Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • We were all told no

    Maya annotates Emma Barnett’s hostile interview of Hadley Freeman on Woman’s Hour:

  • MALE athletes

    I am so tired of the dishonest way journalism frames the issue of men ruining women’s sports. For instance Reuters/The Guardian:

    Transgender athletes will be able to participate in community sport in New Zealand in the gender they identify with and not need to prove or justify their identity, according to new guiding principles released by Sport New Zealand.

    The guidelines do not apply to elite sport and it will be up to individual sports to define where and how transgender athletes participate, the governing body said.

    “An inclusive transgender policy allows individuals to take part as their self-determined gender and not as the sex they were assigned at birth,” Sport New Zealand (SNZ) said. “It does not ask people to prove or otherwise justify their gender, sex or gender identity.”

    The issue isn’t “transgender athletes,” the issue is male athletes. The issue isn’t “gender identity,” the issue is male bodies. The issue isn’t “self-determined gender” versus “sex assigned at birth,” it’s male bodies versus women’s bodies. They all know that perfectly well, the journalists and editors, and they choose to obfuscate it and lie about it for the sake of this idiotic narcissistic ideology. I am so tired of it.

    Transgender participation has proved controversial at amateur and elite levels, with women’s groups and some athletes saying transgender athletes should be banned from female categories to ensure fair competition.

    The fourth paragraph: that’s how long it took them to hint at the real issue, but only hint at it without spelling out the part about men being bigger and stronger and faster than women are.

    Journalism really needs to stop lying about this subject.

  • In crisis areas

    That BBC list of women does of course have heroic brilliant women on it, a fact which I shouldn’t lose sight of in objecting to the Beeb’s inclooosion of men who claim to be women.

    Aye Nyein Thu is a front-line volunteer in crisis areas of Myanmar, focusing on the remote and poor Chin State. She built a makeshift hospital with a small operating theatre in November 2021 and has since been treating sick and injured people.

    Working in a remote area of Indonesia, Velmariri Bambari has been fighting for victims of sexual violence in Central Sulawesi. She has persuaded members of the local council to break with customary law and not impose fines on survivors of sexual abuse.

    In customary law, the sanction of “washing the village” establishes that perpetrators who are thought to have polluted traditional values should pay a fine. This rule is also applied to victims. Because of her campaigning, Bambari is often the first person contacted by the police when sexual violence is reported. She has dealt with several cases this year.

    In her spare time, she travels to other regions where medical treatment is mostly unavailable, to support local patients including internally displaced persons. In the course of her work, she has had charges of ‘causing incitement to violence’ brought against her by the Myanmar military, who accused her of supporting local anti-government militia groups known as People’s Defence Forces.

    A renowned Russian journalist, Taisia Bekbulatova founded the independent media outlet Holod in 2019. The organisation has reported extensively on the war in Ukraine, as well as publishing stories about inequality, violence, and women’s rights. The website was blocked in Russia by authorities in April, during a crackdown on independent media.

    Despite this, Bekbulatova and her team have vowed to continue their work, and have seen their readership increase. Bekbulatova, who left Russia in 2021 after being labelled a “foreign agent”, has travelled to Ukraine herself to report on the war from the front line.

    Heroes all of them.

  • Da hair, da lipstick

    This guy thinks people are obliged to want to “date” him.

    Nobody is obliged to want to date anyone. Beyond that, no one should even consider for a second “dating” this guy. He’d be drinking your blood within seconds.

    https://twitter.com/transwomyn/status/1600134268788752384

  • Guilty guilty guilty

    Trump organization found guilty on all counts.

    The counts are still being reviewed in the courtroom, but it is substantively over. The jurors are confirming one by one that their verdict has been read accurately. Donald J. Trump’s company has been found by a Manhattan jury to be a felon.

    The Trump Organization has been in legal trouble for years, but this is the biggest rebuke yet. The company faces more than $1 million in penalties and it could receive blowback from its lenders and business partners.

    Maggie Haberman observes:

    Even without Trump personally being charged, this is a devastating day for him. He has long sought to avoid having criminality attached to his name in any way shape or form.

    Trump and his children and his company now face a civil suit filed by the New York attorney general accusing them all of widespread and pervasive fraud over a decade.

    Dare we hope to see them bankrupted? Having to go live in studio apartments in Kansas and work in a chicken processing plant?

    Trump became a presidential candidate for a third time just three weeks ago, a move he made in part as a shield against other investigations he is facing, including one in Georgia and two by the Justice Department.

    I’m thinking it can’t be all that healthy for a political campaign to have the candidate’s company found guilty on multiple fraud charges.

  • Two

    The BBC list of 100 women

    Erika Hilton, Brazil

    Politician

    The first black trans woman ever elected to a seat in the National Congress of Brazil. Erika Hilton is an activist who campaigns against racism, and for LGBTQ+ and human rights.

    and

    Efrat Tilma, Israel

    Volunteer

    As the first transgender volunteer in the Israeli Police, activist Efrat Tilma answers emergency calls and works to improve the relationship between police forces and the LGBTQ+ community.

    It’s only 2% (I assume there are no more because the BBC says up front that these two are trans women and they don’t say that about anyone else) but it shouldn’t be any. It just shouldn’t. The whole point is to big up women because women are so generally smalled down. The whole point is to promote women, draw attention to women, chip away at the neglect and lack of representation of women. You can’t do that and add a couple of men to the mix just because it’s fashionable.

  • P***

    Open Democracy seems to have a branch (or perhaps it’s a rib) called open Democracy 50.50. Its Twitter explains it as

    Feminist investigative journalism & frontline reporting. We are #TrackingtheBacklash against women’s & LGBTIQ rights – and challenging exclusion in the media.

    So it’s not feminist journalism at all then. Feminism is for women, end of story. There is no law that says feminism has to dilute itself by adding LGB rights, let alone LGBTIQ rights, at least one of which negates women’s rights.

    I did a post on trans-identifying Natacha Kennedy’s “journalism” yesterday. This one –

    But look, three days earlier they promoted a similar attack on feminism.

    Women who say men are not women are “punching down” according to Jess O’Thomson [sic] who writes a lot for the Trans Safety Network. They is no kind of feminist.

    O’Thomson is much exercised by the fact that women are sometimes allowed to say that men are not women.

    …‘gender criticals’ have sought to rely on the Equality Act 2010 to obtain discrimination protection for clearly anti-trans conduct. For example, in Forstater, it was argued that the Equality Act 2010 should protect Maya Forstater’s right to call Pips Bunce a “part-time crossdresser”. In Allison Bailey’s case, it was argued that the same should apply to a tweet calling a trans woman “male-bodied”, and suggesting that they “ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can coerce young lesbians into having sex with them.”

    O’Thomson thinks we should not have any right to say that trans women are male-bodied or that a man who sometimes wears a dress is a part-time crossdresser. This is “open democracy”?

    Bailey claimed that this terrible and transphobic accusation was a simple expression of her ‘gender critical’ beliefs. Most concerningly, in the judgment, it was uncritically accepted that the acronym ‘TERF’ (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) amounted to a “slur” on the same level as racial slur ‘P***’, which was printed in the judgment uncensored.

    But our virtuous O’Thomson damn well does censor it, thus leaving me with the headache of figuring out what the hell “P***” might be. I got there in the end: Paki. Thank god for censorship so that no one will know what you’re even trying to talk about.

    I suppose that’s pretty typical for the level of intellectual discussion from the virtuous O’Thomsons of the world. Slurs are a form of magic, so that the appearance of the whole word, no matter how meta, how labeled in advance as a slur, how distanced with quotation marks, is every bit as racist and evil as saying it with intent.

    That doesn’t apply to “Karen” though.

  • Silencing the Karens

    Hooded progressives assault protesting women and steal their sign.

    Women must not be allowed to protest. It’s ungodly.

  • Failed to disclose

    Uh……….

    Trump did not disclose $19.8m loan

    Donald Trump failed to disclose a $19.8m loan from a company with historical ties to North Korea, while he was the US president, according to a new report.

    Documents obtained by the New York attorney general, and reported by Forbes, on Sunday indicate a previously unreported loan owed by Trump to Daewoo, the South Korean conglomerate.

    Daewoo was the only South Korean company allowed to operate a business in North Korea during the mid-1990s.

    Forbes revealed that Trump’s relationship with Daewoo is at least 25 years old. At one point, Daewoo partnered with Trump on a development project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Trump World Tower.

    And the filthy lying criminal toad kept all that secret.

    Forbes reports that even though the loan was reported on the Trump Organization’s internal documents, it was not disclosed on the former president’s public financial disclosure reports. Under disclosure laws, Trump was required to submit the documents to federal officials during his presidential campaign and after he became president.

    For obvious reasons. People or corporations or countries he owes money to could use the debt to extort favors. Big favors.

  • Challenge patriarchal social norms

    What an unfortunate juxtaposition, especially for the UN Human Rights chief.

    Maya alerted us to the ridiculous pairing.

  • Sheep may safely graze

    All is not well on the trans progressive front. Nobody is progressive enough or trans enough or safe enough. There are no safe spaces. There are no space safes. All the wheels have come off, even the ones that never touched the ground.

    Mermaids is refusing to let staff see a report into ousted boss Susie Green’s leadership because there are not “safe spaces” in which to read it.

    You can’t trust anyone – not Susie Green, not staff, not Mermaids – no one.

    Last weekend, a whistleblower told The Telegraph how Ms Green faced a staff backlash over her “incapable” leadership, culminating in the “nail in the coffin” report, seen by trustees.

    Trustees. You can’t trust them either. Where are you when you can’t trust the trustees?

    But on Monday staff were told that the board of trustees felt “we can’t safely share the EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] report today as we had planned”.

    You can’t even trust the EDI report!

    Citing media reports and an “unacceptable risk” to the authors, Mat Maddocks, a Mermaids trustee, wrote in the email that “our first priority is the well-being of our staff and given these events it isn’t possible to create the safe spaces for processing the report that are vital”.

    Can you keep track of all these different categories of people who need safe spaces and can’t find safe spaces and say that safe spaces are vital? Because I can’t. I picture a building full of distraught people all trying to prioritize the well-being of everyone else while at the same time preventing everyone else from reading anything written by everyone else.

    Oh wait, there’s another set of people.

    The audit by the Social Justice Collective (SJC), a diversity group, follows staff complaints about alleged racism, safeguarding after a trustee spoke at a conference sympathetic to paedophiles, and Ms Green “shoving her head in the sand” over scandals.

    A diversity group! That’s a social justice collective! Added to the mix! How do they keep track of who is telling which set what to do and who is obeying?

  • So amusing

    Joanne Harris (Society of Authors important person) is still doing her Sneer At The Feminists thing.

    Hur hur Hadley Freeman geddit – the fact that the Guardian wouldn’t let her write about gender ideology doesn’t mean she was canceled hur hur it just means she couldn’t write in the Guardian about an important trend harmful to women despite being a female, feminist columnist at the Guardian. That’s not being canceled hur hur.

    It is too so funny hur hur!

    Just the SOA hur hur!

  • Marginalized

    Lucy Bannerman at The Times reported in 2018 that Natacha Kennedy was “behind a smear campaign aimed at academics.” (I wrote about it at the time.) Cool to see Sally Hines citing Kennedy as a valuable source a couple of days ago, and even cooler to see Open Democracy publishing an article by Kennedy – an article throwing muck at feminist women who don’t kiss the asses of men who claim to be women.

    A transgender lecturer orchestrated a smear campaign against academics across the UK in which universities were described as dangerous and accused of “hate crime” if they refused to accept activists’ views that biological males can be women, it can be revealed.

    Natacha Kennedy, a researcher at Goldsmiths University of London who is also understood to work there under the name Mark Hellen, faces accusations of a “ludicrous” assault on academic freedom after she invited thousands of members of a closed Facebook group to draw up and circulate a list shaming academics who disagreed with campaigners’ theories on gender.

    And he’s still at it, and Open Democracy publishes him, and Sally Hines recommends what Open Democracy publishes by him.

  • Muck

    Sally Hines chastises the BBC for not pampering trans people enough.

    It’s embarrassing how seriously the BBC takes trans ideology, that’s what’s embarrassing.

    I read the Open Democracy piece the other day and was underwhelmed but if Sally Hines thinks it’s timely n relevant who am I to continue to ignore it. It’s by Natacha Kennedy.

    The recent backlash against Graham Norton’s entirely reasonable suggestion that the media talks to more trans people was more revealing than people think.

    The media talks to more trans people than what? I think she meant “suggestion that the media should talk to more trans people” but is a bad writer. At any rate, seriously? The media don’t pay slavish enough attention to trans people already? The media never shut up about trans people, which is somewhat annoying to women given how easy they’ve always found it to ignore women.

    He came dangerously close to exposing organised transphobia’s core campaign strategy, something they don’t want people talking about. In collaboration with mainstream media, its main strategy has been to liberally platform anti-trans narratives, hermetically exclude trans perspectives, and at the same time accuse trans people of ‘silencing’ transphobes.

    Notice that “transphobia” has narratives while trans people have perspectives. Nudge nudge. To put it another way “transphobia” tells lies while trans people have wise reasonable thoughts. Also “transphobes” are not at all silenced, including by this habit of casually throwing buckets of mud at them on all occasions.

    For example, a transphobic group holds a rally somewhere – maybe a couple of dozen transphobes in a draughty church hall. There’s a protest outside. A journalist, with confected faux-indignation, then claims trans people are ‘silencing’ them.

    How dare they, those sneaky bitches. How dare they hold a rally or meet up in a building. Obviously they don’t do it for the reasons normal people hold rallies or meet up, they do it for obscure but sinister reasons of their own. “There’s a protest outside” – kind of the way there’s a rain storm or an earthquake. It’s not a matter of trans “activists” trying to stop women meeting and organizing, it’s just an impersonal event: A ProTest. Then this wholly innocent uncaused not at all political protest is reported by a journalist. Is that sinister or what?!

    There is a name for this mechanism of power: ‘mirror propaganda’. Mirror propaganda means doing to your enemies what you are falsely accusing them of doing to you. 

    But they are doing it. Nobody is falsely accusing them of doing it, because of the fact that they are doing it.

    As, in fact, is Sally Hines. She’s treating us as illegitimate, and having no right to speak. She thinks an article that compares us to Nazis is good and worth promoting.

    So the media creates the myth that trans people are silencing anti-trans activists, while the reality is that every major national media outlet in the UK, from The Guardian and The Times to the Mail and BBC, almost never includes any trans voices.

    That’s the reality?

    Not unless you change the meaning of “almost” and “never” and “includes.”

    Kennedy goes on to compare “transphobes” and their dirty trick of being protested to the Rwandan genocide.

    Kennedy is trans.

  • Coyly campaigning

    Joan Smith says goodbye Eddie Izzard:

    Eddie Izzard likes pink. Pink coats, pink jackets — they’re all over the website promoting his failed bid to stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election. Labour’s colour is traditionally red but pink is for girls, and Izzard has been campaigning in what he coyly calls ‘girl mode’ for months now.

    Triply insulting, isn’t it – the fetish for pink, the pretending to be a woman, the coyly calling it girl mode. Ugh. Imagine a grown woman doing that; now imagine a grown woman doing that in campaigning for public office. Making a game and a joke and an embarrassment of being a female person when you are in fact a man.

    There was no pink in sight when Izzard posted a picture of himself with Abtisam Mohamed after she was selected as Labour’s candidate for Sheffield Central. For once Izzard was all in black but still in ‘girl mode’, judging by his high-heeled boots and the quilted bag slung over one shoulder. Other defeated hopefuls might have contented themselves with congratulating the winner but Izzard had to put himself front and centre. Towering over the diminutive Abtisam, he announced that he looked forward to “campaigning with her in the months and years to come”.

    Well she’s not a slebrity, is she, and he is.

    He towers over her, but to be fair, that’s a glorious photo of her, so props to him for that. He towers but it’s her face that grabs the attention.

    It’s just possible that Labour members were put off by Izzard’s shameless self-promotion, which included a claim that he’s done more campaigning than anyone else in the Labour Party: ‘There isn’t a Labour activist who has done more,’ his campaign literature announced. More even than Margaret Beckett or Harriet Harman, who have been MPs for a total of almost 80 years between them? And they’ve done it without making performative gestures about being in ‘girl mode’. 

    He identifies as having done more.

    It may be that this craven response from the media misled Izzard into over-estimating his popularity. But while people are ready to applaud an actor and comedian who challenges gender stereotypes, they may not be so keen on a man making demands that defy the evidence of their senses. Izzard’s claim to be trans highlights the problem at the heart of self-identification, which is that it requires so little of the individual — but so much of everyone else. 

    Let me repeat that, because it’s a gem: the problem at the heart of self-identification, which is that it requires so little of the individual — but so much of everyone else. 

    I wish I’d thought of that.

  • Fall in behind

    Define “moderate.”

    Republican moderate refuses to disown Trump over constitution threat

    It doesn’t seem very “moderate” to me to give tacit support to a reckless self-serving criminal bully who says we should tear up the constitution and make him dictator.

    “Whoever the Republicans end up picking, I’ll fall in behind” them, Dave Joyce of Ohio told ABC’s This Week, adding that he thought Americans did not want to look back to the 2020 election, the subject of Trump’s lies about electoral fraud and demand for extra-constitutional action.

    We don’t want to “look back” at things that happened a few hours ago?

    Joyce said: “I will support whoever the Republican nominee is. And I just don’t think that at this point [Trump] will be able to get there because I think there’s a lot of other good quality candidates out there.”

    To the host, that was “a remarkable statement. You’d support a candidate who’s come out for suspending the constitution?”

    Joyce said: “Well, you know, [Trump] says a lot of things. You have to take him in context. And right now I have to worry about making sure the Republican Governance Group and the Republican majority make things work for the American people. And I can’t be really chasing every one of these crazy statements that come out … from any of these candidates.”

    Yes, Trump does say a lot of things, many of which are rock-solid reasons for never voting for him and for doing everything possible to consign him to oblivion. The fact that he does that is not a reason to shrug indifferently and continue to support him.

  • Sheffield Central

    So that’s good news anyway.

    Not Eddie Izzard.

  • Definition isn’t reduction

    No that’s not it.

    Image

    It’s not “reducing” people to anything to know what definitions are. Nobody says female body parts are the sum total of women, are what women are about, are all there is to know about women. They’re just the basic equipment, that’s all.

    Feminism has challenged the assumption among advertisers and sexist men that tits and ass are all there is to women, but that doesn’t entail saying women don’t have tits.

  • Will has a theory

    There’s that misogyny.

    Uh huh, a flutter of the eyelashes, that’s us – we’re all Scarlett O’Hara. Just look at all those women fluttering their eyelashes and pleading for protection. The nerve of them.

  • Jobs for the nice girls network

    Jo Bartosch on the elite feminism that can’t define women:

    Even seasoned Westminster watchers could be forgiven for not having heard of the Women’s Equality Party (WEP). Co-founded by luvvie-extraordinaire Sandi Toksvig, the group works towards the laudable, if somewhat woolly, aim of making “equality a reality”. But their brand of insipid dinner party feminism is sinking into irrelevance; washed away by a wave of grassroots women’s rights activists who are tired of playing nice.

    I love the combination of luvvie-extraordinaire and insipid dinner party feminism. I mean the verbal combination; the actual combination I don’t love at all.

    To date, the most notable achievement of WEP’s leader Mandu Reid has been to stand next to a woman who was offended by the late queen’s lady-in-waiting. 

    She hastened to write a Guardian piece about it.

    Perhaps this is fair enough; wringing political points and publicity out of the news is part of her job. But it is worth noting that neither Reid, nor indeed any of the class of professional feminist, have found a media slot to defend the ordinary women who have been vilified for saying that biological sex matters.

    Well, you see, it’s like this. Race is absolute and unmistakable, while sex is malleable and subtle and subjective.

    If you say so, but then how does feminism work? What even is feminism?

    Oh look, a squirrel.

    This is because WEP reject the definition of “woman” as simply an “adult human female” in favour of the idea that any biological male who says he’s a woman should be treated as such. This was confirmed at last month’s conference, where delegates voted to support a system of gender self-identification; transforming the slogan “transwomen are women” into policy. This is about as logical as the Communist Party failing to define ‘worker’ lest it upset industrialists who identify as proletarians.

    Or BLM cheerfully agreeing that if Donald Trump says he’s Black then he is.

    Just a few days before Reid bore witness to “institutional racism” at the palace, a group of women of all backgrounds met at Hyde Park for a Standing for Women rally, a grassroots membership group. Uniting under the dictionary definition of “woman” as “adult human female”, they sought to raise awareness of the dangers of allowing men to identify as women. They were met by a baying mob of masked counter protesters, some of whom held a large banner reading “Arm Trans People”.

    One threw liquid in the face of organiser Kellie-Jay Keen, and another was arrested after physically attacking a woman. There was no statement from WEP, Fawcett or Right to Equality to condemn this, and no round of media interviews

    A palace greeter makes a clumsy mistake and there’s an uproar; men threaten and attack women and there’s a pointed gaze in the opposite direction.

    It is now abundantly clear that organisations like WEP, Right to Equality and Fawcett do little more than provide jobs for the nice girls network. While they complain about funding and etiquette at the palace, they have been outstripped by a revitalised movement of righteously raging females; the ordinary women that professional feminists are too scared to even define.

    Or they just call us Karens.