Category: Notes and Comment Blog

The BBC takes a detailed look at the Darlington ruling.

Hospital bosses never considered ‘female discrimination’, ruling says

When talking to the nurses, NHS managers did discuss “discrimination”, the tribunal found.

But they only ever referred to it in relation to Rose, they added.

Ah. That’s quite the punchline. It’s only the man who claims to be a woman who suffers discrimination. Women who don’t want him leering at them are the lords of the manor spitting on the peasantry.

Tribunal says ruling shouldn’t detract from transgender vulnerability

In its judgement, the panel said the purpose of the Trust’s Transitioning in the Workplace policy was “to create an environment that gave transgender employees comfort and reassurance that they would be accepted and supported in the workplace”.

“This is an admirable and noble purpose,” the panel said, adding: “All good employers will look to ensure that all its staff are treated with respect. We are only too aware that transgender people are vulnerable to exclusion, abuse, mistreatment, lack of respect and misunderstanding in society. Nothing we say in this judgement should detract from that or be seen as diminishing the values that the Trust espouses in supporting its transgender staff.”

Ok but all that applies to women too you know. It’s not the case that feminism has simply shut all that kind of thing down. Furthermore many men who call themselves trans are themselves very hostile to women. We’ve been documenting this fact for years. The purported vulnerability of trans people [meaning mostly trans women i.e. men] does not cancel the vulnerability of women.

Mmmmmmno.

No, see, because the Jews in question were not being told they were not Jews, they were being genocided for being Jews.

That’s a very big difference.

They didn’t “identify” into being Jewish and they couldn’t “identify” their way out. They couldn’t identify their way out of Auschwitz. They couldn’t identify their way out of the six million.

Sophie Molly’s pretending to be comparable to Jews in the Holocaust is about as disgusting as it gets.

And now for the cringe.

Political leaders in Norway have condemned the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s “absurd” decision to present her Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump, accusing the US president of being a “classic showoff” who takes credit for other people’s work.

Good. It is absurd, of course. That’s not how this works. The whole point of it is recognition of Person X. Giving a physical emblem of the recognition to someone else entirely is dividing zero by zero. It’s like children pretending to be royalty or astronauts or moovee starrz.

Kirsti Bergstø, the leader of Norway’s Socialist Left party and its foreign policy spokesperson, said: “This is, above all, absurd. The peace prize cannot be given away.”

Absurd, pathetic, contemptible, embarrassing, childish, delusional, did I mention pathetic?

Trump’s recent threats to invade Greenland, she said, demonstrated why he was not a worthy recipient. “Trump will no doubt claim that he has now received it, but it cannot be transferred, and Trump’s repeated threats toward Greenland clearly demonstrate why it would have been madness to award him the prize,” Bergstø said.

Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, the leader of the Centre party, said: “Whoever has received the prize has received the prize. The fact that Trump accepted the medal says something about him as a type of person: a classic showoff who wants to adorn himself with other people’s honours and work.”

And a damn fool.

Flatterers!

Hmm.

Ah it’s only the KCs “with an axe to grind” who know that men are not women. What’s the axe? Knowing that men are not women, of course.

Yet another that’s not how it works.

Trump said Friday he may impose tariffs on countries “if they don’t go along with Greenland.”

Tariffs aren’t about forcing other countries to accept one rogue nation’s aggression.

Also wtf is “go along with Greenland” supposed to mean? They are “going along with Greenland”; it’s Trump’s plan to annex Greenland that they’re not going along with, for obvious reasons. Saying “Greenland” when he means “my determination to attack and absorb Greenland” is typical of his mind-blind sloppy way of assuming everyone sees what he sees, even when our refusal to see things the way he sees them is the very thing he’s talking about.

The Trump administration has previously said it is weighing multiple options, including utilizing the U.S. military, in order to take over the Danish territory.

Sir, sir, Denmark is an ally; you’re not supposed to take over territory that belongs to an ally.

Oh good god.

Darlington nurses win

A group of nurses who complained about a trans colleague using single-sex changing rooms at work suffered harassment, an employment tribunal judge has ruled.

The judge found the nurses’ dignity was violated and they encountered “a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment” at work.

The seven female nurses, who work at Darlington Memorial hospital, brought a claim against their employer, County Durham and Darlington NHS foundation trust. It stemmed from their objection to another nurse, Rose Henderson, a trans woman, being allowed to use the women’s changing facilities.

It stemmed from their objection to a man, who calls himself Rose Henderson and claims to be “trans”, being allowed to use their changing facilities.

In a judgment handed down to the parties on Friday, Judge Sweeney said: “The trust subjected the claimants to harassment related to sex and gender reassignment by permitting the claimants’ biological male, trans woman colleague to use the female changing room and requiring the claimants to share that changing room without providing suitable alternative facilities.”

The ruling said the trust also subjected the nurses to harassment by not taking their concerns seriously. “This included referring to the need for the claimants to be educated on trans rights and to broaden their mindsets, the later provision of inadequate and unsuitable changing facilities for those who objected to sharing the female changing room with that colleague.”

Sweeney said: “The above conduct had the effect of violating the dignity of the claimants and creating a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment for them.”

All because they’re women who don’t want a man watching them change their clothes at work.

In a judgment handed down to the parties on Friday, Judge Sweeney said: “The trust subjected the claimants to harassment related to sex and gender reassignment by permitting the claimants’ biological male, trans woman colleague to use the female changing room and requiring the claimants to share that changing room without providing suitable alternative facilities.”

The ruling said the trust also subjected the nurses to harassment by not taking their concerns seriously. “This included referring to the need for the claimants to be educated on trans rights and to broaden their mindsets, the later provision of inadequate and unsuitable changing facilities for those who objected to sharing the female changing room with that colleague.”

Sweeney said: “The above conduct had the effect of violating the dignity of the claimants and creating a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment for them.”

Which is part of the point, isn’t it. It’s part of the fun of being a “trans woman”. It doesn’t work that way for women who claim to be men, but for men who dislike women it’s a gift.

The tribunal also upheld the nurses’ complaint of indirect sex discrimination in that women were more likely than men to experience fear, distress or humiliation if they were required to change in front of a member of the opposite sex.

Exactly so. Good to see someone finally notice.

The Darlington nurses win.

NHS bosses discriminated against a group of female nurses by allowing a trans colleague into their changing room, a tribunal ruled on Friday.

In what the eight nurses’ legal team described as a “landmark judgment”, a specialist employment law judge also said the women were harassed by managers at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, who unlawfully required them to share the female-only facilities with Rose Henderson, who was born a man but identifies as a woman.

It shouldn’t take any kind of specialist to know that.

Judge Seamus Sweeney said that trust managers had “engaged in unwanted conduct”, that the policy had the effect of “violating the dignity” of the nurses and that it created “a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment”.

And all this on behalf of a grotesque, unfair, women-hating dogma that men’s pretend-gender gets to cancel women’s rights to safety, privacy, dignity.

The judge, who was part of a three-strong panel, said the trust had behaved unlawfully “by not taking seriously and declining to address” the nurses’ concerns, which had been raised in 2023 and 2024.

And why did the trust do that?

Don’t look at me for an answer; I’ll never understand it. It’s just a silly greedy whim on the part of men who like to dress up as women, while for women it’s the most basic and necessary right to safety from men in general.

Rallying.

Several European NATO countries are deploying small numbers of military personnel to Greenland to participate in joint exercises with Denmark as US President Donald Trump ramps up his threats to forcibly annex the Arctic island.

Trump’s declarations have thrown Europe’s decades-old, US-led security alliance into crisis, raising the prospect of NATO’s largest and most powerful member annexing the territory of another.

And that another is very far from being NATO’s next largest and most powerful.

Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland’s defense, has warned an attack on Greenland would all but end NATO, and announced on Wednesday that it was expanding its military presence “in close cooperation with NATO allies.”

Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands and Finland have all since confirmed they are sending military personnel to Greenland this week.

Canada and France have also said they plan to open consulates in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, in the coming weeks.

The Magnificent Seven for bureaucrats.

News of European deployments to Greenland came as Danish and Greenlandic officials met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance Wednesday, hours after Trump said on Truth Social “anything less” than US control of Greenland is “unacceptable.”

“NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES,” Trump wrote early Wednesday, arguing US control of Greenland would also benefit NATO.

With Trump at the helm? I think not.

France will open a consulate in Greenland on February 6, a move that has been in the works since last year, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on RTL radio Wednesday, according to Reuters news agency.

Barrot urged the US to stop threatening Greenland, Reuters reported.

“Attacking another NATO member would make no sense, it would even be contrary to the interests of the United States … and so this blackmail must obviously stop,” Barrot said on RTL.

But it won’t. Once Stupid starts a fight, Stupid keeps going.

Oh ffs.

Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, has “presented” Donald Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize as she attempted to woo the US president. 

Sigh. Look. That’s not how this works. The object is not the point. It takes someone pathetically literal-minded and obtuse to think it is. In fact, if you think about it for five seconds, it becomes obvious that being in possession of someone else’s prize is more a disgrace than an honor. It’s like being a toddler whining about not getting any presents at another toddler’s birthday party.

Mr Trump has made no secret of his desire to be awarded the honour, which has been bestowed on several former presidents including Barack Obama.

Yes, he’s made no secret of his infantile greed, in other words he’s made a public fool of himself many times by whining about it.

Ms Machado, whose liberal Vente Venezuela party is widely believed to have won the 2024 election, was given the award for “promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela”.  

Which is not a reason anyone is ever going to cite for giving an award to Donald Trump.

Days earlier the Nobel Institute had ruled against Ms Machado’s previous suggestion of transferring last year’s peace prize to Mr Trump. Earlier in the day the Nobel organisers posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”

Last week, Mr Trump said he could not think of “anybody in history that should get the Nobel Peace Prize more than me”.

Well no shit, he can’t think of anybody in history period.

Trump is spoiling for a fight.

Trump threatened on Thursday to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces in Minnesota after days of angry protests over a surge in immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis.

Confrontations between residents and federal officers have become increasingly tense after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a U.S. citizen, Renee Good, in a car eight days ago in Minneapolis, and the protests have spread to other cities. Trump’s latest threat came a few hours after an immigration officer shot a Venezuelan man the government said was fleeing after agents tried to stop his vehicle in Minneapolis.

Rumor has it that immigration officers aren’t empowered to shoot people who are fleeing. They’re not cops.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT,” Trump wrote on social media. Trump, a Republican, has for weeks derided the state’s Democratic leaders and called the Somali community in the area “garbage” who should be “thrown out” of the country.

That’s interesting, because lots of people think that a guy who calls groups of people “garbage” is himself quite garbage-like.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 is a law allowing the president to deploy the military or federalize soldiers in a state’s National Guard to quell rebellion, an exception to laws that prohibit soldiers being used in civil or criminal law enforcement.

Well this isn’t that. Rebellion is what the Southern states tried to do; this is not that.

If Trump sends soldiers to Minnesota, he would almost certainly face legal challenges by the state. The Minnesota attorney general’s office has already sued the Trump administration this week, saying the ICE surge was violating Minnesotans’ rights, and on Wednesday asked U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez to issue a temporary order restraining it.

Brian Carter, a lawyer for Minnesota, told the judge that Trump’s agents were engaged in a “pattern of unlawful, violent conduct,” including racial profiling and forced entry into residents’ homes without warrants. “They are foisting this crisis onto us,” Carter said.

In a social media post on Thursday morning, Trump said incorrectly that the judge had “declined to block” the ICE surge. In the hearing, Judge Menendez ordered the Trump administration to respond by Monday to Minnesota’s complaints, saying she would rule after that, calling the issues raised by Minnesota’s lawsuit “enormously important.”

Telling the truth is for lesser mortals.

What a bizarre headline:

Trump would want military action in Iran to be swift and decisive, sources say

Oh, so he doesn’t want it to be slow and futile? What a surprise!

Dumb headline aside, the subject is the usual Trump failure to grasp reality.

Trump has told his national security team that he would want any U.S. military action in Iran to deliver a swift and decisive blow to the regime and not spark a sustained war that dragged on for weeks or months, according to a U.S. official, two people familiar with the discussions and a person close to the White House.

Yes, bro, so would anyone, but somehow the other team never gets the message. That’s why there are so few three hour wars in the history books.

“If he does something, he wants it to be definitive,” one of the people familiar with the discussions said.

But Trump’s advisers have so far not been able to guarantee to him that the regime would quickly collapse after an American military strike, the U.S. official and two people familiar with the discussions said, and there is concern that the U.S. may not have all the assets in the region it would need to guard against what administration officials expect would be an aggressive Iranian response.

Have so far not been able to guarantee him – but if you just give them a few more days they’ll be able to say it?

Much as I hate having to agree with Josh Hawley…god almighty “Doctor” Verma is a smug lying evasive enemy of women.

If you say men can get pregnant, no one should ever believe a single thing you say about anything else. Because if you will lie about something so obvious, we can assume you will lie about everything. pic.twitter.com/XXlrevytYh

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) January 15, 2026

Mike Haubrich at Miscellany Room:

Hey, there’s even more alarming fuckery coming from the Trump admin, from the EEOC no less. They are demanding a list of Jews at UPenn.

The Guardian:

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

Daily Kos:

I hope that I don’t sound disrespectful or glib when I suggest that handing over any information about one’s religious identity to this administration almost guarantees that it’s ended up in the wrong hands in the first place, never mind with whom it might share that information without notification or consent. 

Even if the EEOC’s ostensible original motivation for seeking this information is a response to a wave of anti-Semitic protests on campuses following Israel’s invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s 7 October 2023, attack, it gets hard to square that motivation with so many of Trump’s own statements and those of members of his administration, and the statements and actions of so many of his supporters. To put it mildly, their commitment to stamping out antisemitism is mixed, at best. 

Back to the EEOC’s subpoena. It requests, in part, the following:

a list of all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation
groups (hereinafter referred to as “organizations”) related to the Jewish religion, faith,ancestry/National Origin. For each organization listed, produce the followinginformation:

a. Name of organization;
b. Indicate if the organization is run by employees and/or volunteers;
c. Identify the organization Point of Contact by first and last name;
d. Produce the organizations Point of Contact’s contact information to includephone number, email address and mailing address;
e. Produce a roster of organization members. For each member listed, indicate ifthey are a University employee or volunteer;
f. For employees identified on the roster, produce their last known contact information to include personal phone number, email address and mailing address; and,
g. Produce the organization’s website, if applicable.

If EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas is unfamiliar with why Jewish citizens would feel deeply uneasy at the idea of a federal government demanding such an extensive, detailed list of Jewish Americans, she is either (a) unfit to lead an agency known as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, (b) stunningly ignorant of Jewish history, or, dare I say it, (c) both. 

Both. It has to be both.

Well, yes.

Any attempt to “modify” Greenland’s territorial or constitutional status would not only violate international law, but could also “undermine” regional stability, the experts, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, said in a statement Wednesday.

“Assertions suggesting that a territory can be taken, controlled or ‘owned’ by another state in pursuit of perceived national security or economic interests evoke a logic of colonial domination that the international community has long rejected,” the UN experts said on Wednesday.

Of course it does. There’s no other way to describe it. “I want this country, you have to give it to me or else” is colonial domination on stilts.

We’re going backward in time.

Again with the forced-team-labeling.

Men should never have been allowed to be women in law, go into female spaces or compete in female sport. It was an absolute brain fart of an idea, not a civil rights movement. pic.twitter.com/zNlo8gyyA2

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) January 13, 2026

There are no LGBTQ+ rights. There are universal human rights, and then there are lesbian and gay rights. I don’t know of any specific to trans people rights that don’t negate the rights of other people, mostly lesbians. The specific to trans people purported rights are not rights, they’re grabs and intrusions and sulks.

Freedom of the press on the way out?

The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter early Wednesday in what the newspaper called a “highly unusual and aggressive” move by law enforcement, and press freedom groups condemned as a “tremendous intrusion” by the Trump administration.

Agents descended on the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. The Post is “reviewing and monitoring the situation”, a source at the newspaper said.

In other words the Post is not preventing the situation.

The reporter’s home and devices were searched, and her Garmin watch, phone, and two laptop computers, one belonging to her employer, were seized, the newspaper said. It added that agents told Natanson she was not the focus of the probe, and was not accused of any wrongdoing.

…

In a first-person account published last month, Natanson described herself as the Post’s “federal government whisperer”, and said she would receive calls day and night from “federal workers who wanted to tell me how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues or transforming their agency’s missions”.

Pure coincidence. Right?

Press freedom groups were united in their condemnation of the raid on Wednesday.

“Physical searches of reporters’ devices, homes and belongings are some of the most invasive investigative steps law enforcement can take,” Bruce D Brown, president of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement.

“There are specific federal laws and policies at the Department of Justice that are meant to limit searches to the most extreme cases because they endanger confidential sources far beyond just one investigation and impair public interest reporting in general.

“While we won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles until the affidavit is made public, this is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”

That’s what Trump does: he escalates.

Saying “I need ___” is not automatically a valid claim to have a right to that ___.

Trump thinks it is, at least when he says it. If anybody says “I need” about something of his, of course that’s not a valid claim to have a right to it.

 Trump insisted that the United States “needs Greenland” on Wednesday, hours before the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, met with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House.

It doesn’t matter whether or not the US “needs” Greenland. It can’t have it. Trump can’t have it. Nobody can have it. Countries aren’t party favors or ice cream cones or bunches of flowers. They’re not inanimate objects of slight value that people can bestow on each other.

When you’re even losing the prosecutors…

At least six career prosecutors in the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s office — including Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson — have resigned as the office continues to face pressure to treat the investigation of the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE officer as an assault on a federal officer case.

Thompson also previously served as the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota; he was appointed by President Trump in June and served in the position until October. He resigned from the attorney’s office along with Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, Ruth Schneider and Tom Hollenhurst.

Two sources familiar with the matter tell CBS News the resignations stemmed from concern over a request to probe Good’s widow — who was with her when they encountered the ICE agents — as well as the way that the case is being treated as an assault on a federal officer as opposed to a civil rights case. 

Missing from photo: any sign of an assault on a federal officer.

Doug Kelley, a former assistant U.S. attorney for Minnesota, says the move is a major blow to the credibility of the office moving forward.

“I’ve been practicing federal criminal law in this state for 51 years and this is the darkest day in 51 years as far as I can see for the rule of law in Minnesota,” Kelley said. “If they feel the need to resign because of orders they have gotten that will violate their consciences, to me it’s a great statement on their part that this is not tolerable by them.”

In other words, when you start to lose the prosecutors people are going to ask why.

Trump says anything short of grabbing Greenland by force is unacceptable.

The Trump administration is poised for crunch talks with Greenlandic and Danish officials on Wednesday, amid the U.S. president’s ongoing push to take control of Greenland.

Greenland Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt and her Danish counterpart, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, are expected to convene at the White House for talks with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump doubled down on his aggressive rhetoric shortly before the high-stakes meeting. In a social media post on Wednesday, the U.S. president said anything less than Greenland becoming a part of the United States would be “unacceptable.”

So this is the new rule now, yes? We say it’s unacceptable for X to hang onto X’s Whatever because we want it so X has to give it to us?

Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, said he does not expect the U.S., Greenland, and Denmark to be able to find a diplomatic solution on Wednesday, describing the situation as “a profound crisis.”

“I think there was a significant change, I think it was yesterday, when it was announced in Washington that JD Vance, the vice president, was going to take over the meeting,” Bildt told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Wednesday. “It was scheduled to be with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has indicated a slightly milder approach, but JD Vance has, of course, been directly insulting towards Denmark and demanding very strange things,” Bildt said.

It’s all very Sudetenland.