The Scottish government is refusing to pay its bill.

A women’s campaign group has condemned the Scottish Government for failing to settle a legal bill six months on from a crushing Supreme Court defeat.

For Women Scotland won the landmark case in April when the UK’s highest court ruled that the definition of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act referred to biological sex.

A subsequent court order ruled that the Scottish Government must pay at least some of For Women Scotland’s legal cost during the lengthy court battle, which ran to a total of around £417,000.

But no payment has yet been made – leading to claims ministers are stalling so that the money isn’t used for further legal action about the SNP Government’s policies on single-sex spaces.

Or, more simply, so that the money stays with them. I mean there’s no need to search around for a specific use they have for the money, surely: they’re just being defiant and hostile because they are defiant and hostile.

At a Tory conference fringe event yesterday, Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, condemned public bodies for failing to fully implement the Supreme Court ruling.

She said: ‘We came out of that courtroom and it was like waking up from a bad dream. But it seems like an awful lot of organisations have not yet woken up, and many of them are hostile to the judgement.

‘It is kind of extraordinary to see people mouthing off that those judges got it wrong. I think their brains have been broken by the illogicality of trying to treat some men as women, and thinking that makes them the good guys. So now they can’t bear to be the bad guys.’

But they’re well content with being the bad guys to women.

Ok so it seems that Australia has the great good fortune of a Sex Discrimination Commissioner who doesn’t know who is which sex.

Let’s pause to think for a moment.

Done?

Ok so how do you be a Sex Discrimination Commissioner IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SEX PEOPLE ARE?

What’s the job then? Just shrugging? Is that it? Eight hours of shrugging, five days a week?

Meet Dr Anna Cody, the Australia Sex Discrimination Commissioner.

Cody speaks:

Sir, I would question whether or not Roxanne Tickle is not [sic] a man, she is a trans woman, and so she has gone through various processes and has transitioned and she’s a trans woman. So she has access or sought access or was provided access to the Giggle for girls app and then was er taken off the access to Giggle for Girls app.

Malcolm Roberts then asks what sort of chromosomes Tickle has and the Australia Sex Discrimination Commissioner says “I can’t answer that.” “You can’t answer that??” he says wonderingly, and she confirms that no she can’t answer that. “Wow,” he says.

We are left to wonder still. How do you commissioner sex discrimination if you don’t know what sex people are?

Jolyon loyally sticking to his project of forcing men on women no matter how strongly the women object.

What he means, of course, is that women are trying to ban men from Hampstead women’s pond. He says it’s time to fight women who are trying to keep men out of the women’s pond. He’d love to punch them right in the face, wouldn’t he.

Michael Goldfarb in a public post on Facebook:

Are you tired of the Germany 1933 comparisons? I’m tired of the Germany 1933 comparisons. Let’s shift to the China 1966 and the Cultural Revolution comparison with Chairman Don instead of Chairman Mao and MAGAts in place of Red Guards. The liberal elites across media and the academy being purged and forced publicly to admit ideological errors and bend the knee to the new dispensation.

It’s not a completely farfetched analogy. An aging and increasingly senile Chairman Don makes cultural, economic and increasingly physical war on American society and is aided and abetted by his own Gang of Four: Stevie Miller, Russ Vought, Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth. The rest of the cabinet and both houses of the MAGA Congress make up a rubber stamp Central Committee, more independent minded Republicans having been purged.

An elite centered around the Ivy League and its regional cousins has grown wealthy and complacent and lost touch with the “people” or “peasants” and are being punished. Struggle sessions are the public humiliation in social media and abuse on podcasts and so-called 24 hour news channels against which it is impossible to defend themselves. The majority are keeping their heads down lest they find themselves losing their privileges (as they did during the years of the Hollywood Blacklist — Scoundrel Time as Lilian Hellman dubbed it).

That’s Trump’s one talent, I guess: being evil in all possible ways. A virtuoso of kakk.

You could even add that just as Nixon visited China to normalize relations with Mao as the Cultural Revolution with its depradations was in full-swing. America’s fellow democracies, chief among them the European allies (pride of place to Britain) troop to the White House to emphasize all is still normal in their relations with Trump.

Including that revolting ring-kissing exercise at Windsor the other week. That should never have happened.

The next great battle – HRT for men!

It is genuinely hard to believe any adult could actually write this, let alone a sitting TD: “I want to prioritise the issue of access to the free HRT scheme. It is completely unacceptable that trans women are being excluded from the scheme. There can be no excuse or justification for this decision. I and others have been raising this with the Minister for a couple of weeks now and I am disappointed with the response. Instead of accepting that the exclusion of trans women is wrong and changing course, the Minister has dug in, further disadvantaging one of the most marginalised groups in society. It really is simple. Trans women should be included in the scheme.”

Erm. Sir. Your honor, Mister TG, Minister, whatever the proper address is – Sir, HRT is not only not required for men, it is useless to men. Men don’t need HRT because men don’t go through menopause because men don’t go through menobegin. Men don’t menstruate. Do you see what I’m getting at? They don’t spend decades shedding their uterine lining every month except when pregnant, because men don’t HAVE any uterine lining. They don’t have the ute part that needs the lining, if you see what I mean. No uterus, no uterine lining, no shedding, no menopause, no need for HRT. You’re shouting about the need for pairs of shoes for people who’ve had a leg amputated. Men are not being “disadvantaged” by not being issued female hormones.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Where we are now.

Pam Bondi had a heated and contentious hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee where she refused to answer questions, made personal attacks against Democratic senators, and got extremely defensive and angry whenever the subject of Jeffrey Epstein came up.

…

Ranking Member Dick Durbin’s opening remarks to Bondi: “You disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and the National cryptocurrency enforcement team, despite the growing threat of foreign election interference and the drastic rise in cryptocurrency crimes. You forced out almost 75% of the Civil Rights Div’s career attorneys while hate crimes are on the rise. You fired more than 100 immigration judges. While the immigration case backlog is more than 3 million. You cut the public integrity section from 30 prosecutors to two, while political corruption skyrocket.”

I didn’t know (or I forgot) that about the Civil Rights Division. Civil rights not a priority eh?

Trump pardoned nearly 1600 J6 insurrectionists, including more than 600 charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement. DOJ is arguing in court that these pardons provide immunity for wholly unrelated crimes in multiple cases.”

… “Jared Weiss was filmed on J6, encouraging his fellow rioters to attack the Metro PD officers, and he said, ‘fuck them, kill him.’ What happened to Weiss? He’s been hired by you as a senior adviser.

Oh that’s nice.

“Although you’ve been a registered foreign agent for Qatar, you didn’t recuse yourself from signing off on Trump’s solicitation of a free jet from the royal family, even though this gift was clearly illegal…

…

Schiff complained repeatedly that Bondi refused to answer any questions from senators: “This is supposed to be an oversight hearing. Dozens of prosecutors have been fired simply because they worked on cases investigating the former president. Bondi: What about the fires in California? What about the riots in LA?”

What about potato chips? What about anything?

Divoosity training hits another bump in the road.

Since its creation in 2020, the [Free Speech Union] has handled over 2,500 individual cases and queries relating to free speech. Of our free speech cases, 46% are in some way associated with the workplace and, among these, approximately one fifth concern EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) training (approximately 230). In practice, this means that our members are asking whether they’ll get into trouble if they refuse to do the training, or seeking our help because they’ve already got into trouble for challenging it.

…

In some cases, EDI training extends to telling employees and professionals how they should behave outside the workplace, such as the insistence that employees should use the preferred pronouns of trans people in their private life. 

Well, if you believe, you believe everywhere. Also, belief is not optional.

We’ve also recently uncovered an example of EDI training at Amazon in which employees are not allowed to challenge the trainers’ ideological biases. The full Amazon case study has just been added to our recent research briefing, the EDI Tax, but here’s a brief summary.

Our source is an Amazon employee and FSU member who provided us with a copy of the training material produced by ‘Glamazon’, the company’s internal LGBT+ affinity group, which has been rolled out to employees in the UK with supervisory responsibilities. The managers concerned are referred to as – wait for it – ‘Glamzonians’.

Ew. Because LGBTQ++++++++ is so glam while the rest of us are so dowdy and lame and dull, is that it?

The course contains many of the familiar LGBT+ topics but, as highlighted by our member who said that employees feel “silenced and scared to admit their own beliefs”, it slides into authoritarianism when discussing “preferred gender pronouns”. The following is taken directly from the Glamazon UK training material:

The #PushforPronouns initiative is aimed at normalizing the sharing of pronouns to ensure all people have the opportunity to define and be referred to by the pronouns they personally identify with.

Yes and that’s the problem. The “sharing of pronouns” should not be normalized. It’s absurd and childish and rooted in fantasy plus ignorance.

But the training material makes a third recommendation:

Start introducing yourself with your pronouns. Whenever you’re introduced to somebody new, it’s easy to state your pronouns alongside your name. This helps others understand how to refer to you in the future, and encourages them to also share their pronouns.

Wrong again. What it helps others understand is that you’re a preening narcissist eager to use up other people’s time and attention.

The training says that employees should:

Do this at work and in your personal life to help establish pronoun sharing as a standard practice with your team, your business org, and your community.

No.

The Times:

The House of Commons has been forced to apologise after allowing a transgender woman to use female-only lavatories on the parliamentary estate despite the recent Supreme Court ruling that protects single-sex spaces.

I do wish the news media would not bow to the trans rules and thus mislead readers/listeners. The reality is he’s a man, who claims to be trans, and thus a woman. The basic fact is that he’s a man, and he has no right to bounce into the female-only lavatories.

Robin Moira White, a trans barrister who is a biological male, was directed to use the ladies’ loos in Portcullis House last week after attending a meeting of the women and equalities committee in which the landmark judgment was discussed.

But he’s not a trans barrister, he’s a real barrister.

White, 61, said parliamentary employees had been told that swift access to the lavatories was required because of the barrister’s health condition. White was then shown to the closest ones to the Thatcher Room, where the committee had met.

Really? He just happens to have a “health condition” that requires him to use the women’s toilets? Meanwhile he’s not just a man, he’s a very burly man with a very deep voice – in short, intimidating. A decent man would see that as a reason to be less demanding and obnoxious rather than more so, but trans activism doesn’t work that way. It’s the height of progressivosity to make even huge rumbling men poster boys for fragile vulnerable trans girls.

The barrister was questioned outside the lavatories by two women’s rights campaigners, Kate Harris and Heather Binning, who had attended the same hearing, and said White should not be using female-only loos.

Gosh, they said a man shouldn’t be using female-only loos? The nerve.

Now look here, if you’re going to call yourself an LGBT station you had damn well better be an LGBT station. You can’t just idennify as one and then kick back and relax, you know, it simply won’t do.

The head of a Belfast LGBT radio station has called a ruling that it does not broadcast enough programmes for the LGBT community “truly baffling”.

The broadcasting regulator Ofcom found Juice Radio to be in breach of some of its “key commitments” of service.

Ofcom said Juice Radio aired “a very limited amount of specialist programming for the LGBT+ community, rather than a service specifically for that community”.

Being on the other side of the planet, I don’t quite see what’s at stake here. What even is an “LGBT” radio station? Is it just that they call themselves that? Does it matter? Does it need regulating?

In 2022, Ofcom had previously ruled that Juice “was not meeting its requirement to broadcast LGBT anthems as part of its music output,” and was instead a “dance music service”.

Anthems? There’s a requirement to broadcast anthems?

Juice is a community radio station based in Belfast which broadcasts online and on FM. It was set up to serve “the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Belfast,” according to the commitments in its licence.

“Juice exists to create a community for people of all ages who identify as LGBT to showcase and discuss the aspirations, concerns, successes and issues affecting them,” its commitments state.

What more do you want? They say they exist to create a communinny. Job done! Call yourself a communinny, you are a communniny. Next case?

But Ofcom ruled that the vast majority of Juice’s output could not be distinguished from a “mainstream” radio service. “The speech content we listened to consisted heavily of presenters announcing the music being broadcast within the hour,” the regulator’s judgement said.

“A small amount of content was clearly for the station’s target community,” Ofcom said, but “there was little to no content to signpost to the listener that service was specifically targeted at the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Belfast. It was not clear from listening to the content on-air that the service targeted the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Belfast.

“This therefore suggested that Juice FM Belfast was a general service broadcasting a very limited amount of specialist programming for the LGBT+ community, rather than a service specifically for that community.”

Do we think they said the C word enough times?

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Snippets from a dialogue:

Judith Butler said it, therefore it is true.

Honestly it’s so pitiful. Because she seems (to the naive) to be saying something technicalish and difficult, therefore she is a genius and to be believed without question. It’s smoke and mirrors, people. It’s pseudo-difficult. It’s bullshit dressed up in fake profundity.

Updating to add another choice snippet of bufoonish hero-worship.

Now why would Trump hate Chicago in particular?

The state of Illinois and Chicago on Monday sued the Trump administration over its move to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago as the White House targets Democrat-led cities amid weeks of protests against the federal government’s immigration enforcement campaign.

The lawsuit opens a new front in the legal battles the White House is waging against state and local officials, coming just hours after a federal judge blocked a similar deployment of the guard to Portland, Oregon.

“Defendants’ deployment of federalized troops to Illinois is patently unlawful,” the lawsuit says. “Plaintiffs ask this court to halt the illegal, dangerous, and unconstitutional federalization of members of the National Guard of the United States, including both the Illinois and Texas National Guard.”

…

The lawsuit asks the court to order the administration to stop federalizing or deploying any National Guard troops to Illinois, and to declare the federalization of National Guard troops more broadly as unlawful. Trump, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among the defendants named.

In a statement, a White House spokesperson said the president “will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities.”

Selected American cities. Chicago seems to annoy him particularly.

Could that be because it’s due north of Mississippi, and thus a mecca for the Great Migration? In other words is it too black for his taste?

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, argued the deployments are politically motivated, claiming Trump has a long history of making “threatening and derogatory” comments about Chicago and the state of Illinois, dating to at least 2013.

Among other examples, it calls out a September 6 social media post by Trump in which he said Chicago would “find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” referring to the president’s rebranded name for the Pentagon.

He’s still furious that the Central Park 5 were not executed.

Today in Trumpofascism:

A federal judge on Sunday night blocked the Trump administration from deploying hundreds of out-of-state National Guard troops to Oregon, even as President Trump turned to the Texas guard in a widening hunt for military forces to send to Democratic cities.

The Trump administration had tried to send hundreds of California National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., while mustering hundreds more from Texas, despite a stern ruling from Judge Karin Immergut of U.S. District Court in Oregon just Saturday that sought to block military forces.

Judge Immergut, an appointee of President Trump, called an emergency hearing Sunday, then broadened her restraining order to cover “the relocation, federalization or deployment of members of the National Guard of any state or the District of Columbia in the state of Oregon,” telling Justice Department lawyers that the president was ”in direct contravention” of her order.

The blizzard of moves by the Trump administration, from Texas to California, Illinois to Oregon, has left governors and the courts scrambling to keep pace. First, the administration tried to sidestep Judge Immergut by turning to California. Then the president ordered as many as 400 members of the Texas National Guard to deploy for “federal protection missions” in Portland, Chicago and potentially other cities, according to a letter released by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, on Sunday night.

In plain English he’s acting like a dictator, and it’s hard to see what can stop him.

But hey, there are about 70 protesters protesting, so SEND IN THE NATIONAL GUARD even after a judge ruled you can’t.

The president’s repeated depictions of Portland as “on fire” diverged from reality, the judge found, citing a month of reports from the Portland Police Bureau showing that the size and intensity of the nightly ICE protests ebbed in August and September.

On Sunday, residents and tourists in the city were largely reveling in a sunny fall morning, playing fetch with their dogs in neighborhood parks, standing in long lines for brunch and crowding downtown sidewalks to cheer on runners in the annual city marathon. Outside the ICE facility in Southwest Portland, two miles from the central city, about 70 protesters chanted, barbecued and passed out bottled water as passing motorists honked in mutual disapproval of the Trump administration.

70.

That would be a lot of people if they were all crowded into a single living room, but hanging around outside a federal building? It’s not exactly the Russian Revolution, is it.

Owen Jones is not what you’d call a sharp thinker.

“Muslim” is not a race.

It’s not legit to pretend it’s a race and just go on from there. It’s not legit and it’s a very bad idea. Why? Because Muslims are not a race but adherents of a religion, and religions have content, and religions tell believers what to do. That matters.

Why does it matter? The quickest explanation might be just the single word “Afghanistan.”

Lynsay Watson in the news some more.

Last month, the comedy writer Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow airport by five armed police officers for comments he had made on social media.

At the time of his detention, Linehan was returning to London from his home in the US to defend himself in court against accusations by a young trans campaigner of harassment and criminal damage, both of which he denies.

In an entirely separate case, The Times reported that a retired police superintendent had discovered that Lincolnshire police had recorded a “non-hate crime incident” against her without her knowledge.

Cathy Larkman had been flagged for tweets rejecting the idea that trans women were the same as biological women and so should have access to their private spaces.

I am so tired of people being persecuted by the police for refusing to pretend that people can change sex.

Linehan and Larkman both claim to have been reported to the police by a trans activist named Lynsay Watson.

It has been revealed that Watson — a transgender former police officer — has made a series of complaints against individuals who, like Larkman and Linehan, express gender-critical views.

Three of those who say they were subject to complaints have come forward to this newspaper to allege the experience has had a destructive effect on their lives and mental health. They have also spoken of their anger at the police for entertaining Watson’s allegations and failing to investigate the former officer for what they say are “vexatious” complaints.

Watson, you will be astonished to hear, says his complaints are not vexatious.

Along with the police complaints, Watson is known to have instigated court actions against institutions including the British Transport Police Federation, Greater Manchester police, Leicestershire police and Police Appeals Tribunals.

And then there’s Sandie Peggie.

There had been safety concerns relating to Peggie’s legal team after it emerged that a social media account believed to be run by Watson had encouraged members of the public to make a citizen’s arrest of the lawyers defending Peggie, as well as the judge.

Vexatious enough yet?

Watson had also been making complaints about Miller to Lincolnshire police — the force that policed the area where he lived — alleging harassment and hate speech in relation to gender critical tweets he had posted. Those complaints were not upheld.

In November, Miller was questioned under caution by Lincolnshire police after another complaint by Watson about a social media post that welcomed the force’s decision to sack her. Miller was also accused by Watson of misgendering in an article he had written about his ordeal with her for The Critic magazine. Again, Miller was released with no further action.

Don’t call him “her”. One, it’s a lie, and two, it simply acts to legitimize his loathsome bullying.

Charlotte Cadden, who served with Greater Manchester police as a detective chief inspector until January this year, said she had been called in front of her superior officers in February 2024 after a complaint from Watson.

Cadden, who founded Police SEEN UK, a campaign group for serving police officers with gender-critical beliefs, said she was informed by her line manager that she had been accused of “spreading transphobia” across the UK. She said the complaint put her under serious stress, making her fear for her job.

The complaint was not taken any further but soon afterwards she began getting abusive tweets from the account named SEEN Police Official Open Public Network on the social media site Bluesky. One message, which the security minister Dan Jarvis MP was copied on, accused her of starting a “secret society for anti-LGBT bigots”.

…

Cadden believes that Watson is behind the SEEN police Official Open Public Network account, and after that post she decided to report the trans activist to the police.

In a witness statement to Greater Manchester police in April this year, she described the toll the alleged “harassment” was having on her. She said: “I live alone with my disabled son and I feel that the harassment of me by Lynsay Watson that started in February 2024 is now escalating.

“It is causing me anxiety and affecting my sleep. The recent threat to start targeting my partner has increased the anxiety that I feel.”

However, she claims her complaint was simply passed between Greater Manchester police and Lincolnshire police and that neither took any action.

Same old same old. The police spring into action at every trivial complaint from Watson and ignore his genuine harassment of others. Why??? What is it about trans ideology that melts people’s brains so fast and so thoroughly?

There’s a lot more; read the whole thing.

Fascism spreading like a fire.

Sirens blared and orange flames audibly crackled as a thick plume of black smoke streamed out of Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein’s Edisto Beach home during a fire that blazed on Oct. 4, video shows.

The home, located off Planters Retreat in the Jeremy Cay Community, is partially surrounded by trees and a marshy area of Edisto Island. That made it particularly difficult to rescue Goodstein’s husband, a former state senator, after he jumped out the back of the house to escape the blaze, a neighbor said.

Resident Tom Peterson was near the couple’s home midday on Oct. 4 when he noticed a plume of smoke that was visible in a video of the fire that was provided to The Post and Courier on Oct. 5.

Peterson spoke with the judge, who told Peterson that she had been on the beach walking her dogs at the time her home caught fire. She informed him that her husband was injured and stranded in a marshy area behind the home.

Rescuers got him out but he and two other people were hospitalized with injuries.

The judge made headlines a few weeks ago.

A South Carolina judge has temporarily blocked the state from giving the U.S. Department of Justice its entire voter database after a voter sued, arguing that releasing such sensitive personal information would violate state law and her constitutional rights.

Judge Diane S. Goodstein of the First Judicial Circuit issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) Tuesday, stopping the South Carolina Election Commission (SCEC) from releasing the data until at least a Sept. 10 hearing in Aiken County. 

The order came in response to a lawsuit filed by Dr. Anne Crook, a registered voter in Calhoun County, after the DOJ demanded the state’s entire statewide voter registration list, including every voter’s full name, date of birth, residential address, driver’s license number and Social Security numbers.

Hmmmmmm.

Wait what? I seem to be in the wrong species. We’re told that queuing for hours = pleasure.

It’s just before 06:00 on a Friday morning and on a busy central London street a queue is growing by the second. It’s dark and chilly, but I’m told the people at the front of this line have been here since 20:00 last night.

Christina Spence is waiting with hundreds of other people who want to be the first shoppers at Korean cosmetics retailer Skin Cupid’s first store. The 16-year-old, who is here with her sister and mum Cheryl, could just buy the products online – but she wants to be part of the queue.

You what? People started to line up at 8 pm and are still there at 6 am and they say it’s because they like doing that?

“Queuing up is exciting and exhilarating – the build up of walking in, and thinking ‘I’m finally here,'” Christina tells me.

After – assuming the shop opens at 9 – standing in the street for 13 hours most of which were in the dark and cold?

I mean you could do that anyway. You could stand outside your house or apartment block or dormitory from 8 pm to 9 am. There’s your excitement and exhilaration right there.

Twenty-six-year-old Maryam has been standing in line since 05:00. “I get to meet new people and have a really nice time,” Maryam explains, as she wraps her arm around someone she first met this morning.

This is only the second time Maryam has queued for an event like this. The first was for the opening of another Korean cosmetics retailer earlier this year.

So is the attraction the queuing or the Korean cosmetics?

Is there something special about Korean cosmetics? Why wasn’t I told?

“There’s a sense of camaraderie – we’re all here together,” Cheryl tells me. She and her daughters will brave all weather for a queue, she explains, exchanging waiting stories with those in the line.

Well, yes, but have you thought of maybe queueing inside a nice all-night Starbucks or fish and chips shop or hospital waiting room? Chairs, lights, roof and walls, warmth.

Others, like Shannon Louise Brown, have gone a step further by creating a “little community” with like-minded people. Gesturing to the people next to her, the 26-year-old explains she is with people she met at previous queues and with whom she keeps in touch.

“It’s really good to meet new people from different backgrounds,” Shannon Louise says, “where a city is so big, here, you get to make and meet friends”.

But aren’t there numerous other, more comfortable ways of doing that? With the added advantage of something more in common than a passion for Korean cosmetics?

Dr Nilufar Ahmed, a psychologist at the University of Bristol says the “anticipation” of what is to come when queuers reach the front of the line – the “reward” – plays a big part in why people do it.

Queuing for “pleasurable activities” – like shopping for luxury items, a bargain, or delicious food – creates a “distinctly different” feeling to queuing for something more mundane like buying your groceries, she says. “The anticipation of receiving a reward leads to the release of dopamine…which makes us feel good.”

This is why I say I must be another species. Under no circumstances could I get a nice little dopamine hit by standing in a line in the street for hours (or minutes). There are few things I hate more.

Adding to the appeal, Dr Ahmed adds, is when the queue is for something that is “hard to get”, or if a person has the “opportunity to be one of the first people to experience something”. Recent examples of this include queues of people snaking around high streets to get their hands on limited edition Labubu plush toys – which are usually sold out online.

“[This creates] a sense of excitement and buzz for the novelty and exclusiveness of the reward,” Dr Ahmed says.

Well, to put it bluntly, only if you’re seriously stupid. “Ooh I’m one of the few people who stood in line for 12 hours to buy a plush toy, how exhilarate.”

People are nuts.

The lust for public humiliation continues.

An FBI agent has reportedly been suspended because they refused to participate in a “perp walk” of the bureau’s former director James Comey, US media reports. The agent was suspended for insubordination, according to the BBC’s news partner CBS, after the agent found the plan to be inappropriate.

Mr Comey was indicted in Virginia on two federal charges days after Donald Trump called on law enforcement to more aggressively investigate his political adversaries, including Mr Comey.

FBI leadership has discussed sending “large, beefy” agents in Kevlar vests to bring Mr Comey to his court arraignment in Alexandria next week, CBS reports.

Trump is so ungrateful. It’s possible that without Comey he wouldn’t have been elected in the first place. Her emails yadda yadda.

The ACLU talks maudlin nonsense on its pet subject yet again and does it dishonestly yet again. The author is one Gillian Branstetter, communications strategist. I would say her strategy is crap.

Over the last five years, politicians across the country have targeted transgender people and our families. 

Ah. “Our” families; so Gillian is trans; so he’s a he.

To the point: it’s not “targeting” men to tell them to get out of the women’s toilets and stop taking women’s jobs and prizes. If anybody is “targeting” it’s men who pretend to be women and take all the women’s stuff.

They’ve banned our health care, censored our speech, and made schools less safe for transgender students. One of the most consistent focus areas for many of these politicians has been the rights of transgender student athletes, specifically the right of transgender girls, to play with other girls. While the overall number of transgender athletes is extremely small–most states have fewer than a handful of transgender students playing sports among 10s of thousands of student athletes– politicians have introduced hundreds of bills over the last few years targeting their ability to play.

Blah blah blah. Not even worth pointing out, it’s so obvious. Boys don’t have a right to play “with other girls” because boys are boys. The fact that there aren’t (yet) many boys cheating girls this way is not a reason to let them keep doing it.

Now, the Supreme Court will hear our challenge against a state law that categorically bans transgender students from girl’s teams.

Liar. The issue is not “transgender”; the issue is boys.

Politicians hope to use the case to legitimize a broad range of discrimination against transgender people (and all LGBTQ people), excluding us not just from sports teams but from civil rights protections and pushing us further out of public life altogether.

Liar again. It’s not about “transgender people” and it’s not about pushing them out of public life. Telling boys they can’t cheat girls is not pushing them out of public life.

Becky Pepper-Jackson of West Virginia is just like any other 15-year-old. She loves spending time with her friends, playing with her brothers, and is active in her school’s band and track & field team, throwing discus and shotput. But under a ban passed by the West Virginia state legislature, Pepper-Jackson would be prohibited from playing on the girls’ team. “She likes to do the best in everything, be it algebra or running or shot put or discus,” her mother told NBC News. “She tries to excel in everything that she does, just like any other kid.”

Except she’s a he, so trying to excel in the girls’ shot put or discus is cheating, and unfair to the girls he’s cheating.

With the help of Lambda Legal and Cooley LLP, the ACLU and the ACLU of West Virginia filed a lawsuit on behalf of Pepper-Jackson and her mother challenging the ban on the grounds it violates her rights under Title IX – the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in public schools – and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

I hope they lose. I really really hope they lose.

Zack Polanski really is a horrible man.

Newman: Well you said the Greens should be a broad church, but that all churches have walls, I mean your walls are potentially keeping women out of your conference aren’t they?

Polanski: Well I think they’s lots of women, including thousands of women who are inclusive feminists, who reconnize that trans rights are human rights –

Newman: So feminists are not welcome, only “inclusive” feminists.

Polanski: Well it depends on how you define yourself as a feminist, I would say if someone doesn’t support trans rights, if they don’t support the LGBT comunniny, if they want to be transphobic or demeaning to trans people, then no.

Newman: So are gender critical feminists welcome at your conference?

Polanski: Well anyone is welcome at the conference based on their beliefs, this is about how people behave, and no, no one is allowed to behave in a way – and I’m not talking about these people in particular, I’m talking more widely – in a way that is transphobic, I stood on a trans-inclusive ticket, I think that anyone who takes any notice of politics would accept that [if] there is a leader who stands for one thing they have an entitlement to say this is who is and isn’t welcome at the conference.

End of clip.

But as always the question arises: how are we defining “transphobic”?

It’s not phobic for women to know that men are not women, and it’s not even phobic for women to say that men are not women. It’s kind of more the other way around, frankly. It’s misogynist for men to insist on being in women’s spaces and taking women’s jobs and prizes on the spurious grounds that they are “trans women.”

Men like Zack Polanski will never admit that though.

No no no no no. Wrong.

No no no. Conversion therapy is trying to “convert” same-sex attracted people to straighthood. That is not the same as telling people that it’s not possible to change sex.

Same-sex attraction harms no one. Gender ideology harms its adherents and women and, ironically, same-sex attracted people.

I wonder what would happen if gender ideology faded out to be replaced by an ideology that says people who identify as airplanes are airplanes. I wonder what the explanations and justifications and purported rights would be.