Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Protected under Article 10

    Andrew Tettenborn at The Critic tells us about a significant ruling at the ECHR on Tuesday:

    Rita Pal is an ex-NHS psychiatrist, activist and journalist writing mainly on medical matters for the leftish press, such as the Huffington Post; for a time she also ran her own online paper, the World Medical Times. About ten years ago she had an argument with barrister and ex-journalist Andrew Bousfield, a supporter of Patients First (another NHS pressure group) and sometime Private Eye stringer who on occasion questioned her accuracy and objectivity.

    The result was a bitter e-mail exchange. Bousfield went to the police alleging harassment, and in 2011 the Met sent Pal a so-called “prevention of harassment letter”, essentially putting her on notice of that complaint. Three years later Pal wrote an article attacking Bousfield’s competence and followed it with a number of vitriolic tweets which, while not naming Bousfield, could be read as referring to him. On this occasion the Met had had enough. It sent two officers to Pal’s house in Sutton Coldfield, arrested and handcuffed her, drove her to London and interviewed her for some hours before charging her with harassment and releasing her on bail on condition she wrote nothing referring to Bousfield. Eight months later the CPS dropped the case, on the grounds that Pal had said nothing not protected under Article 10 (the free speech provision) of the ECHR.

    Pal tried suing the Met for wrongful arrest but failed. She then went to Strasbourg, saying that even though the actual charges had been dropped, her arrest itself had had a chilling effect on her freedom of speech. Here she succeeded. In the absence of clear evidence that the Met had thought seriously about protecting Pal’s freedom of speech, they had no business arresting her in such a way as would clearly discourage her from exercising her speech rights.

    So does the same apply to Marion Millar? Ceri Black? Possibly.

    … the days of the non-crime hate incident may now be numbered. This, readers may remember, refers to the practice of the police in recording against a person’s name anything said by that person if anyone else perceives it as motivated by hate, without ever asking whether this characterisation is actually plausible. The Free Speech Union and others have campaigned against this for some time, thus far with no noticeable commitment from the government. But since recording such incidents can cause real harms (if it appears on an enhanced CRB check, for example, it may prevent a person gaining employment in a sensitive field), one suspects the government may feel itself on thin legal ice in preserving the system.

    May, or may just go right on sending Plod to drop a heavy hand on the shoulder of some evil feminist at her laptop.

  • Empower the pregnant people

    Mississippi’s Attorney General Lynn Fitch pretends to think that overturning Roe v Wade will “empower” women.

    In the opening brief she submitted in July, Fitch asked the Supreme Court to use Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade. She argued that abortion prevents women from reaching their full potential. When Roe was decided in 1973, she wrote, the justices maintained that an unwanted pregnancy would doom women to “a distressful life and future.” But nearly 50 years later, Fitch claims “sweeping policy advances” now allow women to fully pursue motherhood and a career, stamping out the need for abortion.

    One, like hell they do, but even if they did, it doesn’t follow that there is no reason left to end a pregnancy. Some women just don’t want to, and it’s not a kind of thing anyone else should force them to do.

    With this Supreme Court case, Fitch said in a television interview, God has presented women with an opportunity. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dreams and goals,” she said, addressing the women of America. “And you can have those beautiful children as well.”

    But what if you just don’t want those beautiful children as well?

    One of the economists who countered Fitch’s argument in the amicus brief points out that most U.S. mothers don’t have access to that kind of child care. “People from privilege experience a social safety net they imagine everyone else experiences,” said Kelly Jones, a professor of economics at American University who focuses on gender equality and welfare. When high-income people get pregnant unexpectedly, they can turn to family members or other members of their community, she said — or they can fly out of state to get an abortion. But many pregnant people have no one to fall back on and no money to pay for child care.

    Oops. There are the pregnant people again – twice. If it were people who got pregnant we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

    To Jennifer Riley Collins, the Democrat who ran against Fitch in the 2019 attorney general race, Fitch’s argument is “absurd.”

    “You want to empower women?” Collins said. “Put in place systems that support women. You don’t take away from women that which is their freedom.”

    The freedom to decide whether or not to house a human being inside your body is a pretty basic freedom.

  • You don’t get to

    Dillahunty is turning out to be quite a rich source of fatuities. Sinister fatuities.

    We “don’t get” to treat men as a [potential] threat, so that means we don’t get to have any kind of refuge away from men at all, no matter the circumstances or history. We “don’t get” to be aware of the statistics, we “don’t get” to know how many sexual assaults there are and how few of them lead to an arrest and how few of those go to trial and how few of those get a conviction. We don’t get to know what we have known since puberty, which is that adult males are much stronger than we are and can batter us any time they want to. We don’t get to know that some men do want to. We don’t get to take precautions of any kind.

    We have “no right” to exclude men. That’s it then. Open season.

  • Those women with penises

    Very Lewis Carroll, this one.

    Pay attention, willya?

  • Blasted, broke, swept

    Exciting.

    Penn’s Lia Thomas blasted the number one 200 free time and the second-fastest 500 free time in the nation on Saturday, breaking Penn program records in both events. She swept the 100-200-500 free individual events and contributed to the first-place 400 free relay in a tri-meet against Princeton and Cornell in her home pool. Penn split for the day, beating Cornell 219 to 81 but losing to Princeton, 106 to 194.

    Second fastest in the nation!! There’s glory for you.

    There’s just one tiny detail…

    A University of Pennsylvania “women’s” swimmer named Lia Thomas, who used to go by Will as a member of the men’s swimming team, is smashing records and has many wondering if Olympic superstar Katie Ledecky will be soon losing races to a transgender competitor.

    He’s smashing women’s records on account of how he’s a man.

    Dang, look at the neck on Lia.

  • To ensure that women are never erased

    On the one hand it’s grotesque that they did this. On the other hand it’s good that they’re not defending it and they are fixing it.

    One stone at a time.

    Updating to include action tweet:

  • All

    lol

  • Harrop and Hunte take their act on the road

    DOCTOR Adrian Harrop wasted no time after the GMC let him off with a one month suspension yesterday, he immediately spilled his guts to fellow fanatic Ben Hunte at VICE to explain again how saintly he is and how evil the women who disagree with him are.

    The headline sneers at the idea that Harrop’s tweets were anything other than perfectly reasonable and polite:

    ‘Humiliated but Determined’: Pro-Trans UK Doctor Suspended for ‘Insulting’ Tweets

    Because they weren’t insulting, you see. They were fine! Helpful! Polite!

    Adrian Harrop will be suspended for a month after sending “offensive” tweets to people who opposed his views on trans rights.

    Because they weren’t offensive, you see. Only a monster would say they were.

    A British doctor is being suspended from work after sending tweets found to be “insulting” and “inappropriate” to people who opposed his pro-trans rights views.

    In other words these horrible people want trans people to have no rights! Are you shocked enough yet?

    Speaking exclusively to VICE World News following the end of his tribunal hearing, Dr Adrian Harrop said the whole experience has been “mortifying”, but he’s now “more committed than ever before to making sure trans people can access healthcare.”

    Is he also more committed than ever to bullying women?

    The tribunal could have potentially ended with Harrop having his name erased from the medical register, which would have barred him from practising medicine. However, he will now be able to resume his work as a GP in Liverpool, and return to his job providing trans healthcare, after completing the one-month suspension.

    His job is providing trans healthcare? I thought he was a GP. I thought a GP provided general i.e. non-specialized care to the people in his practice.

    Several of Harrop’s tweets, seen by VICE World News, were sent in response to homophobic and transphobic posts he received, as well as some death threats. 

    It was all the evil bitches. Why aren’t they the ones being punished?

    The doctor’s case has been the subject of heated debate, both across social media and in-person at the hearing. VICE World News spoke to some of the self-described “gender atheists” present, some of whom took time off work, missed birthdays and “drove over five hours” to sit in the public gallery.

    See? See? Evil bitches, every last one of them.

    Asked if the continual backlash from “gender critics” has changed his mind about working in trans healthcare for the NHS, the doctor firmly said “absolutely not – I will be dedicating my energy and enthusiasm to improving things for trans people.”

    The man is a saint. A martyr and a saint.

    Members of the public were able to attend Harrop’s tribunal hearing, and several women who told VICE World News they are “extremely critical of gender identity” attended every session. They tweeted second-by-second updates of the hearing to their thousands of equally-critical followers.

    EVIL BITCHES! EVIL EVIL EVIL BITCHES!

    Following the judgment, some of them spoke to VICE World News on condition of anonymity. None of them use their real names in their online campaigning against trans equality. 

    The campaign is not actually “against trans equality” but don’t let that stop you. Any lie is justified in defense of The Cause!

    The punchline:

    Asked what he would say to other doctors who want to fight for LGBTQ rights on social media, Harrop quickly responded “just be very, very cautious.”

    Like, you know, skip the bullying and taunting and threats. That kind of cautious.

  • Actually leaving

    Innnnteresting.

  • Avoid

    It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know, but it’s good to see it in an actual news outlet, with a mug shot.

    Dr Adrian Harrop was said to have brought the profession into disrepute by posting the tweets, the tribunal said

    Smug git; steer clear.

  • To continue to exercise discretion

    Won’t somebody please think of the harrop.

    https://twitter.com/CF_Farrow/status/1465810466601586688

    Why should the women DOCTOR Harrop tormented care about allowing him to “move forward”? Why should they do what the GMC asks when the GMC did nothing to stop him tormenting women for years?

  • Lack of mention

    Science museum makes changes at the behest of science-denying loonies.

    The Science Museum is set to alter its Boy or Girl? display following complaints over a “lack of mention of transgender”.

    The museum in question is the science museum, just as it says in the name, the one in South Kensington, inspired by Dear Albert in the wake of the Great Exhibition. It matters, the way the one on Central Park West matters.

    Curators will make changes to a gallery covering human biology in order to “update (the) non inclusive narrative”, it can be revealed. 

    But science has nothing to do with being “inclusive” at the expense of being accurate. Science isn’t a club or a gang or a party, it’s a form of systematic inquiry and testing which creates bodies of knowledge. It’s not there to be “inclusive” for the sake of it.

    A display on sex characteristics titled Boy or Girl? has received complaints “due to the lack of mention of transgender”, according to internal documents, and there are plans to make alterations to the exhibit which asks “how are boys and girls different?” … Boy or Girl? had previously been altered to remove a sign which stated “your X and Y chromosomes define your biological sex” following complaints in 2016.

    X and Y are such non-inclusive letters.

  • A woman’s liberty interests are unique

    The Supreme Court knows who is a woman and who isn’t. Women are those people the government gets to force to bear children against their will. Women are those people who can’t make their own decisions about their own lives. Women are those people whose bodies belong to the state.

    Until now, all the court’s abortion decisions have upheld Roe‘s central framework — that women have a constitutional right to an abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb, until roughly between 22 and 24 weeks.

    But Mississippi’s law bans abortion after 15 weeks. A separate law enacted a year later would ban abortions after six weeks, and while the six-week ban is not at stake in this case, the state is now asking the Supreme Court to reverse all of its prior abortion decisions and to return the abortion question to the states.

    And since Donald Trump (who is a fan of abortion when the fetus is his) appointed three anti-abortion justices to the Court, Roe v Wade is screwed.

    [Lawyer Julie Rikelman of the Center for Reproductive Rights] argues that under the amendment’s “explicit protection for liberty,” the court has protected marriage, contraception and intimate relationships, even though those words are not in the Constitution, “just as it has protected the ability to make basic decisions about our bodies for over 100 years.”

    “What’s critical to remember,” she contends, “is that the court has long said that a woman’s liberty interests are unique when it comes to pregnancy. Her body and health are deeply affected by pregnancy, as is the course of her life, her ability to work, go to school and to prosper.”

    And it’s her body and her health – not the state’s and not the fetus’s.

    But the Court is what it is, so we’re going backward.

  • Always the men

    So I searched the posts archive and found the last time I had occasion to mention Matt Dillahunty: it was in February and March 2018 and it was about the fact that he and Sam Harris were booked to do an event with Lawrence Krauss despite accusations of sexual harassment against Krauss.

    It makes me tired all over again, just reading the posts. The whole idea of going anywhere – even from one room to another – to listen to those three wowing us with their giant male brains makes me want to hibernate. The one from February says why:

    I suppose this is a built-in hazard of having these all-male Celebrations of All the Brain Things That Women Can’t Do Because They’re Stupid – one or more of the men will turn out to have a long string of sexual harassment and downright assault in his or their past or pasts.

    Do they go together to some extent? This peacocking vanity of pretending to be movie stars Thought Leaders and this unfortunate tendency to trip and fall onto women?

    Yes, I think so. If they get a little fame they get a lot of immunity and looking the other way along with it. “Oh Doctor Professor Man sells tickets, we can’t possibly not invite him when he’s so kindly willing to perform, we’re sorry about the gropes or the insults or both but THE MAN SELLS TICKETS thank you for understanding.”

    Bros protecting bros

    The allegations that convinced him are not public

    I don’t see anything about Dillahunty and “transphobia” – I don’t know if I missed it or just didn’t say anything about it.

  • What’s relevant to being a woman

    The ego-dogmatism soup here is something to behold.

    Loud domineering guy tells the world that being biologically female isn’t relevant to being a woman. Not his to give away, yet again.

    And, those people who have wombs, those people without whom none of us would exist, are women. That’s the word for them. If the Matt Dillahuntys and Adrian Harrops succeed in their efforts to make that word not mean “the ones with wombs” then we’ll just have to get a new word which will mean the same thing. What’s the point of that? We already have the word. If the Harrahuntys want a word that means “men who playact being women” they should get a new one instead of stealing ours.

    There are a lot of scornful quote tweets.

    https://twitter.com/MyAccou72477627/status/1465688642718994432

  • Professional argumefying

    We’re not the ones who have “bought into the confusion.”

    A stupid counter-factual assertion doesn’t become less stupid or less counter-factual because you add a “Period” to it. Matt Dillahunty is Lauren Boebert’s second-best espresso machine. Period. See? It doesn’t work. Trans women are men who say they feel like women inside. That’s what “trans women” means. It’s the word “women” that means “women”; the phrase “trans women” means something else. The “trans” part of “trans women” indicates “not” or “opposite” or “fantasy.” It doesn’t indicate “real” or “literal” or “genuine.” And the “Period” is just decoration.

    And he’s wrong that it’s not remotely like believing the bread turns into Jesus. It’s really quite like it. Granted bread is a different kind of thing from a man who thinks he has the “identity” of a woman, but the belief in a miraculous change from one kind of thing to another kind of thing is plenty similar enough.

    But it gets worse.

    “It’s right there in the name” – oh come on. “God” is right there in the name too, but that doesn’t make the claims about “God” true. Of course it’s right there in the name: it’s right there in the name because the “trans women” put it there, because they’re hell bent on taking our ability to name ourselves away and giving it to themselves. The claim doesn’t become true because the people who want us to believe it’s true worded the claim so as to trick us into believing it’s true. Language isn’t magic that way.

    We’re not paying attention to Dillahunty’s saying some people with penises are women? And if we were paying such attention, we would Understand and Believe?

    What a buffoon.

  • Sadism & GPs shouldn’t mix

    Harrop was worse than I knew. Graham Linehan and ripx4nutmeg share some revolting details of what he and Stephanie Hayden did to Caroline Farrow:

    Not your average caring GP.

    Caroline’s husband is a Catholic priest at two parishes and in 2019 Harrop asked Stephanie Hayden for a game of golf, using a picture of one of her husband’s churches. Hayden famously has a conviction for attacking a man with a golf club.

    Taunts and “jokes” that went on and on, and more. Targeted sadistic relentless harassment of a woman he disagrees with over trans dogma. One month really doesn’t seem like enough after reading all that. (The worst harassment shown here was by someone else, but Harrop’s was only relatively less foul. The man’s a sadist.)

  • Women who choose to wear

    The BBC picks up a very long pair of tongs to talk about [whispers] hijab.

    Europe’s top human rights organisation has pulled posters from a campaign that promoted respect for Muslim women who choose to wear headscarves after provoking opposition in France.

    See it? The very long pair of tongs? It’s the “choose to” bit. It’s tendentious to talk about Muslim women “choosing to” wear hijab when in fact women are forced to wear it, and tortured or even killed for refusing to wear it, in many places where Islam has not liberalized even slightly.

    It’s probably the case that many Muslim women in Europe do have a choice, but it’s also well known that many of them don’t – that their parents or brothers or husbands don’t let them. We know that rules about female “modesty” are enforced with violence in France and the UK as well as in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It’s certainly more than well known enough for a news organization like the BBC to be aware of it. But still they insert that “choose to” even though they must know better than that.

    The Council of Europe released the images last week for a campaign against anti-Muslim discrimination.

    A campaign poster

    That doesn’t actually look like freedom though, does it – that tight muffling thing wrapped around the head and neck, and notice also the long sleeves on what the hijab-free woman seems to find a warm day.

    Several prominent French politicians condemned the message and argued the hijab did not represent freedom.

    But some Muslim women who wear headscarves said the reaction showed a lack of respect for diversity and the right to choose what to wear in France.

    France’s youth minister, Sarah El Haïry, said she was shocked by one poster, which showed a split image of one women wearing a hijab, and one not.

    In an interview on French TV, the minister suggested the poster had encouraged women to wear headscarves. She said this message jarred with the secular values of France, which had expressed its disapproval of the campaign.

    On Wednesday, the Council of Europe told the BBC that tweets related to the campaign had been deleted “while we reflect on a better presentation of this project”.

    Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe there just is no good way to frame the hijab as a “choice” when for millions of women it’s no such thing.

  • The one thing we do not debate

    The Times quotes Stonewall:

    A Stonewall spokesperson said: “It is not true that Stonewall looks to shut down debate. Meaningful, constructive debate and discussion around complex policy ideas are at the heart of what we do as a charity. The one thing we do not debate is whether trans people exist. They do, and what we need to discuss is how to make a world where all LGBTQ+ are free to be themselves.”

    Even if it’s true that Stonewall doesn’t look to shut down debate, it sure as hell does muddy it. That spokesperson spokement is some very wet sloppy mud.

    Nobody is saying “trans people don’t exist.” That’s not the issue at all. We all know there are plenty of people – who exist – who say they are trans. Of course we know that, we see them saying it every day. The issue is what that means, and whether or not it’s true, and what implications it has for everyone else.

    We don’t dispute or “debate” that some people say they are trans. We dispute the claim that saying you are sex X or Y means you are that sex. We dispute the idea that declaration supersedes physical reality. We dispute the magic-like belief that words=a change of sex.

    We also dispute the claim that it’s possible to change sex. We may agree that people can perform or “live as” the sex opposite their own, but we don’t agree that that makes them the sex opposite their own in every sense, and that not believing that claim is the height of evil and violence.

    But of course Stonewall doesn’t want to put it that way, because then the fantasy becomes all too obvious. It has to pretend that we’re skeptical of existence as opposed to attributes. It’s all a big tedious lie.

    As for “a world where all LGBTQ+ are free to be themselves” – the whole point is that they want to be not-themselves – they want to be other people’s selves. They want to pretend to be the sex of other people and to force everyone to endorse their fiction. That’s not a reasonable demand. We get to debate the fuck out of it.

  • Not relevant to being a woman

    Such a nice man, and (as he doesn’t mind saying himself) such a feminist.

    Huh. Tell that to a woman giving birth. Tell it to a woman in her 35th week of pregnancy. Tell it to a woman who’s been raped. Tell it to the women who lost medals to Veronica Ivy and Laurel Hubbard. Tell it, as another person on Twitter said to him, to the Taliban.