Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Aw isn’t that cute – man nominated for women’s prize.

"I'm overwhelmed by this nom," says the man taking a nomination from a woman. pic.twitter.com/JsjgaP6j35

— Gay Not Queer (@Gaynotqueer1) March 10, 2026

One more award for a woman goes to a man.

The campaign to take away everything that belongs to women is flourishing.

A Cheshire Women’s Institute branch has announced it will close at the end of March after members voted overwhelmingly to suspend the group in protest at the national organisation’s exclusion of trans women.

Members of Social Lites WI gathered for a “Special Meeting” on 4 March attended by representatives of the Cheshire Federation of WIs, to formally officiate a vote on the group’s future. More than 75% of members who attended in person or voted by email backed suspension, paving the way for the branch’s closure after 13 years of fully inclusive operation.

How are we defining “fully inclusive”? You’d think inclusive of women would be all that’s required, but no, apparently a WI is fully inclusive only if it has some men.

The committee said many members “could no longer be part of an organisation that supports this exclusion”, describing the decision as one made in solidarity with a marginalised minority.

To wit, men. They think men are a marginalised minority while, I guess, women are the privileged ruthless majority. Seems odd.

The committee acknowledged the emotional weight of the decision but said the values of welcome, equality and solidarity had always been central to the group’s identity. Closing, they said, was the only way to remain true to those principles.

But surely being women was also central to the group’s identity. It is the Women’s Institute after all. Surely the values of welcome, equality and solidarity toward and with women were good enough, weren’t they? It’s not as if men lack institutions.

Two three many epsteins.

Three brothers, including two of the nation’s most successful luxury real estate brokers, were convicted of sex trafficking Monday after a five-week trial over accusations that they drugged and raped scores of women they had dazzled with their wealth and opulent lifestyle.

The verdict came after 11 women testified in Manhattan federal court they were sexually assaulted by one or more of the brothers: twins Oren and Alon Alexander, 38, and Tal Alexander, 39. All three shook their heads as the jury foreperson said “guilty” 19 straight times, a powerful reckoning that could put them behind bars for the rest of their lives.

Are we sure they identify as male?

Victims testified that they met the brothers at nightclubs, parties and on dating apps, and were attacked after accepting their invitations to all-expense paid getaways to the Hamptons; Aspen, Colorado; and a Caribbean cruise. More than 60 women say they were raped by one or more of the brothers, according to prosecutors.

…

Besides the criminal case, the brothers have faced about two dozen lawsuits over the last two years, including one filed last week in which Tracy Tutor, a star of Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles,” alleges Oren Alexander drugged and assaulted her while she was in New York City for a real estate event.

When the first of the lawsuits were filed, multiple women came forward claiming they had also been assaulted, and that the brothers’ misconduct had been an open secret in the real estate world. The government took notice and opened a criminal case.

The brothers’ what? Misconduct? Is that the word for it?

UC Riverside has exciting news.

In a new book, sociologist Brandon Andrew Robinson calls for abolishing sexual identities. 

Robinson, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at UC Riverside, knows it’s a provocative thesis. But they argue that discarding these labels is a critical step toward giving people the freedom to relate to one another on a deeper, more respectful, more meaningful, and more pleasurable level. Sexual identity, Robinson asserts, functions as a kind of prison, confining human desire and reinforcing a false notion of gender based on fixed, biological categories.

Someone should tell him that we already have the freedom to relate to one another on levels that have little or nothing to do with sex.

There’s also the fact that without sex there are no humans to do any relating. Sex is the way it is because otherwise there is no reproduction and so no fashion-obsessed academics telling us sex is dispensable.

“Identities limit us,” Robinson writes in “Trans Pleasure: On Gender Liberation and Sexual Freedom.” “And the fact that we keep creating new identities — such as gynosexual, finsexual, sapiosexual, asexual, or pansexual — shows how these categories fail to capture the full complexities of gender, sexuality, and desire.”

Derp derp derp. Of course they don’t. They’re not meant to. That’s not what categories do.

The book, published Feb. 24 by the University of California Press, draws on hundreds of Reddit conversations about transgender women and their sexuality and dating experiences, as well as from 48 qualitative interviews conducted over Zoom with trans women and trans femmes — trans people who identify with a feminine gender expression.

Oh yay, an academic book about Reddit chats! This guy is right there at the coalface and no mistake!

Quick question.

What. The fuck. Is this?

Where am I seeing it? On a NY Times article.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Internal cannot be external.

When the term “gender identity” was first used, it described an individual’s knowledge of their sex as male or female.

Hmm that doesn’t seem entirely accurate to me. My understanding of the history of the term “gender identity” is that it comes from a few social-sciences branches of academia, primarily psychology (and especially its subdomain of sexology) and anthropology. And that it described a concept that was closely related to sex, but that was mostly understood to be separate from sex, though the boundaries were often hazy.

Psychologically, “gender identity” is not much different from any other cultural facet of identity: religious identity or national identity or ethnic identity, say. These are things that are measurable and that matter psychologically.

But when we try to freight those other kinds of personal senses of identity with overloaded meaning, the results are usually bad. Treating people’s internal senses of their ethnic or religious or national identities as psychologically and materially paramount, fundamental kinds of things immediately triggers red flags about fascism and racism and such. For good reason! They’re not inborn. They’re cultural phenomena. Sex, on the other hand, is obviously not the same. Hence, we call it “gender identity” and not “sex identity”: by using that adjacent-but-separate word we are inherently conceding that sex doesn’t exist on the same plane as “gender”. Sex is material and concrete; “gender identity” is not.

In anthropological contexts, “gender identity” refers to mostly indigenous or highly collectivist cultures in which people are designated into specific social roles, primarily based on their sex, but with some degree of wiggle room for outliers. The classic examples, of course, are “ladyboys” in Thailand and “fa’afafine” in Samoa. In these cases, “ladyboy” or “fa’afafine” are cultural identities, and they’re specifically gender identities because they have to do with behavioural attributes. They’re adjacent to sex but not quite the same thing. Feminine males are male but they identify in a manner that is socially in line with the female social gender role.

Sex, being a material and clearly observable aspect of the human body, is as relevant as ever, but the social facets of “gender” often take precedent in day-to-day indigenous social-culture land. In such cultures, they can see that some people’s personalities and social identities don’t map onto the typicalities of those of their sex, and they are given a special social category.

So in the anthropological sense, “gender identity” means people who are culturally shifted into a rigid social-role category that is closer in line with that of the opposite sex. But crucially: everyone can see that they’re exceptions to the rules and that sex is still there, and it’s rigidly binary.

There’s a lovely short video I’ll try to find in which a young butch lesbian in Samoa discusses how she came to understand herself and her “gender identity” as a fa’afatama (a woman who behaves “in the manner of a man”). A telling moment comes when her girlfriend discusses “coming out” to her mother, explaining that the “guy” she’s dating “is a girl”. There are telling moments throughout, in which she and her community clearly see that she’s both female and more interested in the stuff generally associated with males. They clearly hold both concepts at the same time: actual male and actual female vs. “behavour-in-the-manner-of-male” and “behaviour-in-the-manner-of-female”.

I don’t want to sound too condescending, but I find that kind of accommodation of gender-atypical people in indigenous cultures sweet and lovely, in a basic-first-steps kind of way. Hey, at least that lesbian couple has found some kind of stability and a sense of place in that culture. That kind of thing.

But I don’t dare romanticize these “third-gender” social roles as ideal. I’m an unapologetic advocate for the more modern, individualistic way of structuring society, in which males and females aren’t assigned “gender roles” in the first place. It’s more complicated, but it’s also fundamentally more egalitarian. In fact, in places like Thailand and Samoa, as Western individualism has seeped into them, rejection of the old social order of “gender roles” has begun to take hold. There are cons as well as pros to that, obviously. But my gay male upbringing inclines me to not romanticize the old rigid ways so much as sympathize with the people who feel constrained by them, and to hope they find more happiness and freedom with the new knowledge that’s seeping into their cultures.

Gay rights orgs in Thailand are particulary puzzled right now because the trend was to advocate for society to move beyond Thai society’s “gender identity” concepts of homosexuals, and to vie for more egalitarian cultural understanding of gender-outliers and same-sex-attracted people. The West’s sudden lurch back towards gender-identitarianism has thrown a wrench in that, almost forcing the Thai gay rights movement to do a 180. They’re in a strange place, indeed.

I copied and posted this yesterday but now I can’t find it – perhaps she deleted it. Anyway. Solnit of all people.

Golly, what’s the matter with us, getting all riled up about people pretending that some men are women. We must be those tiresome bitches who always spoil the fun.

Karleen Gribble at Quillette:

When the term “gender identity” was first used, it described an individual’s knowledge of their sex as male or female. However, the meaning soon changed so that gender identity delineated an internal sense of oneself as living in the social role of a man or a woman.

That’s what it now means?

No wonder we’re in such a mess. That’s incoherent. How can you have an internal sense of yourself as living in a social role? They’re antithetical. Social is external by definition; that’s the whole point of it. Growing up is learning to separate your personal wants and whims and tantrums from the world external to you which frankly doesn’t give a shit about your wants and whims.

If the people of gender really do think they can make their internal sense of things a public matter they are doomed to eternal pratfalls. Which we already knew, of course, but that phrasing helps to clarify what we knew.

What, they tripped and fell on the wrong clip? The dog ate their homework? They had the right clip all ready to go so someone must have stolen it while they were brushing their teeth?

Fox News apologizes for showing old video of a hatless Donald Trump at a dignified transfer ceremony

We’re sorry, we were just really coked up that day.

Fox News apologized for airing old video of a hatless President Donald Trump during coverage Sunday of his attendance at the dignified transfer ceremony for U.S. soldiers killed in the Middle East war, insisting it was an honest mistake.

And yet it was an honest mistake that made Trump look less like a greedy monster selling merch at a ceremony for US soldiers he got killed. What an odd coincidence.

Pliny is wicked.

Rebecca Solnit ffs.

Aren’t we just silly to get all riled up about the new encyclopedia of insults to women based on trans ideology? We should smile sweetly and nod in agreement and then go bake some pies.

This is just extraordinary.

Bumped into @ForWomenScot at an #IWD2026 rally outside Holyrood.

FWS are engaging with another attendee. Tom Harlow puts an end to the conversation between women. pic.twitter.com/S1wO5tNvmY

— Nicole Jones (@satiricole) March 8, 2026

I recommend watching it. It’s nauseating – Tom Harlow whispering into her ear for what seems like half an hour, like some kind of transphilic Svengali.

View from the other side:

pic.twitter.com/AWQypolJGT

— Iain Masterton (@iain_masterton) March 8, 2026

pic.twitter.com/VzdKJJmxgS

— Agent Rach (L'Harlot de Pimpernel) (@AgentStJust1789) March 8, 2026

Under His Eye indeed.

If there’s a way to get it wrong, he will find that way. If there’s a way to get it horribly wrong he’ll find that too.

Trump made a bold accessory choice while attending the dignified transfer of six U.S. service members killed in his war with Iran.

Trump, 79, stood as six coffins covered in American flags were solemnly carried from an aircraft to a waiting vehicle at Delaware’s Dover Air Force Base on Saturday afternoon. On Trump’s head sat a gold-embroidered white hat with the letters “USA” on the front, “45-47″ on one side, and the American flag on the other.

The $55 cap is available to purchase on the president’s merch website.

Well so he saw an opportunity to do a little quiet marketing and he took it. What’s the big deal?

Based on publicly available images, the president’s baseball cap, which he has never worn during a dignified transfer, drew immediate outrage. No other U.S. president has worn a baseball hat during a dignified transfer, based on publicly available images.

California governor and top Trump critic Gavin Newsom wrote above a video shared by the White House, “Take your hat off, you disgusting little man.”

Well it’s not a hat, it’s a baseball cap. It’s a very affordable baseball cap at a mere 55 dollars.

“This fool has ABSOLUTELY no sense of dignity or appreciation for the moment,” wrote former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele on X. “It is called the Dignified Transfer for a reason. Take your damn hat off!!” Political strategist Chris D. Jackson wrote, “Trump just wore a campaign hat to a dignified transfer for fallen U.S. soldiers that were killed during his Iranian blunder.”

Guys guys guys it’s called marketing. There is no higher calling than peddling overpriced baseball hats that double as advertising for a loathsome crook.

A new syndrome is born.

Trans broken arm syndrome: A mixed-methods exploration of gender-related medical misattribution and invasive questioning

Gender-related medical misattribution and invasive questioning (GRMMIQ), colloquially known as “trans broken arm syndrome,” is a form of medical discrimination faced by transgender and gender diverse (TGD) patients wherein a provider incorrectly assumes that a medical condition results from a patient’s gender identity or medical transition. This phenomenon may take one of two forms: (1) the incorrect and explicit misattribution of gender identity or medical transition as being the cause of an acute complaint, or (2) invasive and unnecessary questions regarding a patient’s gender identity or gender transition status.

What I wonder is how these researchers know that the provider is incorrect in “assuming” – or suspecting, wondering, etc – that the medical condition could be the cause or a cause of an acute complaint.

Nearly one-third of participants reported experiencing GRMMIQ. Experiences were associated with outness to acute care providers and other types of gender-related discrimination in healthcare settings. Analysis of qualitative data revealed four primary themes: (1) assumptions of disordered thinking and being, (2) hyperfocus on aspects of medical transition, (3) cultural ignorance and incompetence, and (4) dismissiveness of the patient.

But do we know for absolutely certain that there is no disordered thinking involved? Have we absolutely nailed it down that “trans” is never a mistake or an illusion or a socially shaped way of viewing the self? I’ll be honest: I don’t think we have.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Matching the instruments.

“Make Iran Great Again.”

Greatness is something that only Trump can bestow, like a gift to peasants too stupid to do things for themselves. With His Royal Touch (and the dropping of a few tons of high explosives), all will be made Good and Right, and the Iranian people will thank him and demand that he be given the Nobel Peace Prize once he finishes bombing them into gratitude.

Except in Trump’s view, no other country can be (or is ever allowed to be) as “Great” as the United States. This is the whole point behind his attempts at zero-sum trade deals; the United States (read Trump) has to win. A deal in which both sides come out ahead means that America (Trump) has “lost”, that something was left on the table, or given away to the other guy, and that America was somehow “ripped off” and “taken advantage of.” Nobody else is allowed to get ahead, or break even. Mutual advantage precludes American (Trump’s) domination and superiority over everyone else. All other nations are supposed to bow down and worship America (Trump), and give the US (Trump) what it (he) wants. If they won’t do it willingly, he will make them.

He’s made it personal, too. Everything is actually about him. What’s good for Trump is good for America, and good for the whole fucking world. The brilliance of his achievements self-enrichment and grandiosity is somehow supposed to uplift and awe his own grateful, compliant, peasantry, like a video image of the dim, comfortless glow of a cheap, fake fireplace, viewed through a cracked, dirty window. Always The Most, The Best, Like Nobody Has Ever Seen before, and something only he could ever have done. It’s all part of the Trump Brand. If he could, he’d name the whole goddamn country after himself, and cover the whole thing in trashy gold gewgaws.

The Green Party v Reality:

The Green Party was once, however briefly, a genuine refuge for people who believed that politics ought to be grounded in material reality: in the physical world, in measurable consequences, in science. It believed in ecosystems and feedback loops; in the hard logic of cause and effect. It understood that you cannot simply wish away inconvenient truths, whether those truths concern carbon emissions or the biological distinction between male and female human beings. That, at least, is what many of its founding members believed they had joined.

What they discovered instead is something altogether more alarming: a party leadership so in thrall to a well-funded ideological orthodoxy that it is prepared to break its own rules, exhaust its own finances, and silence its own women rather than acknowledge what a unanimous Supreme Court has since confirmed in law. On 16 April 2025, in a ruling that shook every HR department, equality body, and political party in Britain, the Supreme Court declared that the words ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The party’s response was to dismiss the judgment as ‘thinly veiled transphobia.’ You could not, if you tried, design a more perfect illustration of a movement that has ceased to engage with reality.

Now, the Green Women’s Declaration (GWD), a group of Green Party members who hold what the law explicitly recognises as protected beliefs, has formally commenced legal proceedings against the party for discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. For more than two years they raised formal complaints and asked reasonable questions about the treatment of women who hold gender-critical views. For more than two years they were met with silence, hostility, or expulsion. This is not an internal spat. It is a reckoning.

Women are not a fantasy or a feeling or a self-image. Women are real just as men are real, just as water and soil and carbon dioxide are real.

Yes kids it’s International Women’s Day soooooooooo it’s time to talk about men!

Colchester councillor shares her transition story for International Women's Day https://t.co/FOzi92wTvX

— The Gazette (@TheGazette) March 6, 2026

He does. He actually does.

For International Women’s Day 2026, the Gazette has been speaking to women across the city. Here is Councillor Amy Kirkby Taylor’s contribution, in her own words.

I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to focus on here, my first thought was to focus on the barriers that women face in life, and how it feels to have them appearing in my life as I begin my transition. But this year’s Women’s Day theme is Give to Gain, and I want to return the love given by the women around me.

Because in total opposition to the narrative we are fed about trans people living within their adopted gender, that has been my experience. The vast majority of women have been happy to welcome me into the sisterhood with even my political rivals saying they were pleased to see another woman in the chamber.

If that’s true they’re either brainwashed or terrorized. Adding a man is not seeing another woman in the chamber. Adding a man is seeing another man in the chamber. Hope that clarifies.

Trans “activists” invade a women’s march on Women’s Day. Of course they do.

The moment @nottspolice should have stepped in to stop women feeling alarmed and distressed. It didn't happen and as a result one of our attendees was assaulted. Even then @nottspolice refused to manage the situation leaving @ThePosieParker no option but to move our event. pic.twitter.com/S5ovQIAPeK

— Let Women Speak Official (@StandingforXX) March 6, 2026

I saw this

The woman I’m talking to runs the Nottingham women’s centre. She was alarmed and distressed by my questions and comments about how disappointing it is for the women who founded the centre that it now includes men and therefore excludes some women. She’s using funds to get legal… pic.twitter.com/qxYjUa8XBJ

— Kellie-Jay Keen (@ThePosieParker) March 6, 2026

So I decided to seek information on this centre. On its home page you get enormous corporate Memphis balloon women and two headlines.

Run by women for all women.

We provide a supportive space to help all self-identifying women achieve their goals.

Got that? All women, by which they mean including the ones who are men. All self-identifying women, by which they mean including the ones who are men.

On their About us page they boast some more about how expansive their welcome is.

We exist to help all self-identifying women in Nottinghamshire reach their full potential, have their voices heard, and overcome barriers to create a better future for themselves and their children.

They even have a drop-in space. You can drop in!

We’re also a free, safe community space in Nottingham City Centre where any self-identifying woman can drop in for a cup of tea in our Welcome Space or relax and browse our Women’s Library. There’s no need to book unless you’re coming along for a specific service or activity, so pop in any time during our opening hours to have a look around.

Just pop in dahling! They’re here for you!

Tom Nichols explains that having a highly competent military in the hands of a highly incompetent idiot is not a good thing.

Strategy is about matching the instruments of national power—and especially military force—to the goals of national policy. The president and his team, however, have not enunciated an overarching goal for this war—or, more accurately, they have presented multiple goals and chosen among them almost randomly, depending on the day or the hour. This means that highly effective military operations are taking place in a strategic vacuum.

Worse, Donald Trump is now pointing to these missions as if the excellence with which they have been conducted somehow constitutes a strategy in itself. He appears so enthralled by the execution of these missions that he has enlarged the goals of this war to include the complete destruction of the Iranian regime, after which he will “Make Iran Great Again.”

In other words he’s like a little kid playing with a fancy new toy bomber plane with real smoke and bangs.

This kind of thinking is an old problem, and it has a name: “victory disease,” meaning that victory in battle encourages leaders to seek out more battles, and then to believe that winning those battles means that they are winning the larger war or achieving some grand strategic aim—right up until the moment they realize that they have overreached and find themselves facing a military disaster or even total defeat.

And if there’s anyone on the planet likely to fall victim to victory disease it’s Donald Trump.

American military operations have for the most part been astonishingly well executed. Years of training, study, and planning, along with careful use of intelligence, have all contributed to the rapid elimination of much of Iran’s capacity to project power, and almost all of its ability to resist allied attacks.

Operational competence, however, cannot answer the question of national purpose. What is the war about, and when will America know it’s done? Trump, when pressed, dodges the issue of war aims by pointing to the excellence of the military. “I hope you are impressed,” Trump said on Thursday to ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better.” Trump then repeated, “How do you like the performance?” Karl noted that no one is questioning the success of military operations, and he asked the president what happens next. “Forget about ‘next,’” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”

Yuh huh. That’s our boy. “Fagett about next. Just admire the bangs.”

Meanwhile, despite the successes of the military overseas, Trump now admits that a regime that was supposed to be eliminated quickly could reach the United States with terrorist attacks. He told Time this week that “we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.” 

Yes but we didn’t go to war, you did.