Yes but this all misses the point.

Scottish ministers are facing a massive public backlash over their planned gender recognition reforms, according to a poll.

A Panelbase survey suggests the vast majority of voters in Scotland (71 per cent) oppose their plan to let people officially change gender quickly without providing medical evidence of gender dysphoria. Ministers plan to allow trans people to apply for a gender recognition certificate after declaring that they have lived in their acquired gender for three months, and then wait just three months for the certificate to be granted.

The plan follows complaints that current procedures, which can mean transgender people wait for two years for formal recognition, are bureaucratic, invasive and humiliating. This month the Scottish government announced £2 million of funding for gender identity services to help cut waiting times for trans healthcare.

One, what would “medical evidence of gender dysphoria” be? That’s a real question, not a sarcastic one. Dysphoria is a mental state; how does one provide medical evidence of a mental state?

But two, length of time really shouldn’t be the issue or the solution. People should be able to “change gender” at a moment’s notice, just as they can change their political allegiances, their religion, their taste in literature, their favorite color, their haircut. People can’t change their sex, and changing gender needs to be understood as similar to changing an allegiance, not as actually magically becoming the opposite sex.

The poll finds a high level of concern over the implications of gender recognition reforms for spaces currently confined to those who are biologically female, a concern shared by some of the SNP’s own parliamentarians.

Just over two thirds (67 per cent) believed trans-women should not gain full access to female-only spaces such as changing rooms, hospital wards and women’s refuges if they still have a penis, while a third who expressed an opinion thought they should.

At the same time, 86 per cent believe that women and girls have the right to expect to be able to receive care, including intimate care, from biologically female staff in hospitals, care homes and rape crisis centres while 14 per cent disagree.

The first is penis or no penis, the second is woman or not. I think the woman or not bit matters a lot more than the penis or no bit.

The SNP MP Joanna Cherry, a vocal critic of aspects of the proposed gender recognition changes, said: “These poll findings are stark and demonstrate very significant public opposition to the government’s current proposals for self-identification of sex.”

She said that Scotland had very good rights-based protections for women and girls and for trans people but warned: “We are at risk of undermining this if we do not seek to address the significant problems with the planned legislation.”

At risk of driving a tank through it.

Marion Calder, co-founder of For Women Scotland, a feminist group, said that ministers were “rushing into legislation with no regard as to the impact on women’s rights, and have completely forgotten as to why we sometimes need to separate spaces by sex”.

She added: “Allowing the teaching in schools of the ideology that it is possible to change sex will have far-reaching and damaging consequences for Scottish children, which the Scottish government will have to address in the not-too-distant future. Unless halted it will be their shameful legacy.”

It occurs to me that if everyone stopped sleeping at the wheel and said “just forget the whole idea of changing sex, it’s not possible, just accept that all you can do is perform various customs that you consider typical of your preferred gender, and leave it at that,” then people would have to do that, and the idea of bullying women into agreeing that men can be women would die a swift natural death. That would be nice.

A Scottish government spokesman said: “We recognise concerns raised by some women’s groups. Our proposals to reform the current gender recognition act do not introduce any new rights for trans people or change single-sex exceptions in the equality act.”

He said the government is committed to making changes “to improve and simplify the process by which a trans person can obtain legal recognition”.

He added: “We will do this while ensuring we uphold the rights and protections that women and girls currently have under the equality act.”

That sounds sweet, but it isn’t fucking possible. The whole idea of “legal recognition” is stupid and bad. Nobody needs legal recognition to swap jeans for skirts, and doing more than that is doing too much. The point of “legal recognition” is to make the whole world play along with the fantasy that sex can be changed. We don’t want to play along with the fantasy.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Imagining way too many possibilities.

If someone claims to be sexually attracted to members of their own sex and behaves accordingly — demonstrates romantic attachments and physical intimacy with members of their own sex— that’s pretty damn straightforward (so to speak.) We don’t have to question whether sex exists, wonder what a man or woman is, rewrite evolutionary biology, or exercise huge amounts of trust in their subjective reliability in “knowing their own sexual orientation.” Catch a couple of teens canoodling under the bleachers and there’s the objective diagnosis. Sexual attraction isn’t complicated.

Someone claiming to be the opposite sex in their mind would be equally straightforward, if all we were looking at were their personal feelings and beliefs. Instead, we have to overhaul pretty much everything, from epistemology to ontology to biology to psychology to feminism. “Affirming trans identities” isn’t just problematic because of the medical commitments being made on behalf of young children and teens. It’s a twisted and contorted commitment made on behalf of pretty much everything.

I can understand why teachers and others consider transgender claims and see a superficial resemblance to being gay or lesbian. But only years of looking at religious, paranormal, and pseudoscientific beliefs helps me catch a glimmer of understanding concerning how they seem to be able to stop looking so easily. It’s fascinating, in a macabre, depressing sort of way, I guess. And it’s wrong enough and testable enough that it may eventually be looked back on in surprise.

Sarah Phillimore on grooming in the schools:

On 16 December 2021 I saw a very distressing video of a mother, Jessica Konen, speaking at a school board meeting in Salinas, California, objecting to the school going behind her back to counsel her suicidal 12-year-old daughter about her claimed “transgender status”. The anger, pain and misery in her voice was evident.

Local press reported that two teachers at the Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas were recorded coaching other teachers how to conceal the nature of LGTBQ clubs from parents.

The teachers led a workshop about how to run a “Gay-Straight Alliance” club in “conservative communities” at a California Teachers Association conference held in October, called “Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities”. The teachers described the obstacles they faced as “activist teachers” to conceal the activities of GSA clubs from parents. These teachers were later suspended pending an independent third-party investigation.

There’s helping kids who are lesbian or gay, and then there’s coaching kids to think they’re “trans gender.”

I suppose there’s potential for overlap in both, because schools might want to make sure kids know it’s fine to be lesbian or gay and they don’t need to feel shy or awkward or scared about coming out – so that could veer into persuading kids they’re lesbian or gay. The same could apply to kids who think they have an interesting gender identity, but that’s complicated by the fact that it’s not at all clear that it’s fine to be trans. There are several reasons for that, but maybe the most relevant one for young teenagers is the drastic reduction in the dating pool.

No one could reasonably object to a school making efforts to ensure that its pupils — regardless of their sexuality or claimed gender identity — are able to learn in an atmosphere free from abuse or intimidation. This incident in Salinas reveals serious concerns that such clubs may go much further than merely supporting children, but cross a line into “affirming” young children with transgender identities and deliberately concealing this information from their parents.

And affirming transgender identities is more drastic than affirming being lesbian or gay. It’s more drastic, more magic-based, more eccentric, more linked with narcissism. The existence of lesbians and gays enriches the human story, in my view, while the claim to be the other sex very much does not.

Given that this path of affirmation appears to lead inexorably to medical and possibly surgical “transition”, and given what we know of the sparse evidence base for the efficacy of such treatments, most parents would be extremely concerned to think these matters were being discussed in secret by medically unqualified teachers with their 12-year-old children.

That, but also – what does it even mean? Does anyone know? Do these teachers know? Lots of people have a lot to say about it as if they do know, but what they say is less than convincing. The trans ideology comes across as more like an obsession with UFOs or Satanic Panic than like a dot on the map of human sexual variety. It’s creepy if schools are coaxing children to join a cultish new Gender Circus based on the kind of nonsense talked by trans activists.

Activists need to be aware of the distinction between a sexuality and a “gender identity”. The first does not require either medication or surgery to maintain it and a child is unlikely to “grow out” of feelings of sexual attraction. By contrast, the majority of children with “gender identity” issues left to undergo a normal puberty desist from any further desire to “change sex”.

In other words people are mistaking the shock of puberty for gender dysphoria, and acting accordingly – and schools are joining in the fun. It’s a recipe for absolute disaster.

Another way to get rid of female people:

TikTok is flooding teen users with videos of rapid-weight-loss competitions and ways to purge food that health professionals say contribute to a wave of eating-disorder cases spreading across the country.

A Wall Street Journal investigation involving the creation of a dozen automated accounts on TikTok, registered as 13-year-olds, found that the popular video-sharing app’s algorithm served them tens of thousands of weight-loss videos within a few weeks of joining the platform.

Some included tips about taking in fewer than 300 calories a day, several recommended consuming only water some days, another suggested taking laxatives after overeating.

Others suggested walking in front of speeding trains, jumping off tall buildings, swimming with sharks.

TikTok said it would fix things.

Eating disorders for young people are surging across the U.S. in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Health professionals say the disorders often come with other issues such as depression, anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and have worsened as kids have spent more time on their screens in isolation.

Other social-media platforms popular with teens have been criticized for not doing enough to address content promoting eating disorders. The Journal reported in September that researchers at Instagram, owned by Meta Platforms Inc., found that the photo-sharing app made some teen girls who struggled with their body image feel worse about those issues.

And then there’s the fad for deciding you’re the other sex.

Eating disorders are complex, can be difficult to treat and are potentially deadly, health professionals and researchers say. People who already have body-image issues are more likely to be inspired by videos like those on TikTok that glamorize thinness. The pandemic’s loneliness likely worsened the situation.

Does that sound familiar? It does to me. Being trans is glamorized too, especially on social media.

Speaking of amateurs who refuse to trust professionals –

Guests invited to a holiday party at the home of the leading anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr were urged to be vaccinated or tested for Covid-19 because, Kennedy said, he is “not always the boss at my own house”.

The what?

Why would he be “the boss” at “his own” house? He’s married, so it’s not exclusively his house, is it, and he’s not “the boss,” is he. What a stupid, piggy, ugly way to talk, even assuming he was sort of joking. That kind of joke rests on a lot of piggy assumptions. All that and he’s an anti-vaxxer.

Speaking to Politico, which reported the request before the party in California last week, Kennedy said his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, was behind it.

…

Amid widespread criticism, Doug Heye, a Republican operative, wrote: “The ol’ blame-the-wife-for-wanting-people-to-be-safe-when-you’re-an-anti-vaxxer move. Classy.”

Even a Republican operative can see it.

Kennedy has campaigned on environmental issues but is also a leading vaccines conspiracy theorist and activist against shots including those approved to combat Covid-19, which has killed more than 805,000 in the US and more than 5.3 million worldwide.

Earlier this year, Kennedy was removed from Instagram, for sharing misinformation about Covid-19. His Facebook page remains active, as does his Twitter account.

Last month, Kennedy released a book in which he attacks targets including Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. Its title, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, has been no obstacle to bestseller status on Amazon.

Subtitle: Masons, Jews, Fluoridation of Water, UFOs, Manly Men.

Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that Kennedy’s anti-vaccination non-profit, Children’s Health Defense, more than doubled revenue in the first year of the pandemic, reporting $6.8m raised.

That’s just great. He’s using his inherited fame to encourage people to catch a lethal virus.

According to the AP, CHD has recently expanded the reach of its newsletter, launched an internet TV channel, started a movie studio, opened new US branches and established outposts in Canada, Europe and Australia.

The AP also said CHD had become a leading “alternative and natural medicine site”, with millions of users, in part by targeting groups that may be more prone to distrust vaccines, including mothers and African Americans.

Dr Richard Allen Williams, a cardiologist and founder of the Minority Health Institute, said Kennedy was leading “a propaganda movement” and “absolutely a racist operation” particularly dangerous to Black Americans.

“He’s really the ringleader of the misinformation campaign,” Williams said.

Nice legacy.

Edzard Ernst informs us:

Yesterday, it was reported that one of Austria’s best-known opponents of vaccination has died as a result of coronavirus infection. He vehemently refused treatment in hospital. Instead, he insisted on treating himself – and tragically, he is not an isolated case.

“Miracle Mineral Solution” (MMS) is being promoted as a treatment for all kinds of diseases – including, of course, the coronavirus. But MMS is nothing more than the bleach and disinfectant chlorine dioxide, or CDL for short. It made headlines when Donald Trump suggested it as a remedy against Covid-19. Subsequently, CDL became highly popular amongst the anti-vax brigade.

Johann Biacsics was one of the leading figures of the anti-vaccination scene in Austria. On 11 November, he was seen in a Vienna hospital with an acute corona infection. At this stage, he had already taken chlorine dioxide because of fever complaints. Biacsics was, of course, not vaccinated and refused treatment. He was firmly convinced that he had already overcome the infection thanks to his treatment with chlorine dioxide.

The senior physician at the Vienna hospital saw things differently. His condition was “life-threatening”, she said. But instead of accepting treatment in hospital, Biacsics discharged himself and said he would rather treat himself. Once home, Biacsics put in an IV line with chlorine dioxide and sodium chloride. Two days later he was dead.

Well, we have a choice. We can accept what we are told by professionals and the institutions staffed and led by professionals, or we can accept what we are told by random opinionators on social media. I’m a random opinionator myself, and for that reason (along with others) I think it’s a safer bet to trust the professionals and institutions. I say “trust” because I don’t have medical knowledge and because most people don’t, so most of us do have to rely on the people who do have medical knowledge. But it seems strange that so many people opt to do the opposite – to trust Donald Trump raving about injecting bleach at a press conference instead of people with the relevant knowledge and training saying don’t inject bleach.

Wisey the Pretty having a snit.

The replies are many and scorching.

I’ll just quote others, so as not to keep repeating the original.

Men have been allowed to be “powerful” over women for centuries. Society is male dominated. And here you are celebrating yet another example of that dominance, pretending that the power to strip women of their rights and categories is something new. Cowards. @therestofus5

So you’re totally fine with girls being told they need their heads examined because they object to a man cheating them out of their places and records. Not so much Human Rights as Man Rights. @carolinmcmillan

As long as it’s not women living their truth. Their job is to let the males collect all the medals in women’s sport, quietly and submissively, which is a less incredible and powerful feeling. But you wouldn’t know that. @yatakalam

The problem being Lia’s truth tramples all over the truths of the female swimmers. So if we all have individual ‘truths’ how do we decide who’s truth counts for more and whose for less. Oh yes. As you were. Males are primary and females secondary. Male truth counts for more @Penn @cathydevine56

And lots more in the same vein.

I guess human rights don’t include women.

Where to begin. One, “living your truth” is a soppy empty slogan more suitable for advertising than human rights discourse.

Two, truth is universal or it’s not truth. Truth isn’t subjective, truth isn’t personal, truth doesn’t need possessive pronouns.

Three, it’s not his truth, is it, it’s his lie.

Four, what about when “living your truth” is a matter of trampling all over other people, people who are at a major physical disadvantage compared to you? Even the Human Rights Campaign probably wouldn’t be cheering Lia on if he were demanding to join a children’s swim team, but when it’s mere women it’s fine. Why is that?

Five, how about some god damn solidarity with women for once? Some women are lesbians, after all, and surely the Human Rights Campaign isn’t more in solidarity with trans women than it is with lesbians? Is it? IS it?

Six, if you’re in solidarity with all athletes who compete in the sports they love why aren’t you in solidarity with the women Lia is ripping off?

This is why we can’t do anything.

The [Bureau of Land Management] hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director in 5 years. [In other words Trump never bothered.] And Stone-Manning’s tenure begins as the Biden administration is under intense pressure to end all fossil fuel development on federal land in the West. Environmentalists see that as a key component to fighting the climate crisis. But the oil and gas industry still expects the US government to afford it new drilling opportunities.

It’s that “But” – that’s why. On the one hand: we need to “fight” the climate crisis because it’s an existential threat to the planet, to humans, to everything that depends on the planet. On the other hand, an industry wants to continue making $$$. Those two things should not be treated as equally important or urgent or impossible to ignore. The existential threat should knock the profit-desire all the way out of the picture with a single blow, but it never does.

It’s up to Stone-Manning to strike that tricky and some say contradictory balance.

“Some say” – yes, NPR, it’s just a quirky eccentric opinion of some wacky people.

It shouldn’t be up to Stone-Manning to strike any kind of “balance” between trying to slow climate change and what The Oil And Gas Industry wants.

… the oil and gas industry has warned that stopping all new – and discouraging existing – development could cost local economies in the West tens of billions of dollars.

Wait til they see what the rise in sea level is going to cost, to name just one item.

On a BBC story:

GirlsDoPorn victims win rights to their videos

Hundreds of people tricked into making explicit videos for porn websites have been awarded the rights to the videos and millions of dollars in damages.

Hundreds of people? Wasn’t that scam perpetrated on women? It’s not PeopleDoPorn it’s GIRLSDoPorn.

The sites, GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, had been the subject of a long-running legal battle.

The US Department of Justice has ruled that rights to videos and images produced by the now-defunct sites belong to the women.

More than 400 victims can now ask for the online footage to be removed.

They belong to the women, so it’s women, so why people? Has the BBC or at least some of its staff developed a reflexive caution around the word “women” as if it’s tainted, suspect, to be avoided, or at least diluted with random substitutions of “people”?

But the fact that it’s women is of course the core of the story – men do this to women.

John Cleese decided not to continue with a gotcha interview.

“I just did an interview with BBC World Asia. It was to talk about the shows I’m doing in Singapore and Bangkok,” he wrote in a Twitter thread.

“Instead, the interviewer, whose name was, I think, Karishma, started by asking me questions about Cancel Culture.”

I replied courteously and in full I explained that if parents were over protective, it did not prepare children well when they entered the real and often not-very-nice world.

“She then asked a disjointed question, clearly trying to portray me as old-fashioned, uncaring and basically harmful.”

The clip is here:

Judge says Not so fast.

A federal judge on Thursday evening unraveled a painstakingly negotiated settlement between Purdue Pharma and thousands of state, local and tribal governments that had sued the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin for the company’s role in the opioid epidemic, saying that the plan was flawed in one critical area.

The judge, Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said that the settlement, part of a restructuring plan for Purdue approved in September by a bankruptcy judge, should not go forward because it releases the company’s owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family, from liability in civil opioid-related cases.

Although the Sacklers did not file for personal bankruptcy protection, they had made immunization from opioid claims an absolute requirement in exchange for contributing payments amounting to $4.5 billion to the agreement.

The judge says the bankruptcy code doesn’t spell that out so nope.

Lawyers for a small group of states that had appealed the plan immediately hailed the ruling. “This is a seismic victory for justice and accountability that will re-open the deeply flawed Purdue bankruptcy and force the Sackler family to confront the pain and devastation they have caused,” said William Tong, the attorney general of Connecticut.

That’s capitalism.

The Sacklers appear to have taken careful steps to protect their billions as the corpses piled up.

During oral arguments, Judge McMahon said she was troubled by what she saw as a red flag: the more than $10 billion that the Sacklers withdrew from Purdue between 2008 and 2018, as the opioid epidemic was cresting. The Sackler dividends were largely deposited in offshore accounts and trusts that are inaccessible to American authorities.

And notably, she said, the withdrawals escalated after Purdue and three top executives pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal and civil charges related to aggressive marketing of opioids, paying more than $600 million.As Judge McMahon wrote: “Concerned about how their personal financial situation might be affected, the family began what one member described as an ‘aggressive[]’ program of withdrawing money from Purdue almost as soon as the ink was dry on the 2007 papers.”

Those withdrawals left the company without deep cash reserves to resolve thousands of opioid lawsuits that, by late 2019, forced Purdue to seek shelter in bankruptcy. But to settle the lawsuits and emerge from bankruptcy, Purdue needed the Sacklers’ contribution.

That reliance put the Sacklers in a position to make a line-in-the-sand demand: They would only give the money if they received immunity from all opioid-related cases filed in civil courts.

They’ll be running for president next.

Yes, and?

Trans women are, by definition, men who “identify as” women or call themselves women or whatever formula you like for a man who wants to roleplay womanitude. Of course they’re men. If they were women they wouldn’t be trans women, would they. It’s only women who are women. Men who pretend to be women are men who pretend to be women; they’re not women.

Yo, people, climate change is going to eat our lunch so how about devoting all this energy to sabotaging all the cruise ships or something instead of all this whining about men who wanna be women.

Science News on the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf:

The demise of a West Antarctic glacier poses the world’s biggest threat to raise sea levels before 2100 — and an ice shelf that’s holding it back from the sea could collapse within three to five years, scientists reported December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.

Thwaites Glacier is “one of the largest, highest glaciers in Antarctica — it’s huge,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the Boulder, Colo.–based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, told reporters. Spanning 120 kilometers across, the glacier is roughly the size of Florida, and were the whole thing to fall into the ocean, it would raise sea levels by 65 centimeters, or more than two feet. Right now, its melting is responsible for about 4 percent of global sea level rise.

Cruise companies are even now planning cruises to go look at the ice shelf while it’s still there.

Satellite data show that over the last 30 years, the flow of Thwaites Glacier across land and toward the sea has nearly doubled in pace. The collapse of this “Doomsday Glacier” alone would alter sea levels significantly, but its fall would also destabilize other West Antarctic glaciers, dragging more ice into the ocean and raising sea levels even more.

Worse than predicted and much much sooner than predicted.

Workers are expendable.

Why did eight workers at a Kentucky candle factory and six workers at an Illinois Amazon warehouse die this week? They were killed when a powerful tornado destroyed their workplaces, but it wasn’t really the storm that killed them, any more than a sailor forced to walk the plank is killed only by the waves. They were not random victims. They were sacrificed. We here in the most advanced nation on earth offered them up to the gods that we actually worship.

Why did they die? They died because they were inside their workplaces in the path of the storm. They died because they did not leave work before disaster struck. And they did not leave work because they were allegedly ordered not to, by their bosses. The factory workers in Kentucky say that managers threatened to fire them if they left. Amazon workers say that they were told not to leave in advance of the storm. They also say that lack of adequate safety procedures is par for the course at Amazon, where the employee handbook notifies workers that they can be fired for leaving without “permission”.

And why is that? Because the workers have no union. The bosses have seen to it.

None of them had a union to empower them to stand up to a boss who demanded that they do something that put them in danger. None of them had a union to give them the collective ability to require their employers to value their lives. Unions are the only – the only – reason industries from construction to coal mining are far safer today than they were a century ago.

And why didn’t the Amazon workers and the candle factory workers have a union?

They didn’t have unions because employers believe that unions will cost them money, and therefore all of corporate America and much of our political structure has conspired for many decades to make it extremely hard for regular working people to form and maintain unions. Amazon, in particular, goes to great lengths to fight unionization everywhere. It spies on workers; it hires expensive anti-union consultants; it violates labor law; it lies to its workers and tries to scare them.

As corporations did with impunity until some new laws and agencies emerged from the New Deal. Reagan and his successors reversed all that.

This is the American system as we like it. As a society, we prefer a world in which a large number of people live paycheck-to-paycheck and will therefore take jobs as “independent contractors” with few rights and little safety and no union and low wages. We want a world in which people are so afraid of losing their jobs that they will quite literally ride out a tornado for less than $20 an hour, because the alternative is poverty. This is the social arrangement that allows us to have lots of cheap stuff, fast.

Maybe the workers should try identifying as bosses.

Some parents of Penn swimmers have written a letter.

Parents of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team are demanding the NCAA change rules that have permitted transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to dominate the competition, declaring ‘at stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,’ DailyMail.com has learned.

The parents of about 10 swimmers sent a letter last week to the NCAA and forwarded it to the Ivy League and University of Pennsylvania officials.’

At stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,’ they wrote in the letter obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com. ‘The precedent being set – one in which women do not have a protected and equitable space to compete – is a direct threat to female athletes in every sport. What are the boundaries? How is this in line with the NCAA’s commitment to providing a fair environment for student-athletes?

‘It is the responsibility of the NCAA to address the matter with an official statement,’ the parents continue. ‘As the governing body, it is unfair and irresponsible to leave the onus on Lia, Lia’s teammates, Lia’s coaches, UPenn athletics and the Ivy League. And it is unfair and irresponsible to Lia to allow the media to dictate the narrative without the participation of the NCAA.’

You know what I don’t care about here? What’s unfair to Lia. Lia’s the one who is unfair and I don’t think he should come first in the list of people who are being treated unfairly. Include him at the end, if you must, but not at the beginning. He knows what he’s doing and he’s smirking about it. He’s not one of the victims in this situation. Yes the adults are helping him do it, but he’s not innocent.

The university sent a terse response to the parents, claiming the school is doing what it can to help the student-athletes navigate Lia’s success, [and] shared a link to mental health services.

“Don’t like it? Go see a shrink, i.e. fuck off.”

‘Please know that we fully support all our swimming student-athletes and want to help our community navigate Lia’s success in the pool this winter,’ the university replied. ‘Penn Athletics is committed to being a welcoming and inclusive environment for all our student-athletes, coaches and staff and we hold true to that commitment today and in the future.’

And blah blah blah to you too, but being “inclusive” shouldn’t mean excluding girls from the girls’ swim team in order to be “inclusive” of a boy. Include the boy on the boys’ swim team if he’s good enough, but leave the girls’ swim team for the girls.

‘We’ve encouraged our student-athletes to utilize the robust resources available to them at Penn, and I’d like to share them with you as well,’ the school wrote the parents, providing links to ‘counseling and psychological services, the LGBT Center, Restorative Practices and our Center for Student-Athlete Success staff.’ 

Yeah no, they don’t want “resources,” they want their swim team back.

Oh and by the way it’s speeding up.

Planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels and other human activities has already raised global temperatures more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). But the effects are particularly profound at the poles, where rising temperatures have seriously undermined regions once locked in ice.

In research presented this week at the world’s biggest earth science conference, Pettit showed that the Thwaites ice shelf could collapse within the next three to five years, unleashing a river of ice that could dramatically raise sea levels. Aerial surveys document how warmer conditions have allowed beavers to invade the Arctic tundra, flooding the landscape with their dams. Large commercial ships are increasingly infiltrating formerly frozen areas, disturbing wildlife and generating disastrous amounts of trash.

…

The rapid transformation of the Arctic and Antarctic creates ripple effects all over the planet. Sea levels will rise, weather patterns will shift and ecosystems will be altered. Unless humanity acts swiftly to curb emissions, scientists say, the same forces that have destabilized the poles will wreak havoc on the rest of the globe.

There’s a lot more in the same vein. It’s all very bad news.

But that won’t work either.

How can we start over again when the “trans women” and their deranged allies will just grab whatever we build?

The trans cult is destroying everything women have built up since the late 60s, so how would we prevent them from destroying anything we build anew in 2022 and beyond? It’s not as if they’re going to say “Okay, fair enough, we’ll take all your stuff that exists to date and you can have whatever you make starting now.” Of course they’re not. They’re going to go right on saying anything that’s for women is for them too because they are women and you’re a criminal demon if you deny it. They’re inside the house and they’re not leaving.

And the earth sowed with salt.

Brendan O’Neill on Scotland’s Privilege the Rapist policy:

The actual police, the people responsible for recording crime, will acquiesce to a male rapist’s desire to be referred to as female. The consequences of this deranged, hyper-relativist policy will be dire. Crime stats will become a joke, with numerous rapes being falsely attributed to women. Female prisons could be swarmed by male rapists. And complainants in rape cases could face the prospect of having to use female pronouns in court when addressing the man who brutalised them.

Could? Will. This is all too obvious. It’s already happened in the assault case in which the judge ordered the victim, Maria MacLachlan, to call the man who assaulted her “she.”

How long before judges start reprimanding complainants for incorrect pronoun use? ‘She forced her penis into you – please respect the pronouns, Miss.’

It has already happened.

[Rowling’s] point was crystal clear: it is positively Orwellian to refer to rapists as women. It is a flagrant and authoritarian denial of reality to record a violent sexual assault that was carried out by someone with a penis – what we used to call a man – as having been committed by a woman. There is unquestionably something very Big Brother about officialdom’s threat to erase truth in order to avoid offending the cult of genderfluidity and its noisy adherents.

And why is it so urgent to avoid offending the cult of gender souls? It’s never been urgent to avoid offending women, but it’s terribly urgent to avoid offending men who call themselves women? Says a lot, doesn’t it. Too much.