The NHS is getting busy with the erasers.

Official NHS advice about ovarian, [uterine] and cervix cancers have quietly removed the word ‘women’ from their webpages, MailOnline can reveal. 

…

The original version of the ovarian NHS cancer page featured the line: ‘Ovarian cancer, or cancer of the ovaries, is one of the most common types of cancer in women.’

It also highlights the women who may be particularly at risk, saying: ‘Ovarian cancer mainly affects women who have been through the menopause (usually over the age of 50), but it can sometimes affect younger women.’

However, in an update sneaked out in January — which campaigners only uncovered this week — both lines were removed. Instead, another line was added: ‘Anyone with ovaries can get ovarian cancer, but it mostly affects those over 50.’

“With ovaries” is the new “woman.” Will it be contracted to wovaries?

…the NHS has defended the update, stating it seeks to make the pages ‘as helpful as possible to everyone who needs them’. 

No, that’s not true. The way to do that is to be as explicit as possible. Omitting the fact that it’s women (and only women) who get ovarian or uterine or cervical cancer is not explicit, it’s the opposite of explicit.

Similar changes have also been made to the NHS’s womb cancer page, which used to open with: ‘Cancer of the womb (uterine or endometrial cancer) is a common cancer that affects the female reproductive system. It’s more common in women who have been through the menopause.’ But the page was changed in October last year to omit these lines, with no other mention of women on the main page. 

…

Professor Jenny Gamble, a midwifery expert from Coventry University, told MailOnline the change in language risked women missing out on health information.

‘The trend to avoid using the terms woman and women is unhelpful,’ she said. ‘It is a well-established principle of communication that the sex of individuals should be made visible when relevant and should not be made visible when not. This ensures that sex-related needs and issues are not overlooked.’

Yes but what about validation? What about validating everyone’s magic gender? Focus.

The gender playfuls get extra paid time off so haha suckers!

Coles supermarket has announced that team members undergoing gender affirmation will now be entitled to up to 10 days paid gender affirmation leave.

Gender affirmation? Is that what we’re calling it now? It’s not transition any more? No, of course not, it wouldn’t be, would it, because that would imply change, when the gender is eternal. But why does one need time off for affirmation of what one already is? Can everyone get affirmation? So everyone gets 10 days off with pay, i.e. an extra two week vacation?

The retail giant said the policy change was an important step in its commitment to champion inclusion in the workplace.

Inclusion of what?

Why does “inclusion” always mean gender-special people and not, say, women?

“We know that we have at least 900 team members who identify as transgender or gender diverse,” Coles Chief Legal and Safety Officer and chair of the Coles Pride Steering Committee David Brewster said.

And they’re all desperately in need of two weeks off? More in need than all the other “team members” aka workers?

“We need to have proper policy and education in this area so there is clear guidance around taking leave for this important transition in their life.”

Transition? What happened to affirmation?

You’re Not Helping.

Aimee Arrambide works for an abortion advocacy group. She’s not helping.

H/t The Dude Diogenes.

Another man gets historic win in women’s sport!!! Rejoice!!

West Australian longboarder Sasha Jane Lowerson, the first transgender woman to compete in surfing, has claimed a historic victory in the West Coast Suspensions Longboard and Logger State Championships on the weekend.

It’s so historic. Because he’s a man, see, and he did better than the women, on account of how he’s bigger and has broader shoulders and all that useful stuff.

The 43-year-old, who was crowned the men’s champion three years earlier, won both the Open Women’s and Open Logger divisions on her home beach at Avalon, putting together a dominant performance in the left hand waves.

Dominant is right.

“To be the first transgender woman competing in surfing hasn’t been an easy ride emotionally, but the amount of support I’ve been showed has been phenomenal and I’m so grateful to be involved, welcomed and embraced within the longboard community in Australia,” Lowerson said, as reported by The Australian.

So sad that it hasn’t been an easy ride emotionally. Really really sad. I bet it hasn’t been an easy ride for the women either, though. Not easy at all. Quite difficult and stressful, the way rank injustice and insult always is.

Aw, sexy.

Ireland’s largest escort website offered men the opportunity to live out their “war-inspired fantasies” with Ukrainian women, a webinar has heard on Thursday.

By “escort website” they must mean “female human to fuck website.” I don’t think it has a whole lot to do with anyone “escorting” anyone. Anyway, how adorable, that men fantasize about fucking Ukrainian women along with…what, committing war crimes against them? Blowing up their children and then fucking them? Torturing them while fucking them? Hawt.

Escorts Ireland reported a 250 per cent increase in interest for Ukrainian women, Valiant Richey from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said.

That’s the ticket. When people are losing everything they love that’s the time to move in for the sexy fun times.

Mr Richey, a former US prosecutor, told the webinar organised by the Beyond Exploitation that war could be exploited by human traffickers, and Europe had already seen a rise in online searches relating to buying sex from Ukrainian women.

He said it’s up 600 percent in some places. Aren’t humans amazing.

A recent operation in Sweden proved this trend is translating into real life, Mr Richey said. Out of 38 buyers who were arrested, 30 of them were attempting to access Ukrainian women specifically.

Because they’ve lost everything, been terrorized, made homeless, seen their children killed – what better time to fuck them for a little cash?

Statistics Canada tells us:

Below you will find the proposed statistical standards for three variables: gender of person, sexual orientation of person and LGBTQ2+ status of person. These include classifications for the main components of sexual orientation – sexual identity, sexual attraction, and sexual behaviour, which can be measured separately.

Yay, clarity at last.

Gender refers to a person’s social or personal identity as a man, woman or non-binary person (a person who is not exclusively male or female). Conceptions of gender are influenced by several factors, including biological characteristics, cultural and behavioural norms, and self-identity.

Um. There are persons who are not exclusively male or female? According to Statistics Canada?

I guess not Yay clarity after all.

Gender includes the concepts of:

gender identity (felt gender), which is the gender that a person feels internally

gender expression (lived gender), which is the gender a person expresses publicly in their daily life, including at work, at home or in the broader community.

A person’s current gender may differ from the sex they were assigned at birth (male or female), and may differ from what is indicated on their current legal documents. A person’s gender may change over time. Some people may not identify with a specific gender or with the concept of gender as a whole.

So it means everything and nothing, which for most purposes translates to nothing. If it describes everything it describes nothing, it’s just a bunch of slop thrown at a wall. It’s hard to see what a bureau of statistics can do with it. I suppose you can collect stats on what people say about themselves, but really, who cares?

Usage

Sex and gender refer to two different concepts, but are interrelated. While sex is understood in terms of biological features, gender is a multidimensional concept that is influenced by several additional factors, including biological characteristics, cultural and behavioural norms, and self-identity. Caution should be exercised when comparing counts for sex with those for gender. For example, female sex is not exactly the same as female gender.

I love that “for example,” as if they’d chosen “female” at random. Pff. Female is the sex that everybody gets to redefine, whether the “females” like it or not. “Male” has to be left alone, because males have important shit to do, but women are just an extra, a frill, a bit of trivia, so redefine what they are for statistical purposes.

The variable ‘Gender of person’ and the ‘Classification of gender’ are expected to be used by default in most social statistics programs at Statistics Canada. The variable ‘Sex of person’ and the ‘Classification of sex’ are to be used in conjunction with the variable ‘Gender of person’ and the ‘Classification of gender’, where information on sex at birth is needed, for example, for some demographic and health programs and to estimate the transgender or LGBTQ2+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirit or another non-binary gender or minority sexual identity) population. In statistical programs, gender may be reported in terms of a person’s felt or lived gender, as well as how one is perceived by others, depending on whether information on gender is based on self-reported data or done by proxy.

Very statistic. Much precise.

“Katy” Montgomerie is a sadistic bully of women and girls.

Filia in January 2021:

After a frustratingly painful year of violence against women, it seems only fitting that we draw attention to an activist whose relentless dedication to feminist action has made waves across the internet, resonating with women all over the globe.

…

Agence France Presse reported 116 femicides in France during 2019; however, this number is disputed by Femicides by Companions or Ex, an advocacy group who argue that the figure is closer to 138: an average of one woman murdered every three days. Marguerite responded by catalysing a movement of guerilla-style street art entitled Collages Féminicides, for which she installed white collages featuring condensed but powerful messages written in black lettering on the streets of Marseilles and Paris,  the first of which was installed to honour Julie Douib, a woman murdered in March 2019 by her ex-spouse. Since then, collages have been appearing everywhere, including London.

Marguerite is a controversial figure even in feminist movements, having been excluded from posting via the Paris chapter of Collages Féminicides on Instagram following a series of tweets she made discussing her opinion that transactivism is taking up too much space within feminism, admitting that she has experienced threats for expressing such sentiments. 

Fast-forward to today:

Naturellement.

Meta meta – the Times reporting on JKR’s response to the Times report on the bullied student who had to leave her school.

JK Rowling has condemned the “utterly shameful” treatment of a teenage girl who felt forced to leave her school after pupils hounded her for challenging the views of a visiting speaker.

…

Writing on Twitter to her 14 million followers, Rowling shared the Times article and described her treatment as “utterly shameful”. “Add this to the tottering pile of evidence that people in education and academia who’ve supposed to have a duty of care towards the young have succumbed to an outbreak of quasi-religious fanaticism,” she added. “The girl’s crime? Saying ‘sex exists’.”

Rowling has repeatedly come under fire for defending public figures against accusations of transphobia. On Sunday she criticised balaclava-wearing activists involved in a stand-off around the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in St Peter’s Square, Manchester.

She said: “I never expected the right side of history to include so many people in masks intimidating and assaulting women, did you?”

Now the girl is under even more stress.

Owen Jones is a horror.

The Mayo Clinic answers this question:

I’m adopting a newborn, and I’d like to breastfeed the baby when I bring him home. Can I produce breast milk if I haven’t been pregnant?

Neither the question nor the answer mentions “woman” but perhaps we can assume it’s assumed.

With considerable dedication and preparation, breastfeeding without pregnancy (induced lactation) might be possible.

Normally, the natural production of breast milk (lactation) is triggered by a complex interaction between three hormones — estrogen, progesterone and human placental lactogen — during the final months of pregnancy. At delivery, levels of estrogen and progesterone fall, allowing the hormone prolactin to increase and initiate milk production.

Induced lactation depends on the successful replication of this process. If you have months to prepare, your health care provider might prescribe hormone therapy — such as supplemental estrogen or progesterone — to mimic the effects of pregnancy. Hormone therapy may last for months.

About two months before you expect to start breastfeeding, you’ll likely stop hormone therapy and begin pumping your breasts with a hospital-grade electric breast pump. This encourages the production and release of prolactin. At first, pump for five minutes three times a day. Work up to pumping for 10 minutes every four hours, including at least once during the night. Then increase pumping time to 15 to 20 minutes every 2 to 3 hours. Continue the routine until the baby arrives.

In the absence of pregnancy it’s iffy, and a lot of trouble. I think it’s safe to conclude that in the absence of female breasts it’s a lot more iffy. A lot more.

From NPR a few weeks ago:

For the first time during the long legal reckoning over the opioid crisis, members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma heard directly from people who say their company’s main product, Oxycontin, wrecked their lives.

David Sackler, Richard Sackler and Theresa Sackler listened and watched during the roughly two-hour long hearing as people described surviving addiction and spoke of losing loved ones to the epidemic.

…

Roughly 500,000 people in the U.S. have died from opioid overdoses since the opioid crisis began in 1999, including prescription painkillers and street drugs such as heroin and illicit fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The virtual hearing was held in federal bankruptcy court at the request of the mediator who hashed out a deal with members of the Sackler family, who are expected to pay roughly $6 billion in exchange for immunity from future opioid lawsuits.

Half a million people. That’s a hell of a body count.

Family members who served on the company’s board and who played a significant role in management decisions have long maintained they did nothing wrong, according to internal Purdue Pharma documents.

Half a million people.

Can men lactate enough to nurse an infant?

Or, it’s a man putting his kink ahead of the health of an infant.

The NY Times looked into it in 2019:

Is it possible for a man to breastfeed a baby? For millennia, this question has tickled people’s imagination. It has intrigued; it has disgusted; it has also remained largely hypothetical.

That is, until last year, when a peer-reviewed case report confirmed that a transgender woman, assigned male at birth, was able to breastfeed her child after she was put on a regimen of hormonal drugs. Weeks before the baby’s birth, she was able to produce eight ounces of milk per day, and for the first six weeks, the baby could be sustained solely on that milk alone.

But, onlookers wonder, is that regimen of hormonal drugs good for the baby? Do the drugs get into the milk?

Before the treatment, the patient had been receiving feminizing hormones for six years. We don’t know how long it would take for a cis man to induce functional lactation. But “we have a pretty good idea of the types of hormone cocktails that would be needed,” said Tamar Reisman, an endocrinologist with the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery and one of the two authors of the case report.

And are hormone cocktails good for babies? Is anyone even bothering to find out?

Hooray hooray it’s not just sports, men also get to steal work and fame and money from women in tv shows.

Yasmin Finney is joining the cast of “Doctor Who” as a character named Rose, BBC announced Monday. Her role will debut in 2023, coinciding with the show’s 60th anniversary.

…

“If anyone would have told 8-year-old Yasmin that one day she’d be part of this iconic show, I would have never in a million years believed them,” Finney said. “This show has a place in so many people’s hearts, so to be seen as a trans actress by the legend himself Russell, has not only made my year, it’s made my life. I cannot wait to begin this journey and for you all to see how Rose blossoms. Get ready.”

…

The casting of Finney, who is transgender, follows the history-making turn by Bethany Black, who was the first openly transgender actor to be cast on “Doctor Who” when she debuted her role as 474 in 2015. Rebecca Root became the first transgender actor to play a Doctor Who companion when she took on the role of Tania Bell in the audio series “Stranded.”

History-making blah blah blah first openly blah blah first transgender blah blah – all tactfully disguising the fact that these are men taking jobs from women, in an industry where most of the jobs go to men already.

Another one:

A female skateboarding champion has said she is “done being silent,” and is speaking out about her experience coming in second to a biological male allowed to complete in a women’s competition.

On May 17, Taylor May Silverman, a professional skateboarder, posted a statement to her Instagram in which she called out the last Redbull Cornerstone skate event she took part in for allowing a biological male athlete to compete against women, and take the top spot.

In her statement, Silverman writes that she placed second in two previous competitions in which biological males were allowed to compete against female skateboarders, and notes that at the last Redbull-sponsored skate event, the female athletes lost out on financial awards because a transgender competitor took first place.

It’s not the validation, honey, it’s the cash.

Silverman’s instagram post has since been inundated with over 3,000 primarily hateful and abusive comments from trans activists, with many claiming she is being “transphobic” for having concerns about the fairness of the events she took part in.

How dare a female athlete expect only female athletes to compete in events for female athletes.

Mary Wakefield at the Spectator on Kirrin Medcalf and “emotional support animals”:

Kirrin appeared in court last week because Stonewall is currently being sued by a lawyer called Allison Bailey, who claims that they bullied her and cost her her livelihood as a result of her insistence that men and women have different bodies, which of course they do. Bailey has been harassed by the usual activists in the usual way – death and rape threats – but nonetheless it was Kirrin who appeared to feel most victimised. Although he appeared in court only online, via Zoom, he insisted on being accompanied by his mum and his support dog. Just the sight of Bailey was too traumatising for him without the dog.

He tried to insist on being accompanied by his mum and his support dog and his support person – who was actually a lawyer.

I can’t bear to think about what Stonewall’s weird ideology does to children: the unthinking glibness with which they tell kids they can choose their sex, then push them towards mutilating their bodies and taking drugs which will make them infertile. I can’t bear it for the adult activists either – all the restless, unhappy allies who will one day face the enormity of what they’ve done.

I wonder if they ever will. I guess my hunch is that they’ve already warped their thinking so much to accommodate the nonsensical ideology that the thinking will stay warped, and they’ll go on thinking they were right no matter how many former trans people say how much they regret what they did to themselves.

So instead, as we move into another week of Allison Bailey vs Stonewall, I’m going to focus on the animals – not just Kirrin’s dog, but all the thousands of emotional support animals, or ESAs, this anxious young generation requires.

ESAs are a big business now both here and in the States, which I suppose makes sense. If you’ve been persuaded that you’re not the fortunate inhabitant of a free and democratic country, but instead the victim of an oppressive tyranny, you might well feel more comfy clutching some form of teddy – and an ESA is laughably easy to acquire. Unlike service animals for the blind or deaf, emotional support animals don’t need to be trained or properly certified. All you need to designate your pet an ESA is a letter from a therapist saying that the animal contributes to your psychological wellbeing. No therapist? No sweat. Any number of online sites will offer you the same service for a fee and throw in some ESA dog tags and a smashing official-looking harness just like the one on Kirrin’s dog.

So…do they do the trick? Do anxious people become less anxious because they have a critter in a fancy harness with them?

Jeffrey Younggren at the University of New Mexico has written a number of scientific papers pointing out that there’s no real evidence that support animals help with anxiety at all: ‘An ESA is an example of a well-intentioned idea that has metastasised and developed into a world of nonsense.’

Why not have an emotional support stuffed animal instead? Cheaper, tidier, easier to schlep around. I saw a [probably] homeless guy yesterday [there are a great many in Seattle] with a backpack with a little white stuffed bear at the top, packed appropriately for breathing and observing what was going on. To put a hold on the sarcasm for a moment, I found it quite touching – not only that he had it but that he wasn’t embarrassed to carry it around fully visible. I muse sometimes on how difficult it is not to think of stuffed animals as semi-alive or -real or -conscious or all those. You know they’re not, but at the same time, they’re not like a sweater or a bottle or a tennis ball. It’s the deeply encoded response to faces, I think – humans can’t fully override that, no matter what we know.

Men still aren’t women though.

The BBC tells us:

BBC Eye investigates the disappearance of Sophia Huang Xueqin, a high-profile feminist journalist who kick-started China’s #MeToo movement.

Spoiler: it was the secret police.

In the summer of 2021, Sophia was awarded a prestigious Chevening scholarship funded by the British government to pursue gender studies at the University of Sussex.

Oh no. That’s the last place a feminist should go for further education. Actually it seems that any UK university is that, but Sussex has a record.

The Beeb goes on to say that China has detained tens of thousands of activists in recent years and that Sophia Huang Xueqin is expected to face trial for “inciting subversion of state power” and that her story is being erased.

I have to wonder if she realized the University of Sussex, had she arrived there safely, would have told her that men are women if they say they are, that women have no right to say that men are not women or to say women need spaces away from men and services for women only. I wonder if it would have warned her that women who refuse to agree that men are women are called “terfs” and subject to intense bullying and shunning.

The Scouts (UK) explain what “lesbian” means:

What’s the point of even having the word “lesbian” if that’s what it means? They might as well say “lesbian means attracted to everyone.” Attracted to women including men, says Scouts UK.

Meanwhile does anybody around here know how to put up a tent?

All of a sudden Fox News has gone quiet on the Great Replacement front. I wonder why.

Over at Fox News, however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area.

The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.

The racist conspiracy theory, that is.

“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”

…

In a monologue on his Monday night show, Carlson did not directly address replacement theory. He claimed the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was “not recognizably leftwing or rightwing: it’s not really political at all”, despite the rambling document referencing a number of rightwing conspiracy theories.

Mmmyes, not really political at all, a white guy shooting a lot of not-white people. What could the politics of that possibly be?

Strangio is not honest.

That’s not why. The reason we upbraid the ACLU is the insistence on erasing the word “women” from all their advertising and commentary on abortion rights. We don’t think it’s possible to defend our rights effectively without ever mentioning us. We also don’t think there’s anything social justicey or otherwise admirable about shoving the subordinated sex back into the closet marked SUBORDINATE.

Also, by the way, of course Strangio’s colleagues haven’t spent their entire lives litigating abortion cases. They didn’t start at birth, or at age 1, or at age 10, or at age 20. Entire careers is possible; entire lives is not. Lawyers are supposed to be precise with their wording.

The story of the bullied student appeared on Transgender Trend first, and the Times linked to it. It’s not well written, so I’ll quote only sparingly, but with all the anonymity and Owen Jones’s hunt for heretics, there’s an interest in sources.

Teacher John Rickards has written this account for us of how transgender ideology has infiltrated the girls’ school where he teaches, to the extent that the consequences are severe for any pupil who questions it. Recent government guidance on political impartiality in schools states:

Existing statutory requirements on political impartiality cover all schools, regardless of type or funding arrangement. This includes independent schools.

But there’s an invisible coda that says “except on trans issues.”

Anyway. There was

an ‘educational’ visit to a 6th form PSHE session of a member of the House of Lords. We will call her ‘Baroness A’. She is a well known LGBTQ speaker and activist with views on transgender issues not dissimilar to those of Mermaids and Stonewall (or to what its position has been in recent years). It’s worth noting that the school is a registered ‘Stonewall Diversity Champion’ and has in the past invited Mermaids in to address most of the school.

Why would a school invite Mermaids to talk? Inviting Mermaids to talk amounts to marketing trans idenniny to teenagers; why would a school do that?

It was during an after school activity on the day of the Baroness’s visit that the small group of 6th formers involved in the activity arrived very late and in an animated state. There had been, I learned, some major spat in the 6th form centre which they just ‘had’ to stay behind to witness. It involved a significant group of girls verbally ‘laying into’ one particular 18 yr old who had had the audacity to question the position of Baroness A during the Q & A. I later learned that the girl had pointed out that there was another person in the House of Lords, ‘Baroness B’ who held different views to ‘Baroness A’ and she wanted to know if they had debates or arguments about their differing positions.

It’s not at all clear why the Baronesses can’t be named. The sixth form can’t bully them.