One weird little tidbit from yesterday’s picnic in Alaska:

The Russian leader’s transparent manipulation of the US president and Trump’s credulity will worry Ukraine. On Fox, Trump said Putin praised his second term, saying the US was “as hot as a pistol” and he had previously thought the US was “dead.”

Putin also publicly reinforced Trump’s talking point that the invasion three years ago would “never have happened” if he had been president. “I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” said Putin.

And we all know that Putin would never lie about anything.

Trump told Fox’s Sean Hannity that he was “so happy” to hear validation from Putin and also that the Russian leader had reinforced another one of his false claims, telling him that “you can’t have a great democracy with mail-in voting.” That a US president would take such testimony at face value from a totalitarian strongman is mind-boggling — even more so in the light of US intelligence agency assessments that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win.

Also Putin told Trump that he Trump is the smartest and handsomest man on the planet, so yaboosucks to all the naysayers.

Trump just wants Ukraine to surrender, that’s all.

Russian officials and commentators were especially enamored by Trump’s unusually warm red-carpet greeting to Putin on Friday in which they saw an opening to pull America away from its traditional allies in Europe. 

Of course they were. Every time Trump goes belly-up to Putin, that “opening” gets wider.

Within hours of the meeting, Trump had discarded his previous position — and that of Ukraine and Europe — that a full ceasefire was required to allow the details of a peace agreement to be hammered out. The move enables Russia to keep fighting without the risk of U.S. sanctions, and puts pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to Russian terms or face open-ended attacks.

In other words Trump is Team Putin all the way. We know.

Trump told Zelensky that Putin had demanded that Ukraine cede all of Donbas, which includes Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and other occupied territory…Trump told Zelensky that Putin was “ready to promise” to end the war and not start wars against other nations, in exchange for Donbas and the other Ukrainian territory he has seized, the official said. Zelensky is unwilling to give up any more territory, he added, but Trump wants a fast deal — setting the stage for a potentially difficult clash.

In other words Trump told Zelensky to do whatever Putin wanted him to do, aka lose the war and see Ukraine absorbed back into the Russian empire.

Trump’s call to inform Zelensky and European leaders about the summit, which included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the leaders of France, Germany, Finland, Italy, Britain, Poland, NATO and the European Commission, was more tense than the phone call between the Europeans and Trump earlier this week, a second official said.

I should damn well hope so. Trump is helping Putin devour Europe; this is not the sign of a glorious future.

Putin’s other important wins at Friday’s summit included deflecting, for now, tough new U.S. sanctions that would hamper his capacity to keep waging war on Ukraine and repairing his fraying relationship with Trump.

Trump told Fox News after the meeting that his relationship with Putin was “fantastic,” adding there was no need to go ahead with sanctions at this point.

Pro-Kremlin commentator Sergei Markov said Trump had natural empathy with Putin and natural antagonism with the Europeans and Zelensky — and he was moving closer to Putin.

Yeah, we’ve noticed.

Former Swedish prime minister of Carl Bildt said that “from the European point of view the best thing that could be said about the meeting is that it could have been even worse. Combined European efforts blocked at least any deal over the head of the Ukrainians,” he wrote on X.

But he said Trump had suffered “a distinct setback” as Putin once more deflected the full ceasefire he had demanded. “What the world sees is a weak and wobbling America.”

Because it’s been captured by an amoral conceited nincompoop.

Donny’s Day Out in Anchorage:

The two leaders took no questions. Perhaps Mr Trump knew he would be asked about his pre-summit threats of “very severe consequences” if Russia did not end the conflict. Just before landing Mr Trump had told Fox News: “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of ceasefire.” There was no immediate sign of a three-way summit with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Mr Trump had previously floated.

…

Ever the showman, Mr Trump took care to impress Mr Putin. Their planes parked close to each other; the two men stepped out more or less simultaneously, shook hands warmly and walked towards a rostrum as a B-2 bomber, escorted by four F-35 fighters, passed overhead. Four F-22s on the ground formed a guard of honour. Mr Trump may have wanted to demonstrate America’s military power. Instead, he displayed its diplomatic weakness—having repeatedly set deadlines for Russia to cease fire, then done nothing when they were ignored.

America’s current diplomatic weakness is Donald Trump’s weakness, especially the total weakness of his brain.

In his first term Mr Trump often liked to speak to Mr Putin alone, without officials or note-takers. It was a relief, therefore, when it was announced earlier in the day that the planned one-on-one meeting in Anchorage had been expanded to include two other senior officials on each side. But as they stepped off the podium, Mr Trump invited Mr Putin to get into his limousine, known as The Beast—securing the private chat after all.

See? Weak brain.

The honours for Mr Putin were in sharp contrast to the public humiliation that Mr Trump and his advisers inflicted on Mr Zelensky during his first visit to the White House earlier this year.

To put it mildly.

Great.

Trump says he agreed with his Russian counterpart in talks Friday that the Ukraine war will end with land swaps and some type of security guarantee from the US.

Asked by Fox News’ Sean Hannity about territorial concessions that would give Russia land it didn’t have previously and potential US security assurances for Ukraine, Trump said it was a point of agreement with Vladimir Putin.

“Well, I think those are points that we negotiated, and those are points that we largely have agreed on,” he said. “Actually, I think we agree on a lot. I can tell you, the meeting was a warm meeting.”

He called Putin a “strong guy” and “tough as hell,” but said the meeting was positive. “I think we’re pretty close to the end. And look, Ukraine has to agree to it,” he said.

Brilliant. Peachy. Trump gives Putin whatever he wants, and says Zelenskyy has to agree.

Trump’s advice to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Gotta make a deal.”

Trump tells Zelensky he gotta lose the war and give chunks of Ukraine to Putin. What a diplomatic coup!

Taliban celebrating:

Thousands of men gathered across Kabul on Friday to watch flowers being scattered from helicopters to mark the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power – a celebration that women were barred from attending.

Naturally. Men are people, so they get to attend; women are things that make people, and of course things are not invited to parties.

Three of the six “flower shower” locations were already off-limits to women, who have been prohibited from entering parks and recreational areas since November 2022.

For obvious reasons. If women were allowed to enter parks and recreational areas they would always be flopping down and spreading their legs, and then their husbands might find themselves raising other men’s children.

Rights groups, foreign governments and the UN have condemned the Taliban for their treatment of women and girls, who remain barred from many jobs, education beyond sixth grade and most public spaces.

How else are the men supposed to guarantee the women are not fucking other men?

Earlier in the day, the Taliban leader had said God would severely punish Afghans who were ungrateful for Islamic rule in the country, according to a statement.

Oh yes? Then why hasn’t God already done it? Why wait? Why is it “would” punish instead of “has already” punished?

This year’s anniversary celebrations are more muted than last year’s, when the Taliban staged a military parade at a US airbase, drawing anger from Donald Trump about the abandoned American hardware on display.

Of course. Abandoned American hardware, terrible thing; abandoned Afghan women, yawwwn.

Another preening withdrawer steps up.

Last week, I withdrew my nomination from the longlist for the Polari first book prize. The awards had become mired in controversy due to the nomination of the Irish author John Boyne, best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for the main prize for his novel Earth. Four days before the longlist announcement, Boyne had written in the Irish Independent, celebrating JK Rowling “as a fellow terf” and saying of women who had “pilloried” her for her gender activism: “For every Commander Waterford, there’s a Serena Joy standing behind him, ready to pin a handmaiden down as her husband rapes her.”

I think such a viewpoint is abhorrent, but Boyne is free to hold whatever views he wants. What was unacceptable was a statement from the Polari prize addressing the backlash, emphasising its commitment to “support trans rights and amplify trans voices”, but defending Boyne’s inclusion on the grounds that submissions are assessed purely “on the merits of craft and content” and that “within our community, we can at times hold radically different positions on substantive issues”.

I immediately withdrew upon reading it, after the resignation of judge Nicola Dinan, who won the prize last year, and withdrawal of fellow longlisted author Mae Diansangu. Since then, a further judge has withdrawn and at least 16 authors across both lists have excused themselves from consideration. It was not a difficult or painful decision – I felt misled about the principles underpinning the organisation and I no longer cared to be awarded by it. 

So the principles underpinning the org include the “principle” that men can be women?

But it’s not true that men can be women. It is true that men pretending to be women are 1. an insult and 2. detrimental to women and their rights.

The prize has always been for the entire LGBTQ+ community…

But there is no such community. T is not comparable to L and G and can be a threat to them – men invading lesbian spaces and organizations for instance. Q doesn’t mean anything. + means either nothing or everything, neither of which is helpful.

The prize claims that it does “not eliminate books based on the wider views of the writer”. But a prize claiming to be a celebration of LGBTQ+ inclusion should know that the condition of trans people isn’t reducible to a debate in which people are simply holding “different positions” – they are a minority group facing unprecedented levels of harassment and political antagonism.

But “a monority group” is not automatically a group we must or should support. Nazis are a minority group. Catholic priests are a minority group. Torturers are a minority group. As for political antagonism – we are allowed to do that. We are allowed to dislike some political views or causes or organizations. It would be very odd if we weren’t. We are allowed to say that trans ideology is both wrong and harmful.

And to me, the real celebration of LGBTQ+ literature has come not from the prize, but from the community that has rallied behind the withdrawn authors. Our withdrawal has been followed by a 800-strong petition to remove Boyne from the longlist. That is not about him per se – he is obviously suffering great personal upset at this situation. It is, once again, about the stated aims of the organisation.

Oh right. We’re doing this shitty thing to him, but it’s not about him. We’re hoping he’s very miserable, so we pretend it’s obvious that he is, but it’s not about him, it’s about some much more high-minded thing that I am not allowed to specify.

We have, of course, been subjected to the usual name-calling: described as the “Trans Taliban” and “Queer Isis” by Julie Bindel; accused of being proponents of “radicalised”, “totalitarian” politics by Canadian novelist Allan Stratton.

Aw, Diddums. Won’t they let you do your ostracizing and bullying in peace? That’s so unfair.

Daniel Kodsi and John Maier say Philosophers Shouldn’t Duck the Gender Debate.

Over the last decade, elite academia has uncritically embraced gender-identity ideology, according to which self-identification as a boy or girl, or a man or woman, takes priority for all practical and legal purposes over whether one actually is male or female. No doubt a contingent of true believers in gender-identity ideology exists within academia. But mantras like “trans women are women” became accepted in universities in part because many academics who don’t agree with gender-identity ideology failed to speak up against it. However expedient or harmless it may have seemed to give gender-identity ideology a free pass, doing so was a serious mistake.

I can’t really figure out how it seemed even expedient or harmless. The harms are obvious and were sharply pointed out, and the expedience is questionable. I think what it seemed was 1. the latest in the chain of overlooked victims of Prejudice and 2. one of those things you have to do if you don’t want to get yelled at. That’s expedience, I suppose.

How was our essay greeted by the discipline at large? It’s hard to tell. It kicked off a wave of discourse on social media, which crested with an article by Kathleen Stock, a prominent gender-critical philosopher, turning the screws on the cowardice of philosophers, though of course many others in academia, journalism, and medicine are implicated, too. We also received some supportive emails from far-flung individual philosophers—including a prominent, now-retired moral philosopher; an Asia-based philosopher of mathematics; and some prominent public observers of the academy.

But the primary channels for sharing professionally relevant articles—the blogs The Leiter Report, hosted by Brian Leiter, and The Daily Nous, hosted by Justin Weinberg—declined to disseminate it. As Weinberg wrote to us: “Thanks for sharing your essay with me. I finally had a chance to read it, and I’ve decided that I won’t be linking to it or posting about it at Daily Nous. I understand that this may come as a disappointment to you. One thing to note is that I get many requests to share or discuss material at DN, and I turn down a good number of them. I do not normally elaborate on these decisions. Particularly in cases in which people submit material on hot-button topics advancing positions they believe I disagree with, I’ve learned it is difficult to say anything to them, as I turn them down, that they accept as reasonable or in good faith.”

That’s so Justin Weinberg. So quietly boastful, so smug so de haut en bas. You’d think he was The New York Times or something.

On previous occasions, Weinberg has found room on his blog for an unevidenced 5,000-word post by a self-identified trans graduate student in philosophy who had decided to quit the discipline on account of alleged transphobia in the profession. Around the time that he sent us the email quoted above, among the many fresh links on his site was one to a routine by a stand-up comic who “brings up [philosophy] in his act sometimes.” More ironically, one popular recent post on Weinberg’s site, by the philosopher Elizabeth Barnes, was devoted to celebrating the importance of engaging with philosophers with whom one seriously disagrees, lest, among other things, one foster “harmful silos and echo chambers” and acquire bad or lazy philosophical habits.

Hahahahaha that’s truly funny.

What makes this regrettable is that philosophers are well positioned to contribute productively to debates about the myriad issues caught up in the sex-gender nexus. At around the same time as the Skrmetti decision was handed down, the MIT philosopher Alex Byrne wrote a Washington Post column revealing that he was one of the coauthors of a systematic review by the Department of Health and Human Services of treatments for gender dysphoria in minors. As he explained: “Philosophy overlaps with medical ethics and, when properly applied, increases understanding across the board. Philosophers prize clear language and love unravelling muddled arguments, and the writings of pediatric gender specialists serve up plenty of obscurity and confusion.”

Well that’s why it’s so necessary to protect them by banishing all critics and dissenters.

Byrne’s path has not been cost-free. Like other academic philosophers who have criticized aspects of gender-identity ideology before him—such as Kathleen Stock and Holly Lawford-Smith—he has been targeted by cancellation attempts and a hostile open letter from his academic colleagues. But his perseverance, again like that of Stock, Lawford-Smith, and others, is proof that philosophers and other academics can defy the trend of complacent adherence to gender-identity ideology.

Important clarifications need to be made, and bad arguments refuted. We hope that more of our colleagues find the courage to use their expertise to help advance the truth about sex and gender identity—not suppress or obfuscate it.

And that they then apologize.

Is the tide turning?

An NHS board has admitted breaking equality rules by allowing a transgender doctor into a women’s hospital changing room without assessing the consequences.

NHS Fife has confirmed it carried out no impact assessment regarding the provision of single-sex changing facilities for staff, the UK’s equalities watchdog has disclosed.

…

Baroness Falkner, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has now said an impact assessment was a requirement to meet the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). In an unprecedented intervention, she said the EHRC had ordered the board to produce an assessment, and anticipates it will be published by Sept 30.

She said the watchdog had also made clear that NHS Fife must comply with April’s Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not women for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.

…

In May last year, Ms Peggie submitted a formal claim to an employment tribunal against NHS Fife and Dr Upton for sexual harassment, belief discrimination and victimisation.

She has recently been cleared of gross misconduct by an NHS Fife disciplinary hearing.

After the first part of the tribunal in February, the EHRC wrote to NHS Fife “reminding” the board of its obligations about the provision of single-sex spaces.

Lady Falkner said: “Earlier this year, we asked NHS Fife to provide us with information on the provision of single-sex changing facilities for staff and the rights of different groups in the application of these policies. At that point, NHS Fife confirmed no equality impact assessment was available.

“Undertaking an equality impact assessment of relevant policies or practices, and publishing the results, are requirements of the PSED specific duties in Scotland. We believe NHS Fife failed to meet these requirements and told them to carry one out immediately.”

It’s about goddam time.

Tess White, the Scottish Tories’ shadow equalities minister, said: “This damning directive from the EHRC confirms that, on top of being negligent, incompetent and biased, NHS Fife broke the law in relation to the Sandie Peggie case.

“The shameful admission from the health board confirms that Sandie Peggie was hung out to dry from the very beginning of this tawdry scandal simply for standing up for her rights as a woman.”

As anyone with a brain could have seen all along.

And then there’s China-Japan.

Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.

But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.

“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.

…

For China, Japan’s brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound.

What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves “comfort women” – the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation.

Of course in a sense Japan can’t really own up, because the people of contemporary Japan aren’t the perpetrators. Once enough time has passed it becomes impossible to get justice in the sense of accountability from the people responsible.

Human history must be full of such horrors, that can never be apologized for or forgiven because the perps are long gone.

It’s not easy being the National Library of Scotland.

Scotland’s national library has been accused of “cowardice” after removing a bestselling gender-critical book from a major exhibition following staff complaints.

The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, co-edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, features more than 30 essays from contributors including JK Rowling, former MP Joanna Cherry KC, MSP Ash Regan, and former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss.

It charts a five-year campaign opposing Nicola Sturgeon’s bid to reform Scotland’s gender recognition laws to allow so-called self-ID law.

Well not “reform” so much as “change” – because “reform” implies improve.

The collection received four public nominations for the National Library of Scotland’s Dear Library exhibition, twice the number usually needed to guarantee inclusion in the 200-title display, which opened in June to mark the library’s centenary.

Then that’s why. Two is the right number; more than two is just greedy.

[D]ocuments released under Freedom of Information reveal the library’s LGBT+ staff network raised concerns at a meeting with managers on May 7, later warning that the book carried “significant risks” to relationships with authors and stakeholders and could cause “severe harm” to staff.

They claimed it promoted “hate speech” comparable to racism.

Ah but you see it’s not comparable to racism. That’s where the ideology gets it so very very very wrong. It’s not like racism at all. Men pretending to be women is not like Medgar Evers attending the University of Mississippi (and being murdered for it). India Willoughby is not comparable to Fannie Lou Hamer. Men being told they can’t barge into women’s toilets is not like the murder of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

On May 14, the network was told the book would be included, with “safeguarding measures” in place. An internal note described it as “a book that calls for exclusion of a section of society” and asked whether calling it “divisive” would “minimise the harm” of including it.

That’s a lie though. Knowing and saying that men are not women is not a form of cruel/unwarranted/phobic exclusion, just as it’s not “exclusionary” to say that potatoes are not lemons or bicycles are not airplanes. We’re allowed to know the differences between things, and in fact we have to know them in order to function. If we refuse to know differences we’ll be eating dog shit and throwing away ice cream. Knowing the difference between women and men is very literally how we got here. Without it? No humans at all.

In a letter to Ms Shah, Ms Dalgety and Dr Hunter-Blackburn said: “The material disclosed makes clear that you, and some of your senior colleagues, allowed activists on your staff to characterise the very existence of the book as harmful, hateful and akin to racism and homophobia. By conceding to this internal lobbying, not only have you allowed this defamatory misrepresentation to go unchallenged, but you have in effect endorsed it.”

And you are a library.

Ms Dalgety and Ms Hunter Blackburn called for Ms Shah and chair of the Library, Sir Drummond Bone, to meet them and explain “why our book was deemed too harmful to the Library to be treated like any other”. Ms Cherry said she was “appalled” the library had “bowed to pressure from a small group within their staff to censor a book written by feminists, sex abuse survivors and lesbians, about their experiences during an important period in Scottish recent history”.

Bathgate and Linlithgow MP Kirsteen Sullivan tweeted: “Absolutely ridiculous – censoring a book that gives detailed accounts of women who have been unjustly censored!  I’ve had my copy since day one – if you’ve still to read it, now’s the time to buy!”

I suppose this will sell more copies. Always look on the bright side of life.

It turns out the disheveled person in a T shirt who (incorrectly) told us it was not true that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheest was censored is not a random intern or even a junior reporter at The National; she is the editor.

She’s the editor and she’s casual about the truth. Not a good look, even before we talk about the T shirt.

Remember this from…uhh…yesterday?

Scotland’s national library banned a book about feminists’ fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law after staff complained its contents were “hate speech” comparable to racism.

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has been accused of a “shameful” capitulation to censorship after it emerged that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by gender-critical women, had been cut from a major exhibition celebrating the institution’s centenary.

Now we’re told it was all lies, lies lies lies I tell you!

Check out what the slob in the T shirt has to say, because she’s remarkably annoying.

You may have heard that a gender critical book has been “banned” from an exhibition by the National Library of Scotland. Well, it hasn’t.

Uh…yes it has.

She goes on to say people can still read it, but that does not alter the fact that it was withdrawn from the exhibit because fanatics pitched a fit. It was, indeed, withdrawn from the exhibit.

It’s really quite a brazen lie.

Exclusive: Medical journal rejects Kennedy’s call for retraction of vaccine study

Aug 11 (Reuters) – An influential U.S. medical journal is rejecting a call from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children, the journal’s editor told Reuters.

That’s the US Health Secretary.

He has no medical training of any kind, nor does he have any upper level science education. He’s a random crank with a famous name. If you’re a random crank with a famous name you can set about endangering the lives of a huge population and get away with it.

Kennedy has long promoted doubts about vaccines’ safety and efficacy, and as health secretary has upended the federal government’s process for recommending immunization. A recent media report said he has been considering whether to initiate a review of shots that contain aluminum, which he says are linked to autoimmune diseases and allergies.

He says a lot of things. He knows nothing.

The study, opens new tab, which was funded by the Danish government and published in July in the Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed nationwide registry data for more than 1.2 million children over more than two decades. It did not find evidence that exposure to aluminum in vaccines had caused an increased risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders.

The work is by far the best available evidence on the question of the safety of aluminum in vaccines, said Adam Finn, a childhood vaccination expert in the UK and pediatrician at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study.

So Kennedy says nope and throws it in the trash.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Why not indeed?

I don’t think we’re really seeing a wave of trans suicides in Scotland. But it’s plausible that some people with trans identities may commit suicide as they reckon with the new reality, which is that their invented identities are not going to be accepted across society and law.

People with transgender identities are typically already in very poor mental health, and the suicide rate has always been high with that group. I have a lot of sympathy for such troubled people, especially the ones who were misled into doing irreversible damage to their bodies. Some of them surely will end up dead. I’m obviously far less sympathetic to the chancers — the straight men who invaded women’s spaces just because they could get away with it.

But the inevitable burdens on mentally ill people with trans identities that will result from rolling back trans entitlements are not a sign that “terfs” are evil; they’re a sign that the transgender subculture should never have gotten this far out of hand in the first place. The trans movement is dependent on a cultural ecosystem that perpetually reinforces the lie that “gender affirming” body modifications are good and necessary, rather than harmful and entirely unnecessary. The irreversibility of such procedures serves as a kind of cultural blackmail to keep the system going: on some level, almost everybody knows it’s a big lie and that “sex changes” don’t remotely work as advertised. But consciously or not, what they’re really thinking is: What are we gonna do with the people it’s aready been done to? Let’s just keep letting it happen so that we don’t have to reckon with them. The fact that they’re already mentally vulnerable, plus the fact that so many of them have already had irreversible procedures, plus plus the fact that the activists are shouting that it’s helping people (despite all evidence showing it clearly isn’t)… This gives people a sense that doing the right thing isn’t worth the trouble.

(There are some parallels with the medical profession’s complicity in the practice of FGM in Northeast Africa.)

You could say the same about any unhealthy situation that society needs to roll back: the people already caught up in it are going to face some hardship. Phasing out tobacco with sin taxes puts a burden on nicotine addicts, but we can’t just keep letting more and more people die of lung cancer. Phasing out coal negatively affects West Virginians and rural Pennsylvanians, but we can’t just keep on cooking the planet. Heroin addicts struggled after it was banned in the 1920s. On and on…

The Guardian claims:

Caz Coronel was standing in the queue for the ladies’ at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank when she registered a male voice shouting across the vestibule: “The men’s toilets are on this side!”

At first the composer and producer paid little attention, until the man – whom Coronel describes as tall and in his late 60s – approached and touched her shoulder. He continued to challenge her about being in the wrong queue until she asked him bluntly: “Do you want to see my tits?”

Really? Did that really happen?

It doesn’t sound very plausible. Two queues outside the rooms where the toilets are, and a guy shouts from one queue to the other queue? I know, we’re supposed to think he’s a fanatic and so he does this peculiar thing that no one would normally ever do, but I still think it sounds…how shall I put this…made up.

Since the supreme court’s ruling on biological sex, debate around its practical application has focused heavily on access to women’s toilet and changing facilities – in particular after initial advice on implementation from the equalities watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, amounted to a blanket ban on trans people using toilets of their lived gender, which many say in effect excludes them from public spaces.

Ah their “lived gender” – is that what we’re calling it now? There’s your actual gender and then there’s your lived gender? Does that work for other categories? Can we have a lived species that’s different from our actual one? Can we have a lived age? A lived height? A lived pedality?

Critics of the ruling have suggested it may likewise affect cis women who do not adhere to a straight, white template of femininity.

Critics of the ruling have suggested a slew of stupid things; that doesn’t mean the Guardian has to wring its silly hands over them.

Support groups report some early indications that gender nonconforming women are facing increased challenges, raising wider questions about how women read each other’s bodies and whether women’s toilets have ever been entirely safe spaces.

Therefore it’s fine for men to be in women’s toilets. Brilliant thinking, Libby Brooks.

Claire Prihartini was diagnosed with breast cancer a year and a half ago. “I had a really lucky experience: I found out early, opted for a bilateral mastectomy and didn’t need further treatment.” Her chest is now flat, with two small scars and no nipples.

In May, Prihartini was in the women’s changing room area of her local pool. “I was standing with my top off in front of the mirror putting on my swimming cap. Another woman walked in, gasped audibly and said: ‘There’s a man in here!’ I said: ‘Oh I’m not a man …’ in a friendly way, then she said aggressively: ‘You look like a man, there aren’t meant to be men in here’ and continued to look at my body. I didn’t want to engage with her any further so I just walked off into the pool.”

You’ll never guess who she is. Not in a million years.

Prihartini, whose experience was first shared on social media by her husband, Jolyon Maugham, founder of the Good Law Project, is at pains to make clear that this was not “a massively traumatic experience”. After she walked away the other woman did not continue to challenge her. Like Coronel, however, she links the incident directly to the supreme court ruling.

Does she now. Why not link it to the past ten years of relentless bullying of women who don’t want men joining us in the toilets? Why not link it to the problem rather than the solution?

Peak academic authoritative credible evidence-based verificationality. Five stars.

Deal with the substance, damn you! I was speaking to an expert!! Who made!!! The comment!!!! To me!!!!!!

So it was Pete Hegseth who put that loony Idaho women-are-cattle god-pest in the spotlight.

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, recently shared a video in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote, prompting one progressive evangelical organization to express concern.

Hegseth reposted a CNN segment on X on Thursday that focuses on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who co-founded the Idaho-based Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), In the segment, he raises the idea of women not voting.

“I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” Wilson said.

And by “Christian” he means women-subordinating. He would like to see this nation being a nation that treats female people as inferior and subordinate. How cuddly.

Another pastor interview by CNN for its segment, Toby Sumpter, said: “In my ideal society, we would vote as households. I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”

A congregant interviewed for the segment remarked that she considers her husband as the head their household, and added: “I do submit to him.”

Hegseth reposted the nearly seven-minute report with the caption: “All of Christ for All of Life.”

It was bad enough on its own. Knowing it was about the Fox News Secretary of Defense makes it quite a lot worse.

Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed

On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

Now that is an interesting question. My bet is that nothing good happens.

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.

Knowing how to think for yourself, for one thing.

To be fair, I don’t think I think social pressure–>conformity is always a bad thing. Social pressure to give up the little hatreds it’s so easy to pick up from being around other people can be a not-bad thing. Racism used to be entirely taken for granted in the US, and social pressure was necessary to break through [some of] that.

Of course the trans ideologues think that’s what they’re doing – breaking through a bad stupid destructive prejudice that has no foundation in reality. But they’re wrong.

To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex. Eighty-seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles.

Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion.

Fascinating. 77 percent are gender sane but would never say so aloud.

Worth keeping in mind when the shouting starts.

Yet again the people who should know better collapse like melting butter because the teenagers might pitch a fit.

Scotland’s national library banned a book about feminists’ fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law after staff complained its contents were “hate speech” comparable to racism.

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has been accused of a “shameful” capitulation to censorship after it emerged that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by gender-critical women, had been cut from a major exhibition celebrating the institution’s centenary.

Yay centenary no not you.

Members of the public had been asked by the library, which promotes itself as a national forum for “ideas, debate and discussion”, to nominate books which had shaped their lives for inclusion in a ten-month public display intended as a “love letter” to the power of reading.

However, despite The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht receiving double the number of nominations necessary to guarantee inclusion in the Dear Library public display, Amina Shah, Scotland’s national librarian and the NLS chief executive, decided not to include the book after a staff backlash.

Because women must not be allowed to say men are not women, and if they do somehow get away with saying it somewhere, the saying must be hastily and thoroughly disavowed and concealed. This is a tribute to the power of reading.

Documents seen by The Times show a major row broke out at the national library in which some workers repeatedly lobbied for the removal of the critically acclaimed collection of essays, edited by the policy analyst Lucy Hunter Blackburn and the newspaper columnist Susan Dalgety and including a contribution by JK Rowling.

Repeatedly lobbied for the removal why? Because people must not be free to say that men are not women.

Shah ultimately decided not to include the book due to concerns about “the potential impact on key stakeholders” who she feared could “withdraw support for the exhibition and the centenary”.

Dalgety and Hunter Blackburn said it had been “devastating” to learn that their book had been “censored in this cowardly and anti-democratic way by our national library”.

In a letter to Shah, they have called for the decision to be reversed, and for a meeting so that she can explain to them in person why they [she] had allowed their work to be treated as a “dangerous object” rather than an account of a significant period in Scottish political history.

“But this is about more than the book,” they added. “This is the legacy of a decade of political leadership which has demonised and delegitimised people who refused to conform to the approved narrative on sex and gender identity.

“The material released also lifts the lid on the network of discrimination and censorship which operates across Scotland’s public institutions with impunity through staff networks and other activist groups, enabled by weak leadership.”

So much for “Scotland the Brave” eh what?

The public exhibition, which began in June and runs until April next year at the library’s headquarters on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, includes anti-censorship and pro-democracy imagery, something Hunter Blackburn and Dalgety said “adds to the insult”.

The pair, whose work became a Sunday Times bestseller, were also refused a platform at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year.

Jenny Niven, the festival’s director, said the subject of gender was “extremely divisive” and claimed events about it could be seen as “spectacle or sport” in which people’s identity was seen as “subject of debate”.

But if “people’s identity” is wholly fictitious yet treated as sacred and binding, then it should be a subject of debate. “Identity” is like The Prophet in being anxiously and/or violently sealed off from question and dissent. The more idenniny is treated as sacred and undiscussable, the more it needs discussing.

Cherry said: “I am appalled that the National Library of Scotland has bowed to pressure from a small group within their staff to censor a book written by feminists, sex abuse survivors and lesbians, about their experiences during an important period in Scottish recent history.”

Yeah well, women just don’t matter. We’re too boring to matter. A man who calls himself a woman is both saintly and fascinating, but a plain old common or garden woman is the most boring object on the planet.

Hmmmm, which team was it who made the debate toxic?

Nicola Sturgeon has reignited her feud with JK Rowling by blaming the author for creating a toxic debate over trans rights and stoking “vile” attacks which left her fearing for her physical safety.

So Sturgeon is saying Rowling created the debate “over trans rights”?

But that’s absurd, because Sturgeon had already staked out a position on “trans rights” long before Rowling said a word about the subject.

In her memoir Frankly, the former first minister claims the Harry Potter writer wearing a T-shirt branding her a “destroyer of women’s rights” was a turning point in which “rational debate” on the trans issue became “impossible” and “any hope of finding common ground disappeared”.

Frankly, I think it was Sturgeon’s insistence that men can be women that made rational debate impossible. I also think that insistence is indeed lethal for women’s rights. How can it not be? How can women have rights if any man who feels like it can bounce up and say he’s a woman so give him the job as CEO of the rape crisis center?

The author posted the image as a show of “solidarity” with a protest organised by the For Women Scotland campaign group that day against Sturgeon’s gender reforms, which were then making their way through Holyrood.

But of course from women’s point of view they’re not reforms, they’re an attack on women’s rights, hence the T-shirt.

In her long-awaited memoir, which is was due to be published on Thursday but which went on sale in some book shops on Monday, Sturgeon reveals she now wishes she had “hit the pause button” over the legislation, which was passed within three months of Rowling’s attack and was later blocked by the UK government.

The pause button?

Legislation that demolishes human rights for half the population isn’t ok if we just wait a month or two. Pausing a misogynist law is not enough.

She goes on to claim that there are “few issues” more important to her than protecting and advancing women’s rights, “so to hear myself described as a destroyer of them wounds me deeply.”

Well tough shit, because that’s what you are. Think more about the injuries you’ve done to women. Think about the Edinburgh rape crisis center. Think about it. Never mind you, never mind your ego; think about the consequences.

In Frankly, Sturgeon states that while political opposition to her reforms were growing in 2022 and that campaigners’ anger was “bordering on hysteria”, she did not believe the gender issue was causing much concern among the wider public.

She admits this changed early the following year as a result of the Isla Bryson scandal — the biologically male double rapist initially placed in a female jail — and suggests she now wishes she [had] had the “courage” to admit she considers the sex offender a female.

…

In her memoir, Sturgeon admits she was “completely blindsided” by the Bryson case, which erupted within weeks of her self-ID law, which would have allowed Scots to easily change their legal gender, passing at Holyrood.

Well whose fault is that??? She had no right to be blindsided by it, because it was the whole point. If you insist that men are women if they say they are, and the state must agree with them, then Isla Brysons are inevitable. As we said. Loudly and over and over again. How did she manage to be “blindsided” after all that? Absolutely pathetic.

Sturgeon writes that the case gave her critics a “monster” who “brought vividly to life” what until then had been “abstract” concerns. The story then “went nuclear” and left her “fighting a fire that was already out of control”, Sturgeon said.

Well they fucking shouldn’t have been “abstract.” If she really considered them abstract then that’s her fault. We did explain. A billion times we explained.

She said she was then “like a rabbit in the headlights” when faced with questions over whether she considered Bryson, previously known as Adam Graham, to be male or female. At the time, Sturgeon repeatedly refused to directly answer the question.

She maintained that position in an ITV interview broadcast on Monday night to coincide with the publication of her book, but added that she now believes anyone “who commits the most heinous male crime against women probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice”.

There is no such right.

Sturgeon writes: “Whatever the reason, when confronted with the question ‘Is Isla Bryson a woman?’ I was like a rabbit in the headlights.

“Because I failed to answer ‘yes’, plain and simple, to the basic question, I seemed weak and evasive.

“Worst of all, I sounded like I didn’t have the courage to stand behind the logical conclusion of the self-identification system we had just legislated for.”

Whooooosh point totally missed.

You never should have legislated for that self-identification system. It’s a very bad, horrific, lethal for women system. You have something wrong with your brain.