Meanwhile Trump

The arrest of a US army veteran who protested against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has raised alarms among legal experts and fellow veterans familiar with his service in Afghanistan.

Bajun Mavalwalla II – a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations mission in Afghanistan – was charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers” after joining a demonstration against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Spokane, Washington.

We are allowed to demonstrate. Presidents are not allowed to punish us for demonstrating. We are not the criminals here.

Legal experts say the case marks an escalation in the administration’s attacks on first amendment rights. Afghanistan war veterans who know him say the case against Mavalwalla appears unjust.

“Here’s a guy who held a top secret clearance and was privy to some of the most sensitive information we have, who served in a combat zone,” said Kenneth Koop, a retired colonel who trained the Afghan military and police during Mavalwalla’s deployment. “To see him treated like this really sticks in my craw.”

The 11 June protest against Ice that led to Mavalwalla’s arrest was confrontational, leaving a government van’s windshield smashed and tires slashed, but Mavalwalla was not among the more than two dozen people arrested at the scene. More than a month passed before the FBI arrived at his door on 15 July.

It took them all that time to find a pretext.

While the indictment alleges other protesters struck federal officers and let the air out of the tires of an Ice transport, Mavalwalla was not charged with obstruction or assault. Instead, he was charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers”.

According to the indictment, Mavalwalla and his co-defendants “physically blocked the drive-way of the federal facility and/or physically pushed against officers despite orders to disburse and efforts to remove them from the property”.

He helped block a driveway. Wow, what a hardened criminal.

The indictment was handed down two days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US attorney for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker called his exit “a very difficult decision”.

“I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in,” he wrote.

The current acting US attorney, nominated for the permanent post by Donald Trump, is Pete Serrano, a former litigator for the Silent Majority Foundation, a conservative advocacy group. In February, Serrano filed an amicus brief in support of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, a position at odds with the 14th amendment. He has no prosecutorial experience and has described the 6 January 2021, US Capitol rioters as “political prisoners”.

We’re all at the mercy of these shits.

Well there is an easy solution…

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif appeals World Boxing ban over mandatory sex testing

Algeria‘s Olympic gold medallist Imane Khelif has appealed to sport‘s highest court against a World Boxing decision barring her from upcoming events unless she undergoes genetic sex testing, Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said on Monday.

Why? Why is he doing that? Why doesn’t he just take the test?

The appeal seeks to overturn the ruling and allow Algeria’s Khelif to compete at the 2025 World Boxing Championships without having the test, the Court of Arbitration for Sport said in a statement, adding that it had dismissed her request to suspend the decision while the case is heard.

But why? Why go to all that trouble? Why not just take the test?

Because he would fail it.

Do he and his handlers not realize that we can all figure that out?

Also journalism needs to stop calling him “her”.

Well this is horrific. Glinner writes:

The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets.

He shares the tweets. One concludes with “if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Another captions a demo with “A photo you can smell.” The last one says “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.”

At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to a concave mirror that was presumably there to make you reflect on your life choices.

Ffs!

Five cops! Arresting him at Heathrow! Putting him in a cell! Because tweets!

I have to wonder if a single UK cop – let alone five – has ever arrested a man for tweeting violent threats against women.

Surely a more normal response would be something like a parking ticket, or a request to stop by for a chat, in a country where rape goes uninvestigated and unpunished.

Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200—stroke territory. The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life! So I was escorted to A&E, where I write this now after spending about eight hours under observation.

The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel it may also have been a contributing factor that I have now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, perseistent harassment campaign because I refuse to believe that lesbians have cocks.

It’s insane.

Trump administration offers military funeral honors to Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt

The U.S. government is offering military funeral honors for Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was killed at 35 by an officer in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Babbitt was a U.S. Air Force veteran from California who was shot dead wearing a Trump campaign flag wrapped around her shoulders while attempting to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.

Offering military honors to one of the Capitol rioters is part of President Donald Trump’s attempts to rewrite that chapter after the 2020 election as a patriotic stand, given he still denies he lost that election. Babbitt has gained martyr status among Republicans, and the Trump administration agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit that her family filed over her shooting.

Because violent insurrection is fine if you’re doing it for Trump.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on Crucial.

I wouldn’t want to speculate on what the GMC’s rationale its decision about HRT prescriptions might have been; but let’s allow for the sake of the argument that it was buffoonery. Still: there might be an upside to that – or, at least, there might have been a bullet dodged.

Had the GMC said that it was a specialist area, requiring special training, then who would have undertaken such training? Since doctors are not assigned to specialisms by lottery, the answer to that would have to be that the training would only or overwhelmingly be sought by True Believers in the gender cause. And, in turn, that would have given heft to the idea that there is a whole specialism devoted to this thing, therefore this thing must be 100% legit. (Recall a few years ago a minor kerfuffle over chiropractors setting up a professional organisation and publishing professional standards; the concern was then that this gave a fig-leaf to chiropraxis because it made it look like something real.*)

On the other hand, by not saying that it’s a speciality area – by saying that it’s just a normal part of medicine – the door is left open for normal medics to make normal evidence-based decisions about whether HRT is warranted. And while that means that there’d me more doctors with the liberty to prescribe HRT, there’d also be more who’d be inclined not to.

(*Yes, I’m calling it chiropraxis, because “chiropractic” is an adjective. Lord: if there’s one single thing that makes me, as a layman, suspicious of those charlatans, it’s that they do such obvious violence to the rules of grammar. And if they’re mangling grammar, what’re they going to do with my vertebrae?)

But do not call him Ted.

Dr Beth Upton’s birth name will be redacted in official Sandie Peggie documents, the tribunal judge has ruled. The case has restarted for a third time with final submissions being put forward by each legal team before a decision will be made towards the end of the year.

…

Born Theodore Upton, the name was used on the General Medical Council register before he was re-registered under his new name, Dr Beth Upton. His legal team claimed that publishing his birth name would be against his human rights and would out him as a trans woman.

Judge Sandy Kemp ruled in his favour, confirming that the submissions can be published but Theodore Upton will be redacted from all of the documents. His full name will now not be included when Ms Peggie’s evidence is made public, as well as submissions from those on her side.

Fabulous; that way no one will ever know or suspect or guess that he’s not a woman.

Ms Peggie’s lawyer Naomi Cunningham asked for the documents to be published in full to promote “open justice” and “freedom of self expression.” But Ms Russell argued that using the Theodore Upton name was “gratuitous and unnecessary” and claimed that it triggered “gender dysphoria.”

Of course it’s not gratuitous and unnecessary, it’s the whole point. The man is not a god damn woman and he has no right to persecute women who don’t want him in their changing rooms. That’s it, that’s the case!

She pointed out that he is not being sued under that name and cited legislation such as the gender recognition law and the Equal Treatment Bench Book to prove her point. She quoted this: “Name or pronouns can be very important to the transperson. It can be a sign of disrespect if transperson is not referred to by them.

Nobody cares.

“No one should be outed, everyone should be treated with courtesy and dignity.” She went on to claim that the “gratuitous dropping of the deadname in the submissions is harmful” to Dr Upton, and using the deadname is “not relevant in this case.”

It’s not gratuitous. Again: the fact that he’s not a woman is central to the hearing. All this cringing and bowing and scraping is how we got here. It is not reasonable or fair for men to order everyone to call them “her”.

But he got his way all the same.

The NY Times on grinding the proletariat:

Trump is the most ruthlessly antilabor president since before the Great Depression.

If the labor movement does not fight harder than it has since Mr. Trump regained the presidency, its future will be dire.

Mr. Trump and his administration have unilaterally stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, 400,000 workers, or 2.8 percent of America’s unionized workers, have lost their collective bargaining rights because of an executive order that will eventually affect more than one million federal workers. Mr. Trump ushered in Labor Day weekend on Thursday by continuing his assault of federal unions, adding the Patent Office, NASA and the National Weather Service to his list of targeted agencies.

He’s a festive guy.

Despite this assault on their very existence, we have barely heard a peep from unions. Where is organized labor in the public fight to maintain union jobs, stop the stripping of the safety net and lead the fight for democracy? Other than some statements and angry speeches, the movement has been muted.

If the labor movement wants to fight for its survival, it must return to mass mobilization tactics, reminding Americans that their rights come through working together — not through supporting a president who talks about helping American workers while slashing worker safety regulations, supporting tariffs that raise the cost of consumer goods and stripping workers of their legal rights to contracts.

…

One cannot overstate the significance of Mr. Trump’s attacks on government workers. Public sector work has become organized labor’s power base, allowing the total workforce’s union membership rate to remain at around 10 percent, despite less than 6 percent of private sector workers having unions.

Jeezus. I didn’t know it was that bad.

Mr. Trump has attacked workers in other ways. He has gutted the Department of Labor through cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency. He is also rolling back Labor Department rules from the Obama and Biden administrations that allowed home care workers to earn overtime and farmworkers to campaign for better working conditions. And he has severely undermined the National Labor Relations Board, which handles thousands of union matters every year, by firing its head and nominating corporate-friendly figures to steer its operations away from supporting workers.

Happy Boss Day.

Um…happy Labor Day.

Federal employees have had the right to join unions and collectively bargain over working conditions since the 1960s. Unlike private sector workers, government employees cannot negotiate wages or strike. But through collective bargaining, they do help shape disciplinary procedures, parental leave policies, how overtime is managed and much more.

Giving workers a say in workplace policies, the thinking goes, leads to less friction in the workplace and more effective government.

But President Trump has abandoned that idea. Instead, he’s argued that federal employee unions pose a danger to the country. In March, he issued an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for more than one million federal workers at about 20 federal agencies. Almost immediately, many agencies halted automatic deductions of union dues from employee paychecks, cutting off a critical source of cash flow to the unions. Just ahead of Labor Day, Trump issued a new executive order, adding about a half dozen agencies to the list.

Of course he did.

In his March and August executive orders, Trump leans on a provision in federal law that gives him authority to end collective bargaining rights at agencies that have national security as a primary function. Past presidents have used that authority sparingly. Trump is applying it to a broad swath of agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department, the National Weather Service and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the embattled Voice of America.

The president’s rationale is that it hurts national security when unions are able to obstruct management. In a “fact sheet” issued alongside the March executive order, the White House cited the many legal challenges unions have brought. “Certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda,” the document said.

And the workers must not be allowed to challenge the bosses. End of.

Across the federal government, some workers aren’t waiting around to see what happens. They’re quitting now, having decided a government job just isn’t worth it anymore. Many workers fear with unions gone, they won’t have a say in matters such as telework or family leave policies that make a difference to their quality of life.

…

Lee says the government is losing chemists, toxicologists, engineers and others who ensure drugs and medical devices are safe and effective and food ingredients aren’t poisonous.

“It is already, in my view, harming the public because we’re losing that institutional knowledge. We’re losing that subject matter expertise,” Lee says. “As much as the current administration thinks that everyone is just quickly replaceable, they’re not.”

Pfffff. One worker is like any other worker. It’s like replacing a light bulb.

Oh really?

That first bullet point is just so much blather, unless what they are sneakily doing is pretending that the rules and expectations around gender are the same thing as the categories female and male. I think that probably is what they’re doing, and it’s both pompous and deceptive. Of course “understandings of sex” have always been binary, which is not to deny that views on how women and men have to behave are contingent and various.

Yes of course the rules around gender are “open to political manipulation”; we know that; it does not follow that men can be women.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A quiet senior.

Ms. Gaines’s approach to activism involves a weaponization of names, pronouns, physical descriptions and other language to undermine the legitimacy of transgender people’s mere existence in the world.

JFC. It was Thomas who was weaponizing all of that in order to undermine women and rob them of their safety, dignity, and awards.

In other words, she often seems to go out of her way to provoke those who are not already fully on board with her mission.

JFC. Anyone mentioning reality provokes these people. Gaines is not any different in this regard. Thomas is male; always has been, always will be. Maybe Gaines was just tired of living with and having to regurgitate the lie that he was not.

But if Ms. Gaines’s rhetoric is alienating, her specific position on transgender women and sports has increasingly widespread support.

As if Thomas’s delusional, perverted, fetish-fueled intrusion into the women’s swim team was not “alienating.” And why shouldn’t reality have “widespread support”? (Way to normalize abnormal, and, despite claims of being a “woman” criminal behaviour.) Without the protection of his bullshit “gender identity” he would have been arrested, just like any other male who did what he did. His cheating (which is bad enough) is the least of it. His presence in the women’s changing rooms was a sex crime. Thomas is not a hero. Thomas is a sex criminal. Having voluntarily outed himself as a proud, unrepentant sex offender, Thomas should be on watch lists and under restraining orders for the rest of his life. Who the fuck in their right mind wouldn’t have rooted against him?

Now Trump is kneecapping Voice of America.

VOA was established in 1942, during World War II. Building on American use of shortwave radio during the war, it initially served as an anti-propaganda tool against Axis misinformation but expanded to include other forms of content like American music programs for cultural diplomacy. During the Cold War, its operations expanded in an effort to fight communism and played a role in the decline of communism in several countries. Throughout its operations, it has aimed to broadcast uncensored information to residents under restrictive regimes, even airing behind the Iron Curtain.

Ah; that will be the problem then. Trump doesn’t want anybody messing with his restrictive regime.

The Trump administration has moved to lay off more than 500 employees who work for the federally funded network Voice of America, which provides global reporting in places with restricted press freedom.

In March, Trump officials first attempted to close down some of the organization’s newsrooms. But Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia called for the network’s restoration last April, citing a law that requires the Voice of America broadcast to be continued.

Despite the ruling, Kari Lake, the acting chief executive of Voice of America’s oversight agency, posted on social media on Friday evening that 532 government positions were eliminated.

Nobody cares what some judge says; this is Trump’s dictatorship.

Before the downsizing, Voice of America was responsible for broadcasting news in 49 languages to 360 million people every week, including in Russia and China. Now, the network airs programming in four languages: Persian, Mandarin, Dari and Pashto.

The layoffs “will likely improve [the agency’s] ability to function and provide the truth to people across the world who live under murderous Communist governments and other tyrannical regimes,” wrote Lake on X.

Most of the 1,300 Voice of America journalists had already been fired or remained on paid leave prior to these layoffs. Only 100 journalists and other staff members remain employed by the organization.

How exactly will that improve the agency’s ability to function and provide the truth to people across the world?

The Independent breathlessly reports:

Transgender men and women are increasingly having crucial hormone treatment withdrawn by NHS doctors, an investigation has found.

Trans patients and staff at NHS gender services have said that cases of people being refused hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or having the medication withdrawn are on the rise.

That’s one way of putting it. Another would be “Some men and women who think they’re the opposite sex are no longer able to get opposite-sex hormones on the NHS.”

In other words the Indy is very much stacking the deck by calling cross-sex hormones “treatment” and “medication”. Delusions about what sex one is are not a good reason to harm patients by fiddling with their hormones.

HRT is a crucial part of the transition process for many trans people and involves the administration of hormones to align a person’s physical characteristics with their gender identity.

There is no “transition process.” That’s not a thing. We can’t become the opposite sex any more than we can become pigeons or bison or orcas.

While HRT is best known for its use in treating symptoms of the menopause, it is a crucial part of the transition process for many trans people.

Yuh huh, and while mastectomy is best known for its use in treating breast cancer, it is a crucial part of the maiming process for many trans people.

Yes, it’s possible to hijack some drastic medical measures to serve non-medical purposes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Of those who had their HRT refused or withdrawn, some were told their GP didn’t feel qualified to provide the care. Other GPs didn’t provide the treatment on the grounds they don’t have the resources to provide it.

Others, in their responses to a survey by Transactual, a trans-led research group, said their GPs had cited lack of policy or personal beliefs as reasons why they had withdrawn or refused their HRT prescriptions.

Ah, their personal beliefs is it. Well what about the personal beliefs that prompt the demand for cross-sex hormones in the first place? That demand is entirely based on a personal and mistaken belief.

Kamilla Kamaruddin, who has been a GP for two decades and is currently a lead clinician at the East of England Gender Service, said that the issue of care being refused or withdrawn from transgender people has become more frequent.

“GPs who refuse to prescribe are still in the minority but we’re seeing more and more GPs who are refusing to prescribe on the basis that they don’t have the expertise … even though they have already done the prescribing for a very long time,” she said. “If a GP didn’t know how to treat a heart condition they’d ask a cardiologist – they’d get advice and guidance … for some GPs this doesn’t seem to apply to treating trans people.”

But the two are not comparable. Heart conditions are physical; wanting to change sex is an idea.

The General Medical Council, the regulator of doctors in the UK, has previously stated to GPs that the provision of HRT prescriptions to transgender adults is not a highly specialist area and does not require specific expertise.

That’s rather damning. Maybe the GMC should have thought a little harder about that.

Disastrous Kennedy’s demolition of the CDC continues.

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) immunizations chief Dr. Demetre Daskalakis said Sunday that he’s concerned with the direction the agency is going and worried about public health going forward.

Daskalakis, who served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, submitted his resignation from the CDC on Wednesday in protest following the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removing CDC Director Susan Monarez from her position. In his resignation letter, Daskalakis denounced HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership of both the HHS and the CDC.

“From my vantage point as a doctor who’s taken the Hippocratic Oath, I only see harm coming. I may be wrong, but based on what I’m seeing, based on what I’ve heard with the new members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or ACIP, they’re really moving in an ideological direction where they want to see the undoing of vaccination,” Daskalakis told ABC News’ “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz.

In short they want to do all the harm they can.

Daskalakis said there is now no separation of political ideology and science with Kennedy leading HHS.

“I didn’t think that we were going to be able to present science in a way free of ideology, that the firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down. And not having a scientific leader at CDC meant that we wouldn’t be able to have the necessary diplomacy and connection with HHS to be able to really execute on good public health,” Daskalakis said in explaining why he resigned.

And Kennedy is not just not a scientific leader, he’s not a scientific anything. He has no scientific education or training of any kind; he’s a rank amateur and he’s stupid and vain enough to think he can lay down the law on medical issues anyway.

The Telegraph:

A disabled child was banned from summer camp after his mother expressed gender-critical views, The Telegraph can reveal.

The eight-year-old was preparing for his first residential trip in July organised by Over the Wall (OTW) – a Derby-based charity that runs getaways for disabled children and their families. But he and his mother, 52, were turned away after she insisted, during a heated discussion with an organiser from the camp, that people could not change sex.

So now children have to believe in Magic Gender in order to go to summer camp?

But internal papers documenting the incident state that the eight-year-old was barred after the summer camp concluded that the mother’s “views on gender and inclusivity” did not “align” with its own.

How does that work? How is it “inclusivity” to drop a child from summer camp because his mother doesn’t believe in magic swappable gender? Where’s the “inclusivity” for that child?

In a form section labelled “getting to know the camper”, the charity asked: “What are your child’s pronouns?”

In response to the question, the child’s mother, who lives in the south of Scotland, replied: “Seriously?”

In March, months after she had submitted the application, the parent was called by Sally McCluskie, a clinical director at the charity.

In a written summary of the call uncovered by the mother using a subject access request, which allows an individual to see all personal information an organisation holds about them, Ms McCluskie recalled “explaining the importance of pronouns at our camps to ensure inclusivity and respect for all children”.

She added: “[The mother] immediately became defensive, stating that we cannot tell her child what to say. She made it clear that if her child sees a girl, he should refer to her as a girl. [The mother] strongly stated that there are only two genders (male and female) and that biology cannot be changed. I attempted to explain that as a charity, we value diversity and inclusion, and our primary focus is to ensure that every child feels safe and respected at camp, regardless of their gender identity.”

How can every child feel safe and respected at camp when every child is expected to have an opinion on genner idenniny and that opinion has to be the approved one?

As I’ve whispered a billion times, you can’t do both. You can’t burble about incloosividee and feeling safe n respected while at the same time mandating that every child obey all the requirements of genner ideology. It is not “inclusive” to order children to pretend that some children are the sex they are not.

Fraser Hudghton, director of the Free Speech Union Scotland, said: “The facts of this case are plain. Here we have a young child with a lifelong health condition prevented from attending a summer camp designed specifically for boys and girls like him. 

“This has happened because organisers deemed his mum’s rational response to an irrational question unacceptable.”

Exactly so.

That doesn’t sound good…

Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood

The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades…

…

Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels.

And so what will we do to avoid the collapse?

What we’re already doing. Nothing.

It seems pointless even to try to move the needle at this point. People are not giving up their cars or their long-distance air travel or their cruises or their tropical fruit in December. People are not giving up anything. They just aren’t, and they aren’t going to.

An odd way to put it.

That night, the atmosphere in the arena was charged with a tension distinct from the usual intensity of athletic competition. “I’ve never felt a crowd root against anybody before,” said Dan D’Addona, who covered the meet for Swimming World Magazine.

The target was Lia Thomas, a quiet senior from the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Thomas swam competitively for years as a member of the men’s team, before beginning estrogen treatment to transition in 2019, and later switching to racing with the women. Over the course of the 2021-22 season, she became national news, an avatar for churning unease about gender, power, safety, sports, politics, feminism and biology.

First of all, what is a “quiet senior”? What is a noisy senior? How would the reporter know either way? What’s her point?

Her point, of course, is to stack the deck without being too blatant about it. Aw, poor guy, he’s just quiet, he’s not kicking up a fuss like those blahblahblah women.

At any rate, there is nothing “quiet” about pretending to be a woman and stealing women’s athletic prizes. Lots of women consider it quite noisy.

Farther down the page the reporter drops the subtlety.

Ms. Gaines’s approach to activism involves a weaponization of names, pronouns, physical descriptions and other language to undermine the legitimacy of transgender people’s mere existence in the world.

In 2022, she used female pronouns for Ms. Thomas and emphasized that she affirmed her gender identity. “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that,” she told The Daily Wire days after the race.

Now, offensiveness is a part of her brand. 

It’s not “weaponization” of anything to call a man “he” or to point out that men are stronger than women. It’s the other way around. It’s a slow-motion attack on women to pretend that the physical disparities between women and men don’t matter when it comes to sports. It’s not automatically “offensive” to say that.

In other words, she often seems to go out of her way to provoke those who are not already fully on board with her mission. But if Ms. Gaines’s rhetoric is alienating, her specific position on transgender women and sports has increasingly widespread support.

In California, where Mr. Trump received less than 40 percent of the vote last year, 71 percent of public school parents say they support his executive order on transgender athletes, according to a statewide survey this spring.

Brilliant! That is excellent news.

Ok so let’s read SEEN in Journalism’s letter to the BBC.

We call on the BBC to embrace accuracy in its coverage of ‘transgender’ issues and adopt an editorial policy of accurately describing sex.

The BBC has a unique responsibility to deliver accurate, impartial, and transparent reporting to its diverse audience. The current default, of using preferred pronouns and the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ according to a person’s ‘gender identity’ is at best highly misleading and at worst a betrayal of the BBC’s public service remit.

And it does have that public service remit, not least because people are required to pay for it via the license fee.

Biological sex is an objective reality defined by gamete size, determined by chromosomes and resulting in two distinct body types with specific physical traits relevant to reproductive anatomy. Sex cannot be changed. This is indisputably true: hormones and surgery can lead only to a superficial resemblance to the opposite sex.

Gender identity, while deeply personal, is subjective and distinct from sex. The words man, woman, boy, girl – and their equivalent in other languages – evolved to describe people with these two distinct body types. They did not evolve to describe people with ‘gender identities’ and it is misleading to use them in that way.

Because “woman” and “man” don’t describe people’s personalities, thoughts, dreams, fantasies, projects, hopes, fears, loves, hates, habits, occupations, hobbies, favorite foods, taste in wine, clothes, haircuts, art, literature…

There is no evidence to support the claim that a person can be the opposite sex or no sex at all. This is an ideological position that the BBC should report on, but not adopt.

It’s an ideological position and it’s bullshit.

It could after all be an ideological position and still map onto the truth. It could, but it doesn’t. It’s an ideological position rooted in an absurd and grotesque lie.

Sex is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010, which covers every circumstance in which discrimination might arise. The Supreme Court judgment (For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers 2025) made it clear that ‘sex’ means biological sex at birth. It affirms that sex-based rights cannot be overridden by self-identification of gender, by the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, or by possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Trans-identifying men are no type of women, and trans-identifying women are no type of men.

It is time for the BBC to acknowledge that equality law in the UK reflects sex-based reality, and to default to biological descriptors. This will ensure its audience is fully informed, across coverage of contentious issues such as access to women’s prisons, domestic violence shelters, or competitive sports, and public and private services.

The ideological viewpoint that people can change whether they are male or female has been adopted across all output by the BBC – rather than the legally sustained belief in the materiality of sex.

The BBC has a duty to ensure that it is not captured by any ideological viewpoint, including gender identity ideology. The belief and understanding that biological sex is binary and unchangeable, and that it matters, are not only legally protected, they are based on fundamental truths. Yet the BBC persists in telling its audience the opposite. This is a dereliction of the BBC’s Charter responsibilities.

So CUT IT OUT, BBC! Stop it. Just stop it.

Golly gee whaddya know, there are actually reasons women don’t want men in our toilets with us.

POLICE have swept Scottish Parliament toilets for hidden cameras after a suspended Labour MSP was charged with possessing indecent images and banned from the premises.

MSPs and workers in the Edinburgh Parliament were given an update on Friday after news broke that Colin Smyth, who has had his access suspended amid a police investigation, was accused of having installed recording devices in the toilets.

Huh. But we’ve been repeatedly assured that nothing like that ever happens so shut up.

Helen Joyce is pissed off at the BBC.

In May, shortly after appearing on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, I wrote about what a depressing experience it had been. I mentioned that I would be putting in a formal complaint about the way the show misrepresented me in an interview the following week with Sacha Deshmukh of Amnesty, formerly of Stonewall, and predicted that my complaint would get nowhere.

And sure enough it got nowhere.

I’m really not joking when I say that I would like the BBC to be defunded – on my specialist subject, sex’n’gender, it has been nothing short of a propaganda arm. It’s directly responsible for much of the social contagion that has seen trans identification rise so much among young people, for the staggering degree of misinformation about human biology that we see all around us, and for the enormous harm done to women by presenting the unreasonable and narcissistic demands of a tiny number of deranged men as the biggest human-rights issue of our times. We’d be better off without it, and every licence-fee payer would be £174.50 a year better off too.

I’m resharing my original article today for two reasons: first because of an excellent open letter just published signed by several organisations, including Sex Matters, the one I work for, calling on the Beeb to stop doing this. You can read it on SEEN in Journalism’s Substack.

The second is because because of the shocking decision – genuinely, even when I think I can no longer be shocked, it turns out I can – at the highest level in the Beeb to call the Minneapolis shooter “she/her”, and to knock back complaints about its decision to do the same with a British trans-identifying man who killed his husband with a samurai sword.

There were complaints and the BBC responded as it always does. They’re just being polite, you see. It’s like when somebody asks you to pass the sugar. You don’t say sugar is empty calories, you just pass the sugar.

The Beeb says that its style guide requires journalists to refer to people as they wish to be described, and that when it comes to criminals, it uses the language that is used in court. This amounts to saying: “We have a shitty internal policy that prioritises a fringe counterfactual belief system over accuracy and impartiality – which are legal requirements in our charter – and if an arm of the state, namely the criminal-justice system, decides to gaslight the nation, we will too.”

Accuracy in news organizations is so over-rated, don’t you think?

Hey is it suddenly 1950 again? Did I miss the alert?

Aggressive energy is for men only. Women are supposed to have the Goddess energy, not the real kind. Them’s the rules.