Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Guest post: Almost like a dear Muslima

    Originally a comment by maddog1129 on Dim bulbs.

    I’m afraid you’re the one who is misled. I’ve been a part of the LGBTQA+ community for the last thirty two years since I came out in 1990. I have trans friends. This entire thing is just like it was then for gay people – demonization, misrepresentation, lies and hatred.

    But it’s not “just like it was for gay people.” The things that gay people wanted didn’t affect anyone else. The accusations that gay men “recruited” young men to be gay were false. The LG purposely and scrupulously separated themselves from the pedophilia activists like NAMBLA. The “demonization, misrepresentation, lies, and hatred” against gay men and lesbians were false accusations and irrational fears.

    Here, we’re talking about a trans person who is a rapist. Rapists are rightly “demonized,” because they are vile predators who hurt other people. Calling this trans person — and a whole host of others — rapists, predators, criminals is not a “misrepresentation.” It’s not a lie. Rapists are deservedly hated. Here, the accusations are true. That’s what this guy is defending. He’s lying when he says it’s “just like” the unjust animus against gay people. Here, the demonization is a correct representation, is not a lie, and is properly condemned, if not exactly “hated.” He doesn’t know what “just like” means.

    And there’s the broader point that what LGB activists sought did not affect anyone else. The T project is entirely different. They demand, not equal rights, but special privileges and dispensations that are not rights at all. Their demands directly affect the rights of others, primarily the rights of women and girls. Men and boys who violate the boundaries of women and girls, and who demand to do so as a matter of right, raise huge red flags for the safety of women and girls. A significant predictor of which men are the most dangerous to women is the violation of women’s boundaries. The T movement is hellbent on the wholesale destruction of women’s boundaries. Women are 100% justified in fear and wariness toward such men. It’s not “demonization” to point out that men who call themselves women present a heightened risk to women, and that their demands destroy women’s rights. It’s not a “misrepresentation” to point out the conflict between T demands and women’s rights. As for “lies,” the entire T edifice is built on a colossal lie, that human beings can change sex just by wishing. The “lies” are entirely on the T side of the argument. The lies are so stupid that it’s astonishing that they ever gained any traction at all, but here we are.

    This Tom Coates person doesn’t know how reason and logic and words work. He’s still purposely defending a rapist and changing the subject away from the rapist. Almost like a dear Muslima. You can’t talk about the issue directly in front of you, because of this other issue over there. That kind of dishonesty makes me distrust everything about the T movement and its advocates.

  • M&Ms in go-go boots

    All this time I didn’t realize that Tucker Carlson has been ranting about the loss of sex appeal in M&Ms. I had no idea.

    “America, let’s talk,” M&M’s began on social media on Monday. Later, “We have decided to take an indefinite pause from the spokescandies.”

    What happened? And what is a spokescandy?

    The former is easy to answer: Tucker Carlson. The Fox News host embarked on a crusade against the M&M’s the moment the treatmakers disgusted him last year by removing the green M&M’s much beloved go-go boots in favor of sensible sneakers: “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,” he groused. “Until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.”

    So Tucker Carlson does want to have a drink with an M&M? Or did before they underwent a wardrobe change?

    I can see it now – the dim lighting, the groups of friends, the couples, the cigarette smoke, the bowls of peanuts, and Tucker Carlson at a table in the corner with…an M&M.

    This vigorous rebuttal to the wokefication of sweets didn’t end there — [when] in a 2015 promotional image she was depicted with her hand on the brown M&M’s knee, Carlson worried that she “is now a lesbian, maybe?” And he decried the introduction of Purple, whom he described as “plus-sized” and “obese.” (She’s just a peanut M&M.)

    So I guess he won’t be taking her to Bemelmans.

  • Not only men

    Oh give it a rest ffs.

    https://twitter.com/DrProudman/status/1618707403914248194

    Women can help men commit rape, sure. Women can’t literally rape. The fact that one court decided to call helping men rape “rape” doesn’t change that fact. Women can also in theory shove objects up women, but that too is not rape, even if some court says it is.

    Charlotte Proudman seems unusually horrible.

  • Senior management relented

    Frying pans and fires.

    Nicola Sturgeon faces another trans storm after a decision was made to house one of Scotland’s most violent prisoners in a women’s jail. The Record can reveal that volatile Tiffany Scott – who stalked a 13-year-old girl while known as Andrew Burns – has been rubber-stamped for transfer to a jail that aligns with her chosen gender.

    Scott, 31, has been repeatedly refused the switch over several years but senior management relented in recent weeks. It is understood that the transfer is still planned – despite the First Minister instructing a U-turn on a decision to house double rapist Isla Bryson at all-women jail Cornton Vale, Stirling, on Thursday.javascript:void(0)

    Last night the Scottish Government faced calls to make another embarrassing U-turn on Scott. A source said: “Of all the female trans prisoners in the estate, Scott has been considered the most dangerous.”

    Interesting choice then. “Let’s start with the most dangerous man who calls himself a woman. Once he I mean she is in, the rest will be a doddle.”

    The source continued:

    “This highly disturbed prisoner has attacked female staff during time in prison, has admitted stalking a young girl and has been one of the most menacing people inside Scottish jails. It’s madness to send her to a women’s jail – there needs to be a better solution than this.”

    …

    Scott, 32, from Kinglassie, Fife, is being held in segregation at LowMoss Prison, near Glasgow.

    She has assaulted inmates, security officers and female nurses in various jails. She self-harmed and opened veins with her teeth before squirting blood at prison officers.

    In 2010, Scott, while still Burns, attacked a nurse while escaping from a Cheshire hospital while under detention, throwing roof tiles at police during a siege on the hospital roof. In 2013, Scott, while still Burns, was sentenced to 14 months for stalking a 13-year-old girl from a cell at Polmont Prison, near Falkirk, by sending letters.

    He sounds very Hannibal Lecter, doesn’t he.

  • Peak grooming

    Speaking of Katie [Colin] Montgomerie, James Esses provides a new piece of information about him.

    A few months ago Esses received an email from a father concerned about his daughter’s belief that she was trans and needed hormones and surgery. They talked about therapy.

    I explained to ‘Alfred’ that if his daughter was not open to speaking to someone, that “it could end up being counter-productive”. It is common therapeutic knowledge that someone who feels as if they are forced to go to therapy is not going to be receptive to the experience and is, therefore, less likely to benefit from it.

    ‘Alfred’ came back and said to me that his daughter had made an “agreement” with him that she would go to therapy.

    And so I provided ‘Alfred’ with the names of a handful of therapists that I know, who support ethical, explorative therapy for children with gender dysphoria.

    There it ended, until –

    Yesterday, I was contacted by a parent, who, for the purposes of this article, I will call David. David told me that he had a son who said he was ‘trans’ and had been self-medicating from GenderGP over a period of time. His son’s school were aware of this but never informed the family. This was an extremely shocking story to hear, although it is not the first time I have heard such a thing.

    Then he told me about ‘Alfred’.  

    ‘Alfred’ was not real. All along, it was David’s son posing as someone else’s father. David discovered this when he logged on to his son’s Twitter account, concerned by who he might be engaging with online.

    Guess who it turned out to be that David was engaging with? Katie [Colin] Montgomerie. There are screenshots of conversations between David’s kid and Montgomerie.

    In the conversation with Katy, David’s son writes:

    “Hey, I recently made a burner email and went back and forth with James Esses in the hopes that he’d give me a list of his “colleagues” (people he would want doing therapy on tarns (sic) kids) and I got a pretty scary list back; if you’re interested please let me know.”

    Here is a child, clearly in a vulnerable position (more on this below), stating to an adult that he has engaged in deception and lies, in order to try and gain information.

    Katy does not respond by questioning the lies and deception. Nor does Katy ask him about his mental wellbeing and why he feels the need to take such drastic steps.

    Katy simply states: “Yes definitely”. He promptly provides Katy with the list of explorative therapists that I had previously provided him with.

    Read the rest.

  • Institutional capture strikes again

    Katy (erstwhile Colin) Montgomerie gave a staff pride talk at Edinburgh University yesterday.

    Yeah congrats. There’s nothing like inviting a man to talk about how horrible feminists are for making students feel empowered…unless they’re female students of course.

    https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1618987944534241281

    They don’t teach flat earth or creationism in school but they do teach that men who say they are women are women.

    We know the answer to that, he’ll go as far as he possibly can. Always.

    https://twitter.com/DrFletchington/status/1619335909979344898

    What I wonder is why staff at Edinburgh would want to hear a talk by Katy (erstwhile Colin) Montgomerie.

  • Hundreds of lives

    By the way, this just in about that awful terf JK Rowling:

    JK Rowling magicked up hundreds of thousands of pounds to save more than a hundred female lawyers and their families facing murder in Afghanistan.

    The Harry Potter author made her huge donation when Britain and America pulled out of Kabul at speed, leaving hundreds of women judges, prosecutors and defence counsel under threat from the Taliban.

    Along with a million dollars from businessman and philanthropist Lord Michael Hintze, plus large sums from other prominent figures and smaller donations from the public, it meant a total of 508 Afghans could be flown to safety.

    In a life-or-death cloak and dagger operation the female lawyers and their families had to hide in basements before they were smuggled to airports and flown to freedom.

    The generosity of Miss Rowling, author of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban among other titles, in the 2021 rescue only emerged on Thursday in a House of Lords debate.

    Lord David Alton told the chamber how the writer and Lord Hintze ‘in a Schindler’s list moment’ came forward to help when veteran human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy needed money to rescue female lawyers – mainly judges – and their families.

    Lord Alton said that, thanks to ‘spontaneous, generous and very substantial’ private funding; ‘Some 500 people were evacuated – 103 were women lawyers, all of whom, with their children and husbands, were on Taliban kill lists.

    But please, Tom Coates and Ryan John Butcher, do go on telling us what a horrible right-wing terf Rowling is.

  • Dim bulbs

    More progressive men step up to defend the rapist from the meany women who won’t call him Sister.

    Oh really? And how does he know that? How can he know that?

    There is no such “community.” It’s forced teaming.

  • Zeroing in on what matters

    Well, that’s quite something.

    https://twitter.com/ryanjohnbutcher/status/1618979547109797889

    Ooooh yes, that’s the important thing here – not the rapist who pretends to be a woman, not the rapist who pretends to be a woman by wearing slasher fingernails and platinum hair where his face is supposed to be, not the rapist who pretends to be a woman and wants to be in a women’s prison so that he can terrorize and prey on them – no no no no no, the important thing here is that JK Rowling mentioned his name (which has been widely reported in mainstream news outlets).

    Via

    Updating to add another hot take.

    https://twitter.com/ryanjohnbutcher/status/1619026621239033858
    https://twitter.com/ryanjohnbutcher/status/1619034896667930624

    No it isn’t, actually. Not everyone – nowhere near everyone – agrees that “deadnaming” is a thing at all, let alone “a form of persecution” let alone “a form of persecution of a vulnerable minority” by which he means a woman doing it to a man who is a convicted rapist. So no, “deadnaming” in the sense of using the real name of a convicted rapist is very far from recognised as a form of persecution of a vulnerable minority. The rapist is not the vulnerable party here.

  • They don’t want a handout, they just want a handout

    Those people in Rio Verde Foothills are still complaining because they decided to live in an unincorporated settlement in the desert during a drought and for some reason no one is willing to give them water,

    There is only one paved road, no street lights, storm gutters or pipes in the ground. Instead residents have wells – or water tanks outside their homes, which they used to fill at a local pipe serviced by Scottsdale.

    Why did they build there then? If there’s no municipal water supply, why decide “This is where we’ll build our new house”?

    Laura Weaver told the Guardian her community didn’t “want a handout” from Scottsdale. They want time to figure out a plan and, to her, Scottsdale shutting the water off is unneighborly and un-American, she said.

    So she does want a handout from Scottsdale.

    Being neighborly is all very well, but settling in a desert with no access to water as climate change spirals out of control is idiotic. I suspect Scottsdale doesn’t think it has enough water to share with feckless neighbors.

    “Think of the sacrifices some Americans have made for each other. And then these people are sitting here saying, ‘Well, you know, you should just dry up and die.’ Really? I just find it mind-blowingly unpatriotic,” she said.

    Mm. It’s their fault. Scottsdale owes her their water, but she and her neighbors don’t owe Scottsdale the good sense not to build a town in a place with no water source. Make it make sense.

    Incorporating could give the community more options for water supply in future but forming an official town or city brings requirements, such as paved roads, street lights, more taxation and rules. This would be expensive but also change the secluded, quaint feel of Rio Verde Foothills, where people own chickens, donkeys, horses and ride motorbikes straight out their doors to nearby Tonto national forest.

    Fine then, keep your secluded quaint feel, but find your own damn water.

    Entitlement is a dangerous drug.

    It goes back to a booboo with the counting.

    Twenty years ago, scientists overestimated the amount of water in the Colorado River, having measured based on an abnormally rainy season, said Sinjin Eberle, intermountain west communications director for American Rivers, a non-profit campaigning to protect and restore US waterways.

    Oops.

    The river has 20% less water than it did in 2000, Eberle said. More than 40 million people in seven states served by the Colorado River basin – Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, New Mexico and Arizona – depend on the mighty but dwindling watercourse that flows through the Grand Canyon.

    Now, as rain is scarcer and the region’s population has increased, there will be more water shortages, even as sprawling developments insist on golf courses, grassy parks and fountains.

    Even in Rio Verde Foothills new home construction carries on apace, while the water is not there to support expansion.

    Never mind, just blame it all on Scottsdale.

  • Women as all-purpose safety net

    Sometimes a “blanket” rule is what’s necessary.

    The case of Isla Bryson, the transgender double rapist who was initially sent to a female prison, must not result in a blanket ban on trans women serving their sentences in women’s facilities, the campaign group Scottish Trans has said.

    Nonsense. Trans women are men, and as such should not be in women’s facilities. The end.

    “It is right that this should be decided on an individualised risk assessment basis,” Valentine said.

    “For example, a trans woman transitioned for 20 years, who is in prison for a non-violent offence like financial fraud, might pose no risk to other women in custody, but be at significant risk herself if accommodated on the male estate.”

    I don’t care. Don’t make his problem women’s problem. Figure out some other way to solve the problem. Women don’t exist to be a safe haven for men.

  • For allegedly posing

    Where’s the respect for her identity?

    A 29-year-old woman has been arrested in New Jersey for allegedly posing as a high school student.

    How do they know she was posing as rather than identifying as?

    The woman, identified by police as Hyejeong Shin, has been charged with using a fake identification document to enrol in New Brunswick High School.

    Ms Shin attended the school for four days before staff found out her age.

    But age is just numbers on a piece of paper. If her soul is 17, who is the school to deny it?

    The issue came to light at a local education board meeting on Tuesday, where New Brunswick Public School District Superintendent Aubrey Johnson told attendees that Ms Shin was caught at the school.

    “Last week, by filing some false documents, an adult female posing as a student was able to be enrolled in our high school,” Mr Johnson said.

    But what if she’s a teenager in her mind? How can they dismiss her reality like that? Trans teenagers are teenagers!

  • Protect the vulnerable and marginalised rapist

    Baffling.

    As so often, one doesn’t know where to begin.

    Yes, Bryson is a rapist, and as such (as well as for other reasons) he is not a she and his actions are his actions, not her actions. He’s a man. It’s his actions that are deplorable and repugnant – and that are a part of the long and global history of male oppression of and violence against women. Even if you think it’s “respectful” or progressive to refer to men who identify as trans “she” (which I don’t), you surely ought to differentiate between men who rape women and call themselves women, and men who don’t do that. It’s an insult to women to call a rapist “she.”

    Trans women may be subjected to high levels of violence, rape, harassment and abuse, but so are women, and the women Bryson raped are women, so what is the point of whining about trans women and rape when the issue is a man who raped women? Why is this “but violence and rape” used as a shield for the man who committed violence and rape instead of for women? Why are we supposed to gasp in shock horror that Bryson [claims to be] part of a group subject to violence and rape when 1. so are women and 2. he subjected women to violence and rape? It’s grotesque. Man claims to be woman, rapes women, woman barrister tells us to be nice to the rapist man because he is subject to violence and rape. What is wrong with her?

    Nobody is “using” Bryson to “bash a vulnerable and marginalised group” – we’re saying Bryson exploited his claimed “identity” to commit violence against members of the vulnerable and marginalised group called women.

    It doesn’t matter that he’s not “representative of trans women.” That’s completely beside the point. He’s a rapist. Trans women are a different subject.

    Proudman works with the Good Law Project. Maybe it’s a drug?

    Updating to add:

    Great. An MSP, a woman, sides with a rapist and throws his victims on the dungheap.

  • The group had deliberately targeted prisons

    Daniel Sanderson, Scottish correspondent at The Telegraph, and Simon Johnson, political editor at same, report:

    When Isla Bryson was found guilty of two counts of rape, the warrant issued by the High Court in Glasgow recommended that the defendant be sent to HMP Barlinnie, a notorious male-only jail.

    Instead, Bryson – who until 2020 was known as Adam Graham – was taken to an isolation unit at HMP Cornton Vale, the country’s only women’s jail, sparking a backlash that has engulfed Nicola Sturgeon.

    Let’s review. What’s his crime? Rape. Rape of women. Where should he be locked up? Away from women. Where was he locked up? In a women’s prison. If he’d been convicted of torturing children would Scotland have put him on work-release as a janitor in a primary school?

    Sturgeon meanwhile insists it was nothing to do with her.

    Jack McConnell, a former Labour first minister, said on Thursday night: “Let us be absolutely clear. There are no circumstances where this rapist would have been sent to Cornton Vale without ministers knowing.”

    Scotland’s prisons have quietly been a testbed for radical gender policies for years, following lobbying from the same trans rights activists who pushed Ms Sturgeon to introduce a controversial gender self-identification system, it has emerged.

    “Radical” here meaning “hostile to women’s rights.” It doesn’t mean left-wing or progressive or humanitarian, it means ruthlessly brutally misogynist.

    The SPS overhauled its policies in 2014 to state that a prisoner’s accommodation “should reflect the gender in which the person in custody is currently living”.

    Imagine being the SPS and writing that sentence and not noticing the glaringly obvious problem.

    Or, rather, pretending not to notice it. It’s not really possible that they literally didn’t notice it, because they knew why prisons were sex-segregated in the first place. It’s too basic for them to have failed to notice it.

    The shift was heavily influenced by the Scottish Trans Alliance, a vocal cheerleader of the SNP self-identification law and an offshoot of the Equality Network charity that is almost entirely reliant on Ms Sturgeon’s Government for funding. 

    They’ve had £100,000 of government money to smash up women’s rights this way.

    James Morton, then the director of the trans group, admitted in an essay for Trans Britain, a 2018 book, that the group had deliberately targeted prisons as a means of persuading other public bodies to follow its agenda.

    “We strategised that by working intensively with the Scottish Prison Service to support them to include trans women as women on a self-declaration basis within very challenging circumstances, we would be able to ensure that all other public services should be able to do likewise,” he wrote.

    Ahhhhhhhhhhhh that’s nice. That’s lovely. What does he mean by “very challenging circumstances”? He means the obvious and horrific danger to women in prison. He wanted to leverage the danger to women to create more danger for women elsewhere. What a wonderful humane liberating movement this is.

    At Holyrood last month, the First Minister ordered her MSPs to vote against proposals that would have blocked convicted sex offenders, or those facing rape charges, from taking advantage of the self-identification system. 

    Pause to savor that. Nicola Sturgeon ordered her MSPs to put women in danger.

    At a women’s event in November, she was heckled by a protester who told her women had been “actually raped by males who have self-ID’d as women”. 

    She responded by saying it was “men who commit violence against women”, adding: “Most men who commit violence against women don’t feel the need to change gender to do that. Those who do, my argument is that we should focus on them because they are men abusing a system to attack women. What we shouldn’t do is further stigmatise a group of women who are already too stigmatised.”

    But they’re not women. They’re not “a group of women.” That’s the whole point. They’re men who call themselves women. They’re absolutely not a group of women who are more “stigmatised” than actual women are. They’re a group of men who want to steal everything women have and be free to rape and assault women whenever they’re in the mood.

  • The furry fandom v the women

    Oh lord, what’s that I was just saying about how childish it all is? Jo Bartosch on Furries vs Feminists:

    Why are men who identify as cartoon animals planning to protest against a women’s rights rally?

    Because they’re pathetic risible losers.

    Next month, followers of what is known as the ‘furry fandom’ will descend on Glasgow for the ‘ScotiaCon’ convention, Scotland’s leading get-together for furries. Furries are people who identify with and often dress as anthropomorphised cartoon animals.

    Is it kink or just infantile?

    The word is now out that some attendees are planning to take a break from the main convention to do what maladjusted young men have done for millennia: get angry and shout at outspoken women.

    The final day of the Glasgow furry conference coincides with an event organised by Kellie-Jay Keen’s Standing for Women (SfW) group. SfW is planning to demonstrate against Nicola Sturgeon’s recently stalled gender-recognition reforms, which would ride roughshod over women’s rights, and furious furverts have planned a counter-demo.

    Makes sense. Grown men who think they can be women, grown men who think they can be cartoon animals. Not good company either way.

    So who are the furries? And why might they want to join in the transgender crusade against women’s rights? FurScience, a dedicated academic research body into the fandom (yes really), suggests that furries are about 20 times more likely than the broader UK population to identify as transgender. And just as with extremist trans activists, the furry fandom is an overwhelmingly young, nerdy and majority-male community. Ultimately, both identities are clearly appealing to those who prefer fantasy to reality.

    Just what I’ve been saying.

    And, you know, if they were content to just do that – prefer fantasy to reality, and act accordingly in their own heads and in private – I wouldn’t quarrel with them. But of course they’re not; they’re hell-bent on punishing women who think their fantasies are destructive of women’s rights.

    While some claim that underneath the furry’s oversized anthropomorphised beast head is a person who just wants to innocently express themselves, others say it is a fetish. And research supports the view that there is a sexual driver. In a survey of the men at the ‘Furry Fiesta’ convention in Dallas in 2013, 96 per cent admitted that they consume furry-themed pornography.

    Furry porn. There isn’t room in my skull to roll my eyes enough.

    The optics of these furverts protesting against women’s rights could hardly be worse for the trans lobby. Surely, even the goggle-eyed gender loons in the SNP must have enough nous to see that adult men who get a kick from dressing up as animals are not the ideal spokespeople for their self-ID bill.

    But the gender lunacy itself is just as deranged. They’re both ludicrous.

  • Humoring

    Besides, it’s not actually respect, is it. It’s humoring. It’s nervous humoring, the way you would humor a jittery angry terrorist who was holding you captive and claimed to be the reincarnation of Charlie Chaplin.

    We don’t humor other people’s fantasies that way unless they’re jittery angry terrorists. That’s not a thing. It’s not something adults do. It’s certainly not considered respect – if people did do it it would be considered pity, not respect. We play along with children’s games of pretend, but that’s it – we don’t do that for anyone else. Once past childhood people are expected to keep their fantasies private.

    I wonder if the weird (to me at least) development of adults taking various entertainment industry fantasies seriously, going to conventions about them and dressing up as them and talking about them, has been a bridge to this ridiculous new version of “respect.” If people in their 20s and 30s can go to Star Wars conventions maybe it then seems reasonable to pretend that people can change sex to live out their fantasies.

    It seems horribly pathetic to me, the way Sheldon on Big Bang Theory is pathetic albeit funny.

  • It’s being complicit in his fantasies

    Piers Morgan isn’t always wrong. (I hate it when people on the left are this wrong – it’s so cringey.)

    “Respect” ffs. Suppose a rapist dresses up as a laydee in order to rape women, and says as much upon being arrested – should we “respect” his disguise? Why is there any obligation to pretend to believe other people’s fantasies? Why do we have to “respect” such things? Why do people think we have to respect such things? I know one reason is endless shouting, but if everybody stopped “respecting” the fantasies the shouting would die away pretty fast.

    HER continued abuse of HER victims.

    insert rage face here

  • A substitute groomer

    All completely healthy and benign…

    A substitute teacher at the King Middle School in Portland [Maine] was removed from the classroom last week and banned from teaching at the school after parents discovered the sub had shared inappropriate sexualized TikTok videos with students.

    …

    The teacher in question was a substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere.

    The teacher has also gone by Chris Lamere, Lydia Moon, Clodagh Moon, and Clodagh Lamere, and has identified variously as non-binary, as a transgender woman, and as a transgender lesbian, according to a review of public social media.

    It’s not clear which name was used to apply for the role at King Middle School, a process that would have involved passing a criminal background check.

    …

    Mark Davey, a Portland resident whose daughter attends King Middle School, said he learned about Lamere’s prurient posting when he saw videos of the scantily clad substitute teacher on his daughter’s phone.

    …

    “Her gender or sexuality has nothing to do with why I’m upset,” said Davey. “The violation here is the sexualization of children,” he said.

    Here’s a funny thing. The word “groomer” appears nowhere in the article, but it does appear in the url. Someone signaling for help?

  • “How do you reach these people”

    Ah yes the old “some women are so ugly they look like men unlike sexy pretty womany me” says the man who calls himself a woman.

    https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1618543918647500801
    https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1618543923970072578

  • Politically expedient to do a volte-face

    Today:

    A year ago:

    Emma Barnett: There’s one just to put here again to you, Anneliese, if I can, from Jill and I have to say a whole series of these messages came in at the same time. I would legislate for a clear definition of what a woman is. You’re in this position and Labour still, it seems to be the position that Labour would update the Gender Recognition Act to enable a process of self-identification. How does that fit with also trying to support the implementation of single sex exemptions? How do those two  things go together? Which I believe is Labour’s position.

    Anneliese Dodds: Well, they go together because of a very proud Labour achievement ultimately, which was that Equality Act 2010. One of the last measures that we were determined to put into place as a Labour government and that Equality Act, as many people listening to this, I’m sure will be aware and they may well have used its provisions actually against discrimination. It protects on the basis of sex and it ensures that there can be change from the usual principle of, for example, the inclusion of trans people where that is proportionate means to a legitimate end. It’s spelled out very clearly within that act, and we’d uphold those provisions. So that’s how it goes together. You know, really we need to end up in a situation where we see equality across the board where we make sure that we have that future where everyone can have those  opportunities

    Emma Barnett: And Labour’s definition of a woman?

    Anneliese Dodds: Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things. I mean, obviously, that’s then you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition…

    Emma Barnett: With respect, I didn’t ask for that. What’s the Labour definition?

    Anneliese Dodds: Oh, I think with respect, Emma, I think it does depend what the context is surely. I mean surely that is important here. You know, there are people who have decided that they have to make that transition. You know, I’ve spoken with many of them. It’s been a very difficult process for many of those people. And you know, understandably because they live as a woman, you know, they want to be defined as a woman. That’s what the gender recognition act…again a Labour…is brought into place.

    It’s all context. Labour’s Equality Act protects women but who is a woman is all a matter of context. How can legislation protect women if who is a woman is up in the air?