Wait.

Being trans isn’t a belief system?

Then what is it???

Of course it’s a belief system. Without that it’s nothing: just a vacancy.

Saying otherwise is like saying being Catholic or Muslim or Mormon is not a belief system.

Unless, perhaps, RMW is being nitpicky about the “being” bit. Being or calling yourself trans (or Mormon etc) isn’t itself a belief system, it’s trans or Mormon ideology that’s the belief system, but I really doubt RMW was being that nitpicky. I think he was saying trans ideology is not an ideology. Ha. It so is.

The Guardian cautiously explains:

Westminster city council and Social Work England last week became the latest to join a list of organisations – including Arts Council England, a barristers’ chambers and a thinktank – found to have discriminated against a female worker because of their gender-critical beliefs.

No, her gender-critical beliefs. Just four words past “a female worker” we get the terrified “their” – how pathetic is that?

The social worker Rachel Meade’s win against the council and her profession’s regulator means she joins a select but growing group of gender-critical feminists who have successfully brought discrimination claims on the basis of their beliefs.

Their “beliefs” ffs – as if it weren’t something everyone knew until about ten years ago.

Gender-critical feminists believe sex is biological and cannot be changed…

No we don’t “believe” that; we know it. Everyone knows it, but a small set of people pretend not to, and try to force everyone else to pretend too.

On Monday, a tribunal began hearing a constructive dismissal claim from Roz Adams against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. Next month, Kenny McBride’s case against the Scottish government is due to be heard in Glasgow, while judgments are pending in a claim from Prof Jo Phoenix against the Open University and that of the Green party’s former deputy leader Shahrar Ali against the party.

In all four cases – and more in the pipeline – the claimants argue they were discriminated against because they hold gender-critical beliefs.

…

Lewis said there would always be “bad eggs” but compared the situation to legal cases on manifestations of religious belief at work, such as wearing a cross.

But we’re not the ones with the religious belief! We’re not the ones wearing a fucking cross. We’re the ones who refuse to lie about who is what sex.

Analogy failure.

The “questions being asked” are of course questions about magic gender.

Notice that “they” starts by boasting of “their” in depth understanding of biological sex and gender – the kind of “in depth” understanding of course that thinks men are women if they say they are.

But that pales in comparison to announcing that non-adherence to gender ideology is comparable to racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

What a piggy little twerp.

Updating to add information about this genius:

Che Barnes is a Gender Diversity and Inclusion Trainer – helping organisations bridge their knowledge gap on Gender Equality, inc intersex, transgender & non-binary. Science based talks, workshops & online course.

I’m sure it’s all very in-depth.

Hindu nationalism marches on:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the consecration on Monday of a grand temple to the Hindu god Lord Ram on a site believed to be his birthplace, in a celebratory event for the Hindu majority of the world’s most populous nation.

Believed by whom to be his birthplace? Certainly not everyone. Lord Ram is a “god”: a supernatural being. He wasn’t born anywhere, because he’s a fiction. He may be a very meaningful fiction, but that doesn’t make him a real person who had a real birthplace.

Hindu groups, Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its affiliates have portrayed the temple opening as part of a Hindu renaissance after past centuries of subjugation by Muslim invaders and colonial powers.

In other words they’ve intensified the same old Hindu-Muslim rivalry that saw so many people massacred during Partition.

For decades, the temple site was bitterly contested by Hindus and minority Muslims, leading to nationwide riots in 1992 that killed 2,000 people, mainly Muslims, police say, after a Hindu mob destroyed a 16th-century mosque that had stood there.

So let’s have more of that, yeah?

India’s Hindus say the site is the birthplace of Lord Ram, and was holy to them long before Muslim Mughals razed a temple at the spot to build the Babri Masjid, or mosque, in 1528.

Nearly 5 centuries ago – but do let’s keep the quarrel going!

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room 11.

Yet it’s gays and lesbian who are being smeared with the whole alphabet soup communniny phenomenon. It’s STRAIGHT men who are entering women’s sports and spaces, not gay men, yet you never hear of some HETEROTQAI+ communniny.

Excellent point. That’s why they’re so keen on enforcing “TWAW” and demanding the acceptance of transbians. They think it hides the paraphilia the same way they think they pass.

…the whole incoherent, asinine taxonomy of the trans system.

There’s forced teaming within the chimeric “trans community” itself, not just between the T and the LGB. What’s the common ground between AGP males forcing their way into women’s locker rooms for their own sexual gratification and teenage girls desperate enough to escape the strictures of femininity that they’re undergoing radical mastectomies and taking T? Which group is most likely to be driving the trans “movement” as a whole, and to whose benefit?

I wonder how much of the belligerence and bullying would disappear from the discussions around gender identity if you could remove the AGPs, and the trans “allies” who are only in it for the “righteous” misogyny? And if you could subtract those who would desist, the social contagion bandwagoneers, duped autistic kids, and trendy, spicy-straight “queers,” would that leave behind only a small(?) core of genuinely dysphoric people, for whom watchful waiting will not be enough? Likely a very small group, whose needs are poorly served by the current configuration of gender identitarianism? We’ll never know.

Prizes for avoiding Bad words like “girls” and “boys”:

More than 300 schools have been told to stop calling pupils ‘boys and girls’ after signing up to a scheme run by a controversial trans rights lobbying group.

Primaries, secondaries and even nurseries teaching children as young as two receive awards from the charity Stonewall if they ‘remove any unnecessarily gendered language’ from the classroom.

They are urged to use ‘they’ instead of ‘he’/’she’ and ‘children’ or ‘young people’ instead of ‘boys and girls’. 

That’s pretty crappy journalism (Daily Mail; sorry), since it makes three conflicting claims in those three sentences. Which is it? Have schools been told to stop? Or are they being bribed to do so via awards? Or are they urged to?

Anyway, we get the gist. Gendered words are bad. If we stop using them Utopia will ensue.

Other demands include installing gender-neutral toilets and making both boys and girls wear the same uniforms.

Are they demands? Or are they requests, or are they ways to earn rewards? Plz clarify.

Stonewall’s website says ‘any educational institution catering for pupils aged 2-18’ can sign up to the School & College Champions programme, with membership costing £99 for the first year.

…

One secondary that won the award in 2021 said its activities included ‘writing a trans-inclusion policy, adapting the School Journey policy to be LGBTQ+ inclusive, and collating LGBTQ+ inclusive lessons from across the curriculum’.

Trans trans transy trans.

I guess Stonewall is just bored with dreary old lesbians and gay men. So last year. Before long they’ll be bored with transy trans, and move on to something else. Don’t mention giraffes, perhaps.

Do hit the play button on this one.

Won’t somebody please think of the men who just want to cheat women? Their journey, their heartache, their fear?

Oh he’s been “accused of” having an unfair advantage has he? Just because he can hit a ball farther? It’s not that he obviously does have an unfair advantage and people are pointing it out, it’s that he’s accused by a bunch of unreasonable hatey liars? While news outlets carefully pretend he’s a man?

Diddums.

And then there’s Biden.

Rock, meet hard place.

Trump walking on water Trump will win we’re all doomed blah blah blah. The Guardian:

“The funny thing is that everything the other side seems to accuse Trump of they’re guilty of themselves,” said Steve Baird, 52, a chief financial officer. “I feel more that Biden seems to be running the country like a dictator with all his executive orders and everything else.

“Trump might be a billionaire but I feel more of a connection, that he’s more of a president for the people and that he’ll follow the constitution more than what the current establishment is doing.”

More of a connection. A president for the people. I bet I know what that is. It’s because Trump is so deeply utterly consistently stupid. That makes him just like the rest of us! Never mind the “glamorous” wives, the solid gold 80 million square feet penthouse, the gorgeous ageless blond hair, the stubby fingers – it’s his slushpool of a brain that makes him the perfect guy to put in charge of the nukes. A president for the people!

Is there anything left in there?

Nikki Haley on Saturday questioned whether Donald Trump is mentally capable of serving as president again after he repeatedly seemed to confuse her with former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a campaign speech.

As she campaigned in Keene, New Hampshire, Haley referenced Trump’s speech the night before, in which he mistakenly asserted that Haley was in charge of Capitol security on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building seeking to stop the certification of his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump first said that Haley turned down security offered by his administration on Jan. 6 and then again mentioned Haley, adding, “They destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it.”

Haley, Pelosi, what’s the difference? They’re both female, they both talk, they both don’t suck Trump’s dick, so what the hell is the difference between them? Nothing of significance, obviously.

“It’s a distinction without a difference. It’s Nikki and Nancy,” Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said to reporters Saturday night. “What’s the difference?”

See? What I’m saying. Their names both begin with N, too. How much more identical can you get?

At his rally Saturday night in Manchester, Trump said that he took a cognitive test and “aced it.”

Nah. He didn’t take a test, and if he had he wouldn’t have “aced” it. He’s a skilled criminal, that much is clear, but intelligent, no.

“I’ll let you know when I go bad. I really think I’ll be able to tell you,” he added. “I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago. Is that possible?”

In his case?

The question answers itself.

Oh we’re going here again are we?

On Friday, for example, Mr Trump took to social media to refer to Ms Haley as “Nimbra”, a misspelling of her birth name Nimarata, and to baselessly suggest she was ineligible to serve as president or vice president in the US.

The jab against the US-born Ms Haley – whose parents emigrated to the US from India in the 1960s – was reminiscent of the false birther attacks Mr Trump deployed against former President Barack Obama.

It’s all the more attractive in someone whose own paternal grandfather was not Born in the USA.

Worse and worser.

Before I go on to the rest of the tweet I’ll say that my first thought was “Do you need clinical qualifications to run a rape trauma center? Isn’t it a managerial job rather than a clinical one?” It was many other people’s first thought too, and the answer is that you don’t need them if you are indeed just managing but he hasn’t been just managing, he’s been “counseling” too. For that you need qualifications. Why? Because you need training.

It’s all too easy to imagine what a shit job he does of “counseling” when he has no training and he hates women.

The rest:

He has only the following:

1. MSc in the Management of Training and Development from the University of Edinburgh, @EdinburghUni

2. BA English Literature from the University of Pune, @UnivOfPune

3. Diploma in Hotel Management and Catering Technology from MSIHMCT, Pune, India

He also does not have a GRC (for what it’s worth), yet was doing a job that was advertised as being open to women only. And, instead of just a management role, he carried out regular therapeutic interventions with women who had been raped. His words: “I do see survivors – four a week usually – who help me stay connected to the cause …it’s important to keep it fun”.

It’s important to what?!!

These questions need answering:

1. Why was a man with no clinical qualifications allowed to carry out direct work with vulnerable women?

2. Did the women seeing Wadhwa know he had no clinical qualifications; if not, has a crime been committed?

3. Did Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre employ him and allow him to carry out counselling whilst knowing he was not qualified to do so?

4. Did @MaggieChapman and those on the interview panel know Wadhwa would be carrying out clinical work when he was appointed?

5. Did they know he didn’t have a GRC and was still therefore legally a man?

Mridul Wadhwa’s total unsuitability for this role (besides the fact that he is a man), is shown by his saying, it’s “important to keep it fun”.

This NOT how trauma is treated. The therapeutic goal of trauma therapy is to help someone process the emotions, memories and, the re-experiencing of the event and to prevent this from continuing to adversely affect their daily lives.

Only someone with absolutely no idea about what they were doing would say it was about “keeping things fun”. Maybe that’s why Wadhwa allegedly asked women if they had orgasmed during their attacks? Maybe that was the “fun” bit for him.

By the very fact that Wadhwa was not clinically qualified in any way, he could have caused FURTHER INJURY to the women seen by him. Because:

1. They were being forced to participate in his lie that he is a woman. Remember these are rape victims.

2. He had no therapeutic training, so WHAT WAS HE DOING IN THE SESSIONS? Was he just asking random questions about their attacks and thereby reactivating their trauma?

3. Without training in how to de-intensify and reframe the reactivated emotions Wadhwa could have left these women ‘open’ and in a very dangerous emotional state.

We need urgent answers to these questions.

In the meantime, Wadhwa needs to be IMMEDIATELY removed from his job. Otherwise, he will be seeing another four more women this week. How many women’s lives has he damaged already? This is a national scandal. Please RX. This mustn’t be allowed to blow over.

It’s just grotesque.

A new consignment of geriatric shoe manufacturers from the ACLU via Chase Strangio:

In the span of just a few years, transgender people have had their rights and lives radically reshaped by a litany of political attacks against our freedom, our dignity, and the health care many of us need to live.

Wait a second. Who have had what “radically reshaped”? I’d have thought the radical reshaping was being done by surgeons like Sidhbh Gallagher of “yeet the teets” fame.

As part of a coordinated national effort to erode legal protections for trans people and push us out of public life, a wave of bills targeting gender-affirming health care for transgender people have effectively banned it for nearly one-third of transgender youth in the United States. These laws uproot entire families and communities, alarm doctors and medical experts, and endanger the very young people they laws claim to protect.

Sounds alarming, but it relies on various assumptions about what “trans rights” are and what “trans dignity” is and what “trans health care” is.

There’s no such thing as “gender-affirming health care.” Gender in the sense of magic counter-factual sex has nothing to do with health care. Affirming a delusion is not health care. Making people’s fantasies about themselves a matter of law has nothing to do with rights. As for endangering very young people, what about the way Chase Strangio of the ACLU actively promotes the claim that very young people can be in the wrong bodies and need drastic life-altering medical intervention to affirm the wrongness of their current bodies.

In each of these challenges, we are committed to exhausting every option we have with the goal of protecting the ability of our community to access this care for as long as possible. 

But it’s not care. It’s not care. It’s tinkering, and not the good kind.

Guardian rant by trans man Finn Mackay:

In December, five years later than promised, the Tories finally delivered draft, non-statutory guidance for schools on “gender questioning children”…

The document doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about this government’s hostile stance on trans identities, inclusion and rights; but, unfortunately, what it does do is further solidify in official documentation and language the politicised phrase “gender identity ideology”.

Well speaking of “politicised” what exactly do you mean by “trans rights”? What are they and how do you know?

It is in fact quite obvious what the government means by “gender identity ideology.” It means the ideology that claims men can be women and women can be men. It means the ideology that claims people invariably are what they say they are in the case of sex/gender. It means the ideology that claims people can literally be the opposite sex of their own bodies. It means the ideology that claims ideas in the head can cancel physical realities. It means the ideology that claims the brain is the only sex organ. It means the ideology that claims that vaginas and penises, ovaries and testes, are just trimming, and wholly beside the point when it comes to knowing who is which sex/gender.

The government is attempting to bring into the mainstream this contested term, a creation of rightwing sex and gender conservatism that dates back to the 1990s, and which forms a key part of renewed attacks against the LGBTQ+ community.

Liar. Saying men are not women is in no way an attack on lesbians and gay men.

As used in this context, the phrase “gender identity ideology” is actually nothing to do with gender, as in masculinity and femininity, and how this shapes our identities. 

Pffff. As if Mackay would agree he’s merely “masculine” as opposed to being literally in every sense a man.

The real gender ideology is the binary sex and gender system that requires all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual; and which attaches harsh penalties to those who deviate from this script.

More bullshit. Knowing which people are men does not require all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual. Yes, sure, there are some people who dislike girly men and boyish women, but that fact is not the same as knowing which people are which sex.

One thing this ideology does do is ruin people’s thinking skills.

Central Oregon Daily News tells us via the US Attorney’s Office:

A federal grand jury in Eugene returned an indictment Thursday charging a Cottage Grove, Oregon, woman with posting a violent threat online, announced the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon.

Elizabeth Ballesteros West, 56, has been charged with one count of transmitting an interstate threat.

According to court documents, in late September 2023, the FBI received an anonymous tip that West was threatening coworkers on Facebook. Later, in November 2023, the FBI learned West had established an account on X (formerly known as Twitter) that she was allegedly using to post and repost memes, videos and statements containing violent messages targeting Black and Jewish people and immigrants. Several of West’s posts included what appeared to be self-produced photos of firearms including several handguns, a shotgun, and an AR-style assault rifle.

Etc etc etc.

But the PostMillennial tells the story differently.

The FBI arrested a trans-identified Oregon woman on Friday who allegedly made a series of credible violent threats towards minority groups, including Jews, black people, and immigrants.

That’s just confusing. A woman who identifies as a [trans] man? Or a man who “identifies as” a woman?

Court records show that authorities were first alerted to West in September when she had posted on a transgender women’s support group page on Facebook claiming that she was being bullied by “transphobic” coworkers, and saying that she had reached “the end of my rope.”

So a trans woman then?

It’s odd that the Feds simply call him (?) a woman throughout, with no mention of transery in either direction. Law enforcement should not be in the job of lying about the sex of violent arestees.

Here he is in person, calling women who don’t believe men like him are women “probably misogynist.”

He is such a piece of work.

Susan Dalgety on the mess at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre:

Today, there are 17 rape crisis centres across Scotland, from Shetland to Dumfries and Galloway. In 2020-21, Rape Crisis Scotland – the movement’s national body – received more than £5 million for its sexual violence support work, much of it from the Scottish Government.

But as the movement evolved from a voluntary service to a professional one, the principle which underpinned it remained constant. Survivors of rape and sexual assault should have access to female-only support services. Women looking after each other in a way only women can understand. Until recently that is, when gender identity ideology, which dismisses the reality of biological sex, began to assert itself in that most sacred of female-only spaces – rape crisis centres.

A report published this week shows that the sector is now in turmoil across the UK. Women’s Services: A Sector Silenced, launched by human rights charity Sex Matters, reveals that groups are mired in confusion as they grapple with the conflicts arising out of a move towards “trans-inclusive” services, often forced on them by funders. It also points to growing evidence that women are reluctant to seek help because they do not want to risk being counselled by a man.

The lead author of the report, social-science researcher Matilda Gosling, says that those sector leaders who believe in the necessity of single-sex spaces face an intolerable choice between not offering the services that women need or losing out on funding. “These are brave, principled leaders who’ve been put in an impossible situation – and either way, vulnerable women lose,” she says.

All for the sake of men who claim to be women. It doesn’t seem entirely fair, does it.

As the report was published, an employment tribunal involving a former member of staff at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) began. Roz Adams, a support counsellor, is claiming constructive dismissal after she was subjected to a nine-month disciplinary process where she was accused of being “transphobic”. She had suggested that the centre tell a woman survivor that one of its advice workers was “a woman at birth that now identifies as non-binary”.

This is not the first time the Edinburgh centre has hit the headlines in recent years. It is run by Mridul Wadhwa, who was born male. In August 2021, Wadhwa told the Guilty Feminist podcast that “bigoted” rape victims would be challenged by the centre, adding: “…if you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma. But please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices.”

Wadhwa, who self-identifies as female, later stepped back from the remarks, issuing a statement that said: “The Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre or the rape crisis movement in Scotland is not looking to re-educate survivors when they come in for the urgent, potentially life-saving support they may need – that would be inappropriate.” But the damage had been done, with reports of women refusing to use the Edinburgh service. And evidence at this week’s tribunal further revealed Wadhwa’s strong views, including a suggestion at a public meeting in Edinburgh University last year that firing staff can be as important as hiring them when creating “inclusive” workplaces.

Be more inclusive by firing people.

A witness, who had attended the event, said that when asked how best to bring staff on board if they were not sure about trans-inclusive policies, Wadhwa replied: “Fire them.” But perhaps the most harrowing evidence to emerge from the tribunal, which is expected to end next week, was on the first day, when Roz Adams told of a woman who was refused support from ERCC because she asked if the service was women-only. She explained that the woman, in her 60s, had wanted a female-only group therapy context. On being told the ERCC was “trans inclusive”, the woman asked “is that women-only?” and later received an email saying she was not suitable to use its service.

Because she’s not inclusive enough. Women who’ve been raped are turned away from a rape crisis centre run by a man because they don’t want group therapy with men. That’s inclusion.

It also emerged that the Edinburgh centre refuses to refer women to Beira’s Place, the female-only sexual support service set up by author JK Rowling a year ago, even though they have closed the waiting list for their advocacy services. Adams, who now works at Beira’s Place, told the tribunal that ERCC “have made it very clear they won’t refer people on to our services”.

That too is inclusion. It’s all so inclusive that women have nowhere to go.

Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscelllany Room.

I wish there was one single all-encompassing, factual, non-polemical book about this. So far, there isn’t one. (But I’ll be honest: I’d love to write one myself.)

Helen Joyce’s book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality is fantastic — analogous to Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the sense that it’s a broad overview of the definition of trans and how the concept is not backed by science — just like Dawkins did with the concept of God.

But Joyce’s (excellent) book sticks to the facts, and lacks a broader analysis of the social and political context, which has so much to do with why this nonsense idea has become so popular so quickly.

Here, Kathleen Stock steps in and takes a feminist-philosophical view in her book Material Girls. (Which — I know, I’m a horrible monster, kill me now — I have only started and haven’t finished. So I can’t really speak to this one too much.)

For a pre-social-media perspective on specifically male transsexualism, transgender identity, and homosexuality, and the connection between them, Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen is very good. (And it’s available as a free PDF now, with the author’s blessing.)

And then there’s Bailey’s spiritual sequel of sorts, Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, which mostly focuses on the controversy surrounding Bailey’s book, and which launches from there into the subject of ideology and activism and how those forces interact with the pursuit of science, for better or for worse. (Very interesting, enlightening and engaging stuff.)

In Tough Crowd, Graham Linehan writes movingly about trans from the perspective of the social media landscape and what it’s like to be a celebrity who dissents from the liberal consensus and who dares to blaspheme about the topic. (I’m biased towards this book because I had a hand in its creation, and because Graham is one of my closest and dearest friends. We’re colleagues, too: we host a long-running, popular YouTube podcast together. But all bias aside, the book has been a runaway bestseller because the consensus is that it’s a brilliant, hilarious, and moving read.)

Dr. Az Hakeem has written two books from the perspective of a therapist who has seen first-hand that there’s a way for virtually all (98%) young people who are convinced that they need trans identities and sexchange surgeries that they can climb down from that belief and reconcile their minds with their bodies. His latest is the newest of the bunch of high profile trans books, and I haven’t read it yet, but I hear it’s very good.

I myself have taken a stab at a broad-overview essay, which imagines its reader as an otherwise uninformed liberal progressive looking to get a foothold into this subject. A Cliff’s Notes primer. My essay tries to pare this incredibly complex topic down to a few basic, digestible concepts to a reader who is otherwise hostile to gender-critical ideas. Here it is.

There’s no one way into this mess of a topic, and there’s no single, universal story that comes close to capturing it — yet. But I puzzle every night and day over whether such a solution is possible, in the way mathematicians and chessmasters probably puzzle over abstract theorems. I want so badly for there to be some kind of elegant, simple solution: an easily deployed explanation I can use to break my erstwhile friends free of the spell of gender madness. It’s a cult, and it’s stolen my life away because it’s stolen virtually all of my friends and colleages, and I keep wishing for some kind of science-fiction code word that will break them all out of the spell, like Angela Lansbury’s Queen of Diamonds playing card in The Manchurian Candidate — only in reverse: to break someone OUT of a mind-control trance, instead of inducing one.

There’s gotta be a solution out there somewhere that will solve this problem! Something to stop the madness!

Until we find one, I hope the recommendations come in handy for you.