The war on women continues to rage.

Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.

And this doesn’t make forced pregnancy the law in Oklahoma, it also catches Texas women in its trap.

More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas outlawed abortion after six weeks gestation in September 2021.

One way or another they will force women to stay pregnant when they don’t want to.

Before former president Donald Trump took office, federal courts routinely blocked abortion bans. However, Trump was able to confirm three conservative justices, which tipped the balance of the supreme court to the right.

Donald Trump who brags of grabbing women by the pussy, Donald Trump who bragged of never doing anything with his children when they were babies and laughed at the idea of walking them in the park, Donald Trump who has been accused of sexual assault by more than one woman, Donald Trump who leers at his own daughter and brags of how “hot” she is, Donald Trump who tells us which women are too ugly for him to molest, Donald Trump who is apparently never photographed with a grandchild in his arms or on his lap (have you ever seen such a photo?), Donald Trump who insults and ridicules women every chance he gets – he has succeeded in forcing thousands of women to stay pregnant or spend a lot of money and time getting an abortion. No skin off his ass is it.

“These legislators have continued their relentless attacks on our freedoms,” said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, a related reproductive rights advocacy group.

“These restrictions are not about improving the safety of the work that we do. They are about shaming and stigmatizing people who need and deserve abortion access.”

Women, god damn it. It’s women who are forced to stay pregnant, women whose lives are ruined. If it were “people” this wouldn’t be happening.

Trump has been trying to tell historians what to say about him.

As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”

Point missed. He was “not so great.” He hired the not so great people. He was the record-breakingly bad president.

I am the editor of a scholarly history of Trump’s term in the White House, the third book in a series about the most recent presidents. A few days after The New York Times reported on the project, Trump’s then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and me—something that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama had done. For someone who claimed indifference about how people in our world viewed him, Trump was spending an inordinate amount of time—more than any other ex-president that we know of—trying to influence the narratives being written about him. My co-authors and I weren’t the only people he reached out to. According to Axios, Trump conducted conversations with more than 22 authors, primarily journalists, who were working on books chronicling his presidency.

Of course he did. He’s a narcissist, and he’s clueless. Put the two together and you get this absurdity.

But if anything, our conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his dealmaking prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical. He demonstrated a limited historical worldview: When praising the virtues of press releases over tweets—because the former are more elegant and lengthier—he sounded as if he himself had discovered that old form of presidential communication. He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.

He’s both evil and stupid. There’s nothing covert about it.

He seemed to measure American politicians primarily by how they treated him. Even many of those elected officials who criticized him in public sang a different tune, he insisted, when the television cameras were off. Trump vented about governors who continually expressed during private meetings how impressed they were with his COVID policies (“I hope you can get the tapes,” Trump said) yet proceeded to “knock the hell out of me” in public: “So unfair.”

It occurs to me to wonder how this plays out in real life. I’ve known some vain self-centered people, as we all have, but I can’t say I’ve ever experienced anyone who carried on as grotesquely as Trump does as a matter of course. It’s just so odd. It’s as if he has the tiniest amount of awareness of other minds of anyone in human history – just no idea that everybody doesn’t love him the way he loves himself. Person woman man camera tv.

The current issue of Free Inquiry arrived yesterday. One of the esteemed editors found the perfect illustration for a column I wrote.

But “conversion therapy” is the wrong label. Why does the BBC keep using it?

More than 100 organisations have pulled out of the UK’s first ever global LGBT+ conference over the government’s stance on conversion therapy.

The UK government had promised to ban conversion therapy but last week decided to exclude conversion therapy for transgender people in the ban.

Probably because it’s not conversion therapy. Sexual orientation is not the same as “gender identity.” The two are different. The most noticeable and consequential difference is that sexual orientation entails no surgical or pharmaceutical interventions at all. This discrepancy is why medical professionals need to be very cautious about agreeing with the self-diagnoses of adolescents who say they are trans: agreeing could be the first step to drugs or surgery or both that will cause irreversible changes to the teenage bodies that get them. Being lesbian or gay? Not so much. Literally speaking, not at all. No drugs, no surgery, no nothing, just live your life.

This is why the BBC really needs to report on the subject truthfully.

But who are the reporters on this story? Josh Parry, LGBT producer, and Lauren Moss, LGBT correspondent. Is it the LG part or the T part? Here again, the two need to be uncoupled. T isn’t the same as LG, and it isn’t much like it, either.

According to NHS England, conversion therapy tries to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

Then NHS England is wrong, because that’s apples and oranges.

But the LGBT+ Consortium, an umbrella body for LGBT+ community organisations, has issued a statement branding the government’s U-turn on conversion therapy “abhorrent”.

Eighty-two member organisations of the consortium have signed an open letter, which is written by LGBT+ charity and campaign group Stonewall, pulling out of the conference.

Stonewall is not the solution here, Stonewall is the problem. Mashing the T together with the LG is a mistake.

A Terrence Higgins Trust spokesperson said: “Trans rights are human rights – progress without or at the expense of trans people is not progress. We stand together and will not be divided.”

But it’s not at the expense of. Not rushing to provide surgeries or puberty blockers is not an injury to trans people and people who think they’re trans but change their minds. It’s first do no harm.

Boris Johnson has previously called the practice of conversion therapy “repulsive and abhorrent” and had promised plans to outlaw it on a number of separate occasions. However the plans to do so have since changed; meaning the legislation will mean conversion therapy to attempt to change people’s sexuality will be outlawed, but those practices carried out to try to change people’s gender identity will not.

But what if there’s no such thing as “people’s gender identity”? What if there’s just a spectrum of feelings about one’s sex or gender or both? What if some or most or even all such feelings are highly malleable and temporary? What if they’re social and cultural rather than physical? What if they’re not actually a good reason to make drastic irreversible changes to one’s body? What if it really is better to be slow and cautious rather than speedy and reckless?

Responding to the legislation on Friday, Nikki da Costa, a former director of legislative affairs at No 10, said elements of the law would have had “profound consequences for children struggling with gender dysphoria”.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Doctors, therapists and parents would be deterred from exploring with a child any feelings of what else may be going on for fear of being told they’re trying to change a child’s identity”, adding that it was “deeply concerning”.

And she’s not wrong. Even if she’s one of Boris Johnson’s very best friends, she’s not wrong.

So now let’s read the Equality and Human Rights Commission guide.

Who this guide is for

This guide is for service providers (anyone who provides goods, facilities or services to the public) who are looking to establish and operate a separate or single-sex service.

There was a time when that mostly meant service providers who excluded women from men’s clubs and bars and gyms, which was not only sexist in itself but also an extreme barrier to women working in various professions and businesses where a lot of the networking and jockeying for position took place in…clubs and bars and gyms.

Now it doesn’t mean that any more, now it means service providers who exclude men from women’s toilets ffs. There’s precious little executive networking that happens in toilets; the only reason men want to invade women’s toilets is in aid of some form of spying or assault or both. It’s beyond maddening that we’re having to fight for the right to say no to men peering over the partitions at us.

Summary

The Equality Act allows for the provision of separate or single sex services in certain circumstances under ‘exceptions’ relating to sex.

To establish a separate or single-sex service, you must show that you meet at least one of a number of statutory conditions (set out in this section of the guide) and that limiting the service on the basis of sex is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. For example, a legitimate aim could be for reasons of privacy, decency, to prevent trauma or to ensure health and safety. You must then be able to show that your action is a proportionate way of achieving that aim.

There are circumstances where a lawfully-established separate or single-sex service provider can prevent, limit or modify trans people’s access to the service. This is allowed under the Act. However, limiting or modifying access to, or excluding a trans person from, the separate or single-sex service of the gender in which they present might be unlawful if you cannot show such action is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. This applies whether the person has a Gender Recognition Certificate or not.

It just makes me tired. We shouldn’t have to defend it. We shouldn’t be required to “show such action is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.” Excluding men should just go on being the default. I don’t care how they “identify.” I just don’t. I can’t. They don’t care about how we prefer to pee away from men, so why should I care how they identify? They care only about themselves, so why should I care about them?

When considering how your service is provided to trans people, you must balance the impact on all service users and show that there is a sufficiently good reason for excluding trans people or limiting or modifying their access to the service.

In other words, women have to “balance” our rights with the purported rights of men who say they are women. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

Updating to add a very on the mark observation from Sastra.

Trans Twitter urges veto on…well, on following the law.

Likely to be found unlawful on judicial review…according to some people on Twitter.

Well but this one Twitter account says it’s likely to be found unlawful on judicial review, so surely that’s safe enough, isn’t it?

Lotta fans, at least.

Succinct, maybe, but is it true?

Yes ask Jolyon Maugham first, he knows everything.

On pronouns:

If it’s all well-intentioned then why should we not adopt the pronoun game as a universal custom? There are several reasons why I believe we should not: because it undermines self-confidence and resilience by asserting that one’s self-concept is rightly dependent upon external-validation, it endorses and encourages narcissistic behavior, and it creates a world of bizarre and unnecessary confusion for children around the topics of sex and gender. Put simply: it does more harm than good both to those it seeks to aid and everyone else.

Especially everyone else, and there are a lot more of us, and we’re not the ones making bizarre demands to change the language in order to “center” us.

Why are we not asking deeper questions about what is happening here? If some individuals are unhappy enough with their secondary sexual characteristics that they engage in a radical form of self-rejection through a spectrum of cosmetic and medical interventions, and require consistent affirmation from others in order to complete the illusion that their mental health will suffer… is pretending to see what they want us to see really helping them to become healthier and happier or is it merely an act of codependency which enables dysfunction and fosters fragility?

Good question. I suppose that’s why the issue has been (forcibly) made so political as opposed to psychological. If it’s political it’s about what everyone else does, and it can be enforced via bullying and expelling and firing. If it’s psychological it’s about what the “trans” person does, and there’s nothing to enforce on everyone else. Telling everyone else what to do is fun.

By teaching people to dictate how others speak about them in the third person, we are also coaching them to adopt narcissistic traits such as interpersonally exploitative behavior (I am using you as a mirror to reflect the image of myself I wish to see), entitlement (you owe it to me to affirm what I say), lack of empathy (I don’t care what you really think/feel), and arrogance (I demand that you bend to my will or I will say you are harming me).

Truth. I wish more people would point that out. This is where much of the confusion about “transphobia” comes in, I think. It’s not phobia of the trans part, it’s phobia of the narcissism and entitlement and arrogance.

The BBC puts it more sharply.

After a contentious approval session where scientists and government officials went through the report line by line, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published its guidance on what the world can do to avoid an extremely dangerous future.

First, the bad news – even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.

This finding has drawn the ire of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

I find it pretty annoying myself. I won’t be here for the worst of it, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it, oldies remaining cheerful because it won’t bite us in the ass, at least not as hard as it will bite people who will still be alive in 2040, 2060, 2080. The people who could do something are the ones who won’t still be here, and the people who can’t do anything are the ones who will pay the price. It’s grossly unfair.

The good news is that this latest IPCC summary shows that [keeping temperatures down] can be done, in what Mr Guterres calls a “viable and financially sound manner”.

But keeping temperatures down will require massive changes to energy production, industry, transport, our consumption patterns and the way we treat nature.

And we’re not making those changes. We’re making some small ones around the edges, but we’re not even giving up luxuries like gigantic cruise ships.

There was Oradour-sur-Glane, there was My Lai, there was Srebrenica, there was Amritsar, and now there’s Bucha.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that Russia’s public image is now one of torture and execution after the retreat of Russian forces in the town of Bucha led to the discovery of the killing of hundreds of civilians.
…

Ukrainian officials said the bodies of 410 civilians have been found in Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces. Satellite images taken late last week show a 14-metre (45ft) mass grave in Bucha near the Church of St Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints. Maxar, the company that took the pictures, said the first signs of excavation for a mass grave there were seen on 10 March, several weeks into the invasion.

Witnesses of alleged atrocities in Bucha told the Guardian that Russian soldiers had fired on men fleeing the town, and had killed civilians at will. Taras Schevchenko, 43, said Russian soldiers had refused to allow men to leave through a humanitarian corridor, instead shooting at them as they fled across an open field. Bodies, he said, were scattered on the pavements, with some of those killed having been “squashed by tanks … like animal skin rugs”.

…

Russia denied responsibility for the killing of civilians. Its defence ministry described the photos and videos from towns such as Bucha as “another staged performance by the Kyiv regime”, echoing a similar claim made after the bombing of a children’s and maternity hospital in Mariupol.

That’s what they all say.

As always, the word is that we can do it if we really get serious and hurry up, and the obvious problem is that we’re not going to.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, warns that unless countries drastically accelerate efforts over the next few years to slash their emissions from coal, oil and natural gas, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, will likely be out of reach by the end of this decade.

That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse — grow considerably. 

And what goes along with worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse? Mass migrations, and resistance to mass migrations, and wars and genocides. In a world that’s already broken. It will be horrible. It will be Mariupol everywhere and Treblinka everywhere.

But the task is daunting: Holding warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius would require nations to collectively reduce their planet-warming emissions roughly 43 percent by 2030 and to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s, the report found.

Yeah. Do we look as if we’re doing that? Do we look as if we’re going to be doing that starting today?

By contrast, current policies by governments are only expected to reduce global emissions by a few percentage points this decade. Last year, fossil fuel emissions worldwide rebounded to near-record highs after a brief dip as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Governments probably can’t do anything about it without being overthrown and replaced by governments that will undo any doing.

The report, which was approved by 195 governments and lays out strategies that countries could pursue to halt global warming, comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused oil and gas prices to skyrocket, diverting political attention from climate change. In the United States and Europe, leaders are focused on shoring up domestic fossil fuel supplies to avoid painful price spikes and energy shortages, even if that means increasing emissions in the short term.

But of course there is no “short term.” There’s no short term in the sense that “we can keep on with the fossil fuels for just this one short term and then we’ll immediately slash them by 43 percent and the planet will be saved.” How long would that short term be exactly? How would we know? What would be different such that an immediate switch to using roughly half of what we’ve been using would be quick and painless? Don’t make us laugh. It’s not possible. Animals don’t evolve to take the long view, not even as long as the next eight years. When heating costs double from one month to the next it’s game over.

But even if that goal becomes unattainable, scientists said, it will still be worthwhile for countries to slash emissions as quickly as possible to prevent as much warming as they can. Every additional rise in global temperatures increases the perils that people face around the world, such as water scarcity, malnutrition and life-threatening heat waves, the U.N. panel has found.

And what goes with them: mass migrations, wars, genocides. I think the panels and journalists should include that part, even though it’s not as trackable as water scarcity and the rest.

Joan Smith on Twitter v Rowling:

One of the biggest lies about the conflict between feminists and trans activists is that ‘the debate is toxic on both sides’. It’s trotted out in just about every article that takes a supposedly neutral position, even though the authors never produce any evidence for this slur on women who’ve never threatened anyone.

OR called anyone the equivalent of “cunt” and the rest of it.

Team Trans on the other hand is not so reasonable.

JK Rowling is a favourite target and now a music video has emerged in which trans campaigner Faye ‘Trust Fund Ozu’ addresses the author with the chilling words ‘hope you fit in a hearse’. The video also features vocals about ‘killing TERFS’.

JKR tweeted about it in a jokey vein, but the rest of us get to skip the jokey part.

When the actor James Dreyfus reported the post to Twitter, the social media platform failed to uphold his complaint. Even more bizarrely, it claimed that the alleged death threat hadn’t ‘broken its safety policies’. It’s a colossal piece of cheek from a platform that regularly hands out suspensions to women who state facts, such as saying trans women are not biological women, or ‘misgender’ trans athletes like Lia Thomas. 

Dreyfus made exactly this point in his response: ‘So, death threats = Good. Saying “women are women” = Bad. Congratulations, Twitter Support. You’ve hit rock bottom. Seek help.’ He’s right, of course, and it’s clear that platforms like Twitter are penalising gender-critical women for what is, since Maya Forstater’s successful appeal, protected speech.

I can add a piece to the puzzle here, because I too reported that tweet and in my case Twitter agreed.

I don’t know why I got a different response – maybe we ticked different boxes. At any rate there’s still a pattern of turning a blind eye to threats and verbal abuse for This One Set of Special People.

What this episode tells us, however, is not just that we are dealing with entitled, narcissistic individuals. We already knew that. It’s becoming clear that there has been a collective decision that trans people are the most vulnerable group in society, regardless of what the statistics tell us, and anyone who speaks for them (or claims to do so) is endowed with the same mantle of victimhood. 

Hence they’re given a free pass even if they are gloating about the imagined death of a children’s author or clutching a baseball bat and threatening to murder feminists. I’ve seen it so often that I’m more shocked by the widespread refusal to acknowledge the hateful reality than the threats, which have been documented on many occasions.

Same. People I used to consider friends not only buy into the absurd dogma but also shrug off threats and insults that used to infuriate them when aimed at women or atheists or argumentative bloggers.

Maybe it’s the name.

In October, Donald Trump announced he was planning to launch a revolutionary technology company.

“I created Truth Social… to stand up to the tyranny of big tech,” he said.

By which he meant a Twitter clone that would let him tell any lies and scream any insults he wanted to.

The app launched on Presidents’ Day, 21 February, but six weeks later is beset by problems. A waiting list of nearly 1.5 million are unable to use it.

Truth Social looks a lot like Twitter, which banned Mr Trump from posting on the platform after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol on 6 January, 2021. Twitter contended that Donald Trump, by making false claims the presidential election had been “stolen”, had incited violence. He was banned for life on 8 January, 2021.

Truth Social might look like Twitter, but it isn’t available on Android phones, web browsers or, apparently, to most people outside the US.

“It’s been a disaster,” Joshua Tucker, director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, said.

And that’s a good thing.

Hahahahahahaha I love it when that happens.

It happened to me once. I was arguing with some guy in comments at Crooked Timber (this was a long time ago) and he told me I would benefit from reading this amusing satirical guide to rhetoric on a website called Butterflies and Wheels. That was fun.

Hey what’s the deal with people having names that are spelled funny? Huh? What are they trying to do? Are they crazy or something?

Three days into his first term as a Republican congressman, Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, then just 33, pulled on a smoke hood and fled the Capitol as rioters invaded the House chamber on January 6. He later voted to certify the election results and ended up being one of nine Republicans to vote to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. Since then, Meijer has suffered death threats, a Trump-endorsed primary challenge, and now the indignity of having Trump make fun of his last name at a political rally in his home state.

Well. Be fair. “Meijer” – did you ever? I mean, really.

Last night, Trump appeared at a sports hall outside Detroit to promote the candidacy of a couple of low-level Republican candidates for state attorney general and secretary of state. As is often the case when he shows up to help another candidate, Trump spent most of the time talking about himself and insulting one of his enemies, in this case, fellow Republican Meijer. 

Talking about himself and insulting other people – sums him up.

“A guy who spells his name `M-E-I-J-E-R’ but they pronounce it `MY-er,’” Trump said. “The hell kind of a spelling is that? `MY-er.’ I said: `How the hell do you pronounce this guy’s name?’”

“Nobody knows him,” Trump said of Meijer. “He’s done nothing in Washington. I said `How do you pronounce his name? Is it ‘MAY-jer? MY-jer?’ They said it’s `MY-er.’ How the hell do you get `MY-er’ out of it?”

Same way you get “Yohan” out of “Johan” – you learn that several languages, like for instance Dutch and Swedish and (cough) German, pronounce J the way Anglophones pronounce Y.

But that won’t do, because that’s foreign. Foreign means bad.

The congressman’s last name is Dutch, and there’s a decent sized Dutch-American community in Western Michigan that tends to vote conservative Republican—a constituency Trump’s advisors apparently didn’t bother to brief him on. Meijer is also a household name in Michigan that adorns a beloved local chain of supermarkets that have, among other things, given away millions of dollars worth of free prescription drugs to treat diabetes and heart disease, as well as antibiotics and prenatal vitamins, the sort of meaningful philanthropy the Trump family has never even contemplated. 

Another fun fact: Trump’s grandfather immigrated to the US from Germany.

Speaking of the American right and how it’s not accurate or fair to translate it to “conservatives,” take just this one item from Trump’s Event yesterday:

Representative Lisa McClain, a Michigan Republican, claimed on Saturday that former President Donald Trump “caught” former Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

McClain, who first entered Congress during the 2020 election with Trump’s endorsement, made the comment as she spoke ahead of the former president during a rally in Washington Township, Michigan. The GOP congresswoman lamented how she and many others view the country to be worse off under President Joe Biden than it was under Trump.

“While President Trump was in office, we didn’t have a war and I think he made three peace treaties,” McClain said during her speech. “Caught Osama bin Laden and Soleimani, al-Baghdadi. And this president is weak. And I’ll tell you weakness breeds aggression. We need strength.”

Yes I remember that night. I remember casually turning on the tv to find all the networks breathlessly telling us to stand by for news from the White House. I remember standing by, and watching crowds gather to stand by, and then Obama walking to the podium to tell us that Donald Trump had caught Osama bin Laden.

The Times article on Emily Bridges part 3:

The current version of the article has been amended. Fair Play for Women pointed out an error 9 hours ago.

That sentence has been deleted.

He or an editor must have changed it. He’s grumpy about it though.

It…wasn’t shouty.

Anyway. Section 195.

Section 195 ftw.

The Times article on Emily Bridges part 2:

It was considered a short-term issue, one that the UCI would soon process, but senior figures in the sport believe the organisation has it within its power to continue excluding Bridges under regulations updated in 2020.

While British Cycling rules demand only that a transgender cyclist falls below a set testosterone threshold for a period of 12 months — indeed Bridges has been registered for the women’s events by the national governing body for the Nations Cup in Glasgow later this month — the UCI rules go further by referencing the need to “preserve the safety, fairness and integrity of the sport, for the benefit of all of its participants and stakeholders” within specific eligibility regulations for transgender athletes.

In other words the UCI rules actually take women into account.

The regulations cite the need to “protect the health and safety of participants” and “guarantee fair and meaningful competition that displays and rewards the fundamental values and meaning of the sport”. They add that the UCI wants “its athletes to be incentivised to make the huge commitments required to excel in the sport”, and “does not want to risk discouraging those aspirations by permitting competition that is not fair and meaningful”.

Which, of course, letting male-bodied people compete against women would do.

Perhaps most crucially, the regulations identify “the significant advantages in size, strength and power enjoyed (on average) by men over women from puberty onwards, due in large part to much higher levels of androgenic hormones, and the impact that such advantages can have on sporting performance, it is necessary to have separate competition categories for males and females”.

The regulations are open to interpretation, of course, and may well be challenged by transgender athletes.

Yes, and it’s “open to interpretation” whether men have physical advantages over women or not.

The Times reports:

The transgender cyclist prevented from participating in a national track event this weekend could be the subject of an indefinite ban under rules introduced by the Union Cycliste Internationale, the world governing body.

That’s a slightly misleading paragraph if you don’t already know the story. Why would anyone ban a cyclist from an event just because the cyclist is transgender?!! What shocking bigotry!

In other words Matt Lawton, Chief Sports Correspondent for the Times, buried the lede.

It’s not a “transgender cyclist” who was “prevented from participating in a national track event,” it’s a male cyclist who was prevented from participating in a women’s national track event. Omitting the sex from both the cyclist and the event is a misleading way of reporting this subject. Journalism should stop doing that.

Paula Radcliffe joins in:

Margaret Atwood won the Hitchens prize. The Atlantic shares her speech, in which she pointed out an important distinction:

I expect Hitch would join me in a distinction I have been making lately: that between belief and truth. It’s a comment on our special times that I’d even feel I have to make this distinction. A belief cannot be either proved or disproved. If you wish to believe that invisible flower spirits are causing your string beans to grow, there is no point in my trying to dissuade you, because these entities are invisible and immaterial. Something proposed as a truth can, however, be put to the test. In recent years, people have confused beliefs with truths. From this confusion have come ideologies and dogmas—the characteristic of a dogma being that it’s proposed as an absolute truth and cannot be disputed, and if you try disputing it, you’ll be burned as a heretic.

There’s also a distinction between feeling or “feeling like” and truth. Claims to “feel like” X also can’t be proved or disproved, and they also don’t mean very much.