Gannett refuses to publish Doonesbury.

NPR chatted with Masha Gessen about comparing Gaza to Nazi ghettoes back in December.

Prominent Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen received a prestigious award for political thought over the weekend, in a ceremony that almost didn’t happen due to backlash over their recent writings on Israel-Gaza.

Israel’s air-and-ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 20,000 people in the 10 weeks since the Hamas-led attack on Israel killed some 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage.

Why did Israel commit this air-and-ground assault on Gaza? Because that’s where Hamas is. It didn’t do it as part of a broader campaign to kill all Muslims or all Arabs. It can still be a war crime, but comparable to Hitler’s genocide it is not.

Gessen, who is Jewish and whose family lost loved ones in the Holocaust, has been criticized for a New Yorker essay published earlier this month in which they likened the Gaza Strip to the WWII-era ghettos that Nazis developed to segregate and control Jewish people in occupied Europe.

Gessen of course is also the damn fool who blew up her own reputation for serious journalism by “coming out” as a they/them.

Gessen notes there are key differences between the two: The Nazi claim that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from disease “had no basis in reality,” while Israel’s stance that the isolation of Gaza is necessary to protect against Palestinian terrorist attacks “stems from actual and repeated acts of violence.”

“Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate — and now, mortally endanger — an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own,” they contend.

Well, that’s misleading, because “entire population” refers to very different things there. The entire population of Gaza is a tiny fraction of the entire population of European Jews circa 1940. Also, “in the name of protecting its own” has very different meanings in Gaza today versus all of Europe circa 1940.

LF: And you also make a comparison that caused backlash, saying Gaza right now is like a Nazi era Jewish ghetto and that right now the ghetto is being liquidated. But you must have known writing it would get this type of backlash. Why did you make that comparison?

MG: Well, the comparison is very much the centerpiece of the article. And I think that we have a moral and one could also argue, legal obligation to compare the Holocaust and the atrocities committed during the Second World War to the present. If we take the promise of never again, seriously, we once again have to constantly be asking ourselves, are we laying the foundations for the mass murder of millions of people? Are we employing or is part of the world employing the same kinds of tactics that were employed by the Nazis? I think there’s every reason to say that that is exactly what’s happening.

You know, the Nazis weren’t the last occasion of mass murder of large numbers of people. Remember the Balkans? Remember Rwanda? The Rohingya? Uighurs? Cambodia? Partition? We keep doing this. Bad analogies don’t help anything.

The Times of Israel in December:

The Russian-American writer Masha Gessen received a German literary prize Saturday in a ceremony that was delayed and scaled down in reaction to an article she penned comparing Gaza to Nazi German ghettos. The comparison in a recent New Yorker article was viewed as controversial in Germany, where government authorities strongly support Israel, in part as a form of compensation for the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews.

Gessen, who was born Jewish in the Soviet Union, is critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

One can be critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians without claiming it’s comparable to the Holocaust.

In Gessen’s article, titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” the author explores German Holocaust memory, arguing that Germany today stifles free and open debate on Israel. Gessen also is critical of Israel’s relationship with Palestinians, writing that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

Apart from the very significant differences.

The Böll Foundation, affiliated with Germany’s Green party, called the comparison made by the author between Israel and Nazi Germany “unacceptable.” A jury decided in the summer to award Gessen, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the foundation said it wasn’t canceling the award itself.

Gessen was originally due to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought on Friday in the city hall of Bremen, in northwest Germany, but the sponsoring organization, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Senate of the city of Bremen withdrew from the ceremony.

It took place instead in a different location Saturday with about 50 guests crowded into a small event room and with police security, the German news agency dpa reported.

The slaughter of civilians in Gaza is horrible. It’s also not comparable to the Holocaust. The differences should be too glaring to ignore.

Parental advice-giver found guilty of horrific child abuse. Of course.

Ruby Franke, a mother of six who gave online parenting advice via a popular YouTube channel, was sentenced to four prison terms of between one and 15 years each, on aggravated child abuse charges on Tuesday.

Franke, 42, who had 2.3 million followers on her now-deleted 8 Passengers video channel, was arrested in the southern Utah city of Ivins last August after her malnourished 12-year-old son, with open wounds and bound with duct tape, climbed out of a window at the home of Jodi Hildebrandt, owner of a self-improvement counseling business, to ask for food and water from a neighbor.

So her parenting advice is to hand your children over to a sadist to be starved stabbed and duct taped?

I’d love to know all about Hildebrandt’s wisdom on self-improvement.

One of Franke’s daughters was later found in a similar malnourished condition in Hildebrandt’s home…

Franke and Hildebrandt, who collaborated on parenting and relationship advice videos posted on Hildebrandt’s life coaching service ConneXions, pleaded guilty to second-degree aggravated child abuse in December. Hildebrandt was also sentenced to to the same prison terms as Franke on Tuesday.

Life coaching! Please, share the life coaching! We all need to improve.

In Solicitors Behaving Badly news…

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) yesterday upheld allegations that a solicitor published antisemitic and offensive posts on social media and also abused Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) staff.

The conduct of Farrukh Najeeb Husain was reported to the regulator by leading law firm Bevan Brittan, where he was working as a self-employed consultant to deliver on a particular client mandate in spring 2021. Some of the key tweets were directed at Simon Myerson KC, a Jewish barrister, and Hugo Rifkind, a Jewish journalist at The Times.

And they are eye-watering.

In its rule 12 statement – setting out its case to the tribunal – the SRA alleged that, as well as being “plainly inappropriate, offensive, pejorative, puerile and derogatory”, some of the tweets aimed at Mr Myerson could be considered to be antisemitic as well. Mr Husain frequently used the word ‘Zionist’ as a synonym or substitute for ‘Jew’, it said, while he used words used by the Nazis, such as ‘Untermensch’ and ‘Lebensraum’.

“The use of these terms associated with Nazism would have upsetting associations for Jews (not just Zionists) and were of course terms or principles/policies used towards Jews (not just Zionists) by the Nazis when perpetrating the Holocaust,” the SRA said. “If the respondent was seeking to make a comparison to seek to demonstrate that Israel was treating Palestinians in the same way that the Nazis had historically treated Jews, it is reasonable to infer that the use of comparisons so closely associated with historic antisemitic violence was deliberate in order to offend the recipients (including Mr Myerson KC) not only as Zionists (as claimed to be by the respondent) but also as Jews.”

Especially given the absence of trains taking Palestinians to extermination camps.

Among the comments aimed at Mr Rifkind were that he was “a Zionist pig supporting theft of Palestine for his Eastern European kin” with other tweets referring to Israel as “ShitRael” and asking if he was “just mentally retarded as a racist?”

That’s why I say breathtaking.

The CAA said that, during cross-examination, Mr Husain described Mr Myerson as “a fascist” and also attacked Mr Silverman. The SRA accused Mr Husain of publishing tweets on other subjects that made “offensive or pejorative comments relating to others’ race and religion, making sexually explicit comments, using language intended to shock”.

Further, Mr Husain sent the SRA’s investigating officer “offensive emails when he was displeased with the course of the SRA’s investigation”, such as one saying: “You are a Zionist apologist and fascist like ur organisation – look forward to the McCarthyite show trial.” He suggested that the officer was “a Sikh Punjabi” who was “angry about comments made on twitter by me about the Sikh national hero Ranjit Singh as a rapist of Muslim women”.

Lordeee. It sounds as if he’s out of work; maybe he can get Trump to hire him as a speechwriter.

Trump finally mentions Navalny, but…..

Well, you know. Not the normal way.

Seventy-two hours following the death of Alexei Navalny, Donald Trump made his first comments on the death of the Russian opposition leader Monday but stopped short of condemning anyone or offering sympathy.

Instead, the former president related his own legal woes to the death of Navalny, who died in prison on Friday at the age of 47. Trump on Friday was ordered to pay a $354.8 million penalty payment as part of civil fraud trial decision.

Apart from the callous self-serving, there’s the fact that Trump isn’t 47, Trump really is a criminal and a bad person, Trump isn’t dead.

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

He might as well have said “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of” ice cream or baseball or mosquitos or Rembrandt. He wasn’t thinking about Navalny at all.

Steve Scott’s interview with “Emily” Bridges wasn’t his first rodeo. He was pouring on the sympathy and flattery all the way back in June 2022.

Online abuse has become a way of life for Emily Bridges: “It is very difficult to read everything people are saying about you, and it hurts, it hurts.”

Maybe – and this is just a suggestion – if you weren’t cheating women in their own sport people wouldn’t be saying things about you that you find “difficult.” Maybe the people wouldn’t be hurty if you weren’t so cheaty.

Bridges has become one of the most talked about athletes in Britain and the discussions about her are seldom nuanced. She sits at the centre of a polarising issue that sport in general is struggling to reconcile.

Why do the discussions about him – HIM, not her – have to be nuanced? His cheating isn’t nuanced.

He makes an odd admission toward the end of the piece.

For Bridges, though, how much of it is about medals and winning, compared to inclusion?

“The whole appeal of cycling as a sport for me, and sport in general, is about the struggle.

“I want to fight to get the best out of myself, to get the best performance that I can do. It’s not about the winning for me. Obviously, I like winning, I want to win, but it’s secondary to being allowed to compete – being given the opportunity to get the most out of myself, on an equal playing field, against people who have an equal performance to me.”

If that’s true, he should still be competing against men.

Man disagrees with woman by saying he doesn’t consider her sexually appetizing. How very original.

There’s also video.

Bridges at 0.30 says “if it was safe for me to compete” but doesn’t go on to explain how it’s not safe for him to compete. Of course it’s safe for him to compete against other men, apart from the risks all competitive cyclists take on. The claim that it’s unsafe for him in particular is just more of the maddening reversal all male trans “activists” go in for – pretending they’re vulnerable, they’re at risk, they’re unsafe, they might face physical violence.

Then he says “I can’t compete” and Scott says, rather unsympathetically, “But you can compete in an open category.” This flummoxes the lad a bit. He pauses, then asks with a girlish tilt of the head, “Can I?” Flirtatious pause, then “Would it be safe for me to compete in an open category”? Then there’s a jump cut, so we don’t know how Scott replied. Why would it be unsafe for the oily manipulative sly Bridges to compete in an open category? Is he suggesting an angry woman would violently attack him? And win the fight?

Then he says it’s not fair to make a trans woman compete in the open category, “and it’s not safe, either.” He doesn’t explain why. He of course never explains why he thinks it is fair to let men compete in the women’s category.

Scott asks him if in elite sport fairness is non-negotiable. Bridges, slightly flustered, claims he understands why fairness is important. Scott asks him if he thinks his human rights have been violated and Bridges says “Yeah, I think they have.” No follow-up. Violated how? What human right is there for a man to pretend to be a woman and compete in women’s sports? What is the wording?

Bridges says it’s part of a bigger picture of “banning trans people from public life.” By that of course he means not letting men invade women’s toilets and the like.

To finish up we get a clip of brave “Emily” riding down an empty road among t’moors and an assurance that he will continue his heroic struggle. Of course he will.

Not only does Steve Scott at ITV News write a fawning piece about “Emily” Bridges and his tragic failure to continue cheating women in cycling races, but also ITV News turns off comments on the Twitter link to said piece.

ITV News doesn’t turn off comments lightly…in fact it apparently never does except when the subject is an entitled man trying to cheat women in sports.

Yes why is that? Why is that??

Oh good, more whining from a man about not being able to compete in women’s sports.

Emily Bridges once dreamt of racing for Olympic glory in Paris this summer. But after British Cycling barred transgender women [aka MEN] from competing in the female category last year, she has all but given up on elite sport.

Diddums. After British Cycling barred men who pretend to be women from competing in the female category, Bridges gave up. That’s good news.

Bridges said the policy amounts to a ban from elite cycling.  

“A ban is a ban. You can say you can compete in the open category, but we’re women – we should be able to race in the women’s category,” she said.

They’re not women. They’re men who try to look like women, which doesn’t make them women. I could try to look like a dolphin, but it wouldn’t make me a dolphin.

British Cycling had given her the option to compete in the ‘open’ category alongside other transgender women, transgender men, and athletes born biologically male. But Bridges said she would not feel safe competing alongside men and does not like transgender women having to ‘out’ themselves to compete in the category.

Diddums. Again. Journalists should stop taking this entitled whining seriously. They should also stop calling men “she” and “her” – it just further entrenches the tedious destructive lie.

Beyond sport, Bridges is unequivocal about the impact about the wider impact excluding transgender athletes is having. She believes calls to restrict the participation of transgender athletes reinforces the idea that trans women are not women and that they are a threat.

It’s not “an idea”; it’s the reality.

Don’t mention the War.

For quite a while now, it has felt a bit like mainstream feminism has been dialled back 10 years. It’s not just the over-the-top obsession with the Barbie movie – there seems to have been a more generalized dumbing-down in the media when it comes to women’s issues. In 2021 and 2022, it felt like intersectional feminism was everywhere and nuanced discussions about how gender intersects with other forms of oppression, such as classism and racism, had moved from academic circles into the mainstream. It felt like there was a huge push – to paraphrase Rafia Zakaria, the author of Against White Feminism – to “put the fangs back in feminism”. Now, however, mainstream feminism seems to have lost its fangs and put on some sparkly lipstick instead.

Really? In 2021 and 2022? There was a huge push to put the fangs back in feminism? Along with the huge push to put the men back in feminism, which kind of nullified the fangs.

While liberal feminism (which is also often termed white feminism or corporate feminism or lean-in feminism) did fall out of favour for a bit, it feels like it’s trying very hard to make a comeback.

…

Beyond the trending headlines, substantive work is happening. Things are moving forward. “There are so many different types of feminism and gender-conscious activism that operate well outside mainstream media narratives … and social media trends,” Koa Beck, the author of White Feminism, told me over email. “I don’t advise looking to white feminism to articulate, support, or celebrate these stories in a substantive way.”

Do you advise looking to male feminism to do so?

Perhaps the ultimate takeaway from this is that, in the end, everything is cyclical. There is progress, then there is pushback. “White feminism is a concept, a story, a brand, and an ideology that many powerful entities have invested in, both literally and figuratively,” Beck says. “So there are going to be efforts by influential people, powerful companies, and profitable institutions to ‘get back’ to white feminist ideals of individualization, self-empowerment (in the trademark sense of the word), and lots and lots of spending. Like with all big change, there is cultural and political resistance. You can set your watch by it.”

The end. It’s quite a long piece yet it says not one word about the way trans ideology and bullying have undermined feminism and replaced feminist women with misogynist men.

Just imagine: a lesbian is planning a lesbian club and she’s not including men. So eccentric.

A feminist campaigner is to open Britain’s first lesbian members bar that will only allow biological women to join.

Well duh. It’s a lesbian members bar, so obviously it’s not for men.

(The men can always try the Garrick.)

The bar, named the L Community, is due to open in London later this year and will operate as a private members club so that it can bar trans women from signing up.

The bar has been set up by Jenny Watson, who in September last year was at the centre of a transphobia row after she insisted only “adult human females” could attend the lesbian speed-dating events she had organised, and urged men to stay away.

Women must never ever ever say no to men.

The bar will continue to provide speed-dating sessions, as well as open mic shows, live music performances and a book club. Ms Watson rejected the suggestion that her bar policy was transphobic and said she was instead trying to create a women-only space.

But women are subversive, so if there are no men present, they might bring all of society down. It’s a risk.

The Daily Mail is surprisingly restrained on the subject of male breast milk.

[A]n NHS Trust says drug-induced milk from transgender women who were born male is as good for babies as a mother’s breast milk. A leaked letter from the medical director of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, published this week, describes both as ‘human milk’ and says that they are the ‘ideal food for infants’. The letter was sent on behalf of the Trust’s chief executive in response to a campaign group’s complaint about gender policies.

So what’s the truth? Can a biological male really breastfeed a baby by producing milk from their nipples? The complex answer is yes and no. By using a regimen known as the Newman-Goldfarb protocol, originally developed in 2000 for adoptive mothers, the body can be tricked into lactating even if it’s male.

It works by mimicking the hormonal changes that take place naturally in the body of a woman who has just given birth, and involves several weeks of regularly using a pump to stimulate the breast, taking a combination of contraceptive hormones and the anti-nausea drug domperidone, which increases levels of the milk-producing hormone prolactin.

But if that sounds simple, it really isn’t. For a start, domperidone is banned in the US over concerns it causes heart problems. The NHS sometimes offers it to breastfeeding women who are struggling with low milk supply, as long as neither mother nor baby has any heart issues, and with clear instructions to report any changes in the baby’s behaviour. It should be used, says guidance, only ‘for a short time’.

That’s a lot of stipulations. Sometimes; struggling; as long as; clear instructions; only for a short time. That would at the very least indicate that doing it for the sake of a man’s vanity project or worse is beneath contempt.

What’s more, it’s not at all clear what else is in a trans woman’s ‘milk’. Since trans women are likely to be taking other prescription drugs as part of their transition, such as anti-androgens to lower their production of testosterone, and oestrogen and progesterone to help them create a less ‘masculine’ appearance, critics say the milk is potentially unsafe for a newborn, or at the very least should be rigorously tested.

Feminists mutter darkly about yet more double standards from the medical establishment — women, after all, are told to avoid aspirin while breastfeeding and to abstain even from the odd glass of wine because no one knows how much gets through to the milk.

But when a man wants to experiment it’s all hey live your best life bro.

Some scientists seem positive. A paper in The Journal of Human Lactation earlier this year stated that: ‘For transgender women . . . on oestrogen-based, gender-affirming hormone therapy, the ability to nourish their infants through production of their own milk may be a profoundly gender-affirming experience.’

What many experts say in private, however, seems utterly uncontroversial to most of us — that female breast milk is a miraculous biological substance with properties the male equivalent can’t replicate.

Breast milk, after all, is a ‘live’ substance, which adapts to a baby’s needs with remarkable precision. Many of us will know about colostrum, the ‘liquid gold’ that is produced in the earliest days of breastfeeding. It’s packed with antibodies, antioxidants, vitamins and nutrients in much higher quantities than in breast milk. Colostrum production has never been observed in males.

Blah blah blah. You’d think it was all about the babies.

It’s not always easy for new mothers to breastfeed, of course. Yet help from the NHS and independent organisations is already stretched thin, and many professionals tell me they are baffled and infuriated by resources being spent on promoting the idea of males trying to lactate when so many women are struggling to find adequate support. The pro-breastfeeding group La Leche League, for example, devotes lengthy space on its website to the issue.

‘About 85 per cent of mothers start breastfeeding in the UK, but that drops by about 50 per cent in the first six weeks, with as many as nine out of ten saying they didn’t want to stop but couldn’t find the help,’ one woman, who did not want to be named but who is involved in breastfeeding education, told me.

Kvetch kvetch kvetch. How are the men doing?

The BBC hits a new low.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on We’re the violent actors?

We’re not the ones shouting threats and posting images of guns and knives.

Pffft. That’s just a) passionate rhetoric; b) completely justified self defence; c) “just joking” or “ironic”; in other words, good, clean, healthy fun; d) taken out of context. Choose whichever one is most expedient to the particular threatener.

Canada’s intelligence agency is warning that extremists could “inspire and encourage” serious violence against the 2SLGBTQI+ community

I daresay that those of us posting here on B&W would all be branded as “extremists” in light of the inflated threat vocabulary of transactivists. If misgendering is “violence,” questioning gender identity is “denying their right to exist,” and opposition and resistance to their demands is plotting “trans genocide,” then we are all guilty. Use our words against us; it’s all here. Low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking. Just a few pseudonyms to fugure out and you’re done. Take us away.

We’re as “guilty” of these things as feminist philosophical critiques of gender ideology are implicated in the murder (by men) of Brazillian trans-identified sex workers. There’s an undeniable, inevitable, straight-line connection between essays defending women’s rights and spaces and the brutal slaughter of thousands upon thousands of trans identified males happening around us every day, year in, year out. Just look around; trans folk are being banned from sports; they’re denied any and all medical care; they’re thrown out of their jobs and homes. They’re being rounded up as we speak, carted off to camps, never to be heard from again. It’s JUST LIKE THE JEWS IN NAZI GERMANY (oops, Jews are the bad guys now, right?) Why isn’t CSIS investigating all of that?

A former University of Waterloo student accused of attacking a gender-studies class with a knife last summer — sending an associate professor and two students to hospital — now faces 11 terrorism charges.

I wonder; in the current climate of captured government agencies, would an attack on a feminist gathering by a knife-wielding trans activist result in terrororism charges? Or would it be passed off as a “lone wolf” attack that could be blamed on the feminists themselves?

There is no “ecosystem of violent rhetoric within the anti-gender movement.”

But Ophelia, denial that such a thing exists is tantamount to admiting that it does.

There must such an ecosystem, or CSIS wouldn’t be interested in it. It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy, the resources being squandered by earmarked for will bear fruit of some kind, however vapourous and insubstantial. If a society believes in witchcraft, witches will be found. If not found, they will be created.

CSIS might declare victory by claiming to have “prevented” any number of attacks. They will be tied to the “transphobic dogwhistles” of the mildest sorts of criticism or questioning, because even the mildest criticism, the simplest presentation of the truth of the immutible human sex binary is an unorgiveable “incitement” that cannot be allowed to stand. Such shocking ideas are branded as right-wing bigotry by transactivists in an attempt to shut down debate and intimidate any who would speak such heresy. CSIS is now part of the Inquisition; if they are blind to the rhetorical asymmetry between transactivists and those women who dare say “No” to their demands, then they have joined the side of the genderists and will act on their suggestions. In fact , through this announcement, they already are.

Never mind the steady pushes against women’s rights from transactivists (Ogre even got a fucking medal for pretty much just that), never mind the men put into women’s prisons, the smearing of “watchful waiting” as “conversion therapy.” If “our side” was doing all of this to the “other side,” then CSIS might have something to investigate. But that’s not happening, and those examples of trans incursion on women’s rights are all state sanctioned actions. Perhaps CSIS is being put on the case precisely because of this resistance to what is essentially government policy. Would they have gone casting around on their own to find this as a subject of investigation, or were they pointed in that direction by their political masters? Are there no more important dangers and threats to the country that their time and effort could be more usefully deployed? Would they have made this sort of pre-emptive well-poisoning public announcement without permission? I have my doubts.

And if there is anti-trans violence, it won’t be because of the feminist critique of trans “rights.” Violent right wing extremists have their own agendas, and just because they agree with us that the sky is blue and water is wet, that doesn’t make us complicit with or the inspiration of whatever actions they take. We’re not telling anyone to “Punch transwomen in the fucking mouth.” You can’t even read it between the lines. They’re the ones demonizing fair, principled opposition to their demands, refusing open and honest debate. They’re the ones who hound people out of their jobs for refusing to aquiesce to trans orthodoxy. And now they’re the ones wielding the power of the state intelligence security aparatus. Welcome to Lysenkoism 2.0, the Trans Edition.

Maybe I’m awfulizing for no good reason, exhibiting an unreasonable combination of political hypochondria and histrionics. Indeed, putting all this out there makes me sound like I’ve become some kind of raving, right-wing conspiracy nut, even to myself. But I’ve stood still while much of the Left (of which I have counted myself among) has jumped of a fucking cliff, leaving me politically homeless. I would only ever vote Conservative if all the other alternatives were even farther to the right than they are, but all of the parties I normally support have surrendered to trans dogma. The lunatics haven’t taken over the asylum yet, but they’re being asked to advise on policy; delusional fantasies are accepted as Gospel truth, and sanity is being viewed with increasing suspicion and distrust.

I fear, at some point, I will be left muttering beneath my breath, “Eppur si muove.”

Wait what? Tranz kidz aren’t at greater risk of suicide if they don’t wreck their bodies? But we were assured they are!

A new study challenges the common assertion that gender-dysphoric youth are at elevated risk of suicide if not treated with “gender affirming” medical interventions. If it’s true, it ought to have a seismic impact on the accepted medical approach to gender-confused youth.

Reported in the BMJ, the study examines data on a Finnish cohort of gender-referred adolescents between 1996 and 2019, and compares their rates of all-cause and suicide mortality against a control group. While suicide rates in the gender-referred group studied were higher than in the control group, the difference was not large: 0.3% versus 0.1%. And — importantly — this difference disappeared when the two groups were controlled for mental health issues severe enough to require specialist psychiatric help.

In other words, if I understand correctly, some adolescents who are gender dysphoric may have other mental health issues that nudge them into suicide.

In other words: while transgender identity does seem to be associated with elevated suicide risk, the link is not very strong. What’s more, the causality may not work the way activists claim.

As in, not “lack of gender fiddling–>elevated suicide risk” but “mental health issues–>gender dysphoria and elevated suicide risk.”

The association between gender dysphoria and mental illness is well-documented by both providers of “gender-affirming care” and trans advocacy groups and clinical psychology research. But one less well-evidenced claim, based on this association, is that these difficulties are caused not by being transgender, but by the political and social stigma associated with it. Gender dysphoria, we are to understand, is not in itself a mental health issue. What causes mental health issues in transgender youth — up to and including suicide — is the wider world’s rejection of their identity, and of the metaphysical frame of “gender identity” as such.

Which looks like not so much a medical or mental health explanation as a tactic. “Give me what I want or I’ll kill myself,” to put it concisely.

But if the Finnish study is correct, this whole rhetorical, legislative, and medical edifice may be built on sand. If the elevated risk of suicidality in trans youth disappears when you control for other psychiatric difficulties, this suggests strongly that trans youth are not more at risk due to transphobia or invalidation, but due to the well-documented fact that gender dysphoria tends to occur in people who are disturbed and unhappy more generally.

Horse and cart as opposed to cart and horse.

Every bit as good for babies, they say.

An NHS trust has said that breast milk produced by trans women who were assigned male at birth [i.e. men] is as good for babies as that produced by a mother who has given birth.

In a letter to campaigners, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust (USHT), said that the milk produced by trans women after taking a combination of drugs is “comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby”.

“Comparable” is a weasel-word there. Sure, you can compare the two, but they’re not the same, or alike.

In an August 2023 response, the hospital defended its claims, referring to five scientific papers dating back to 1977 and pointing to World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance and “overwhelming evidence” that “human milk” is better for a baby than formula milk.

Well yes, “human milk” meaning the milk mothers produce. Not meaning the liquid men can produce after they take a cocktail of hormones and progestin.

For a person born male to breastfeed, they must develop milk-producing glands by taking the hormone progestin.

A drug is required to lactate, such as domperidone, which is often prescribed to women struggling to breastfeed, and helps to stimulate the production of prolactin – a separate hormone that tells the body to produce milk.

Domperidone, also known by the brand name Motilum, was not intended for this, but is prescribed off-label by doctors, despite the manufacturer, Janssen, itself recommending against it because of possible side effects to a baby’s heart.

Oh, well, just the heart, so that’s no big deal.

The patient leaflet for Motilium says: “Small amounts have been detected in breastmilk. Motilium may cause unwanted side effects affecting the heart in a breastfed baby. [It] should be used during breastfeeding only if your physician considers this clearly necessary.”

Is it “clearly necessary” for men to be able to produce nipple goo to feed to babies?

Lottie Moore, of the Policy Exchange, which uncovered the letter, said the trust “is unbalanced and naïve in its assertion that the secretions produced by a male on hormones can nourish an infant in the way a mother’s breast milk can”.

USHT has removed the webpage where the guidance was published, but now links to an external website, La Leche League, which states it “supports everyone who wants to breastfeed or chestfeed in reaching their goals”.

Even if they’re men, and even if the men “reaching their goals” is bad for the baby’s nutrition and health. Rock on, daddies!

Oh yay, yet another piece on how self-obsessed it’s possible to be.

I’m non-binary. I came to terms with this recently, after living socially as a woman for many years — but I think I knew from a very young age. I just didn’t have the right words for it.

Are you really???? How fascinating and exciting! Please tell us everything about it in the utmost detail.

Then puberty hit and assigned me with the very special task of looking after two giant sacks of flesh, fat and membrane.

In every play I performed in after that point, I was only ever cast as matronly old women or busty temptresses. It sucked.

Well now that’s a different story. The article is accompanied by a photo, and she does indeed have very big breasts. I would have hated that too, but it wouldn’t have been because I was “non-binary.”

Nowadays, I use they/them pronouns, and I try to let people know that upfront — but a funny thing tends to happen when people look at me. You see, their eyes always trend downwards, scoping out what you might call the ‘traditionally feminine’ body I live in. You might also call it my ‘massive boobs’. When this elevator-eye assessment is complete, I like to think that a little switch flips over in the cis person’s brain to a ‘SHE/HER’ setting. When this switch is flipped, it takes a gargantuan effort to reset it to neutral.

No, see, it’s the other way around. Your breasts don’t determine your personality, your interests, your character. You can’t be “neutral” because that’s not a thing, but you can be a woman with massive boobs who flouts the silly rules about how women are supposed to look and act. You can do that without expecting other people to pretend you’re neither woman nor man. It’s actually a lot less trouble in the end.

Well that’s me convinced!

Top quality advocacy for sure.