Reem Alsalem steps up again.

UN expert calls for recognition of surrogacy as system of violence, exploitation and abuse, urges abolition

GENEVA (10 October 2025) – A UN expert today called for the recognition of surrogacy as a system of violence, exploitation and abuse against women, and called for the practice to be abolished globally.

“Surrogacy reduces women and children including girls to mere commodities, stripping them of their equality and dignity and encouraging their exploitation and abuse,” said Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in a report to the United Nations General Assembly.

The report examines the different manifestations of violence against women and girls related to surrogacy, focusing on drivers like patriarchal norms, sex and gender inequalities, economic disparities, and globalisation.

“Surrogacy is the result of commodification and commercialisation of women’s reproductive capacities, and it preys on and exploits women, particularly those from marginalised and impoverished backgrounds,” Alsalem said.

Her report highlighted physical, psychological, and economic violence faced by surrogate mothers and argued that this practice results in severe human rights violations including of their right to health, privacy, family and physical safety and increases the risk of enslavement, torture, inhumane and degrading treatment.

The Special Rapporteur said that emerging, available evidence points to serious risks for children born through surrogacy, including negative physical and mental health and development outcomes resulting from separation at birth from their mothers. Others include identity struggles, increased risk of statelessness, trafficking, and abandonment, and the arbitrary and forceful termination of their lives in utero at the discretion of the commissioning parents.

“Despite these harmful consequences, several State and non-State actors remain complicit in enabling surrogacy, including by downplaying the accompanying abuses and risks, and sanitising the practice, which is gravely concerning,” the expert said.

Alsalem stressed that a human rights-based, sex and gender-responsive approach to surrogacy requires the adoption of a global abolitionist framework that would end demand by penalising the commissioning of children via surrogacy or its facilitation by intermediaries. She also called for the decriminalisation of surrogate mothers, recognising them as victims and providing them with comprehensive assistance, protection, access to justice and reparations, and end their economic dependence on involvement in surrogacy arrangements. The report flagged the importance of raising public awareness, including through education campaigns on the harmful consequences of surrogacy.

Alsalem recommended ensuring recognition of the birth mother as the legal mother, with any transfer of parental rights permitted only through judicial adoption processes that safeguard the child’s best interests.

Other key recommendations include guaranteeing equal rights and access to services for children born through surrogacy arrangements, improving data collection, and strengthening international cooperation with a view to developing effective strategies to assist and protect victims.

Originally a comment by guest on Windownight.

I’m here at Filia and we’re hardly noticing the handful of young men hanging out in front of the conference centre making a lot of noise. The police seem to be doing a good job of keeping order, and patrolling temporary fencing set up to protect us going in and out of the building (and, now, to block off the front of the building from any repetition of the vandalism, as well as to keep them from pounding on the windows, as has happened at previous women’s gatherings).

The statement of Trans Pride Brighton (or bash back, I don’t remember which now), said that they feared retaliation and believed the ‘trans pride centre’ in Brighton would be attacked…as if any of us even knew where it was let alone had any interest in playing Sharks and Jets with these guys. And they ended their statement with something like ‘paint washes off but blood doesn’t’, which doesn’t actually make any sense but sounds like a threat.

Sian Berry on the other hand…

Well I’ll be damned. The BBC has managed to report on the window-smashing at the Filia conference without blaming or insulting or ignoring the women.

The title, in particular, took my breath away. Have the scales fallen from their eyes at last??

Trans activists vandalise feminist conference

Golly. Not terf conference, not evil bitches conference, not Rowling-approved conference, but feminist conference. Not activists but trans activists. Not protest or confront or reject but vandalise. No soft-soaping at all.

Police have launched an investigation after a venue in Brighton was vandalised ahead of a women’s rights conference.

Trans activists claimed responsibility for the incident at the Brighton Centre on Kings Road in the early hours of Friday. Masked figures were seen in online videos smashing windows and spray-painting the building, ahead of a three-day event billed as one of the largest grassroots feminist gatherings in Europe.

Note the absence of any insinuation that the women’s rights conference had no business being there. Note the lack of hints that feminists are evil if they focus on women rather than trans women. Note the second appearance of the word “feminist” without any surrounding insults or provisos.

The group said it carried out the vandalism because the conference was hosting “some of the most vicious transphobia in pop politics”, and warned of further action.

Previous guests at the charity’s conference have included JK Rowling, who has been called transphobic for her views on gender identity and allowing trans women into women-only spaces. The author retweeted a post on X which criticised the vandalism.

That’s the closest they get to re-assigning the crime, and it’s not very close.

Event organisers FiLiA said: “It is shocking and saddening that a conference for women to discuss domestic abuse, sexual violence and lesbian safety has been met with smashed windows, graffiti and intimidation.”

FiLiA CEO Lisa-Marie Taylor added that the charity “campaigns for a world free from patriarchy where all women and girls are liberated. The activities of a small, violent minority will not diminish the spirit of sisterhood and solidarity which FiLiA embodies,” she said.

The BBC neglects to add anything to undermine or sneer at those statements.

I’m stunned. I wonder if it will last. I wonder if someone has put a foot down.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Putting the plebs in their place.

Sums it up nicely.

Women must not be allowed to gather, speak, protest, argue, resist. Women must stay at home and be silent. Resistance is futile.

Trans activists have vandalised the venue of Europe’s largest feminist conference.

Purple paint was sprayed on the Brighton Centre and windows were smashed ahead of this weekend’s FiLiA conference.

Bash Back, a trans activist group that has claimed credit for the vandalism, posted a video showing masked figures attacking the venue overnight.

That’s not bashing back, of course, because FiLiA didn’t bash them. It’s just bashing. FiLiA planned to speak, and “Bash Back” responded by smashing windows. They are not Bash Back, they are just Bash.

[Julie] Bindel, who is speaking at this year’s event, wrote on X: “Trans activists have smashed one of the large front windows of the Brighton Centre – the venue where 2500 feminists are meeting this weekend to talk about male violence, misogyny and the like.

“Why can’t EVERYONE see this movement for what it is?”

Well you see it was the inclusive kind of bashing.

A Bash Back spokesman told Scene Mag: “Despite presenting itself as a feminist conference with ‘zero tolerance […] for transphobia’, FiLiA plays host to some of the most vicious transphobia in modern pop-politics.”

They added: “Speakers at FiLiA claim to advocate for ‘protecting women’s spaces’ and ‘sex-based rights’ but routinely advocate for the erasure of women’s bodily autonomy and self-determination. Their vile and hateful rhetoric that seeks to exclude and erase us leads to the same kind of discriminatory violence that kills hundreds of trans people every year.”

Really? Is that true? Hundreds of trans people killed every year (presumably in the UK)? It doesn’t sound true to me, because if it were true I think we would hear about it. A lot.

Neener neener.

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for promoting democratic rights and fighting dictatorship, receiving the award despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated statements he deserved it.

That’s a silly addition. Repeated statements that one deserves the Nobel Peace Prize do not make it surprising that someone else won it. Rather the contrary. If they want to mention the fact that Trump has been, grotesquely, demanding the prize like a toddler demanding more cookie, they should say, in a new sentence, something along the lines of “this will piss off Trump, because he’s been shouting that he should win it for years.”

Anyway. They didn’t obey his ridiculous demands.

Machado, a 58-year-old industrial engineer who lives in hiding, was blocked in 2024 by Venezuela’s courts from running for president and thus challenging President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in power since 2013.

Trump would love to do that, you know. What Maduro did, not what Machado did.

“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its citation.

We may need them in the US in the near future.

More trumpian vengeance:

A federal grand jury in Virginia has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on one count of bank fraud and one count of making a false statement to a financial institution — charges that come after steady pressure from President Trump to prosecute one of his longtime political foes.

James, a Democrat who pledged to investigate Trump during her campaign, eventually sued Trump and his company for inflating the value of some of its properties, winning more than $450 million in the civil business fraud case. The financial penalty was later thrown out on appeal.

At one of his own campaign rallies last year, Trump called for both James and the judge in that case to “be arrested and punished accordingly.” The president has been persistent in his calls since taking office, writing “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED” in a post on TruthSocial last month that was directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi.

And by “justice” he means “persecution of people who make trouble for Trump.”

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia spent months on the case this year. A Republican career prosecutor there determined there was not enough evidence to bring a case against James. Then he was forced out of his job by the White House, only to be replaced by Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer in Florida with no experience as a prosecutor.

Last month, Halligan secured an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey, who has pleaded not guilty to two felony charges.

Put the right people in, tell them they don’t get to say no, and there you are, all your enemies punished. Isn’t it fun to be a corrupt evil head of state?

Oh for god’s sake. Does it not occur to him that trying to bully them into giving him the prize negates the prize? It’s a peace prize, not a bullying prize. If it were a competition for who is the biggest bully, he would win in a walk, but it’s not, it’s a prize for peace-making. He’s not a peace-making guy. He picks fights multiple times every day.

Norway is bracing for the aftermath of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement on Friday as the Nordic nation has faced increasing pressure from Donald Trump and his administration to award it to the US leader.

How do they not see it? If you demand it with menaces, it become worthless to you. Trying to pressure people into giving it to you makes it as valuable to you as a half-empty can of dog food.

Trump’s aggressive push to secure the prize, including public declarations he deserves it and calls to Norwegian officials, has intensified with a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and a possible peace deal. At the same time, the decisionmakers at the Norwegian Nobel Committee have signaled that this pressure has been futile.

Do the trumpies seriously think that demanding it will be successful?

In a social media post overnight Thursday, Trump’s son Eric asked his followers on X to “retweet if you believe @realDonaldTrump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.” The White House official account on X posted a photo of Trump calling him “The Peace President” at about the same time.

Yo, Eric, I don’t think the committee makes its decision based on retweets.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Stalling.

It’s truly fascinating watching the reactions from the UK left to the Supreme Court decision. I’ve always been fascinated by cults that collapse. What do doomsday cultists do after the deadline passed and the apocalypse never came? What goes on in their minds? The UK Supreme Court decision is rather comparable to that: an incursion of sobering reality that the delusional can’t simply pretend didn’t come to pass. It’s a devastating blow to the cult’s whole folkloric worldview and social structure.

Fascinatingly, many doomsday cults persevere even after their deadlines pass — the very ones they were so absolutely adamant were guaranteed to mark the end of the world, 100%, no margin for error — this is the day, and there’s no possibility that the apocalypse won’t come this time. And then the day comes to pass, and the apocalypse doesn’t. Yet, some of them stay with the group, more adamant than ever in its rightness, even in the face of its incontrovertible, humiliating wrongness.

(The Jehovah’s Witnesses were a doomsday cult, predicting specific dates for “Armageddon” from 1915 to 1925 or so, constantly revising as each day came and went. Most of the cult members walked away, shattered, but the hardcore only hardened: eventually they decided that Jesus did in fact come back and they witnessed it! But they’re still here on this mortal plain for now, for some reason or another. There’s some spiritual mopping-up to be done, loose ends to tie up, or something. I’ve no interest in the nitty-gritty of it. The details of their beliefs don’t actually matter. The fact that a tribal cohesion was formed is the bit that matters; logic was cut off for them from that point onwards, so who cares what crazy stories they’ve been telling themselves after that point.)

That’s the power of the human brain’s limbic system. We’re wired to prioritize tribal allegiance over rational thinking. It cuts off cult members’ access to their own critical thinking faculties so completely, they can’t process the most basic, simple, pieces of logic if they pose a threat to that tribal bond. The poor frontal cortex — the part of the brain that us non-cult-addled outsiders have such easy access to, and which can process so utterly, completely clearly that those poor saps have been led into a trap — that brain-processing region simply isn’t available to them, and therefore the basic facts of reality that only it can perceive, are quite literally invisible to them.

This was illustrated well in the HBO sci-fi drama Westworld, with its characters’ mantra, repeated incessantly: “That doesn’t look like anything to me.” It’s one of those puzzle shows, like Lost or Twin Peaks, where everything is a mystery. In this case, half the characters don’t know that they’re actually synthetic robots — biomechanical androids — living as cast members in an elaborate amusement park, while the flesh and blood among them are the wealthy patrons. But it turns out there are layers upon layers of illusion, and pretty quickly the viewer is puzzling through an intricate maze of artifice versus reallity. What’s fascinating and relevant here is the mechanism by which the androids are prevented from seeing the evidence that’s right in front of them, that they’re obviously robots: their artificial brains simply refuse to process anything that will give the game away. Upon being challenged with a photograph or any piece of evidence that they’re robots in a theme park, the inevitable response is a passive, “That doesn’t look like anything to me.”

“They cannot see the things that will hurt them. I’ve spared them that” says Anthony Hopkins, playing their creator. (Hammily. Entre nous, I’ve always found Hopkins a ham. Even his Hannibal Lecter was just a bit much for me, though I loved The Silence of the Lambs. Remains of the Day: another good film. Hopkins was still hammy AF in it.)

It’s a dark reminder to all of us that the primitive, tribal part of our brains, the ape that processes our monkey emotions, is ultimately in charge, and it only lets the critical thinking part pretend to take the wheel occasionally, only at times when the ape inside of us — the ape that IS us — doesn’t feel threatened. And boy, is it easy to trip the threat wire on our inner apes. You and me and every one of us is a slave to our limbic system: we’re easily wired up to ally ourselves to charlatans, and once that happens, we’re trapped. It can happen to virtually any of us. I’ve said repeatedly that GC Twitter turned into its own kind of tribe, and therefore fell into its own set of blind spots, inaccessible to critical thinking.

(I maintain that I’m a rare breed, somewhat uniquely immune to tribalism, owing to my uniquely traumatic childhood: because I had no friends and no tribal bonds to form as a child, my limbic system’s tribal-latching mechanism didn’t develop properly. And because it didn’t get wired up properly, because I had no friends as a feminine little boy, I’m better equipped to call out tribalistic bias when I see it. Which is fucking everywhere, all the fucking time. I’m a pain in the ass to virtually everyone, because I’m really really good at seeing everyone’s tribal biases, and I have a habit of saying so.)

Anyways, the UK Supreme Court decision that “trans women” are in fact men is one of those cult-devastating moments, like a doomsday clock ticking on past its deadline. And the way the UK left has reacted to it has had much of the same shape of cults facing their reckonings. The less-committed ones capitulate and let go. (Wes Streeting of the centrist Labour Party, for example, who finally gave in.) For the ones who’ve committed themselves too much to it, the sunk cost fallacy kicks in: like gambling addicts, they’re in a hole. They’ve sunk too much into asserting “trans women are women” and they just can’t bear the cost until it destroys their lives, and they hit rock bottom. Your Green Party nuts, your Owen Joneses and your Billy Braggs.

Creepy enough?

He’s a Vancouver Parks Board Commissioner. The responses to his ridiculous smug misogynistic announcement are many and scathing.

I disavow him. Are we supposed to say it three times? I disavow him I disavow him I disavow him. Nyah.

Talk about bad journalism…

‘This will not happen again’: Vancouver Park Board apologizes for hosting Harry Potter event

A motion calling on the Vancouver Park Board to officially apologize for hosting an upcoming Harry Potter attraction passed Tuesday in a unanimous vote.

Members of the city’s transgender, gender diverse and Two Spirit communities had expressed concerns about the decision to partner with the event this holiday season due to its association with J.K. Rowling, author of the seven Harry Potter novels.

Some spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, include Rob Hadley, a member of Vancouver’s S2LGBTQ+ advisory committee—and someone who previously read the books to their own children.

A motion where? Passed in a unanimous vote where? Expressed concerns to whom? Spoke at Tuesday’s meeting of what?

The reporter forgot to say and apparently no editor noticed. Is it a meeting of Vancouver parks people? Then you need to say so. Is it a group of people on a park bench? Then you need to say that.

It doesn’t get more intelligent as it goes on.

Rowling has denied her views are transphobic, but the billionaire author has battled with transgender individuals on social media for years—once suggesting trans “ideology” will “end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies”—and recently launched a legal fund to support challenges to trans-inclusionary policies in women’s spaces in the U.K. and Ireland.

News flash, brainless reporter: pointing out the dangerous stupidities of trans ideology is not “phobic”.

The word is meant to signal irrational dangerous hatred of a set of people for no valid reason. The critics of gender ideology reject and dispute the ideology. That’s not phobic, it’s rational.

Vancouver has embraced such policies since 2016 through the Transgender, Gender Diverse and Two Spirit Action Plan. Addressing the meeting, Ky Sargeant, of the non-profit group Qmunity, celebrated those efforts as having had a “measurable” impact on the lives of trans residents.

What meeting? You forgot to say. It really would be nice to know.

Several commissioners said they were unfamiliar with Rowling’s political activism when they approved the attraction, Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience, which was done in a closed-door meeting without a chance for public input.

“When decisions are made in the dark, these are the kinds of mistakes that happen,” said vice-chair Brennan Bastyovanszky. Going forward, he said, the city will seek to partner on events that “reflect the actual magic of this city, which is in how we actually treat each other.”

Each commissioner present offered a personal apology to the trans community as well, with Angela Haer promising, “This will not happen again.”

Good, but not enough. Did they pour ashes on their head, whip each other, eat rotting fish, slice into a vein?

Addressing the meeting, Hadley acknowledged the popularity of the Harry Potter series and the excitement many have for attending the event, but suggested there could have been other options that would have been “palatable for everybody.”

“A lot of people who have read the books have done as I have, and put those books up for sale,” Hadley added. “And donated the funds to transgender charities.”

That’s the ticket. Anything the trans communinny doesn’t like must be withheld from everyone, no matter how few people make up the trans communinny or how many people make up everyone else. If a billion people want Harry Potter in the Park and six trans people pitch a fit, the six trans people must win. Always. No exceptions. It’s only fair.

The Scottish government is refusing to pay its bill.

A women’s campaign group has condemned the Scottish Government for failing to settle a legal bill six months on from a crushing Supreme Court defeat.

For Women Scotland won the landmark case in April when the UK’s highest court ruled that the definition of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act referred to biological sex.

A subsequent court order ruled that the Scottish Government must pay at least some of For Women Scotland’s legal cost during the lengthy court battle, which ran to a total of around £417,000.

But no payment has yet been made – leading to claims ministers are stalling so that the money isn’t used for further legal action about the SNP Government’s policies on single-sex spaces.

Or, more simply, so that the money stays with them. I mean there’s no need to search around for a specific use they have for the money, surely: they’re just being defiant and hostile because they are defiant and hostile.

At a Tory conference fringe event yesterday, Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, condemned public bodies for failing to fully implement the Supreme Court ruling.

She said: ‘We came out of that courtroom and it was like waking up from a bad dream. But it seems like an awful lot of organisations have not yet woken up, and many of them are hostile to the judgement.

‘It is kind of extraordinary to see people mouthing off that those judges got it wrong. I think their brains have been broken by the illogicality of trying to treat some men as women, and thinking that makes them the good guys. So now they can’t bear to be the bad guys.’

But they’re well content with being the bad guys to women.

Ok so it seems that Australia has the great good fortune of a Sex Discrimination Commissioner who doesn’t know who is which sex.

Let’s pause to think for a moment.

Done?

Ok so how do you be a Sex Discrimination Commissioner IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SEX PEOPLE ARE?

What’s the job then? Just shrugging? Is that it? Eight hours of shrugging, five days a week?

Meet Dr Anna Cody, the Australia Sex Discrimination Commissioner.

Cody speaks:

Sir, I would question whether or not Roxanne Tickle is not [sic] a man, she is a trans woman, and so she has gone through various processes and has transitioned and she’s a trans woman. So she has access or sought access or was provided access to the Giggle for girls app and then was er taken off the access to Giggle for Girls app.

Malcolm Roberts then asks what sort of chromosomes Tickle has and the Australia Sex Discrimination Commissioner says “I can’t answer that.” “You can’t answer that??” he says wonderingly, and she confirms that no she can’t answer that. “Wow,” he says.

We are left to wonder still. How do you commissioner sex discrimination if you don’t know what sex people are?

Jolyon loyally sticking to his project of forcing men on women no matter how strongly the women object.

What he means, of course, is that women are trying to ban men from Hampstead women’s pond. He says it’s time to fight women who are trying to keep men out of the women’s pond. He’d love to punch them right in the face, wouldn’t he.

Michael Goldfarb in a public post on Facebook:

Are you tired of the Germany 1933 comparisons? I’m tired of the Germany 1933 comparisons. Let’s shift to the China 1966 and the Cultural Revolution comparison with Chairman Don instead of Chairman Mao and MAGAts in place of Red Guards. The liberal elites across media and the academy being purged and forced publicly to admit ideological errors and bend the knee to the new dispensation.

It’s not a completely farfetched analogy. An aging and increasingly senile Chairman Don makes cultural, economic and increasingly physical war on American society and is aided and abetted by his own Gang of Four: Stevie Miller, Russ Vought, Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth. The rest of the cabinet and both houses of the MAGA Congress make up a rubber stamp Central Committee, more independent minded Republicans having been purged.

An elite centered around the Ivy League and its regional cousins has grown wealthy and complacent and lost touch with the “people” or “peasants” and are being punished. Struggle sessions are the public humiliation in social media and abuse on podcasts and so-called 24 hour news channels against which it is impossible to defend themselves. The majority are keeping their heads down lest they find themselves losing their privileges (as they did during the years of the Hollywood Blacklist — Scoundrel Time as Lilian Hellman dubbed it).

That’s Trump’s one talent, I guess: being evil in all possible ways. A virtuoso of kakk.

You could even add that just as Nixon visited China to normalize relations with Mao as the Cultural Revolution with its depradations was in full-swing. America’s fellow democracies, chief among them the European allies (pride of place to Britain) troop to the White House to emphasize all is still normal in their relations with Trump.

Including that revolting ring-kissing exercise at Windsor the other week. That should never have happened.

The next great battle – HRT for men!

It is genuinely hard to believe any adult could actually write this, let alone a sitting TD: “I want to prioritise the issue of access to the free HRT scheme. It is completely unacceptable that trans women are being excluded from the scheme. There can be no excuse or justification for this decision. I and others have been raising this with the Minister for a couple of weeks now and I am disappointed with the response. Instead of accepting that the exclusion of trans women is wrong and changing course, the Minister has dug in, further disadvantaging one of the most marginalised groups in society. It really is simple. Trans women should be included in the scheme.”

Erm. Sir. Your honor, Mister TG, Minister, whatever the proper address is – Sir, HRT is not only not required for men, it is useless to men. Men don’t need HRT because men don’t go through menopause because men don’t go through menobegin. Men don’t menstruate. Do you see what I’m getting at? They don’t spend decades shedding their uterine lining every month except when pregnant, because men don’t HAVE any uterine lining. They don’t have the ute part that needs the lining, if you see what I mean. No uterus, no uterine lining, no shedding, no menopause, no need for HRT. You’re shouting about the need for pairs of shoes for people who’ve had a leg amputated. Men are not being “disadvantaged” by not being issued female hormones.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Where we are now.

Pam Bondi had a heated and contentious hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee where she refused to answer questions, made personal attacks against Democratic senators, and got extremely defensive and angry whenever the subject of Jeffrey Epstein came up.

…

Ranking Member Dick Durbin’s opening remarks to Bondi: “You disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and the National cryptocurrency enforcement team, despite the growing threat of foreign election interference and the drastic rise in cryptocurrency crimes. You forced out almost 75% of the Civil Rights Div’s career attorneys while hate crimes are on the rise. You fired more than 100 immigration judges. While the immigration case backlog is more than 3 million. You cut the public integrity section from 30 prosecutors to two, while political corruption skyrocket.”

I didn’t know (or I forgot) that about the Civil Rights Division. Civil rights not a priority eh?

Trump pardoned nearly 1600 J6 insurrectionists, including more than 600 charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement. DOJ is arguing in court that these pardons provide immunity for wholly unrelated crimes in multiple cases.”

… “Jared Weiss was filmed on J6, encouraging his fellow rioters to attack the Metro PD officers, and he said, ‘fuck them, kill him.’ What happened to Weiss? He’s been hired by you as a senior adviser.

Oh that’s nice.

“Although you’ve been a registered foreign agent for Qatar, you didn’t recuse yourself from signing off on Trump’s solicitation of a free jet from the royal family, even though this gift was clearly illegal…

…

Schiff complained repeatedly that Bondi refused to answer any questions from senators: “This is supposed to be an oversight hearing. Dozens of prosecutors have been fired simply because they worked on cases investigating the former president. Bondi: What about the fires in California? What about the riots in LA?”

What about potato chips? What about anything?

Divoosity training hits another bump in the road.

Since its creation in 2020, the [Free Speech Union] has handled over 2,500 individual cases and queries relating to free speech. Of our free speech cases, 46% are in some way associated with the workplace and, among these, approximately one fifth concern EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) training (approximately 230). In practice, this means that our members are asking whether they’ll get into trouble if they refuse to do the training, or seeking our help because they’ve already got into trouble for challenging it.

…

In some cases, EDI training extends to telling employees and professionals how they should behave outside the workplace, such as the insistence that employees should use the preferred pronouns of trans people in their private life. 

Well, if you believe, you believe everywhere. Also, belief is not optional.

We’ve also recently uncovered an example of EDI training at Amazon in which employees are not allowed to challenge the trainers’ ideological biases. The full Amazon case study has just been added to our recent research briefing, the EDI Tax, but here’s a brief summary.

Our source is an Amazon employee and FSU member who provided us with a copy of the training material produced by ‘Glamazon’, the company’s internal LGBT+ affinity group, which has been rolled out to employees in the UK with supervisory responsibilities. The managers concerned are referred to as – wait for it – ‘Glamzonians’.

Ew. Because LGBTQ++++++++ is so glam while the rest of us are so dowdy and lame and dull, is that it?

The course contains many of the familiar LGBT+ topics but, as highlighted by our member who said that employees feel “silenced and scared to admit their own beliefs”, it slides into authoritarianism when discussing “preferred gender pronouns”. The following is taken directly from the Glamazon UK training material:

The #PushforPronouns initiative is aimed at normalizing the sharing of pronouns to ensure all people have the opportunity to define and be referred to by the pronouns they personally identify with.

Yes and that’s the problem. The “sharing of pronouns” should not be normalized. It’s absurd and childish and rooted in fantasy plus ignorance.

But the training material makes a third recommendation:

Start introducing yourself with your pronouns. Whenever you’re introduced to somebody new, it’s easy to state your pronouns alongside your name. This helps others understand how to refer to you in the future, and encourages them to also share their pronouns.

Wrong again. What it helps others understand is that you’re a preening narcissist eager to use up other people’s time and attention.

The training says that employees should:

Do this at work and in your personal life to help establish pronoun sharing as a standard practice with your team, your business org, and your community.

No.