It just gets better and better.

Note that “another minority woman.” Joss Prior is neither a woman nor a minority. He’s a vicious toad of a white guy. “Trans”activism should just change its name to vicious toad activism.

This guy was actually an MP for two years.

A Tory MP at that, but he changes the wording just as obstinately as the “activists” do.

So maddening. The issue is excluding men from women’s sports. It is not excluding men from society. If a former MP doesn’t know the difference, or pretends not to know the difference to make a rhetorical point…it’s yet another bit of evidence that this “activism” relies on lies and distortions to get its way.

Hoo boy – as if it weren’t terrifying enough already. Climate change–>more pandemics:

There will be at least 15,000 instances of viruses leaping between species over the next 50 years, with the climate crisis helping fuel a “potentially devastating” spread of disease that will imperil animals and people and risk further pandemics, researchers have warned.

As the planet heats up, many animal species will be forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions. They will bring their parasites and pathogens with them, causing them to spread between species that haven’t interacted before. This will heighten the risk of what is called “zoonotic spillover”, where viruses transfer from animals to people, potentially triggering another pandemic of the magnitude of Covid-19.

And this will be in a world that’s already struggling with rising sea levels, failing crops, wildfires, mass migrations, lethal heatwaves, disappearing marine life…

“As the world changes, the face of disease will change too,” said Gregory Albery, an expert in disease ecology at Georgetown University and co-author of the paper, published in Nature. “This work provides more incontrovertible evidence that the coming decades will not only be hotter, but sicker.” …

Albery said that climate change is “shaking ecosystems to their core” and causing interactions between species that are already likely to be spreading viruses. He said that even drastic action to address global heating now won’t be enough to halt the risk of spillover events.

“This is happening, it’s not preventable even in the best case climate change scenarios and we need to put measures in place to build health infrastructure to protect animal and human populations,” he said.

We need to do so many things that we’re not doing.

H/t Mike Haubrich

Temperatures are rising in India.

Millions of Indians are experiencing a brutal heatwave that is throwing lives and livelihoods out of gear – and there is no relief in sight.

…

While heatwaves are common in India, especially in May and June, summer began early this year with high temperatures from March itself – average maximum temperatures in the month were the highest in 122 years. Heatwaves also began setting in during the month.

…

The effects are visible. Farmers say the unexpected temperature spikes have affected their wheat harvest, a development that could potentially have global consequences given supply disruptions due to the Ukraine war.

We’re told to remember that weather is different from climate, and not to attribute all extreme weather to climate change, but that said, the matter of wheat harvests and global consequences is one of the reasons climate change is so lethal. You may be comfortable in an air-conditioned office or a swimming pool, but when the crops start to fail…

The heat has also triggered an increase in power demand, leading to outages in many states and fears of a coal shortage.

Loop, innit. Heat—>more power demand—>more heat—>more power demand—>ad infinitum.

Russia has things back to front here.

Sending heavy weapons and other arms to Ukraine is dangerous for European security, the Kremlin has warned Western nations.

Sure, and if I set fire to a neighbor’s house it’s dangerous for the neighbor to summon the fire trucks.

What’s really dangerous for European security is this whole thing of Putin trying to smash Ukraine back into being a branch of Mother Russia. You broke it you pay for it.

Spokesman Dmitry Peskov was responding to a speech by UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss urging Kyiv’s allies to “ramp up” military production to help Ukraine.

Western allies have maintained their support does not amount to a military confrontation between Moscow and Nato.

But Peskov told reporters: “The tendency to pump weapons, including heavy weapons into Ukraine, these are the actions that threaten the security of the continent, provoke instability.”

Like the old joke about a sign (probably apocryphal but I don’t know) at a French zoo that said this animal is wicked, if attacked it defends itself*. It’s not the “tendency” to help Ukraine defend itself that provokes instability, it’s the unprovoked attack on Ukraine that provokes instability. You the provoker, Vlad, not that other guy.

*Cet animal est très méchant,
Quand on l’attaque il se défend.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on From kulaks to Mariupol.

Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation. […] Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies—rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia that its leaders had promised.

According to Jung Chang the same was true in China during the so called Great Leap Forward. There were villages where there was no bark left on the trees because the starving peasants had nothing else to eat after everything else had been taken from them and sold abroad in order to finance the nuclear weapons program. This very deliberate and cynical policy was justified by re-labeling the victims as “land owners” (and hence part of the oppressor class). Meanwhile fat Chairman Mao was portrayed as the true voice of the workers, the peasants, the poor, the oppressed while living like an emperor. Even after most leftists in the west had realized that Stalin was a monster, many continued to see Mao as this selfless idealist and explain away things like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution as idealistic projects gone wrong (despite the Chairman’s good intentions) or entirely the fault of self-serving underlings. Indeed I can’t remember ever meeting a self-professed Stalinist, but I have personally known several Maoists in my lifetime.

When I lived in Germany (from about 1995 until 1999-ish), the weekly papers published detailed descriptions of atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht in WWII on that particular day that the Sunday paper was published. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Not only were the Germans reminding themselves, everyone else was, too: I would go to Italy, and see the same thing (“This week in Nazi Atrocities”) printed in Italian newspapers. Germany and Germans have been paying penance for their sins for decades, and very publicly at that.

That’s very much my experience as well. As someone who studied German, speaks the language (or at least used to…), and even lived in Leipzig for a short while, I have been to lots of German museums that deal with the Nazi era, the Second World War, the Holocaust etc., and in my experience the main focus is always on how monstrously evil the German regime was and the unspeakable atrocities of the Nazis. The one jarring note when I visited Japan back in 2016 was going to the Edo Tokyo Museum (a fantastic museum in every other way – including the building itself!) and noticing the glaring contrast. As I remember, all the horrible war crimes of the Japanese regime were compressed into a couple of vague references to “regrettable instances” (or something along those lines) while the focus otherwise was almost entirely on the (admittedly real and very traumatic!) suffering of the Japanese people. Shortly before I went Emperor Akihito had caused a bit of a stir by expressing (from memory) “deep remorse” for the atrocities of the Japanese army while then prime minister Abe was criticized for doing the politician thing, talking about “looking forward” and not dwelling on the past etc.

We are much worried about Allison Bailey. (Who’s we? Her admirers, friends, colleagues, comrades, fans.) She’s in the hospital and there is no news.

The majority view is yes, it was a deliberate troll by Stonewall.

Also this:

H/t Holms

Oh the endless quest to be more special than everyone else. How tiring it is, how strenuous, how exigent, how pointless.

The “friendly reminder” bit is always charming, because of the way it assumes you’re interested in the person saying it, and lavish attention on her them daily, and know all about Them but just need the occasional loving refresher course.

But even better is the woman saying “I am not a woman.” Yeah you are. Just as the people helping a woman deliver a baby know what sex the baby is, you are a woman because you are a woman. Words aren’t magic, and saying “I am not a woman” doesn’t make you not a woman any more than saying “I am Victoria Station” makes you Victoria Station.

“I am nonbinary” is just childish and banal. We’re all “nonbinary”; get over yourself.

“I occupy a space outside the gender binary” is grotesquely self-admiring and ooky. No you don’t. You’re not magic, you’re not special, you’re not unique, you’re not Unlike all those boring drones who are utterly determinedly “binary.” You’re a human like other humans. Deal with it.

It’s not that it’s “hard to wrap our heads around.” It’s that it’s stupid and meaningless and made-up and childish.

Everybody just grow up.

This does indeed seem like a very odd, not to say stupid, thing to tell children.

“They looked at you and made a guess.” No they didn’t! Any more than they looked at your mother and “made a guess.” They knew your mother was pregnant and giving birth; they had to, in order to help her with the giving birth part. They knew that and thus necessarily knew she was a woman.

Also, you weren’t born with a sweet frilly pair of underpants on (nor were you born spotlessly clean and dry). It’s a funny thing about those underpants – newborns aren’t normally dressed in frilly knickers, so we are forced to conclude that the illustrator of this fatuous book drew them on this sex-unkown baby for a reason. What reason? So that it won’t be blindingly obvious which sex the baby is.

Anne Applebaum starts with Stalin’s genocide of the “kulaks” in Ukraine in 1932-3.

Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation.

But it was all ok, because there was a story to explain why they deserved it.

Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies—rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia that its leaders had promised. The kulaks should be swept away, crushed like parasites or flies. Their food should be given to the workers in the cities, who deserved it more than they did.

And the Stalinist segment of the Left bought into the propaganda and tried to persuade everyone else to buy into it too, for years. There’s a grim shadow history of the Left in which way too many people allow themselves to be persuaded or coerced to believe utter bullshit.

Years later, the Ukrainian-born Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko wrote about what it was like to be part of one of those brigades. “To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes—and your mind,” he explained. “You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.”

He also described how political jargon and euphemisms helped camouflage the reality of what they were doing. His team spoke of the “peasant front” and the “kulak menace,” “village socialism” and “class resistance,” to avoid giving humanity to the people whose food they were stealing.

See: Orwell, passim.

There was a brief window of time when Russians could and did read about this history, but that window closed long ago.

Instead of declining, the Russian state’s ability to disguise reality from its citizens and to dehumanize its enemies has grown stronger and more powerful than ever.

And, staring at that sentence, it occurs to me that the same thing is happening here in the US, with “the Russian state” replaced by whatever we want to call the Trumpist movement.

Putinism doesn’t bother with genocides, because it doesn’t have to. Now the putins and trumps can just lie on social media and get the same result.

Although Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They got angry when anyone accused them of lying, and they produced fake “evidence” or counterarguments. In Putin’s Russia, politicians and television personalities play a different game, one that we in America know from the political campaigns of Donald Trump. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But if you accuse them of lying, they don’t bother to offer counterarguments.

They just throw out a lot of competing stories, all of them absurd.

This constant stream of falsehoods produces not outrage, but apathy. Given so many explanations, how can you know whether anything is ever true? What if nothing is ever true?

This is a world in which the shiny new trans dogma is right at home. Men can be women. Men can be women better than women can. Men are the only real women.

Instead of promoting a Communist paradise, modern Russian propaganda has for the past decade focused on enemies. Russians are told very little about what happens in their own towns or cities. As a result, they aren’t forced, as Soviet citizens once were, to confront the gap between reality and fiction. Instead, they are told constantly about places they don’t know and have mostly never seen: America, France and Britain, Sweden and Poland—places filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and “Russophobia.”

Oh lord. Putin is taking notes.

Hate speech doesn’t always lead to genocide, but genocide is always preceded by hate speech.

The modern Russian propaganda state turned out to be the ideal vehicle both for carrying out mass murder and for hiding it from the public. The gray apparatchiks, FSB operatives, and well-coiffed anchorwomen who organize and conduct the national conversation had for years been preparing their compatriots to feel no pity for Ukraine.

They succeeded. From the first days of the war, it was evident that the Russian military had planned in advance for many civilians, perhaps millions, to be killed, wounded, or displaced from their homes in Ukraine. Other assaults on cities throughout history—Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—took place only after years of terrible conflict. By contrast, systematic bombardment of civilians in Ukraine began only days into an unprovoked invasion.

(I think London should have been in that list, and before Dresden.)

All of this—the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance about mass murder, even the disdain for the lives of Russian soldiers—is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history (or German history, for that matter). But Russian citizens and Russian soldiers either don’t know that history or don’t care about it. President Zelensky told me in April that, like “alcoholics [who] don’t admit that they are alcoholic,” these Russians “are afraid to admit guilt.” There was no reckoning after the Ukrainian famine, or the Gulag, or the Great Terror of 1937–38, no moment when the perpetrators expressed formal, institutional regret. Now we have the result. Aside from the Kravchenkos and Kopelevs, the liberal minority, most Russians have accepted the explanations the state handed them about the past and moved on. They’re not human beings; they’re kulak trash, they told themselves then. They’re not human beings; they’re Ukrainian Nazis, they tell themselves today.

Beware what you tell yourself.

Originally a comment by Lady Mondegreen on These questions take on new urgency.

Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave?

What a leading way to put it. No, women won’t all have a “shared set of adventures and exploits.”

What we will share is the fundamental fact of existence in a female body as opposed to the other kind.

From that it follows that the vast majority of us will share at least some experiences unique to women. Menstruation, for example. The possibility of pregnancy. Pregnancy itself, and childbirth. From that follows the sociopolitical consequences of being female, which vary quite a lot by nation, ethnicity, and class but consistently over the past few millennia have meant subordination to those other people–the male-bodied ones.

Why have women historically been seen as subordinate, inferior, the second sex? It ain’t because we share “a set of adventures and exploits.” Biology, evolutionary psychology, and history all converge on an answer: It’s because we’re the ones who have the babies. We’re the ones who have the babies and males are the ones who want to the babies we have to be theirs. Add in the fact that we’re smaller and therefore can be bullied and the origins of male supremacist social structures are not hard to trace.

I doubt that chimps believe that females are inferior to males, but the males are dominant. (Bonobo females’ dominance over males is collective, not individual–sisterhood can indeed be powerful.) Our species developed language and our peculiar narrative tendency and then invented stories to account for a pre-existing state of affairs. Probably. (I’m skeptical about Golden Age tales of peaceful Matriarchal civilizations and Noble Savages living in perfect equality with one another and harmony with Nature.)

I’m oversimplifying. I could be wrong. But you don’t have to have an amateur interest in primatology and evolutionary biology to notice that there are some profound physical differences between the sexes, and that these differences have consequences. It strikes me, not for the first time, that people like Carol Hay, for all their “sex positivity,” must live in profound alienation from their bodies.

This reads like parody but apparently isn’t. Dear god.

I’ll just quote the rest to make things simple.

And here’s the abstract: Who counts as a woman? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave?

The relatively recent visibility of and sensitivity to the experiences of trans people gives us new reason to return to questions that feminists and other gender theorists have been grappling with for decades.

These questions take on new urgency in light of the increasing violence and discrimination trans people face across the world—in one of the most recent instances of this discrimination, for example, Ukrainian trans women are reportedly being denied passage out of the country, despite their legal status as women and the imminent danger they face at the hands of Russia’s transphobic policies, because they are being misgendered as men.

What, and Ukrainian women are having a fucking picnic??! And Ukrainian men are having a fucking picnic having to stay behind and fight to defend their country??!

According to the account I defend, womanhood is best understood as a family resemblance concept. I propose a normative reading of this view that recognizes that decisions about which features are taken to make up paradigmatic cases of womanhood are fundamentally political. This makes possible a conception of womanhood that does not continue to center the experiences of traditionally femme, non-disabled, straight cis white women, while simultaneously making sense of actual historical failures in this regard.

Oh yes those stupid femme, non-disabled, straight cis white women, those Karens, who should all be replaced by men who call themselves women.

I’ll argue that when a TERF complains that trans women haven’t had the same experiences as “real” women who were assigned female at birth, what she’s really saying is, “Trans women haven’t had the same experiences as women like me.”

Very academic, calling women “TERFs.” She might as well call us doo-doo heads.

If 30-plus years of intersectional feminism has taught us anything, it’s that this is precisely the move that feminists need to stop making.

Yes but as Aristotle always said, woman doesn’t intersect with penis.

Linda Riley has a venomous hit piece on lesbians at Stonewall.

Two years ago, I came to the conclusion that a single day for lesbian visibility was simply insufficient. We needed, and deserved, more time to shine a light on some of the amazing women in our community, and to celebrate who we are without fear of prejudice, harassment or vilification. As the publisher of DIVA, the leading magazine for LGBTQI women and non-binary people, I wanted to use our platform to create a unique space.

There are no such women. There are no LGBTQI women, there are no LGBTQI men, there are no LGBTQI people. Nobody can be all of those things, so it’s a stupid label, but on the other hand it makes it easier for quislings like Linda Riley to do their quisling work.

Pause for commercial:

I decided to look at extending the day to a week and, with the help of a brilliant team at DIVA Media Group, in less than two years the week has already become an unmissable event in the LGBTQI calendar.

Pay at the cashier.

gathering support from other LGBTQI organisations was fairly straightforward. As a former board member for GLAAD, I was delighted when they became involved, alongside Stonewall, Kaleidoscope Trust, UK Black Pride, Albert Kennedy Trust, LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, the Peter Tatchell Foundation and many others.

These organisations all agree that lesbians need to be given space to be visible and shown to the world on our own terms. For too long, we have been fetishised by the heterosexual male gaze, as little more than the stuff of fantasy. At the same time, a small number of cis lesbians, whose opposition to the rights of our trans siblings has become ever louder and more toxic, have led some to believe that the lesbian community is not an inclusive space.

Lesbians need to be given space to be visible and shown to the world on their own terms but at the same time they have to include men who call themselves lesbians, or be held up for bullying and shunning by this poisonous worm. Yay for lesbians on their own terms as long as their own terms are approved by Linda Riley. Yay for lesbians on their own terms except they’re toxic if they don’t include men.

What a crock of shit.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist on the pronouns campaign, one front in the larger Gender War:

There are two sides in this war. They call each other various names, but we can call them – fairly neutrally – genderists and gender criticals.

The genderists claim that sex doesn’t matter. Whether you’re a man or a woman depends not on your body, but on your inner sense of identity. A male person who says that he is a woman should be treated, referred to – and even thought of – as a woman for all purposes; and vice versa.

Meanwhile, though, the rest of the world will go on treating women the way it always has.

Gender criticals think biological sex does sometimes matter: for healthcare, for safeguarding, for everyday privacy and dignity, for fairness in sport, and so on. They think sex is determined by whether you have a male or a female body, and that it’s no more possible literally to change sex than to change species. 

In other words one could swap genderists/gender criticals for fantasists/realists or loonies/not-loonies.

The attentive reader will have noticed that the “gender critical” viewpoint is made up of commonsense propositions that until about ten minutes ago no sensible person – whether on the political left or right – would have dreamed of contesting. The genderist beliefs are novel, and surprising.

And – this is important – wrong.

So what about pronouns?

This takes us to the manner in which genderist beliefs have been promoted. You can’t defend irrational beliefs with reason. By and large genderists don’t try: instead, their strategy has been to attempt to leapfrog over the usual campaigning, lobbying, arguing, persuading phases of bringing about profound cultural and legal  change, and to pretend instead that the desired outcome is already accepted by all right-thinking people – and to silence dissent by visiting dire consequences on anyone who questions that claim. That, I believe, is the whole reason for the vitriol and toxicity that surrounds this subject. Anyone who points out the absurdity of propositions like “some women have penises” must be howled down as a bigot, shamed, no-platformed, hounded from her job, kicked off her course, etc.

Yes, it’s easy to see how that would work in theory, except for the fact that so few people would be motivated to promote the genderist beliefs in the first place.

Kidding. It turns out way more people than I ever realized are susceptible to this kind of cognitive engineering.

The more insidious part of the strategy is the first part: the pretence that the contentious  propositions that form genderist beliefs are already accepted without question by all educated, right-thinking people. Genderists make determined efforts to weave their claims seamlessly into our language and the fabric of our workplace culture, with the aim of converting contentious claims into the kind of tacit knowledge that doesn’t even need to be stated or formulated. 

And that’s where the stupid “pronouns” come in. Nudge nudge, shape shape, warp warp.

Oh she did, did she.

Days before Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared [in a text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows] to press for Donald Trump to overturn his 2020 election defeat by invoking martial law, new messages show.

Brackets added. MTG didn’t actually appear in a text to Meadows.

“In our private chat with only Members several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call Marshall [sic] law,” Greene texted on 17 January. “I just wanted you to tell him. They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next.”

Eleven days after the attempted coup she said that.

Greene – one of Trump’s fiercest far-right defenders on Capitol Hill – also texted Meadows days before the Capitol attack asking about how to prepare for objections to Biden’s win at the joint session of Congress, the text messages show.

“Good morning Mark, I’m here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th,” Greene wrote on 31 December. “I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn’t get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help. We are getting a lot of members on board.”

That text message from Greene, who had not yet been sworn in as a member of Congress, a week before the Capitol attack also underscores her close relationship with the Trump White House and an extraordinary level of coordination to obstruct Biden being certified as president.

In other words an extraordinary level of attempted sedition.

Suzanne Moore on Stonewall’s grotesque desertion of the very people it’s supposed to be for:

Last October it was agreed that Bailey could pursue her claim against her employer and Stonewall for direct discrimination against her gender critical beliefs, as well as indirect victimisation. The case is due to start tomorrow. 

[Now yesterday.]

So what did Bailey do so wrong that has caused Stonewall to complain to her employers? She has done “wrongthink”. She will not swallow the dogma. She believes that biological sex is immutable and that conflating sex with the made up notion of “gender identity” will leave women with no legally enforceable boundaries against men. She does not think womanhood is just a feeling in one’s head. She was not assaulted as a child because of “feelings in her head”. She does not think men can become women because of these feelings. She is concerned, above all, with male violence. 

And for those reasons Stonewall is trying to wreck her life. With friends like these who needs enemies?

Stonewall wrote to her chambers complaining about Bailey’s views. She was a founder of the LGB Alliance, posited as an alternative to Stonewall. Surely gay people have the right to organise politically as they see fit. Some gay people ally themselves to the trans cause, and some don’t. Sexual orientation and gender identity are separate issues. 

Very separate. Very very very separate, and sometimes in conflict.

Any ideology that cannot be questioned is dangerous and yet that is how Stonewall have infiltrated so many of our institutions.

In picking on Bailey they have found a woman who has fought her entire life. Is this really a good look, Stonewall? Trying to destroy a black lesbian? 

We watch agog. Bailey, like any other woman, gay or straight, can think what the hell she likes. Is she really your enemy, Stonewall? Seriously, who do you represent now? 

We know the answer to that all too well.

Never in a million years would you…

But what you would have in a million years, indeed in a few seconds, is a man telling women that men are women if they say they are, and telling women we have to agree with that on pain of relentless bullying, and telling women what we can talk about and how we can talk about it. That’s what you would have. That’s what we do have, and we’re beyond tired of it.

Simon Edge at the Glinner Update starts with Linda Riley’s tweet bashing JK Rowling and moves on to that other bully:

Also yesterday, Owen Jones tweeted that ‘transphobes’ – by which he means people who think sex is real, gender ideology is harmful, and lesbians and gays have the right to organise separately from the trans movement – should be banned from ‘every lgbtq bar’.

“We’re overwhelmingly united behind our trans siblings,” he said cloyingly. “An attack on them is an attack on all of us.”

Solidarity forever blah blah blah. Imagine a workers’ organization saying “We’re overwhelmingly united behind our billionaire boss siblings; an attack on them is an attack on all of us.” Imagine a BLM activist saying “We’re overwhelmingly united behind our white supremacist siblings; an attack on them is an attack on all of us.” Imagine an environmental activist saying “We’re overwhelmingly united behind our ExxonMobil siblings; an attack on them is an attack on all of us.”

The interests, the goals, the claims of trans activists are different from those of lesbian and gay activists, and some of them are at odds with those of lesbian and gay activists. Just pasting the T on at the end and then hammering in a lot of nails doesn’t change that.

This is a community at war with itself – with ex Stonewall insiders Matthew Parris, Anya Palmer, Kate Harris and Simon Fanshawe all saying the charity has become a danger to lesbians and gay men – but where one side is desperate to keep that war a secret.

For example, the LGBT+ Consortium is an umbrella group comprising hundreds of organisations. They can be marshalled to sign joint letters whenever Stonewall asks, and it looks like stunning display of unanimity, with only the hated LGB Alliance in the carpers’ corner.

But it’s more casuistry. You’re only allowed into the LGBT+ Consortium if you support the official line. These organisations form a bloated establishment with a massive vested interest in convincing their funders – overwhelmingly the taxpayer – that they represent their community.

“Their community” that doesn’t exist as a community – “their forced team” is what it is.

More of the great erodification of everything provided the everything belongs to women: “Lesbian visibility week…and when we say ‘lesbian’ we mean everyone.”

Powered by

Diva

Stonewall

There’s your problem right there.

Ready? All strapped in safely? Ok here’s your lesbian visibility week:

Our aim is BOTH TO celebrate lesbians and show solidarity with all LGBTQI women and non binary people in our community. We believe in unity, and lifting up those who are most marginalised.

Their aim is BOTH to celebrate lesbians AND to spit in lesbians’ faces by instantly, I said INSTANTLY, changing the subject to people who aren’t lesbians, especially men. You can have your lesbian visibility week for as long as it takes to say the three words, but then it all gets handed over to the real people.

What the fuck are “LGBTQI women” anyway? How can a woman be lesbian and gay and bi and trans and queer and intersex? And how can “lesbian visibility week” both celebrate lesbians and change the subject to people who aren’t lesbians?

Lesbian Visibility Week aims to show our solidarity with all LGBTQI woman and non binary people in the community, as well as celebrate lesbians. It is essential that Lesbian Visibility Week is a voice for unity and lifts up ALL women, especially those who come from marginalised communities. 

Like for instance men who call themselves women.

There has been a Lesbian Visibility Day since 2008.

Building on this, we want to create a week that recognises, celebrates and importantly supports lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer women across the UK and beyond to be their true selves at work, at home and socially.

They want to create a week that forces lesbians to team with men who identify as women. This is Linda Riley’s claim to fame: expanding the day to a week and forced teaming with men.