Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Both argue

    The “erring on the side of” bit seems all wrong in this Atlantic piece on “trans athletes” by sports columnist Sally Jenkins.

    Transgender participation in women’s athletics is the single most difficult issue I’ve seen in 40 years of covering sports. It makes gambling, performance-enhancing drugs, and regulation of collegiate athletics look like tidy challenges.

    What’s difficult about it? Just say no. No, men can’t play in women’s sports.

    Two groups—trans women and cisgender women—both argue that they need equal protection from discrimination. But if they can’t have it at the same time in the often zero-sum realm of sports, who wins?

    Oh please. It’s often the case that two groups argue that X. Deal with it.

    At the core of the matter is whether trans-women athletes have a lingering testosterone advantage…

    Is it? I think the core is that males have a whole array of physical advantages and that’s why women’s sports exist.

    It’s unclear how many people are directly affected by the issue of trans competitors in women’s sports—according to the NCAA, fewer than 10 trans students competed among 500,000 collegiate athletes in 2024. But to high-school and collegiate girls and women who fight tooth and nail for every scholarship, decent athletic facility, and ounce of confidence in what remains a man’s world, no number seems small. At the same time, few groups must fight harder for acceptance in a hostile world than trans women.

    Well, you could say the same about serial killers, or arsonists, or men who rape babies. “Acceptance” is not something that’s automatically owed to everyone in all circumstances no matter what. Women are not under any obligation to “accept” men who call themselves trans in all places and circumstances without exception.

    It’s just not that difficult.

  • Still no pond for women

    Jolyon Maugham gloating that for now men can continue to force themselves on women at the women’s pond on Hampstead Heath.

    The High Court just refused Sex Matters’ permission to ban trans women from the Hampstead ponds. We’re relieved that the ponds can remain a place where trans people have always belonged.

    Notice that he resorts to the usual lie. Sex Matters is not seeking to “ban trans women from the Hampstead ponds”. Sex Matters is seeking to ban men from the women’s pond. Note that if they succeed the men’s pond will still be there and trans women aka men will still be able to splash about in it.

  • Guest post: If he dresses as a pantomime horse

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Choose one.

    Norfolk Constabulary confirmed that “in most cases” the force recorded the self-identified gender of suspects.

    Do they also note their astrological sign and favourite flavour of ice cream? They’re just as useful and relevent as “gender identity.”

    If that’s far as it went, there’d be little problem, but what the police are doing is letting these suspects lie about their sex.. Once they’re in the system, this putative “gender” is used in place of sex because the system is built around seeing a suspect or prisoner’s sex.

    “Gender identity” wasn’t a thing when women’s prisons (or women’s anything for that matter) were established. They were intended to account for the physiological differences between men and women. To put it bluntly, women need protection from men. Female vulnerability to rape and pregnancy requires protection from men’s greater physical strength. Letting men circumvent this basic, humane, sensible safety requirement by means of some conveniently self-proclaimed, imagined, invisible, untestable, unquestioned, “identity” is brutally sadistic.

    The police and courts cannot not know this. Do they place a suspect in the police stables if he dresses as a pantomime horse? Do they set him free if he “identifies” as innocent?

    “Identifying as a woman” does not change the material body of the males being arrested and imprisoned. It does not change their guilt or innocence. His “identity” does not make him a victim, and treating him as the male he is and always will be is not in any way victimization. It should not let them be imprisoned with unwilling female inmates who are forced to accept his presence. Even if they’re receiving “gender affirming treatment”, they remain male. And even psychologically, such identification will not change male-pattern offending.

    This dishonest bait and switch is exactly what genderists chide critics for, but precisely what these opportunistic, predatory men are counting on to escape the male estate and gain access to a target-rich environment.

  • Choose one

    Oh gee, what a good idea.

    Police force lets suspects choose their gender

    So rape suspects get to choose to “be” women? Men who assault women get to choose the women label? Domestic violence perps get to say they are women? All men who commit crimes against women are allowed to tell the police they are women?

    Why would the police do that?

    Norfolk Constabulary confirmed that “in most cases” the force recorded the self-identified gender of suspects. The policy has been criticised by women’s rights groups, who fear that it skews crime statistics and obscures focus on the safety of women and girls.

    They don’t just fear that it does, they know it does. How could it not? If you let men lie about their sex then of course you’re skewing the statistics.

    When even the police can’t see it…

  • Wait, who are angry and liars?

    The guy with the syringe is what you’d expect: a fan of the ratbag.

    The man who sprayed an unknown substance on Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar at a town hall in Minneapolis has a criminal history and has made online posts supportive of President Donald Trump.

    Anthony Kazmierczak, 55, was convicted of felony auto theft in 1989, has been arrested multiple times for driving under the influence, and has had numerous traffic citations, Minnesota court records show.

    The kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about other people. Naturally.

    In social media posts, Kazmierczak described himself as a former network engineer who lives in Minneapolis. Among other things, he made comments critical of former President Joe Biden and referred to Democrats as “angry and liars.”

    Hmmmmm. Are Democrats more angry than Republicans? Are they more angry than the current president? Trump spends a lot of time fuming and raging and spewing insults. He’s a bigger liar and angrier than any Democrats I know anything about.

    “Trump wants the US is stronger and more prosperous,” Kazmierczak wrote. “Stop other countries from stealing from us. Bring back the fear that enemies back away from and gain respect that If anyone threatens ourselves or friends we will (expletive) them up.”

    In another post, Kazmierczak asked, “When will descendants of slaves pay restitution to Union soldiers families for freeing them/dying for them, and not sending them back to Africa?”

    Oh yeah, gee, why aren’t people whose great-grandparents were enslaved more grateful to the country that enslaved them? Why don’t they give us all money?

    The attack came days after a man was arrested in Utah for allegedly punching U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida, in the face during the Sundance Film Festival and saying Trump was going to deport him.

    All part of our proud history.

    H/t Mostly Cloudy

  • Out, suddenly

    The Bulwark:

    This White House has a playbook for scandal: Always double down, never apologize, and above all attack, attack, attack. So it was nothing less than shocking yesterday when the administration—after two days of utterly shameless lies about the killing of Alex Pretti—slammed on the brakes in an attempt to pivot to a more normie-palatable [acceptable] narrative.

    Out, suddenly, were statements like Stephen Miller’s, who called Pretti “a domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” or Kristi Noem’s, who called it a “fact” that Pretti had “committed an act of domestic terrorism.” No longer, apparently, was it the Department of Homeland Security’s position, as the official DHS account tweeted Saturday and Border Patrol mook Greg Bovino later repeated, that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

    White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt conspicuously declined yesterday to defend any of these obscene statements. Instead, she reached for a pair of new, less noxious lies: that President Trump was mourning Pretti’s death as a tragedy, and that DHS would conduct a full and fair investigation.

    Hmm. Is it really less noxious to claim that Trump is mourning Pretti’s murder? I for one think it’s highly noxious to pretend that Trump would ever mourn anyone’s murder, let alone that of a guy like Pretti. Here’s why: Trump does not care about other people.

    “Nobody here at the White House, including the president of the United States, wants to see Americans hurt or killed,” Leavitt said, adding that “we mourn for the parents—as a mother myself, of course, I cannot imagine the loss of life, especially losing one’s child.”

    Trump has said nothing that could be construed as “mourning.” His sole commentary on the shooting was to tweet out a picture of Pretti’s pistol, which he described as “loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go,” before pivoting back to his usual pack of grievances against Minnesota.

    Trump might mourn for a BigMac that fell into a mud puddle, but for a person, no.

  • 44 names

    Let’s pick a fight with Denmark.

    Staff at the US embassy in Copenhagen have removed 44 flags decorated with the names of Danish soldiers that were killed in Afghanistan, put up after US President Donald Trump’s recent criticism of allied countries’ military contributions.

    As yet unidentified activists put up the flags on Tuesday but they were removed later the same day by an embassy security guard, according to Danish media TV2,

    In an interview with Fox News last week, Trump said that allied soldiers in Afghanistan, “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines” – causing pushback from European capitals.

    Trump himself, by the way, stayed more than a little back. Trump stayed all the way back. Way way way back.

    Copenhagen’s mayor for environmental affairs, Line Barfoed called the removal “disrespectful.” “The flags marked in a very nice and quiet manner the tremendous effort that the Danish soldiers deployed there made over several years,” she said in a statement to Euractiv.

    “There was no malicious intent behind removing the flags” an embassy spokesperson told TV2, adding that if the embassy management had been aware of the purpose, the flags would have remained in place. Yet according to the outlet, embassy security staff was briefed on the action before they the flags were removed.

    Leave no ally uninsulted.

  • Framing 101

    One of those times when you compose the next sentence before reading it.

    The sentence before the next sentence:

    Holed up in the White House over the weekend, with temperatures dropping and a major snowstorm on its way, Mr. Trump expressed concern about the killing to aides and allies.

    The next sentence you compose in your head:

    You mean Trump pitched a fit about the public reaction to the killing and how everybody else had to fix it because the reaction was bad for him.

    The next sentence the NY Times wrote:

    But his frustrations were more about the coverage of the events rather than the incident itself, according to people familiar with the dynamic.

    Yeah no shit. Of course they were. They always are. Always. There is nothing in this world or any other that matters to Trump except how whatever it is affects him. Not one single thing.

  • Incitement

    Trump and consequences:

    Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unidentified substance by a man with a syringe on Tuesday as she gave her first in-person town hall of the year in Minneapolis, during which she called for ICE to be abolished “for good” and DHS secretary Kristi Noem to resign.

    Omar had only been speaking for a few minutes when a man in the audience got up and began to shout, while spraying her with the liquid. People at the meeting said the liquid had an acidic smell.

    The good news is that it was a small amount.

    Some, such as Minneapolis council member LaTrisha Vetaw, pleaded with Omar to end the town hall early to get checked, due to concerns for her safety because of the unidentified liquid . Omar refused to stop. “Ten minutes, I beg you … please don’t let them have the show,” she told the security team.

    After the alleged attacker was subdued, there was applause from the room as he was escorted out. “Here is the reality that people like this ugly man don’t understand, is that we are Minnesota strong,” the congresswoman said.

    …

    Omar is among a wave of Democratic politicians to react with outrage and horror to the Saturday shooting of 37-year-old VA nurse Alex Pretti, the second fatal shooting of a US civilian by federal law enforcement in Minneapolis.

    You know…it’s hard to figure out how else anyone should react to the slaughter of Alex Pretti, especially given the reality of who and what he was. A cancer ward nurse in a veterans’ hospital? Come on.

    Jasmine Crockett, the Democratic representative from Texas, said in a social media post that she was “disgusted” and “outraged”, writing: “Let’s be clear: nonstop hate and dangerous rhetoric from Trump and his allies has fueled this type of violence.”

    …

    Omar has long been a political target of the US president, who in recent months has renewed his xenophobic attacks, calling in a post on his Truth Social network for her to be “sent back to Somalia”. She arrived in the US as a refugee aged 12 and became a citizen more than 25 years ago.

    Can we send Trump back to Germany? Now?

    H/t Mostly Cloudy

  • The values

    Nah.

  • “We’re happy it was accurate”

    This this this! If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a billion times.

    “Booker was not disqualified for being transgender. This is inaccurate. Disqualification for this reason would be illegal. Booker was disqualified for being male.”

    THAT. They do it every damn time, and it’s sneaky, and it’s a lie.

    Back you go indeed.

  • As she channels

    Squeeeeeeeeeeeee another new way to insult women, how exciting!!

    Just imagine a tweet shouting about a white person who “channels” some of the most iconic poses of Black people throughout history. Imagine a tweet shouting about Sean Hannity as he channels Thurgood Marshall, Paul Robson, Fanny Lou Hamer, Ruby Bridges, Rosa Parks.

    Go choke on your own toffees, Rainbow.

  • That’s her problem

    Shut her up.

    SNP ministers tried to “silence and intimidate” a female prisoner who had been traumatised by sharing a jail with biological men by sending her testimony to police, a court has been told.

    Aidan O’Neill KC, who is representing For Women Scotland (FWS) in its latest legal battle with the Scottish government, argued that ministers were in contempt of court by sending a draft of the woman’s written evidence to Police Scotland without her or the court’s permission.

    The devolved government, which is fighting in court to continue to allow biological men who identify as women to remain in women’s prisons, also urged Lady Ross KC on Tuesday not to accept the sworn affidavit, calling it “irrelevant” to the case.

    Well let’s face it, women themselves are irrelevant. Let’s all just pack up and go home.

    O’Neill claimed that the government’s actions amounted to an attempt to “discipline and punish a woman for speaking out” on gender issues, arguing that sending her allegations to detectives, as well as her name, was a “startling” abuse of court process.

    The affidavit provided to the court was from a former prisoner who spoke of the “humiliation, fear and intimidation” she had experienced at having to serve her sentence with transgender women.

    Who are men, and not just any men, but deceptive manipulative lying abusive men.

    The SNP government, in its legal response to the FWS’s campaign to have prison policy ruled unlawful, has denied that female inmates are disadvantaged by having to share supposedly single-sex jails with men.

    In one submission, ministers likened housing potentially violent trans women in female jails to a mother taking her young son into a single-sex changing room, saying that neither would “challenge the dignity” of females.

    Who are these people? How can they possibly say that?

    FWS has claimed that, after last year’s Supreme Court ruling, in which they defeated the SNP ministers for a second time, housing biological men in female jails is unlawful. The Supreme Court ruled that sex in the Equalities Act should mean biological sex.

    The Scottish government has rejected this, despite publicly accepting the ruling and rewriting gender policies in schools, claiming that a “blanket” policy in which no men could serve sentences in female jails would breach the human rights of transgender inmates.

    And we can’t have that. But, oddly enough, we can have breaching the human rights of female inmates. Male “transgender” inmates can have whatever they want; female inmates must shut up and take it.

  • Specify

    Expert in what?

    Expert says trans children’s rights are not being respected

    Expert in what field exactly?

    The reporter, one James MacEnany, Education Specialist, fails to say.

    Next we get photo caption:

    Expert academic says the rights of trans children in Scotland are not being respected 

    Then we get the first two paragraphs:

    “It is a difficult time to be doing any kind of research on trans or queer or even feminist topics, so I’m finding that I need to be quite cautious about media coverage.”

    This is the view of Dr Ruth Pearce, an expert and researcher at the University of Glasgow.

    Expert expert expert, we get it, but expert in what field?

    We are not told. We do get another expert though.

    Dr Pearce has recently collaborated with an expert from south of the border to examine whether or not the rights of trans children are being respected in Scotland, with a particular focus on the way in which the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) – which was supposed to protect and enhance the rights of all children – is operating in practice after its incorporation into Scots law.

    Finally we get the answer.

    “I was working with Dr. Cal Horton. They’re at Oxford Brookes University and an expert on trans childhood in the UK, looking at areas like education and healthcare as their main focus. We were looking specifically at Scotland because it is the only part of the UK that’s has integrated UNCRC into domestic law.

    “I’m a sociologist rather than a legal scholar, as is Cal, so in a sense we’re kind of looking at how the law in terms of the experiential impact of it.”

    That should have been at the top. “Expert” means nothing. People can idennify as experts, and they do.

  • Walking back the lies

    It’s stuff the genie back in the bottle time in Trumpolandia.

    “Chief Gregory Bovino has NOT been relieved of his duties,” the DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, pointing to earlier comments from the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, praising Bovino as a “key part of the president’s team and a great American”.

    Leavitt spent Monday’s press briefing walking back initial claims made by senior administration officials about Pretti. Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, called the victim “a domestic terrorist who tried to assassinate law enforcement”, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, accused him of perpetrating “the definition of domestic terrorism” – characterizations that have been undercut by video footage that showed Pretti getting shot in the back multiple times after being tackled to the ground by a group of US border patrol agents whom he had been filming, and disarmed of his gun.

    Or to put it more bluntly, Miller and Noem told the usual blistering lies about the guy their team murdered and this time it didn’t work.

    Trump himself on Monday said he had a “a very good call” with Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, who[m] he had previously blamed for Pretti’s death.

    Yes oddly enough it just doesn’t look good to murder a dedicated ICU nurse and then tell a pack of lies about him.

  • Expected to retire soon

    Bovino is out.

    Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol “commander at large” and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.

    Bovino’s sudden demotion is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is reconsidering its most aggressive tactics after the killing Saturday of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents under Bovino’s command.

    It turns out murdering a veterans’ hospital nurse is not all that popular.

    Earlier today, President Trump appeared to signal in a series of social-media posts a tactical shift in the administration’s mass-deportation campaign. Trump wrote that he spoke with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—whom the White House has blamed for inciting violence—and the two men are now on “a similar wavelength.” Tom Homan, the former ICE chief whom Trump has designated “border czar,” will head to Minnesota to assume command of the federal mobilization there, Trump said.

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski, who were Bovino’s biggest backers at DHS, are also at risk of losing their jobs, two of the people told me.

    Oh please do fire Noem. And then fire yourself. Go play golf.

    For the past seven months, Bovino has been the public face of a traveling immigration crackdown on cities governed by Democrats. Noem and other Trump officials gave Bovino the “commander” title and sent him and his masked border agents to Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, and then Minneapolis. Bovino became a MAGA social-media star as he traveled the country with his own film crew and used social media to hit back at Democratic politicians and random critics online. Veteran ICE and CBP officials grew more and more uneasy as Bovino worked outside his agency’s chain of command and appeared to relish his role as a political actor.

    Eeeeyuch. His own film crew ffs.

    One murder too many, it seems.

  • Only so much they can handle

    It turns out the border patrollers don’t like it either.

    Morale is “plummeting” among federal law enforcement officers tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration operation, as they complained that [of] long hours, ambitious arrest quotas and hatred from the public, according to reports.

    While officers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol, overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, said they supported the administration’s goal of deporting undocumented migrants, many of them have grown “disillusioned” with the tactics being implemented by leadership.

    At the behest of the monstrosity in the Oval Office.

    “You’re not addressing the problem by throwing a 500-pound gorilla into these inner cities,” Oscar Hagelsieb, a former immigration officer and special agent, told the Times. “They’re causing chaos, and unfortunately it’s costing lives.”

    But it makes great tv.

    I don’t say that in jest. I think that’s absolutely what Trump wants – a show. A brutal sadistic vengeful angry show, every day and all night.

    “It’s completely unfair to the agents who have been put in this position,” he added. “There’s only so much they can handle before bad things start to happen.”

    Border patrol agents, who generally operate at Ports of entry, have been assisting ICE with raids and deployed to support amid the protests. Top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino previously described the agency’s tactics of arresting individuals rapidly before protesters can move in as “turn and burn.”

    Bovino oversaw operations in Chicago, where agents deployed tear gas in neighborhoods and hit protesters with pepper balls. These tactics were “far outside standard practices in law enforcement,” Gil Kerlikowske, who led Customs and Border Patrol during the Obama administration, told the Times.

    But they made great tv for Trump.

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced calls to resign after she claimed Pretti “brandished” a weapon before an officer with Border Patrol “fired defensive shots.” The narrative has been undercut in video footage of the incident.

    Current and former ICE officials who spoke with the outlet anonymously said they were “unhappy with the sharp rhetoric” coming from top White House and Homeland Security officials. One agent with the department told the Times that he had “always given the benefit of the doubt to the government in these situations,” but that he now no longer believed “any of the statements they put out anymore.”

    “We lost all trust,” a current ICE official added. “I’m not sure I can see how we exist three years from now.” Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin also reported “extreme frustration” in the department over “some of the claims & narratives DHS pushed in the aftermath of the shooting.”

    “These sources say this messaging from DHS officials has been catastrophic from a PR and morale perspective, as it is eroding trust and credibility,” Melugin reported Sunday.

    But it’s all worth it because Trump likes a show.

  • Keynote speakers or shot 10 times

    Oh yes. I had indeed forgotten about them.

  • Through the blank blank eyes

    People in Minneapolis and the rest of the country may be depressed by casual murders at the hands of ICE but the Trump family is dressing up for a party.

    Trump and first lady Melania Trump on Saturday night hosted a private screening of “Melania,” a new documentary about the first lady — drawing criticism from Democrats who questioned the president’s priorities hours after another fatal shooting in Minneapolis upended domestic politics and raised the possibility of a government shutdown.

    So there’s a new documentary about Melania Trump.

    Why?

    What on earth is there to say? She’s a blank space.

    The documentary “offers unprecedented access to the 20 days leading up to the 2025 Presidential Inauguration — through the eyes of the First Lady herself,” according to its official description.

    Who on earth cares?

    Trump also has pinned a post to the top of his Truth Social feed that promotes the film as “an unforgettable, behind-the-scenes, look at one of the most important events of our time.”

    Well he would say that, wouldn’t he.

  • Send it right back

    It takes so much lying and concealing and manipulation to keep this ideology going.

    Yes we know you’re happy to do this manipulative wording, but your happiness is not the issue here. The issue is that saying “transgender” instead of “a man” carefully and with malice aforethought hides the fact that the man in question is a man. We know you’re happy to drive a 16-wheeler through women’s rights but women are not happy to have 16-wheelers driven through our rights.

    We’ve only said this a billion times. The issue is not transgender, the issue is that he’s a man in a women’s competition. That’s the part that matters. That’s the part that’s an attack on the rights of women, as you must know perfectly well or you wouldn’t be so determinedly hiding it.