What was that I was just saying about Joyce Carol Oates being not intelligent?

“so, just answer: what are the statistics of men currently incarcerated in women’s facilities?”

Replies providing said stats are many. She will never acknowledge them, and she will never adjust her views accordingly.

Joyce Carol Oates plays dumb.

Yeah and what’s all this fuss about Trump’s war on immigrants? Why is everybody yelling about Elon Musk? What’s the big deal about global warming? So what if Trump is corrupt and incompetent and stupid? Who cares if California burns to the ground? Why do people even need food?

Labour MPs resist.

Labour MPs have deemed the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of a woman as “completely unnecessary” and a “backslide” on rights, months after the judgment.

Oh yes, it’s completely unnecessary to remind people that women, and women only, are women, and men are not, repeat not, women. It’s completely unnecessary despite the fact that a shocking number of people are insisting that some men are women and that non-men women are strictly forbidden to say otherwise much less act otherwise.

Although many letters sent by MPs, and seen by The Times, featured generic stock responses, an analysis of more than 50 pieces of correspondence revealed how some MPs continued to push back against the ruling and cast doubt over forthcoming guidance being produced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the equality regulator.

Andrew Western, a work and pensions minister and the MP for Stretford & Urmston, told one constituent that he believed the case was “completely unnecessary” and he appreciated “the fear and distress that has resulted” from it.

Thus revealing that he has no awareness whatsoever of the needs of women, which is pretty appalling in an MP.

Josh Newbury, the MP for Cannock Chase, said in a letter it was “clear in my view that trans women are women and that trans men are men”. He said the Supreme Court ruling did not contradict that but that “the misinterpretation of, and fallout from, the ruling has wrongly brought this into question”.

He said: “I do not believe it is morally right for trans people to be excluded from single-sex spaces designated for their gender.”

But he does believe it is morally right for women to be excluded from women’s single-sex spaces. Why? Why does he believe it’s more important to give a small number of men access to women’s spaces than it is to give millions of women access to women’s spaces? How does that work in his head?

In another letter Noah Law, the MP for St Austell and Newquay, said the ruling could “be used as an excuse to discriminate against transgender people”. He said he feared the ruling would “serve as a backslide” and added: “It is, ultimately, not down to any court to decide how people feel living in their own skin, and it seems like obvious common courtesy to let people live in a way that makes them feel happy and safe.”

Unless they’re women. It seems like obvious common courtesy to let men use women’s toilets but it does not seem like obvious common courtesy to let women use women’s toilets. Make it make sense.

No.

No. Of course not. Women’s prisons are women’s prisons. That has never meant that each man should be “assessed on an individual basis” before being sent to a men’s prison. It has always meant that women’s prisons are for women, and as such they are not for men. The end. There is no “humanity and decency” in forcing trapped women to share their spaces with men.

Why are so many people so eager to lavish “humanity and decency” on men at the expense of women? What is this about? Did everybody’s mommy say no to a third cookie once too often?

Behold, UN Women goes out of its way to erase women and girls from its little homily about the stigma around – wait for it – menstruation.

I, you, we, they, but not she she SHE.

If we need to be able to talk about menstruation without fear or shame then we need to be able to start with the fact that it’s something women do, women exclusively, women and not men. Being so “inclusive” that you include men in menstruation is an inclooosive too many.

You can’t break a stigma by lying. You can’t speak openly about menstruation by pretending that men menstruate. You can’t make it possible for women to talk about menstruation without fear or shame by openly brazenly publicly LYING about it on social media.

Things the BBC is not reporting on.

Very Don’t Mention the War, isn’t it.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on #No BeKind for you.

Because trans identity tops an all-important oppression hierarchy and the purest form of virtue is being a “trans ally”.

I think it’s the purest form of virtue because it’s the costliest dogma to uphold. That’s always been the way with religion: the more preposterous and ostentatious the display of commitment — i.e., the harder it is to merely casually dabble, which is to say, the more expensive the dues are in that particular membership “tier” — the more virtuous one is seen to be, at least among fellow aspirants to that particular religion. That’s why the most committed members of any religion demonstrate it by wearing conspicuous articles of clothing — yarmulkes, turbans — and/or by the male members forcing the women under their control to be covered by garments whenever they’re in public — enshrouding them in burqas of varying degrees of severity.

And the more loudly one demonstrates their belief in the dogma — especially the most “difficult” parts, i.e., the hardest parts to swallow — the more virtuous one is presumed to be. This is the principle that drives Muslim suicide bombers, for example.

To my mind, this is all best understood through the lens of behavioural science — to be specific, something like, evolutionary behavioural neuropsychology, if that’s even what they call it? I.e., human culture is irrational and crazy because the human brain is just a primitive monkey with an overactive prefrontal cortex, which has deluded itself into thinking it’s a lot smarter than it actually is.

People covet exclusivity. Hell if I know exactly why, but it’s evidently a built-in drive that lives somewhere deep down in the brain where the animal instincts allegedly are, near the cerebellum. It’s apparently related to tribal in-group insecurity. This phenomenon isn’t limited to religion; the entire fashion industry runs on it, for one other notable example.

It’s trans ideology’s naked preposterousness that has made it irresistible to that primitive part of the brain that controls tribal in-group signalling, and which subsequently set off a frenzy among insecure left-wing people to see who can smother themselves in it the most. I don’t think that the autogynephiles who made up the religion planned it that way; it was just dumb luck that their silly belief system happened to fit the bill. Call it “keeping up with the Transes.”

As this religion falls apart, we’ll see the majority of people quietly slink away from it — like a fashion fad that’s come and gone. But I think we’ll also see a small few, the ones who’ve mentally cornered themselves into fighting to the bitter end, become extremely violent, more along the lines of Islamist terrorists.

It’s true.

Will the adults ever come back?

The obligatory opaque headline:

Transgender pool player loses discrimination case

He’s a man, of course.

A transgender pool player has lost a discrimination claim against one of the sport’s organisers.

The English Blackball Pool Federation (EBPF) banned players who were not born biologically female from its women’s competitions and teams in August 2023.

Professional player Harriet Haynes took the organisation to court, saying the rule was “direct discrimination” against her on the grounds of her gender reassignment.

It’s all dishonest and sneaky. A male “transgender” player has lost his claim. Players who were “not born biologically female” are men. One three-letter word as opposed to six long-winded words. Professional player “Harriet” is a man. He claimed the rule was discrimination against him on the grounds of his “gender reassignment” – which is not a thing. Species is not assigned and neither is sex.

But a court judge has said he is satisfied exclusion was the only “reasonable” way to ensure “fair competition” and dismissed her claim.

His claim. His his his his his.

A spokesperson said: “The court found that pool is a game in which men have an advantage over women and that allowing only those born as women to compete in our women’s competitions is necessary to secure fair competition.”

In her claim, Haynes said her exclusion from the Kent Women’s A pool team had caused her distress and upset, and she had been subjected to hurtful comments on social media.

Notice the contrast. On the one hand, he’s a man so he has unfair advantages. On the other hand wah wah distress and upset wah wah hurty comments wah wah his feefees matter while women’s don’t.

What a spectacle.

Ah yes, the old “if you don’t like the stats, fire the statistician” ploy. Always good advice. See also: if you don’t like the diagnosis, fire the doctor. If you don’t like the weather, fire the National Weather Service. If you don’t like the distance from New York to Miami, fire the mapmakers.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a monthly jobs report that included weaker-than-expected numbers for July, plus major downward revisions of May and June’s numbers.

In a post on Truth Social on Friday, the president said the jobs numbers were “rigged” and that he’d asked his team to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.

“We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate,” Trump wrote.

In another Truth Social post, the president added, “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

And what do we suppose he based that personal opinion on? A thorough investigation of the labor statistics? Or his dislike of the labor statistics on offer?

Denial; it ain’t just a river.

Trump faced criticism from Democrats and Republicans in Congress on Friday when he decided to fire McEntarfer, with several Republican senators questioning whether the firing would actually help the Trump administration improve future jobs numbers.

“We have to look somewhere for objective statistics. When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that, you know, the statistics won’t be politicized,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told NBC News on Friday. “I’m going to look into it, but first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting,” he added.

Well, let us know if second impression is that you can really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What no excuses?

“I wish they could have found another way to promote their cause without causing damage.”

All the women who have suffered at the hands of this “cause” would agree. But “causing damage” was the goal of this cause. Getting what transactivists wanted was only possible by destroying women’s rights. Unfortunately there were far too many people eager to do exactly that, knowing full well what the consequences for women would be, and became, because women told them. It should always be remembered that this was a price that activists and their allies were willing to force women to pay. This was not an accident, or an unforeseen, unintended consequence: it was the inevitable result of choices that were made deliberately, choices and policies enforced with calculated, misogynistic malice. Men in women’s prisons. Men in women’s hospital wards. Men in women’s crisis centres. Men in women’s short-lists. Men in women’s sports.

None of this just “happened.” It was all done, with authorization, coordination, and implementation from Cabinet on down, through all levels of corrections, hospital, counseling, and sporting authority management and staff. And all of it was regulated and enforced by these same departments and officials, as well as both the police and the judiciary. It was all reported upon by compliant, partisan, pro-trans/anti-women media, both public and corporate. This was a coup of delusion that captured practically the entire apparatus of the British state. How did it happen so quickly and so completely? How does anyone trust any of these institutions ever again? Some of them engaged in what amounted to state-sponsored terrorism against many of their own citizens, with the vast majority of the victims being women.

I’m still slightly amazed at the ruling of the Supreme Court, but it’s still early days. Too many institutions and departments are dragging their feet, or actively denying and resisting the clear meaning and legal requirements of the ruling. They’re pretending there’s wiggle room, nuance, or confusion when there is none. This is a slap in the face for the women who stood up and said “No” to a state gone mad. We can hope that their courageous example will serve as a beacon and promise of justice to come in other countries. The continuing human toll of what has been perpetrated during this nightmare time may well be incalculable. Some of it just can’t be undone. The tide seems to be turning, but the cleanup will take years; there’s a lot of toxic waste to be collected and safeguards to be installed. Heads should roll, but probably won’t.

Well I’ll be. The BBC doesn’t say a single mollifying word to excuse the vandalism.

The cost to repair an almost 300-year-old mausoleum which was graffitied with the words “trans rights” is expected to be more than £2,000. The message was sprayed on the side of Dashwood Mausoleum near West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, reports the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

James Parker, the West Wycombe Estate land agent, said the Dashwood family would bear the cost of the cleaning and restoration work, which has yet to be completed. He said: “This site holds deep personal and historical significance not only to the estate, but to others with loved ones buried nearby. Many feel this as a personal violation of a sacred space.”

This should be the place where the Beeb jumps in to remind us how marginalized and persecuted and marginalized and terrorized trans people are. Yet somehow the jumping in never happens.

Mr Parker said: “This mausoleum is not only a place of rest for the Dashwood family ancestors, but a part of our shared heritage and local community. While we support everyone’s right to free expression and peaceful protest, damaging sacred and historic spaces cannot be justified under any circumstances.”

Independent member at Buckinghamshire Council, Orsolya Hayday, said she was saddened by the incident. “Whilst I understand the important issue of minority rights, as everybody should have the same rights, but vandalising this family mausoleum in a popular beauty spot is definitely not the right way to go about it,” she said. “I wish they could have found another way to promote their cause without causing damage.”

And there the story ends.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Janice Turner on magic gender and snobbery:

Of all such cases — and I’ve followed many — none encapsulates the shibboleths, snobberies and magical thinking of our age so well. Day after day we heard doctors and managers of Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy, relate how they unashamedly closed ranks against a working-class nurse, whose rights, feelings or even basic humanity fell beyond their #BeKind purview.

It’s true you know. “Be kind” is never ever about listening to women who want to preserve the rights we’ve worked so hard to declare and defend; “be kind” is only for men who claim to be women and the few women who cheer on their claim. The rule for non-compliant women is sit down and shut up.

Each day we learnt new ways in which senior hospital staff had persecuted a nurse with a flawless record. Jamie Doyle, head of nursing, wanted Peggie reported to the police. Upton claimed to have noted earlier incidents in which Peggie’s hostility towards him had endangered patients. But no one corroborated these grave claims and an IT expert who analysed Upton’s phone testified that these were not contemporaneous notes but added after the Christmas Eve row. (Peggie was cleared of these and other allegations in a separate hospital disciplinary inquiry.)

Why did all of these senior people fall over themselves to take Upton’s side, even at the expense of truth? Because trans identity tops an all-important oppression hierarchy and the purest form of virtue is being a “trans ally”. 

And why does trans identity top an all-important oppression hierarchy?

I don’t know. I’ve never understood it. I doubt I ever will.

I suppose part of the explanation is wanting the current thing to be the best ever, so that we here now are involved in the best thing ever, as opposed to being involved in a stupid destructive mistake. But that’s such a silly pathetic reason for this massive clusterfuck, so it’s not an explanation that really explains much.

Four months after the Supreme Court clarified the meaning of sex, it is an outrage that public money is still being squandered while women fight for basic rights. Why does the Health and Safety Executive not remind employers of 1992 workplace laws which mandate single-sex changing? Why are NHS England and the NHS Confederation allowed by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to drag their feet? The ludicrous joke that sex is an unfathomable mystery has worn very thin.

And it was never funny.

This makes no sense.

The burqa and all the rest of it are not for life at home, they’re for outside. Women who are forced to cover up aren’t going to be nursing their babies in the park, are they. It’s bad enough that Tower Hamlets is apparently promoting Islamist subordination of women, but it’s even worse that they get the rules wrong.

But who is the real threat here?

‘Trans rage’ protesters vandalise Wes Streeting’s office

Windows at the Health Secretary’s Ilford North Office were smashed, and the words “child killer” daubed on the front in paint.

Trans Bash Back, a “trans-led direct action project”, claimed they were responsible for the vandalism in a post on the social media platform BlueSky.

Sharing an image of the front of the office shortly after it had been vandalised, they wrote: “Don’t want action? Don’t kill kids.”

Taking “kill” as hyperbole for injure, harm, damage, endanger and the like, who is really doing that? Which is the most harmful and damaging: urging interfering with people’s puberties, or advising not interfering with people’s puberties?

It’s not just self-evident that trying to halt puberty via drugs or surgery or both is safer than not doing so. It’s more the other way around, in fact. Primum non nocere. Interfering with puberties is in fact a very drastic thing to do, and at least potentially quite harmful.

Trans Bash Back, which appears to have only recently been launched, posted a manifesto online in which it said that organisations seeking to ban puberty blockers, or define what a man or woman is, should “expect” it.

If nobody is allowed to “define” what a man or woman is, then what does “trans” even mean? If the words “woman” and “man” don’t mean anything, then “trans” doesn’t mean anything either.

In an online FAQ, the organisation described itself as a “Nonviolent Direct Action Group”, and defines the actions it takes as “risky, and rarely legal”.

In a statement on social media, the group said it refuses “to sit and watch as trans young people have their healthcare stripped from them. We refuse to allow Streeting to cover up their suicides. We refuse to endure the violence and humiliation. They will have to go through us”.

So feisty, so brave, so self-sacrificing, and so idiotic. Gender fiddling is not healthcare, and protecting teenagers from fashionable fiddling is neither violence nor humiliation. Hopped-up rhetoric doesn’t change any of that.

Update: h/t Mostly Cloudy.

Trump and Fox News are working hard to turn immigration into a military issue.

Trump has already enmeshed the United States military in domestic law enforcement operations involving immigration to an unprecedented degree. He has authorized a major military buildup at the border. He has maximized the use of military planes for deportations, complete with the White House pumping out imagery of migrants getting frog-marched onto souped-up military aircraft. He sent the National Guard into Los Angeles amid large-scale protests there—and then sent in the Marines.

But an internal memo circulated inside the Department of Homeland Security suggests that Trump’s use of the military for domestic law enforcement on immigration could soon get worse. The memo—obtained by The New Republic—provides a glimpse into the thinking of top officials as they seek to involve the Defense Department more deeply in these domestic operations, and it has unnerved experts who believe it portends a frightening escalation.

The memo lays out the need to persuade top Pentagon officials to get much more serious about using the military to combat illegal immigration—and not just at the border. It suggests that DHS is anticipating many more uses of the military in urban centers, noting that L.A.-style operations may be needed “for years to come.” And it likens the threat posed by transnational gangs and cartels to having “Al Qaeda or ISIS cells and fighters operating freely inside America,” hinting at a ramped-up militarized posture inside the interior.

…

The memo was authored by Philip Hegseth—the younger brother of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who is a senior adviser to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and DHS liaison officer to the Defense Department. As such it also sheds light on Hegseth the Younger’s role, which has been the subject of media speculation labeling him an obscure but influential figure in his brother’s MAGA orbit.

Fox News is in charge.

The larger context here is that the administration has taken extraordinary license in its invention of pretexts for draconian domestic operations. The administration has insisted we are under foreign “invasion” to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of people with little to no due process. Government agencies have hyped supposed evidence of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 ties to justify illegally renditioning him to a Salvadoran prison. Trump has a long history of lying about crime to justify immigration crackdowns. He invented numerous fake pretexts for sending troops into L.A.

The memo suggests further operationalization of that tactic. “They see Los Angeles as a model to be replicated,” Lee said.

All this comes as ICE is about to receive well over $100 billion in new funds. The memo raises the question of what that use of military personnel detailed “within ICE and CBP” will look like with all that money.

In a sense, the administration seems to be supercharging immigration “invasion” agitprop to manufacture a sense of national trauma similar to the one that arose after the September 11 attacks. That led to another type of war-on-terror hyper-militarization at home (as well as abroad). The administration seems determined to outdo that—this time against the new internal enemy.

“Normalizing routine military support to law enforcement could create a kind of domestic ‘Forever War,’ but one that is uniquely dangerous,” the Brennan Center’s Nunn told me. “As the Founders well understood, a military that is turned inward is a threat to both democracy and individual liberty.”

Trump is cool with that.

Good title.

Universities ‘on notice’ after Kathleen Stock treatment, says minister

Name in the headline! There’s glory for you!

Universities have been put “on notice” to uphold free speech following the treatment of Kathleen Stock, a minister has said.

Baroness Smith of Malvern, the universities minister, told The Telegraph that higher education institutions must take lessons after the University of Sussex was hit with a record fine for breaching Dr Stock’s free speech.

The Office for Students (OfS), the higher education watchdog, fined the institution £585,000 in March and ruled that it had failed to protect the academic from being hounded out over her gender-critical views.

Yes, it “failed to protect” in the sense of all but applauding.

Baroness Smith said universities could face even larger sanctions if other academics were subjected to similar treatment, with new free speech laws set to come into effect on Friday.

“We have seen too many instances where those on campus have had their voices silenced and the chilling effect that has taken hold in some institutions cannot continue,” she told The Telegraph.

And what voices are silenced? The ones that say women have rights too, and that men should stop bullying us and stop trying to force us to play along with their magic gender fantasies. How did universities get to a place where women defending our own rights are seen as malevolent evil monsters while men in lipstick are treated as holy martyrs?

It marks a change in tone from the Government after Labour last year tried to shelve free speech laws drawn up in the wake of Dr Stock’s case and other high-profile episodes of cancel culture on campus.

Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, pulled the plug on flagship Tory legislation designed to protect academics last July, days before it was due to come into effect, and said she would consider repealing it altogether.

The Government later U-turned on the decision following widespread backlash from academics, with the new free speech laws now coming into force on Aug 1 – a year behind schedule.

Labour thinks women should be punished and driven out of their jobs for saying that men are not women. Make it make sense.

Another hon in the Mitfordian sense:

One Tuesday evening last month in his mother’s house on the Wirral, the recently ex-Harvard philosophy professor Jimmy Doyle took to X to say, at last, what he really thought about the state of free speech in American academia.

In one tweet he wrote: “For unrelated reasons I’ve resigned my position at Harvard. But I haven’t been able to speak frankly with anyone for [about] five years. And it’ll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation’s intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society.”

In another he identified exactly what he had been unable to be frank about. He accused the trans movement of “provoking the most obvious social contagion since the Children’s Crusade”.

To his surprise, many of the (many) responses were non-hostile.

At Harvard, he says, there was just one person to whom he could speak frankly. This was Alex Byrne of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a prominent critic of transgender rights who last month outed himself as one of the anonymous authors of the Trump administration’s report on gender affirmation care for children. Byrne, he says, earned notoriety for saying what “no one would have batted an eyelid at ten years ago”.

Or twelve, or fifteen. The monstering was well under way ten years ago.

Byrne’s wife is Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist who in 2021 said on Fox News that it was a big mistake if medical school professors were shying away from using scientific terms such as “male”, “female” and “pregnant woman”. She left her job at Harvard in 2023 claiming a lack of support from colleagues when she was attacked for her remarks. She had been left with “no choice” but to leave.

Steven Pinker, Harvard’s superstar psychology don, took her side, but he was “one of those too-big-to-fail guys” and more or less alone.

Pinker also took Jerry Coyne’s side when the Freedom From Religion Foundation monstered him. Isn’t it bizarre that there’s a “side” that insists men can be women?

When he first taught in America, constraints on academic free speech were few. Had anyone, until a decade ago, said someone with a penis was a woman, they would be asked what on earth they meant.

Again: more than a decade. Not a lot more, but a decade ago the fire had enveloped the whole house.

“And it’s not as though the introduction of that proposition into the discourse was accompanied by any kind of explanation or justification. I mean, in logic, an axiom is a sentence that you can assert without having to prove it. The point of an axiom is that it’s a proposition on the basis of which you can prove or justify others. If you didn’t have any axioms, you wouldn’t be able to prove anything interesting. But the slogan ‘trans women are women’, that couldn’t possibly have entered the discourse as something that people had arrived at a consensus about.

“And I think that’s a pretty dangerous position to be in with regards to free inquiry.”

…

He says he once had a trans student, a young father, who asked to be called “she/her”. He would have been in a “world of trouble” had he declined but is still in two minds about whether he should have. “‘Why be an arsehole?’ is a legitimate question independent of any ideological considerations. But on the other hand, it’s one thing to be an arsehole but another to be required, on pain of ostracism, not to be an arsehole.”

I don’t actually think it’s being an asshole to refuse to pretend a man is a woman. It may feel like being an asshole in the moment, but when the dust has settled, who is really the asshole? Someone who doesn’t call a man a woman, or a man who expects people to call him a woman? Trying to oblige people to call you something you’re not is an asshole move. Not hurting people’s feelings by calling them ugly or boring is one thing, and pretending they’re the sex they’re not is another.

Although he is a new entrant to the public trans debate, he has a personal reason to know the territory. His sister, Ursula Doyle, worked at the publisher Hachette in London, where she acquired a book by Kathleen Stock, the British philosopher who resigned from the University of Sussex after being attacked by colleagues for her views on gender.

Doyle, who suffered online abuse for her part in the book’s publication, left Hachette last year claiming she had been treated “as an emotional basket case who made a fuss about nothing”, and brought a (now settled) employment tribunal case against her employers. Her brother is a fan of Stock’s, trans-critical writers such as Graham Linehan and Hadley Freeman, and his sister.

Team Trans-skeptical. We have the best jokes.

Several layers to this, but worth it.

A massive crack in the dam!

High fives all around.

Jane Russell again! And [pause to choke back laughter] Robin Moira White.