single-sex services like changing rooms must be based on biological sex. If a male person is allowed to use a women-only service or facility, it isn’t any longer single-sex.”
Writing on the WhatsApp group of LGBT+ Labour MPs, Dame Angela said: “Let’s meet about this when we get back from Easter recess to decide a way forwards. The ruling is not as catastrophic as it seems, but the EHRC guidance might be and there are already signs that some public bodies are overreacting.”
Dame Angela thinks it would be “catastrophic” for women to have their own facilities and sports.
Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday has revealed that government ministers secretly condemned the ruling in a WhatsApp group and plotted to challenge it. Labour MPs specifically attacked Baroness Falkner, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is due to issue new guidance this summer on the court’s common-sense ruling that “sex” means biological sex.
Falkner has correctly interpreted the judgment to mean that men who claim to be women cannot use single-sex spaces or compete against female athletes at sporting events. But when a Labour MP in the WhatsApp group described Falkner’s response as “pretty appalling”, Culture minister Sir Chris Bryant replied that he “agreeed [sic]”. A Home Office minister, Dame Angela Eagle, suggested that they should seek a meeting “ASAP” with the “relevant Equality Minister”.
In order to make sure women are denied equality.
Bryant and Eagle are patrons of LGBT+ Labour, which now lists more than 50 MPs and 10 Labour peers as patrons. Four years ago, the group began to harass the then Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, demanding an apology and “reparations” after she liked a tweet stating that only women have a cervix.
…
Trans people have not lost a single right in this country. What they don’t have — and never had, despite the claims of activists — is a right to be treated as biological women. The hysterical response to the judgment is a cry of pure fury, an echo of every time an entitled man has heard the word “no”. And that makes it an exceedingly dangerous moment for women.
Why aren’t ALL MPs saying this? With one voice? Why is it cool for men to threaten women with violence and murder? Why does the left look hard in the other direction?
A mob of trans-activists waving death threats at women isn't protest—it's criminal incitement. If the law isn’t enforced, we don’t have equality, we have two-tier justice.
It’s time for Labour to stop being on the side of these extremists and start defending women. https://t.co/CJKC4ZTesb
The reaction to the judgment serves as an important reminder that, while the law is the law, our culture remains dead-set against women who say no to men. It’s how women’s and lesbians’ rights were so rapidly eroded by Stonewall and its allies in the first place, and why women have been bullied, hounded and sacked simply for trying to assert their legal protections.
The same people are ignoring the supreme court’s emphasis that none of this takes away from trans people’s existing rights, and are scaremongering and infantilising trans people as victims. Lloyds Bank wrote to all its employees to say it “stood by” and “cherished” all its trans employees.
Cherished! Cherished ffs. Who says that? Who wants that? I want respect, god damn it, and not being bullied or messed with. I’m not a baby or a glass sculpture, I’m an adult and I want equality and respect, not slop.
Trans women won’t cease to exist because five judges decided the legal definition of a woman within the Equality Act 2010 does not include them, even if they hold Gender Recognition Certificates.
No, they most certainly won’t. So what’s the fucking problem, then?
And now they have to navigate a world that is crueller than it was before.
No, they fucking don’t. There is absolutely nothing cruel about acknowledging anyone’s biological sex, ever. If a man cannot cope with other people acknowledging his biological sex, he’s clearly got his mind tied up in mental knots and he needs serious therapy to untie them.
But most of these men absolutely can cope with acknowledging that they’re male, quite easily. They just don’t want to. These privileged, entitled men don’t want to let go of the luxuries they’ve embezzled from women.
I keep thinking back to the trashy, campy daytime talk shows of the nineties, like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich. They often had transsexuals and crossdressers on them, acting outrageously, being silly, goading the audience into boos and cheers. There’s one clip in particular that comes to mind, featuring members of some death cult I believe. They were actually just gothy, eccentric young artists performing at being in a death cult to get on TV. One of them was Nina Paley, who is now a gender-critical cartoonist. Another was a transwoman. He didn’t really “pass” as a woman; it was pretty clear he was a man. But he was passed off as a woman until near the end of the show, when in a climactic moment, after he’d riled up the audience with some shocking statement or other, he leapt out of his chair and announced, as if putting the cherry on top of his shocking sundae: “And also, I’m transgender! That’s right — I’m a man!”
That’s right — I’m a man.
They used to just come right out and say it. In public! Even on TV! For fun!
Nobody dies when crossdressers admit that they’re crossdressers. Nobody suffers, really.
Well… I don’t doubt that there will be some discomfort as they come back down to reality. And to some of them, it will feel like suffering. But it’s like the suffering of the rich losing their fortunes. Like the Ratliff family in the latest season of the White Lotus, basking at a Thai wellness retreat, blissfully offline, unaware that back home in North Carolina, all hell has broken loose, the FBI has raided the family business and all the money is gone. Their life of luxury had been bankrolled by embezzlement, and the thought of losing it and having to go back to living normally like everyone else seems unbearable.
Here’s Parker Posey, in a high camp Tennessee Williams southern drawl: “I just don’t think at this age I’m meant to live an uncomfortable life. I just don’t have it in me. I don’t think I ever did.”
Right now in the UK, a lot of men are like the Ratliffs at the end of their vacation at the White Lotus, when they got their cellphones back and discovered they’re about to face the same reality as the rest of us. Tough luck, guys.
That doesn’t sound like fear, it sounds like rage. Male rage.
Trans rights activists who vandalised statues in Westminster are “simply criminals” and should be prosecuted, the shadow home secretary has said.
Seven statues were defaced when thousands of people gathered in central London on Saturday to demonstrate against the Supreme Court ruling that the definition of a woman is based on biological sex.
Protesters daubed “fag rights” and a heart on a banner held by the suffragette Dame Millicent Fawcett.
Well of course. She’s just another bitch, right? Another one of those horrible bitches who think women’s rights matter.
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, added: “The law must be enforced equally. Why have there been no arrests or charges for criminal damage? Until there is proper punishment for criminality like this, people will continue to do it knowing they can get off scot-free.”
Oh come on, you know why. Because they’re so vulnerable, so fragile, so excluded, so delicate, so easily hurt.
If you’re a politician, and a speaker at the rally you’re attending starts calling women “bitches” and saying they want to shit on them, leave. https://t.co/dzQVDYElO7
And, yes, I know that women lost their jobs for voicing their beliefs on biology. That was a wrong that required to be righted. But suffering is not binary in the way the court has decided sex is. Trans people have been under attack, too. Their besiegement has been amplified by the same judgment that has lessened yours.
Right. Ok. So the woman was raped, I get it, but the rapist has been under attack too. Now the rapist has been convicted and it’s your fault – you have amplified his besiegementitude.
Trans women won’t cease to exist because five judges decided the legal definition of a woman within the Equality Act 2010 does not include them, even if they hold Gender Recognition Certificates.
And now they have to navigate a world that is crueller than it was before. It doesn’t matter where you place the blame for that: with politicians, the media, extremists on either side of the culture war divide. There’s still a field out there strewn with casualties.
The world is crueller than it was before because men who pretend to be women can no longer grab all of women’s rights for themselves? How does that make sense? How is it cruel to tell men that they can’t take what belongs to women? Think.
The U.S. DOGE Service is putting new curbs on billions of dollars in federal health-care grants, requiring government officials to manually review and approve previously routine payments — and paralyzing grant awards to tens of thousands of organizations, according to 12 people familiar with the new arrangements.
The effort, which DOGE has dubbed “Defend the Spend,” has left thousands of payments backed up, including funding for doctors’ and nurses’ salaries at federal health centers for the poor. Some grantees are waiting on payments they expected last week.
…
Some officials have been told that only Trump political appointees can sign requests to disburse funds, even if a career official has already approved it, adding an additional layer of review. The justification for each payment also must include an explanation of how the money will be used to advance Trump administration priorities, according to two employees in separate agencies who received high-level briefings on the process.
If that’s the case then most payments will be ended entirely, because they have nothing to do with Trump admin priorities. Naturally public health is not a Trump priority.
Among those immediately suffering consequences are federal health centers, which provide services for low-income people and those who lack insurance, the employee said. Those centers rely on regular drawdowns for their operational expenses, such as doctors’ and nurses’ salaries and basic medical supplies.
Among those immediately suffering consequences are federal health centers, which provide services for low-income people and those who lack insurance, the employee said. Those centers rely on regular drawdowns for their operational expenses, such as doctors’ and nurses’ salaries and basic medical supplies.
If the funding delay continues much longer, the situation will grow dire for such centers, imperiling their ability to assist the poor, the employee said.
Sitting in court on Wednesday, I was especially delighted to hear the word ‘incoherence’ repeated in the judgement again and again. The incoherence of trans ideology wasn’t just an insult to me as a man who cared for the women in my life, it was also an affront to me as a writer. In standing for women, the Supreme Court stood up for all of us who need words to have meaning.
That. The incoherence and the sheer blinding stupidity. It’s been a grating maddening frustrating outrage all along, and will go on being all that until it dies entirely or the planet dies entirely. It’s incoherent, it’s absurd, it’s childish; why are we being bullied and pushed to sign up to something so ludicrous and stupid? The emperor is buck naked and he’s not a woman so get tf out of here and leave us alone.
This was the decade in which British history repeated itself. For their heresy in standing up to male power, these women lost jobs and friends, were thrown in cells, made the subject of mockery and smears by the press. The state broadcaster, the BBC, simply decided they didn’t exist. Feminist Jenni Murray was removed from her seat at Woman’s Hour, which then proceeded to talk about anything other than the unprecedented assault on rights already won. The most important feminists of the day were denied a platform and told there was ‘no debate’.
Women were told this return to Edwardian values was progress, that they should dim themselves so that men could shine. They were expected to make themselves smaller so men could crowd into their spaces. Eddie Izzard felt bold enough to recast the story of a group of young girls objecting to his presence in a woman’s toilet as an act of bigotry. None of his fellow comedians contradicted this, because to do so would be career-ending.
Sophie Molly delivering a passionate speech dressed in the contents of a lost property box. It was nice of the crowd to maintain a 5 metre distance to avoid standing on his feet. pic.twitter.com/WqExrxG11d
The US Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to pause the deportation of a group ofalleged Venezuelan gang members.
A civil liberties group had sued to stop the removal of the men, currently in detention in Texas, saying they had not been able to contest their cases in court.
Donald Trump has sent accused Venezuelan gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president power to detain and deport natives or citizens of “enemy” nations without usual processes. The act was previously used only three times, all during war.
In wartime, the United States must protect its people and territory. Doing so may require actions that might not pass legal or political muster in peacetime, such as the preventive detention of enemy combatants for the duration of the war. But the Alien Enemies Act, an authority that permits summarily detaining and deporting civilians merely on the basis of their ancestry, goes too far and must be reconsidered. Passed in 1798 as a part of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, the Alien Enemies Act is a deeply flawed authority with a sordid history.
Ancestry is a funny thing. Some people care deeply about it but others don’t. That’s a consequence of modernity and technology and the like – many people are not fixed in the same place as their parents, let alone their ancestors, and they don’t always feel obliged to consider their ancestors’ enemies their enemies. Feuds and rivalries that go on for centuries depend on low tech. Once people can just leave, lots of them do, and family ties can weaken over time. That can be sad but it can also be liberation. Not all parents are good parents; not all children owe their parents. In short it is no longer a slam dunk that all people of X nationality are loyal to other people of that nationality rather than to the different set of people they now live among. It’s miles from a slam dunk. Some people cling to the ancestors but some just don’t, and that’s a fact.
Back to the Brennan Center.
The law was last invoked in World War II as the legal authority for interning noncitizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. Those internments — along with internments during previous wars — were shameful episodes in our nation’s past. The Alien Enemies Act and complementing authorities have allowed presidents to target people on the basis of their identity, not their conduct or the threat they pose to national security. In 1988, when Congress apologized and provided reparations for Japanese internment, it acknowledged that the policy was rooted in “racial prejudice” and “wartime hysteria,” not valid security concerns. Congress would later describe Italian internment as a “fundamental injustice,” and the Department of Justice would recognize that German noncitizens had been targeted “based on their ancestry.”
The Japanese-Americans got the worst of it because they looked more different than Italians and Germans – that’s how thoughtful humans can manage to be. We think we know better now, but if we’d been born in 1900 who knows what we would have thought of Manzanar.
Notwithstanding this widespread condemnation, the Alien Enemies Act was not repealed or amended after the war. Indeed, the law has not been substantially modified since its adoption. If the United States were to declare war in the future, the president would be able to invoke the Alien Enemies Act’s vast detention and deportation power. Worse still, the language of the law is broad enough that a president might be able to wield the authority in peacetime as an end run around the requirements of criminal and immigration law.
Yup, a president might, and oh gosh golly gee, he is.
The White House called challenges to using the law for mass deportations “meritless litigation”.
Nope. The litigation has merit. We haven’t done this before, and there are good reasons to think we should never do it.
The Supreme Court case was brought by a group called For Women Scotland. It wanted to overturn Scottish legislation which said 50% of members on public boards should be women – and trans women were included in their definition.
The group lost its case in Scotland’s highest court but appealed to the UK Supreme Court. The case was heard towards the end of last year.
“What we wanted was clarity in the law – when something is described as a single-sex service, a single-sex space, that this relates to biology,” Susan Smith from For Women Scotland told the BBC.
We wanted things for women to be for women.
Over time the arguments over how a woman is defined had become increasingly angry, bitter and divided, because the stakes were high for all involved.
For transgender people, who say they often face victimisation and harassment, the battles were rooted in attempts to win better legal protection.
No they weren’t, not really. They were rooted in determination to take everything away from women. Every single thing.
I can agree that that may have stemmed from the “trans women are women” dogma, but I don’t really care. If trans women really were women they would have enough empathy for women to get why we can’t just ignore the physical realities. Instead they attack us in every way possible and do their level best to take everything that’s ours. We’re not the instigators here.
Crucially, the ruling provides a clear framework for what equality laws mean. The EHRC says it is “working at pace” to update its guidance, and expects that to be ready by the summer.
It has already made it clear that if a single-sex space, like a toilet or changing room, is women-only, that means biological males who identify as women should not use it. It says instead that trans people should use their “powers of advocacy” to campaign for third spaces, such as unisex toilets. And it has said it will pursue the NHS if it does not follow the latest ruling.
Health service guidance on single-sex wards currently says that “trans people should be accommodated according to their presentation, the way they dress, and the name and pronouns they currently use”. Currently this allows trans women to be offered beds on women-only wards. The NHS says its policy is under review.
It was always a horrible policy.
For trans people there is also a lot of uncertainty. They will have been used to using spaces which correspond to their gender identity – changing that may be difficult and, for some, frightening.
Now think about how women have been feeling all this time.
Trans rights activists defaced a statue of Millicent Fawcett during a protest over the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of a woman.
That’s the spirit! Deface a statue that represents women’s struggle for equality! Make it both personal and anti-feminist!
Thousands of protesters marched through central London on Saturday in an “emergency demonstration”. Draped in blue, pink and white, they chanted calls for trans liberation, blocked traffic and held up placards which read “No feminism without trans women” and “Biology is not binary”.
No: all feminism without trans women. No feminism with trans women because they have demonstrated themselves to be saturated in hatred and contempt for women. All this bullying and shouting and taking away has not made us love them. Surprise!
Maya Forstater, the CEO of human-rights charity Sex Matters, told The Telegraph: “Yet again the trans rights activists show us who they are. This is not a peaceful request for the right of a marginalised group to live quietly and with dignity; it’s a violent anti-women mob.
“They’ve defaced the statue of Millicent Fawcett, who represents women’s suffrage, to make their point that they will not respect women’s boundaries, even when the law requires it. Once again, they prove why women need male-free spaces and services – to keep men like this out.”
Funny how they don’t make the connection, isn’t it. I guess it’s because they see us as The Power and themselves as the crushed bleeding working class or persecuted race or exhausted pacifists or all three. Dudes: listen up: we are not The Power and you are not our victims. Women are not tyrants who keep men helpless and imprisoned.
Joanna Cherry KC, a former SNP MP who opposed the party’s trans policy, said the activists had shown “appalling misogyny”.
She posted on X: “Anyone doubting the appalling misogyny of trans activists need only look at this evidence. The handmaidens should hang their heads in shame.”
“Delegitimising”. These posts are a lawyer, a KC who formerly practised in tax law, who now runs a not for profit campaigning law organisation he set up, and who has a close personal interest in these issues, delegitimising the judgment of our country’s final court of appeal pic.twitter.com/Ic8VzElLPs
Sadly for him he’s on record saying what the Supreme Court rules is the law.
On a previous occasion in 2019 (the ruling that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament was unlawful) when a judgment of the UK Supreme Court attracted public controversy, this selfsame commentator said something very different about the legitimacy of the court and its decision pic.twitter.com/znkamaJBhZ
But…he never objected to “trans women” searching women did he? Wasn’t that his whole point? Yes, it was. So why is he so horrified that men will be searched by male officers? If it’s ok for women how can it be so terrible for men? Why are people who support that “disgusting human beings” while people who support trans women searching women are the very best enlightened compassionate human beings?
