The Telegraph on the WI ructions:

The Women’s Institute (WI) has banned transgender women from becoming members.

The National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI), the WI’s umbrella organisation, revealed on Wednesday that, in light of a Supreme Court judgment on gender, it could not legally offer formal membership to biological males from April 2026.

Pathetic that they want to offer membership to males. It’s not the Men’s Institute.

The announcement by the WI – the UK’s largest women’s membership organisation – has prompted calls for public bodies to also comply with the Supreme Court ruling. Many have refused to change their policies and prevent trans women from using women’s facilities, such as toilets and changing rooms.

They have said they are waiting for Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities, to publish updated guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the UK’s equality watchdog.

Oh get a grip. It’s not rocket science. Yes, people have been erecting a huge edifice of lies and absurdities for the past ten-plus years, but the lies and absurdities are just that. Put them aside.

Rosie Duffield MP, who sits on the Commons women and equalities select committee, said: “I am really glad that finally the Women’s Institute has seen sense and realised that they exist primarily as a women’s organisation. It’s time other bodies, such as the NHS, the Civil Service and gym groups, followed their lead, and the law.”

Damn right.

Ms Green, of the NFWI, said the future of the charity relied on acting on the Supreme Court’s judgment.

She said: “As an organisation that has proudly welcomed transgender women into our membership for more than 40 years, this is not something we would do unless we felt that we had no other choice. To be able to continue operating as the Women’s Institute – a legally recognised women’s organisation and charity – we must act in accordance with the Supreme Court’s judgment and restrict formal membership to biological women only. However, this change is only in respect to our membership policy and does not change our firm belief that transgender women are women.”

Well don’t brag about it. You might as well brag about your firm belief that a large man in red pajamas comes down your chimney every December 24th.

The announcement from the WI follows confirmation from Girlguiding leaders on Tuesday that the organisation had made “the difficult decision” to prevent biological boys from becoming members.

Oh dear oh dear it’s so difficult to decide not to let boys be members of an organization for girls. The fact that the boys have their own organization is entirely beside the point.

The Beaumont Society, the longest-established transgender support group in the UK, said of the decision of the NFWI and Girlguiding: “This is a backward step in both the law and in society and will, in time be found to be as unsupportable as similar pseudosciences such as vaccines causing autism, or phrenology, or polygenism or injecting bleach to cure Covid.”

Wut? We’re the pseudoscience? Magic gender is as scientificky as not injecting bleach to cure anything?

Helen Belcher, Chair of the TransActual campaign group, accused the Government of allowing the ECHR to “impose the most extreme interpretation of the supreme court ruling”.

She said: “This is the second national charity in as many days which has been pushed to force out trans people, against the organisation’s will and at great cost. If these changes must be forced on organisations, then it’s clear this is the result of a handful of extremists imposing their views on groups which have been very happily trans inclusive for many years if not decades.

The reversal yet again. We’re the extremists, we’re imposing our doolally beliefs on everyone else.

Can we speed up the recovery a little?

Even more weeping and wailing about no longer being able to let men into organizations for women. The Graun:

The Women’s Institute will no longer accept transgender women as members from April following the UK supreme court ruling on the legal definition of a woman, the Guardian can reveal.

Melissa Green, the chief executive of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, said the organisation had taken the decision with the “utmost regret and sadness”, adding it had “no choice” but to exclude trans women from its membership.

“Incredibly sadly, we will have to restrict our membership on the basis of biological sex from April next year,” Green said. “But the message we really want to get across is that it remains our firm belief that transgender women are women, and that doesn’t change.”

Utmost regret n sadness, inCREDibly sadly, our firm belief that men are women doesn’t change. What is WRONG with these people?

Membership of the 110-year-old organisation will be restricted to those who are registered female at birth, with new members or those renewing expected to confirm that they meet the criteria.

That’s because it’s the Women’s Institute and always has been.

Green said the organisation wanted trans women to remain “part of the WI family” and that from April it would launch new “sisterhood groups”, open to all and which would be “a place where we will recognise transgender women as women and explore what it is to be a woman in the 21st century”.

In other words Green said, no doubt proudly, that the organisation would continue to insult and abuse women for the sake of being inclooosive of men.

In 2023, the WI said it would continue to “celebrate” the lives of the transgender women enriching its membership, after reports it was facing an attempt by an internal group to overturn inclusive policy – in place since the 1970s and made official in 2015 – which allows transgender members to join the organisation of more than 175,000 members.

Inclusive inclusive inclusive. Shut up with your inclusive. Not everything has to be inclusive. Being inclusive is NOT A GOOD THING in all cases and circumstances. It’s not good to be inclusive of bosses in labor unions. Not good to be inclusive of pyromaniacs in the Fire Department. Not good to be inclusive of high school dropouts on the surgical team at your local hospital. Many forms of groups and teams and organizations have specific criteria for membership and that is not only allowed but necessary.

Green said that while some would welcome the decision she was aware it would also prompt “anger, sadness and disappointment”. The organisation said it had “a large transgender population” in its membership, but did not have exact numbers of how many people would have to leave.

Men. How many men would have to leave. Note the Guardian helping Green to lie about this. Note how pervasive that sloppy annoying trick is.

“My hope is that the message that the transgender community gets from this is not one of betrayal, but is one of our desire to continue to maintain those friendships and that support,” she said. “This has been a very difficult year for everybody, particularly for the transgender community, but I hope that when that anger subsides the transgender community will know that we stand with them.”

Why is she so passionately embracey of the tranzgenner communniny and so disdainful of the women communniny when it’s a women’s organization she’s at the top of which?

On Wednesday, the WI will tell its members – who are part of 5,000 independent local WIs – of the decision in a statement, which reads: “It is with the utmost regret and sadness that we must announce that from April 2026 we can no longer offer formal membership to transgender women.”

So the WI will take pains to insult and belittle its own membership. Women at the top of an organization for women will go out of their way to cuddle men while kicking women in the teeth. Might as well rename it Misogyny Institute.

The Guardian version:

Trans girls will no longer be able to join Girlguiding, the organisation has announced, saying it has made the decision after seeking legal advice as a result of the supreme court ruling on gender earlier this year.

Blahblah. The question is why were boys allowed to join in the first place? What’s the point of having Girl Guides if you let boys join? This business of boys joining relies on the presence of girls, after all. If all the girls leave then what are they left with? Another thing for boys. Don’t they have enough yet?

The statement from the top people

added that Girlguiding “believed strongly in inclusion” and would continue to support young people and adults in marginalised groups through a new taskforce.

But if your goal is inclusion then you should never have had Girl Guides in the first place. It should have been just Guides. Open to girls and boys, women and men, big and small, cats and dogs, goats and sheep, elephants and lions.

What they mean of course is inclusion where possible, inclusion where it makes sense, inclusion of people the organization is meant for. They don’t mean inclusion of everyone and everything – so why bring it up at all?

Because it’s manipulative, that’s why. It makes people feel guilty. It makes it sound as if Girl Guides is excluding clumsy girls, malnourished girls, girls without money, girls with the wrong accent, girls who don’t own a tennis racket. But excluding boys from a group for girls is not like excluding girls without money or expensive clothes. It’s like excluding adults, or professional athletes, or serial killers. Some exclusions are necessary, and not all inclusions are safe or fair or reasonable.

Girlguiding had been facing legal action from a parent over its policy allowing transgender girls to join as members and trans women to volunteer in roles reserved for women, claiming it “exposes girls to harassment”, the Times reported.

Its policy allowing trans members was introduced to some criticism in 2018, but Girlguiding defended its decision by saying: “Simply being transgender does not make someone more of a safeguarding risk than any other person.”

Same old cheap trick. Yes we know that; the point is that being male does make someone more of a safeguarding risk.

Ew. Yet another horrible man I didn’t know about.

It’s a bit late to stop buying Harry Potter.

More seriously, what horseshit. No we’re not “wealthy.” No this is not plutocrats grinding the faces of the poor. What an idiotic thing to say. Trans ideology is not progressive or socialist or socialist-adjacent or leftwing in any other way. It’s an absurdity adopted by a lot of gullible wannabe radicals who don’t know their ass from their elbow.

“some isolated billionaire”? Meaning JKR? Jeez, we should all be so isolated. More centrally, we’re not talking about “a little girl” here, we’re talking about boys who pretend to be girls and want to invade Girlguides. It’s not sheer, pointless cruelty to tell boys no, they can’t invade Girguides. The pointless cruelty would be allowing them to.

Apparently the Ness guy writes books. I look forward to not reading them.

She’s right.

From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it’s proved shockingly successful. Trans activists’ shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they’ve been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step.

Time and again, I’ve seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. ‘Well, yes, maybe there’s something in what you’re saying, but it’s hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can’t you be nice? Why won’t you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don’t you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?’

I actually have an answer to these questions. Why can’t I be nice? I’ll tell you why. Because this whole campaign is so ridiculous, so insulting to our intelligence, so destructive to women’s rights, so stupid, that in its presence niceness shrivels and disappears in an instant, like a drop of water on a red-hot stove burner.

Either a man can be a woman, or he can’t. Either women deserve rights, or they don’t. Either there’s a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn’t. Either you’re on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you’re not. The alternative to being ‘blunt’ – using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on – was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We’ve always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.

Corporal Blunt here, at your service.

Brilliant title.

BBC shift towards accuracy angers the gender identity faithful

Oh no, not a shift towards accuracy!!

The BBC has ‘given way to transphobic rhetoric’, according to US activist Erin Reed. Erstwhile celebrity India Willoughby says a new editorial policy is ‘dehumanising’ trans people. Their indignation is reflected across gender activist social media.

Erin and India, in their current iteration at the BBC, are ‘biological males who identify as women’. Earlier this year they would have been trans women. Last year they would have been women.

This in a nutshell is the reason for the anger. Perhaps next year Erin and India will simply be he/hims in BBC copy.

Erin’s piece last week, and India’s latest car protest video, were prompted by the BBC describing Sophia Brooks, who accused Graham Linehan of harassment (he was cleared), as a biological male who identifies as a woman, and using neutral ‘they’ pronouns.

Shock horror as news outlet tells the truth about the sex of an aggressive misogynist man.

But there is a new BBC policy to move towards accuracy. It was shared with us last week that the new informal policy is to use ‘biological male who identifies as a woman’ in every story ‘where it helps the audience understand’.

Golly, helping the audience understand what the hell the story is saying: what a concept!

On the other hand: some teams think facts need a trigger warning (we wrote to them about this), the BBC does still use ‘trans women’ and always qualifies the word male, it still substitutes ‘trans’ for ‘male’ in key stories, its reporting is still patchy (for example its coverage of the puberty blocker trial has been a thin version of what’s needed), drag still holds sway and its regional reporting is still pretty well sunk in a bog of affirmation.

Inch by inch.

From The Critic nearly four years ago:

Police are investigating a woman for raising safeguarding concerns about Girl Guide commissioner Monica Sulley

We’re in UpsideDownLand again.

A teacher and mother-of-three has been questioned under caution by Merseyside Police for sending a letter to Girlguiding UK raising safeguarding concerns.

Her story begins in November 2021 when it emerged that Girlguiding UK had appointed a local commissioner called Monica Sulley, a role that involves overseeing Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. 

Social media reports showed that Sulley, a trans woman, had posted pictures of herself on Instagram wearing dominatrix clothing, one of which was captioned “Now behave yourselves or Mistress will have to punish you #mistress.” She had also posted a picture in which she wielded what appeared to be a fake assault rifle. 

The Merseyside woman, who does not wish to be named, wrote two emails expressing safeguarding concerns about the appointment: one to Girlguiding UK, and one to the local Girlguiding organisation in Southwell. She was one of a number to write such emails: in late November, Mail Online reported that Girlguiding UK was carrying out an investigation into Sulley.

The woman received a formal acknowledgement of her email from the national organisation, which didn’t address the particular issue she’d raised. She then heard nothing more until 7 January this year, when a police officer came to her house and told her she needed to attend the police station for an interview under caution, which “meant that I could attend voluntarily, but that if I chose not to attend I could be arrested.” As a response to a simple email, this felt, she says, as if things were “spinning out of control.” 

On 13 January, she was interviewed under caution at Smithdown Lane Police Station in Liverpool. During the interview, which lasted an hour, she was asked about the contents of the email and why she sent it. She was told that she could be charged under the Malicious Communications Act.

If Sulley had been displaying his kink privately, I could maybe see it, but he was displaying it on Instagram. If you flaunt your kink on social meeja you may get talked about.

She didn’t have difficulty answering the questions, she says: “I’d been a teacher and a mum for years and am old enough to feel certain and confident that there was a breach in safeguarding. I kept referring to the unsuitability of such a person for the role, and that it meant that young girls in this case were threatened, that their safety and privacy were threatened.” 

She also told the police officer that safeguarding rules exist to protect women and girls from the minority of biological males who are predatory. At the prompting of the duty solicitor, she pointed out that when Girl Guides go to camp, they share accommodation and showers, and that “to have male-bodied men in that setting, I believed, was a safeguarding concern.”

At the end of the interview, she was told that her case would be sent to the CPS for consideration. Her duty solicitor, she reports, “said he had never been more baffled in his life.” When the solicitor asked the police officer whether it was necessary to proceed to the CPS, the police officer replied, she says, that the email was considered a “hate crime”. 

Again, this was nearly four years ago, and maybe wouldn’t happen now, but still, godalmighty – that it ever happened is horrifying.

Girl Guides have put out an absolutely disgusting apologetic misogynistic statement.

Denise Wilson (Chair of Trustees), Felicity Oswald (CEO) and Tracy Foster (Chief Guide)

02 December 2025

Following April’s Supreme Court decision relating to sex and gender, many organisations across the country have been facing complex decisions about what it means for girls and women and for the wider communities affected.

Complex shmomplex. It’s not complex at all. Boys are not girls: get out.

Girlguiding’s governing charity documents set out that the membership and people who benefit from our organisation are girls and women. The Supreme Court ruled that girls and women are defined in the Equality Act 2010 by their biological sex at birth.

Because what the fuck else would they be you dribbling loonies?!

God I’m sick of this playing dumb pretend confusion fantasy disbelief. These are adults; they haven’t been steeped in trans ideology their whole lives; they know perfectly well that boys are not girls. They’re putting on this ridiculous bewildered act because they have somehow convinced themselves that boys who dislike being boys matter far more than mere girls.

Girlguiding’s governing charity documents set out that the membership and people who benefit from our organisation are girls and women. The Supreme Court ruled that girls and women are defined in the Equality Act 2010 by their biological sex at birth.

In other words the court had to go to the trouble of ruling what everyone already knew. No depth of misery at being a boy can make a boy into a girl. That’s not how this works. No depth of misery at being a human can make a human into a giraffe or a bat or a flea or a hummingbird. Wishes can change some kinds of reality, but not all kinds.

Following detailed considerations, expert legal advice and input from senior members, young members and our Council, the Board of Trustees for Girlguiding has made the difficult decision that Girlguiding must change, following the Supreme Court’s ruling.

From today, 2 December, it is with a heavy heart that we are announcing trans girls and young women will no longer be able to join Girlguiding. This is a decision we would have preferred not to make, and we know that this may be upsetting for members of our community.

What a pack of shits. They’re in anguish because they can’t keep on ruining Girl Guides for girls.

Girlguiding believes strongly in inclusion, and we will continue to support young people and adults in marginalised groups.

So, what if you were an organization for children with physical handicaps? Would you allow children with zero physical handicaps to join, with the result that children with physical handicaps would no longer have an organization for them? Would you just ignore the whole point of having that specific kind of organization, which is to provide children who are in some way disadvantaged with a place where that disadvantage no longer applies? If so, WHY???

Oh dear. She’s “trans nonbinareee” she tells us, but do we by any chance know why she has pain from these surgical scars here after her elective double mastectomy? Not that she doesn’t love her mastectomy, no no no, but there is the hurty part. Also, she loves us very much.

She’s startin’ to have some physical limitations? But like she said [sic], she’s starting to have some physical limitations with certain movements [like moving her arms for instance], some pain in certain areas, some muscle isssssues in certain parts.

Nothing to see here.

What prompted me to ask Google about “routine” MRIs was Heather Cox Richardson’s post yesterday about Trump’s mental acuity.

President Donald J. Trump’s behavior over the holiday weekend has increased concern about his mental acuity. A rant on his social media account at midnight on Thanksgiving itself threatened to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants, called Minnesota governor Tim Walz a profoundly offensive slur, and ended: “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”

On NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday, Walz responded by calling for Trump to release the results of an MRI he told reporters he underwent in October, later saying: “I have no idea what they analyze, but whatever they analyze, they analyzed it well and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.” Although Trump told reporters the MRI was part of his routine physical, medical experts say such tests are not routine.

Walz said to Kristen Welker: “Here we got a guy on Thanksgiving, where we spent time with our families, we ate, we played Yahtzee, we cheered for football or whatever. This guy is apparently in a room, ranting about everything else. This is not normal behavior. It is not healthy. And presidents throughout time have released a couple things. They’ve released their tax returns—not Donald Trump—and they’ve released their medical records—not Donald Trump. And look, the MRI is one thing, but I think what’s most concerning about this is, as your viewers out there are listening, has anyone in the history of the world ever had an MRI assigned to them and have no idea what it was for, as he says? So look, it’s clear the President’s fading physically. I think the mental capacity, again, ranting, you know, crazily at midnight on Thanksgiving about everything else. There’s reasons for us to be concerned. This is a guy that randomly says the airspace over Venezuela’s closed. He’s ruminating on if you could win a nuclear war. Look, this is a serious position. It’s the most powerful position in the world, and we have someone at midnight throwing around slurs that demonize our children, at the same time he’s not solving any of the problems. So I’m deeply concerned that he is incapable of doing the job.”

Last night, on Air Force One, Trump responded oddly to a reporter’s question about Walz’s call for Trump to release the MRI results: “[I]f they want to release it, it’s okay with me to release it,” Trump said. “It’s perfect. It’s like my phone call where I got impeached. It’s absolutely perfect…. [I]f you want to have it released, I’ll release it.” When a reporter asked “What part of your body was the MRI looking at?” Trump answered: “I have no idea. It was just an MRI. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing,” he said, pointing at the female reporter. He then pointed at another female reporter and said: “You, too.”

He didn’t get a perfect mark. If the test were on misogyny on the other hand, that he would ace.

Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt released a memo from the president’s physician, Sean P. Barbabella, saying that “advanced imaging” was performed on the president as a preventative measure. The memo said this imaging “was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.” It said Trump’s cardiovascular and abdominal imaging is “perfectly normal.”

Conspicuously absent from the memo was any reference to the president’s brain.

Picky picky picky. Brain, abdomen; what’s the difference?

The White House is saying Trump’s MRI was just normal routine preventative care. The trouble is, that’s not a thing. I asked Google/AI specifically: Is it true that preventative MRI scans are normal? The answer is no.

No, preventative full-body MRI scans are not considered standard or normal by major medical organizations. While they can find abnormalities, they are not recommended for the general public because they often lead to false positives, unnecessary anxiety, expensive and potentially risky follow-up procedures, and lack of proven effectiveness in improving health outcomes or lifespan. Standard MRI scans are typically used to diagnose specific symptoms or monitor a known condition, not for general, symptom-free screening.

And yet the White House swears up and down that Trump’s MRI was just totally normal routine boring standard practice.

Trump is furious at the Times again.

The Creeps at the Failing New York Times are at it again. I won the 2024 Presidential Election in a Landslide, winning all Seven Swing States, the Popular Vote, and the Electoral College by a lot. I won our Nation’s Districts by 2750 to 550, a complete wipeout. I settled 8 Wars, have 48 New Stock Market Highs, our Economy is Great, and our Country is RESPECTED AGAIN all over the World, respected like never before. The last Administration had the Highest Inflation in history – I have already brought that down to normal, and prices, including groceries, are coming down. To do this requires a lot of Work and Energy, and I have never worked so hard in my life. Yet despite all of this the Radical Left Lunatics in the soon to fold New York Times did a hit piece on me that I am perhaps losing my Energy, despite facts that show the exact opposite.

He still has his Energy, damn you! He also still has his random Capital Letters – Work and Energy get caps but prices, groceries, life, piece, and facts do not. Even dear friendly opposite does not get a capital letter.

They know this is wrong, as is almost every thing that they write about me, including election results, ALL PURPOSELY NEGATIVE. This cheap “RAG” is truly an “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.” The writer of the story, Katie Rogers, who is assigned to write only bad things about me, is a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.

Doooooooonald, you’re projectiiiiiiiiiing again.

There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone

But he’s careful not to run his battery down.

Katha Pollitt asks

Why Did So Many People in Epstein’s Circle Look the Other Way?

Here is what I’ve learned from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal so far: If you are rich, practiced in the art of flattery, generous with favors and connections and donations, give star-studded dinner parties, and offer flights on your private plane, nobody cares if you hired a 14-year-old girl for sex.

Or, nobody except those boring cranky argumentative people who think women and girls matter.

Even if you went to jail for it—though Alan Dershowitz and future labor secretary Alexander Acosta finagled a deal whereby you didn’t serve your whole sentence and were allowed out during the day and on weekends. Nobody’s going to ask a lot of follow-up questions about your activities in the years since your encounter with the law. It was just the one time! Mistake of judgment!

As Jeffrey Epstein’s very good friend Noam Chomsky (yes, that Noam Chomsky) put it in 2023 when The Wall Street Journal asked him about his extensive contacts with Epstein over many years, “What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to US laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”

What???

Like hell it does.

It yields a you have served your sentence. Having served a sentence is not the same thing as a clean slate. It means you can’t be sentenced again for the same crime; it does not mean you are now a decent human being. You may be a reformed human being, but then again you may not. Having served a sentence doesn’t tell us which you are.

Epstein had no problem attracting famous, brilliant, immensely powerful people into his circle, almost all men.

Because women are for poking; women are not for brilliant. Nobody cares what’s in a woman’s brain.

Everyone who hung out with Epstein had more than enough information to ask hard questions about their dear friend Jeffrey and chose not to ask them. Or maybe even to think them. As the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who himself left Arizona State University over sexual harassment accusations, told an interviewer in 2011, “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”

Oh come on. That’s azza scientist I judge based on empirical evidence? I’ve seen all these very young women around him but I haven’t watched him fuck them so I would believe him and no one else? That’s not judging on empirical evidence, that’s seeing what you want to see and nothing else. Or as Katha puts it, “Empirical evidence apparently doesn’t include a conviction for soliciting a minor and lifelong placement on the sex-crimes registry.”

These are men accustomed to looking beneath the surface and pursuing what is hidden wherever it leads—about science, language, world affairs. But about these women those men evinced a profound incuriosity. They were just the scenery, the help, or as Dominique Strauss-Kahn memorably put it, the “equipment.” In degree but not in kind, they are like the men in Southern France who were invited to rape a drugged Gisele Pelicot, and justified this bizarre situation on the basis that her husband had given permission.

But they’re important dudes so whatever.

Trump continues to urge the US military to commit war crimes.

The president has picked up where he left off before Thanksgiving, when it comes to his anger at the six Democratic lawmakers who took part in a video urging service members to “refuse illegal orders”.

A reminder, that Trump initially went on a Truth Social tirade, accusing the members of Congress (all of whom are veterans or former intelligence officials) of sedition, adding that their actions are “punishable by death”.

They are all veterans or former intelligence officials, and he is not. He is a real estate hustler. That’s it, that’s his “profession”. He’s qualified to tell service members to commit war crimes by his decades of experience building casinos and golf resorts.

Good to know.

Julie Bindel talks to an escapee from fanaticism:

In 2003, aged 20, Appel trained as a hairdresser and worked in a salon for a decade. In 2011, he met his husband-to-be, and in 2017 they moved to New York, where he enrolled at Columbia University. Studying non-fiction writing, while campaigning against the incoming Trump administration, he became embedded within the so-called liberationist movement that includes LGBT rights.

In the three-and-a-half years he spent there, Appel saw fellow students becoming indoctrinated with pseudoscientific, anti-Western dogma sold to them as progressiveness. He began to see that what was happening was cult-like and “in many ways worse than Lamb of God”.

Any slight digression from the “trans women are women”, “death to the West” type politics was severely punished, he says. “Intelligent young people bent over backwards to be anti-racist, against imperialism and even embracing Islamic jihadists in the process.”

And embracing the idea that being critical of Islam is equivalent to being racist, or for the less subtle types racism tout court.

Social justice warriordom morphed into the cult of queer, and punishments meted out for failure to adhere to the creed were severe, involving bullying and ostracisation.

He had been indoctrinated in the view that sees white cis men (gays included) as the enemy. For these new puritans, the airing of grievances was the preferred blood sport, and there was an obsession with identifying the oppressor, rather than the victim.

That’s a good point. The sadistic thrill of othering one of their own is the top priority.

In his third year at Columbia, he continued to excel, but mentally he was falling apart. “Suddenly,” Appel says, “I was having these symptoms that were exactly like [the ones I experienced as a teenager].”

He found himself flooded with constant anxiety about being a bad person, misspeaking, misgendering and sinning. “It was so all-consuming,” he says. “People started to call me something called ‘cis’ and it had to do with my gender performativity. It sounds horrible. It sounds like sissy.” Not only that, but it was said “in the same cadence that the middle-school kids called me fag, and with the same hatred and the same vitriol behind it”.

The hatred and vitriol are the point. The cause they’re in aid of is just the launchpad.

Now a full-time writer, and non-aligned politically, Appel says: “You have to keep in mind that arguing with these people is like trying to argue with a biblical literalist, in that they believe that holding certain views makes them a good person and protects them from going to hell.

“Now I can say, there’s no third gamete, men should not be in women’s prisons, children are never in the wrong body, and not all white people are racist. I will be saying this even if they bring back the guillotine, right before the blade falls.”

They don’t need the guillotine. They could just lock you in a cell with a video of India Willoughby talking on a loop forever. This is hell, nor are we out of it.

Could be a war crime.

A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors.

The remarks came in response to a Washington Post report on Friday that said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a verbal order to kill everyone aboard boats suspected of smuggling drugs, and that this led a military commander to carry out a second strike to kill those who had initially survived an attack in early September.

“Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Representative Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio and a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said on CBS that if the report was accurate, the attack “rises to the level of a war crime.” And on CNN, when asked if he believed a second strike to kill survivors constituted a war crime, Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, answered, “It seems to.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the thinking is that once the enemy is disarmed and helpless it’s a war crime to kill said enemy.

I don’t fully understand why that doesn’t apply to dropping bombs on small boats, but anyway.

The United States has built up a military presence in the Caribbean meant to put pressure on Venezuela. Trump administration officials have said that they are trying to deter drug smuggling, and that the boat strikes, which have killed more than 80 people since early September, are part of a purported formal armed conflict with drug cartels. But members of Congress have been voicing concerns over the legal justification being used to conduct them.

Well it certainly sounds weird. What formal armed conflict? The drug cartels have formally declared war?

Democrats have repeatedly criticized the boat strikes as illegal, likening them to extrajudicial killings. Mr. Kelly was part of a group of six lawmakers who made a video this month that reminded troops they were obligated to refuse illegal orders, though it did not mention any specific order.

On Sunday, Mr. Kelly, who is being investigated by the Pentagon for his remarks in the video, said he had “serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over.”

Mkay so I’m not the only one who doubts the drug cartels have declared war on the US.

Still, many Republicans have expressed support for the military operations in Venezuela. On Sunday, Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, a close Trump ally, dismissed The Post’s report and defended the administration.

Mr. Mullin, who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Trump was “protecting the United States by being very proactive.”

Well, that’s one way of putting it. No doubt Lt. Calley would have said it if it had been current jargon at the time.

Headline:

Woman who tried to summon her MP to court is jailed for harassment

Caption under photo:

Tracey Smith used phrases including ‘a person is dangerous when they have nothing to lose’, ‘be warned’, and ‘bullets will be flying around’.

Lede:

A woman who tried to summon her MP to court has been jailed for harassment.

Clear enough?

What comes next:

Tracey Smith, who is a trans woman, sent Solicitor General Ellie Reeves 22 emails and 10 voicemails calling her “transphobic” and accusing her older sister – Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves – of physically assaulting her at a buffet bar.

Smith used phrases including “a person is dangerous when they have nothing to lose”, “be warned”, and “bullets will be flying around”.

Newspapers have no business lying about the sex of a violent threatening man in a news article.

The good news is he was sentenced to 26 weeks in prison.

Nevertheless The Standard calls him “her” and “she” throughout the article.

Another “Here’s a thing for women that’s not for women” boobytrap.

It was as Mara Hafezi watched the first wave of runners line up for Nike’s latest After Dark race aimed at women that she noticed something wasn’t quite right. The 10km event, held last Sunday evening around the Excel centre in east London, had been marketed as an opportunity for women to come together and “reclaim the night” — but among the thousands of female runners in attendance were a handful of men.

“It was really disappointing,” said Hafezi, 35, from London. “The moment you have men involved, whether it’s two or twenty, it’s no longer a women’s-only race. There were people asking, ‘Why are they here?’ I just couldn’t understand it.”

They were there to underline the message yet again that women don’t matter.