Good grief. How about “No.”

Coronation: Public asked to swear allegiance to King Charles

Why on earth would anyone want to do that?

People watching the Coronation will be invited to join a “chorus of millions” to swear allegiance to the King and his heirs, organisers say. The public pledge is one of several striking changes to the ancient ceremony revealed on Saturday.

In a coronation full of firsts, female clergy will play a prominent role, and the King himself will pray out loud. The Christian service will also see religious leaders from other faiths have an active part for the first time.

They couldn’t make it sound more repulsive if they tried. Monarchy on the one hand and god-bothering on the other – no thank you.

The public will be given an active role in the ceremony for the first time, with people around the world set to be asked to cry out and swear allegiance to the King.

An active role, which is to swear allegiance to this one man because of who his mother was. Much active, very participate.

The order of service will read: “All who so desire, in the Abbey, and elsewhere, say together: I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.”

Not going to happen. I pay no allegiance to Choss, true or semi-true or pretend.

A spokesman for Lambeth Palace, the archbishop’s office, said: “The homage of the people is particularly exciting because that’s brand new. That’s something that we can share in because of technological advances, so not just the people in the Abbey, but people who are online, on television, who are listening, and who are gathered in parks, at big screens and churches.

“Our hope is at that point, when the Archbishop invites people to join in, that people wherever they are, if they’re watching at home on their own, watching the telly, will say it out loud – this sense of a great cry around the nation and around the world of support for the King.”

Why does he need all this support? He’s the one with all the money and the multiple giant houses on giant tracts of land and a whole train all his own. How about he supports us instead?

As part of the service Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Sikh peers will present the King with pieces of the coronation regalia, including bracelets, the robe, the ring, and the glove.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a practising Hindu, will read from the biblical book of Colossians.

That made me burst out laughing. It’s so take your favorite toy to school day. Rishi will read from the Bible and Fred will read from the Upanishads and Muriel will read from Atlas Shrugged.

After the religious service has ended, the King will receive a greeting by Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist leaders.

No atheists of course. No skeptics, no humanists, no secularists – just faith-heads of all flavors. So novel, so exciting, so progress!

You don’t say.

Transgender women face prostate cancer risk, says first-of-its-kind study from UCSF

Of course they do: because they are men.

Transgender women have a small but meaningful risk of prostate cancer, but traditional screening tools may not work well for them, especially if they’re taking estrogen for gender-affirming care, according to a national study led by UCSF researchers.

Or rather, especially if they’re mucking up their bodies by taking estrogen to foster a delusion that they’re women. “Gender-affirming care” is a misnomer, and medical researchers shouldn’t be using it. “Gender affirmation” isn’t medical.

The research, published Saturday in the journal JAMA, is the first in the U.S. to look at prostate cancer in transgender women. It underscores the need to improve overall health care for transgender people, who are underrepresented in medical research and who experience worse outcomes than cisgender patients for all kinds of health issues.

Perhaps because they’re recklessly tampering with their bodies?

Transgender people, who are thought to make up less than 1% of the population, have mostly been left out of large studies of all kinds of health issues. When the UCSF team decided to look at prostate cancer in transgender women, the first problem they ran into was finding patients. Generally, “transgender” isn’t noted in patients’ medical records, so scientists had to look for secondary clues like estrogen prescriptions or a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Not noted in patients’ medical records! Gee, you think that might be a bad idea?

Statement from the Edinburgh Principal:

I would like to express my extreme disappointment that last night, for the second time in six months, we were left with no alternative but to stop the screening of ‘Adult Human Female’ because of safety concerns for attendees. 

No alternative? Please. The alternative was to force the protesters to get out of the way so that people could go in to see ‘Adult Human Female.’ That’s it, that’s the alternative.

We refuse to be intimidated by the unreasonable behaviour of those who sought to prevent lawful discussion of challenging topics on our campus yesterday. 

But they don’t. They don’t refuse to be intimidated. They let the bullies do whatever they wanted, and then they canceled the screening. That’s not refusing to be intimidated, it’s being intimidated.

It is unfortunate and disappointing that last night attendees were again prevented from being able to gather and discuss these issues on our campus. We worked with organisers of the event and leads of organisations representing those who wished to participate in peaceful protest at the screening of the film, putting increased measures and extra security in place to mitigate risks, whilst ensuring that all were in a position to express their views, including respecting others with differing perspectives.

Despite these significant additional measures, a small handful of disruptive protesters restricted access to the venue preventing the organisers from holding the event, and leading to increased tensions and safety concerns.

Then get them out. Get the small handful of disruptive protesters out. That’s it, that’s the solution. Just stop it.

In Edinburgh the University actually helped the protesters prevent women from getting in, before piously announcing it was forced to cancel the screening because of the protests the university itself assisted.

Please, tell us more about how marginalized and persecuted our trans sisters and brothers are.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Look back in horror.

Okay, I’ll see your “look back in horror” and raise you “looking on in horror right now. Just off the top of my head here’s what being “uncritical” of gender has resulted in:

Violent male sex offenders being imprisoned with women in what were and should be female only prisons. The women have no say in this and are forced to submit.

Men being admitted into what were and should be female only rape and domestic violence services. The women have no say in this and are forced to submit.

Men being housed in what were and should be female only hospital wards. The women have no say in this and are forced to submit.

Men and boys competing on what were and should be female only sports teams. The women and girls have no say in this and are forced to submit.

Men invading women’s toilet and changing facilities. The women have no say in this and are forced to submit.

The mutilation and sterilization of children whose minds are insufficiently developed to comprehend the import and gravity of the disastrously life-altering path they’ve been encouraged to take.

The erosion of women’s health care through the erasure of the words “woman” and “women” in the name of “inclusion.” There is no comparable erasure of “man” and “men” in health communications which are equivalent to the campaigns from which all references to women have been excised.

The bullying, intimidation, villification and assault of any and all women who dare to oppose any of the above, or who even questions the validity and coherence of trans ideology.

Trans identified males are not women. Never have been, never will be. Don’t go on about how “marginalized” and “victimized” they are, or how they are at much greater risk of being victims of violence or murder than anyone without some hard statistics to back these claims up. The ability of this oh-so-powerless group of helpless snowflakes to force women to submit to their presence in what had once been and should be female only spaces proves that these protestations of victimhood are lies. Just own up to the fact that you’re defending entitled men. Powerful entitled men. Trans activism has been wildly successful in its recruitment of a startlingly broad range of public and private institutions to advance and enforce their completely unreasonable and dangerous demands. (See the above list from off the top of my head, compiled without leaving this page, and without breaking a mental sweat.) And who has paid the price for this imposition of the will of a tiny minority of men? Women and girls. That’s the real horror. Actual harm, actual violence, actual dismissals, silencings and deplatforming. You don’t have to wait for the hypothetical perspective of some imagined, delusional, “inclusive” future to find faux horrors to boggle your mind as you look back. Open your fucking eyes and look at the horrors noted above. Horrors you are promoting. So yeah, I’m “critical” of gender. Why aren’t you?

News from Australia:

The Australian government has instructed a news outlet to remove or heavily censor an article that “offended” a trans-identified male living in the country.

Reduxx, an independent media project dedicated to exposing gender ideology, received a notice from Australia’s eSafety Commissioner on April 28. The notice alerted them to a complaint made about an article they published on April 1.

The article, “Thousands of Complaints Filed After Trans YouTuber Allowed To Play On Women’s Football League, Reportedly Injured Players,” revealed the identity of a transgender male who had been the subject of mass complaint after reportedly injuring female players at a football game while playing on the women’s team.

The male in question is Riley Dennis.

Apparently his anonymity is more important than the safety and fair sport of female football players.

Why would that be? Why should it be a secret who he is? Why should he be protected while the women are both harmed and injured?

Dennis is a trans activist and former YouTuber best known for having condemned lesbians as “transphobic” for not dating trans-identified males.

Surely Dennis is even more transphobic for not dating trans-identified males. Why do women have to when he doesn’t have to? Who made that rule? Other than Rapists Unlimited?

Despite Reduxx not being located in Australia, the outlet was instructed by the Australian government to remove all images of Dennis, including all references to the player’s name, soccer club and social media handles.

How about “No.”

Owen Jones wonders aloud why some of us dislike Dylan Mulvaney.

Let me explain.

Clear?

Happening now – so if you happen to be at Piccadilly Circus or a few minutes away you still have time to join in –

Behold: an idiot.

Ghul purports to be an academic herself, so you’d think she’d know better, but this is now, so actually you wouldn’t.

Normally progressives like her don’t say “It’s fine that you were forcibly prevented from watching and then talking about a film in public because hey you can always watch it in private and talk to yourself about it.” Normally they don’t, but when it’s about the poor fragile victimized men in skirts they do.

Yeah seriously gender critical feminism is so cool and edgy while trans ideology is tame stodgy conservative white-shoe old-skool boring cream of wheat.

Women may not talk back.

Originally a comment by Cluecat on Summation.

This is something that seems very strange – how is it that *this* is what the “So Very Skeptic Atheist Bros” have thrown everything away for. Really.

They’ve quite literally gone from “Hurr, Religiot! Humans don’t have souls! You’re all stupid to insist on it!” to “Hurr! Of course I have a pink sparkly feeeeeemale identitay! You’re all stupid to deny it!”.

They’re right back agreeing that souls exist, and that they can be in the “wrong” bodies (by some mechanism that’s never made clear). Do they understand this, these Big Skeptic Bros?

It’s embarrassing, frankly. It’s the antithesis of everything they have been claiming when it comes to any other area. Unlike those who have been seriously considering the ideas and discussing what this *means* for practical life (in addition to intellectual implications), they’ve just been calling believers stupid. So it’s looking like they just wanted an excuse to feel Very Superior Doodz, and be dicks to people. All that Skeptic Stuff, and the Deep Thinkers, and the Rational Bros, and… they’ve thrown it away. For a bunch of fetishists in dresses.

Seriously!

So embarrassing.

Hmm. So the Supreme Court answers to no one, so the Supreme Court justices can…do whatever they like.

It was a short letter. John Roberts, chief justice of the US supreme court, was brief in his missive to Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee. Citing “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence”, Roberts declined to appear before the committee to discuss disturbing recent revelations of ethics violations at the court.

What about ethical concerns and the importance of preserving judicial non-corruption? No? Nothing?

Congress is meant to exert checks on judicial power – to investigate or even impeach judges who abuse their office or interpret the law in ways that violate its spirit, and to affirm that the elected branches will hold more sway over policy than the appointed one. But the chief justice’s show of indifference to congressional oversight authority reflects a new reality: that there are now effectively no checks on the power of the court – at least none that Democrats have the political will to use – and that the justices can be assured that they will face no repercussions even if they act in flagrant violation of ethical standards. It seems that they intend to.

Clarence Thomas in particular. Harlan Crow? Conflicts of interest as far as the eye can see?

During his long tenure on the court, he has repeatedly had trouble filling out his financial disclosure forms correctly. Once, he failed to report more than half a million dollars in income that his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, received from the rightwing Heritage Foundation. He said at the time that he had misunderstood the forms. That was also his excuse regarding Harlan Crow’s largesse.

You know…you’d kind of expect a judge who has a seat on the Supreme Court to be able to figure out what the rules are. You’d kind of expect him to have the requisite smarts and knowledge and understanding and resources and commitment to ethical norms to do that much. Wouldn’t you?

Republican Supreme Court rules gerrymandering is totes legal.

Barely a year after Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court said new maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts were partisan gerrymanders that violated the State Constitution, a newly elected Republican majority on the court reversed course on Friday and said the court had no authority to overturn those maps.

The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled State Legislature to scrap the court-ordered State Senate and congressional district. boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in their favor for elections in 2024.

Can legislatures fix elections in advance? Sure sure sure, no problem. (Unless the legislature happens to be majority The Wrong Party.)

Oops.

Right?? Who the hell ever heard of “race” and “critical” being discussed in the same breath?

Oh wait…

Not amazed. Not triggered. Not convinced.

Ok so then bring out the big guns, argumentatively speaking.

You can’t have equality between the sexes if sex is determined by rhetoric rather than reality.

“Legal sex” here means “fictional sex.” It’s ridiculous. It’s not workable or reasonable to base laws on fictional “identities.” Eventually you’ll have everyone identifying as heir to the throne and entitled to all that cash.

I wonder how Lady Haldane would rule if a lot of people started identifying as military veterans entitled to the benefits that go to such veterans.

In surprise twist, violent man turns out to be violent man. Who could have seen that over the horizon?

Barbie Kardashian under Garda investigation for allegedly threatening to rape female prison officers

Dangerous inmate Barbie Kardashian is facing the prospect of more jail time – after gardai began an investigation into allegations she threatened to rape female prison officers.

The Mirror has confirmed that the [male] transgender prisoner is alleged to have threatened to sexually attack several female prison officers at Limerick Prison this week.

Kardashian, who is legally a woman after she secured a gender recognition certificate, is alleged to have issued the threats after she refused orders to clean up the shower area of the prison’s women’s section after she had used it.

He’s “legally a woman” but physically a man and mentally/morally a violent sadist. What could possibly go wrong?

Male prison staff had to intervene to protect their female colleagues and bring Kardashian back to her cell.

We keep telling you. This is why you can’t just merrily say all men who say “I’m a woman!!” get to be ValiDated as women at all times in all circumstances.

Michael Tomasky says never mind Carlson, get Murdoch.

As Tucker Carlson begins to slither out of the news cycle, here’s a reminder to keep our eyes on the prize. The prize—that is, the real enemy of standards and decency and integrity—is Rupert Murdoch. Carlson was a symptom. An unusually disgusting and purulent (great word, look it up!) symptom, but a symptom all the same. The disease is Murdoch.

He has been destroying journalism for 50 years. I’ll get into some of that below. But right now, let’s focus on something that’s happening in England, which I can assure you is something that Rupert is worried about—maybe even more worried than he is about Smartmatic.

He means Britain or the UK, not England. It’s about Harry v Choss and Harry v Murdoch and the fact that Harry is a real threat to Murdoch and his foul empire, which causes me to feel suddenly optimistic.

Harry is part of a large group suing Murdoch’s British media empire, News Group Newspapers, over the old phone-hacking scandal, which Harry and other litigants claim went on far longer than known and extended to the Murdoch property The Sun (so far, only The News of the World, shuttered after a massive settlement, has been implicated). In papers released Tuesday, Harry alleges that Queen Elizabeth II wanted to go after Murdoch’s media empire legally but that Charles called her off. This was allegedly because he wanted to stay on Rupe’s good side for the sake of Camilla—that is, so that Murdoch media outlets didn’t make any waves about her becoming queen.

The tiny things that sway important matters. Murdoch is a one-man pandemic, and Charles Windsor wants to protect him because of his, Charles Windsor’s, sex life.

The internal royal squabbling is an interesting curiosity. But what concerns us more over here is Harry’s crusade against Murdoch. Clive Irving explains in The Daily Beast: “Harry’s attack on the ‘grotesque and sadistic’ London tabloids is likely to bring more reputational harm. Murdoch’s lawyers know this. Harry’s refusal to settle out of court—as thousands of other hacking victims have done because they lack his kind of wealth to support protracted litigation—means that damning documents uncovered during discovery would suddenly be made public in court.”

Harry is out for blood. And unlike the thousands of regular-person victims of the phone-hacking scandal, such as the grieving parents of dead children, Harry has the money to go toe-to-toe with Murdoch in the courtroom. He doesn’t want to settle. He wants all the facts out there, and he wants Murdoch crushed.

Does he now.

I wish him all the luck in the world.

I saw a cruise ship heading from Puget Sound into Elliott Bay this morning for the first time this year. I saw another one at a pier a few days ago. April to October they ply to and fro, burning up their 80 thousand gallons of fuel per day.

Meanwhile Spain is hot.

Spain recorded its hottest ever temperature for April on Thursday, hitting 38.8C according to the country’s meteorological service.

Seattle got that hot two years ago, but not in April.

The record figure was reached in Cordoba airport in southern Spain just after 15:00 local time (14:00 BST). For days a blistering heatwave has hit the country with temperatures 10-15C warmer than expected for April. It’s been driven by a mass of very hot air from Africa, coupled with a slow moving weather system.

…

The high temperatures come on top of long running drought in many parts of Spain. Reservoirs in the Guadalquivir basin are only at 25% of capacity. This combination is raising the prospect of early forest fires, with the national weather service warning that large swathes of the country would be at risk. Spain saw the most land burned of any country in Europe in 2022.

Climate change is very likely playing a role in this heatwave, according to experts in the field.

…

This heatwave in Spain is not an isolated event – all across the world high temperatures in the first few months of this year have shattered records.

Oh well. Book a cruise to take your mind off it.

First of all the headline.

Narrow legal definition of sex in Montana bill would jeopardize protections for trans people

What “narrow”?!! It’s just the definition. A small set of people are trying to force all of us to “broaden” the definition so that it means nothing. If sex stops meaning “female/male” then it’s just random. (Of course there are other meanings of “sex,” in particular the activity, but the definition PBS means here is the one that names female or male.)

A bill advancing through Montana’s statehouse would legally define a man as someone who produces sperm and a woman as someone who produces eggs — and apply that definition to 40 aspects of the state’s legislative code, from employment protections and school sports teams to burial records and marriage licenses.

The 60-page bill, which is being considered in the House after being passed by the state Senate on March 17, is an extreme example of a trend growing across the country this year: anti-trans bills that focus on narrowly defining sex.

But it’s no more “narrowly” than excluding bananas and peaches from the definition of “cherries” or rabbits and raccoons from the definition of “birds.” Definitions are a kind of thing you don’t want to make wider or broader, because then they can’t do the work of defining. It sounds conservative in the sense of mean and pinched and joyless, this business of “narrowly” defining sex, but that’s a rhetorical ploy. Definitions are necessarily narrow; a “liberal” definition is a useless definition.

LGBTQ+ advocates say it’s part of an attempt to totally push transgender people out of public life by excluding them from as many areas of law as possible.

If that really is what LGBTQ+ advocates say then they’re lying. The attempt is to prevent addled “activists” from defining women out of our rights.

“With SB 458, they’re just jumping right to the finish line,” said SK Rossi, a longtime LGBTQ+ activist and lobbyist based in Montana. “They essentially just decided to wipe us from the code . . .  which means you actually can’t function in public spaces or public systems as yourself without either lying to the state or to your local government about the gender you were given at birth, or misgendering yourself at every juncture of your public life.”

Wut? Where does the necessity to lie to the state or to your local government about the gender you were given at birth come in? The point is to tell the truth about the gender/sex you were determined to be [not “given”] at birth.

Logan Casey, senior policy researcher and adviser for the Movement Advancement Project, which monitors LGBTQ+ policy, has tracked 15 active bills introduced this year across 11 states that aim to define, or redefine, sex…Not every bill is focused on defining men and women by their reproductive capacities, but all aim to make a legal distinction between men and women based on their characteristics at birth.

Because that’s the distinction that counts. People don’t pop out male and then become female 10 or 20 or 50 years later. It doesn’t work that way.

Shawn Reagor, director of equality at the Montana Human Rights Network, said that the state has seen a “disturbing” rise in the quantity and harm of anti-LGBTQ+ bills compared with its last legislative session — and that more Republicans are rallying around them.

Montana’s proposed bill to define sex creates many unknowns, Reagor said — how it would be funded, how it would be implemented and how it would be enforced. It has the potential to impact transgender people in nearly all parts of their day-to-day life — through housing protections, identity documents, employment and health care.

“It entirely eliminates the existence of intersex people. It tries to force trans and nonbinary folks to misidentify their gender. And it has huge implications for the rest of the state, taking us back hundreds of years,” he said.

Hundreds of years? So we’ve had these new exciting progressive definitions of “women” and “men” for hundreds of years? Any citations for that?

Ezra Ishmael Young, who teaches constitutional law at Cornell Law School, said Montana’s bill clearly violates the state’s own constitution, as well as the federal Constitution. In the 1970s, Montana added an “individual dignity” clause to its constitution — stating that “no person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws” or discriminated against by the state on the basis of sex.

Montana’s Supreme Court has held that the plain meaning of the dignity clause protects the intrinsic worth and basic humanity of its citizens — which is “directly at odds with what this bill aims to do,” Akilah Maya Deernose, staff attorney at the ACLU of Montana, told reporters at a virtual briefing on Wednesday.

I don’t see it. That’s a less batshit claim than many of these claims, but I still think it’s wrong. I don’t think the worth and basic humanity of people relies on a right to lie about oneself and force everyone else to agree with the lie. In fact I think this line of argument pulls in the other direction – I think it’s infantilizing. It amounts to saying we all have to humor everyone’s delusions about the self, when a huge part of growing up involves shedding delusions about the self. “Oh, actually, I’m not more important than everyone else, I’m not more special than everyone else, I don’t deserve better treatment than everyone else, I’m not a miraculous miracle compared to everyone else.”