Republicans have gone all identity politics on us.

At this point, the best — and probably only — way to stop Trumpism would be for a significant share of Republicans to align with the Democratic Party, at least temporarily. But here’s the problem: For many Trump-skeptical Republicans, both elite and rank-and-file, being a Republican, and definitely not a Democrat, is a part of their personal identity. And so far, too few have been willing to prioritize the health of the country over this attachment.

That’s odd though, because what has Republican identity now become? It’s deeply entangled with Trump and trumpism and Trump’s revolting character and temperament and smashed moral compass. If you’re Trump-skeptical why would you cling to an identity that’s soaked in trumpism?

I’m pretty sure that people such as Bush, Cheney and Romney know that the pre-Trump Republican Party isn’t coming back. They can see that the GOP of 2021 is less about keeping the government small than, say, making it harder for Democratic-leaning Americans to vote and stopping Americans from learning about the lingering effects of slavery.

Not to mention cheering on Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and Mitch McConnell and stop I can’t take any more.

The term “identity politics” has become a pejorative, deployed to suggest that Democrats are too focused on people of color and women.

You know, if you combine women and people of color that turns out to be a lot of people. Why not be focused on such a massive demographic? When it’s the demographic that has less of a head start than white men? Just a thought; sorry to interrupt.

But political scientists say that one of the strongest identities in America today is which of the two parties a person supports and, perhaps even more so, which one they don’t.

That’s odd. I on the other hand am always sharply aware that though I vote for Democrats I’m not a Democrat. The Dems are generally too “moderate” for me, aka too conservative; I’m on the left as opposed to being a Dem. That’s part of my idenniny I guess.

Cancellations rebuked:

The University of Essex has today published Akua Reindorf’s Review of two events involving external speakers, concerning the controversy surrounding events at which Professor Jo Phoenix (Open University) and Professor Rosa Freedman (University of Reading) had been invited to speak.

The report concludes that the University breached the Professors’ rights to freedom of expression because of preconceptions about their views on trans rights and gender identity.

It was in breach of statutory duties and its own policies.

In Professor Phoenix’s case, a seminar which she was due to give in December 2019 was cancelled at the last minute because of threats of disruption. A flyer was circulated in the University bearing an image of a cartoon character pointing a gun and the words “SHUT THE F*** UP, TERF”. The report concluded that proper use of the University’s external speaker notification procedure would have averted the last minute panic which resulted in the cancellation. Thereafter, a decision was taken to not invite Professor Phoenix to give another seminar because of concerns that she would engage in “hate speech” against trans people. The report concluded that this amounted to blacklisting and was unlawful, and that there was no reasonable basis for thinking that Professor Phoenix might use unlawful speech of any kind.

That’s the thing about the category of “hate speech” against trans people – it’s defined so very broadly by the people who accuse that when an adult looks into it, it turns out to be a great big zero. Children squawk “But she will hate-speak!!!” and for some unfathomable reason institutions jump to disinvite and shun the invited speaker while the children celebrate another victory.

Professor Freedman was invited to take part in a roundtable discussion in January 2020 on the subject of The State of Antisemitism Today, as part of the University’s Holocaust Memorial Week event. After concerns were raised about her views on sex and gender the invitation was effectively rescinded. A member of the University posted a tweet comparing her views to Holocaust denial. The report concluded that the withdrawal of the invitation to Professor Freedman was particularly egregious because she had been invited to speak on a matter which was entirely unconnected to sex and gender and which was of particular personal significance to her.

But the children wanted her punished, and what the children want, the children get. Why is that? When the quality of their thought is so crude and empty, why is that?

he University’s apologies to the Professors and the actions which it intends to take in response to the report’s recommendations have been published on its website. The University intends to implement all of the recommendations save for the recommendation that it give consideration to the relative benefits and disbenefits of its relationship with Stonewall in light of the drawbacks and potential illegalities identified in the report as having arisen from that relationship.

That’s unfortunate. Stonewall is terrible. Universities should walk away from it – they should “disinvite” it, as it were.

Another letter.

The letter contains no surprises.

As leaders of trans and LGBTQ+ organisations we are writing to express our frustration and disappointment at the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) recent record on LGBTQ+ people’s rights and trans people’s rights specifically.

The emphasis is always on trans people. Why?

Probably because people are so easily bored. Lesbian, gay, that’s so last week – let’s have something fresher!

We are disappointed that, despite the realms of possibility to improve LGBTQ+ people’s lives and our access to our human rights, the EHRC has driven forward very little for our communities in recent years. Against that backdrop of a lack of support for LGBTQ+ people, we are frustrated that you then chose to intervene in a case to say that so-called ‘gender critical’ beliefs should be a protected philosophical belief.

In other words they’re frustrated that the Equality and Human Rights Commission says that women have a right to say that men are not women. If women don’t have a right to say that men are not women then we don’t have any rights at all, because a man can always bounce up and take them away from us while claiming to be a woman.

It was a kick in the teeth to trans people to see the EHRC appear to put their organisational weight behind a movement that has only contributed to rising hate for trans people in communities, creating a policy environment where it is harder for trans people to access their rights.

What about women and their ability to access their rights?

Brilliant: another mosque in India demolished in defiance of the law. That will turn out well.

A local administration in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has defied a state high court order and bulldozed a mosque, in one of the most inflammatory actions taken against a Muslim place of worship since the demolition of the Babri Mosque by a mob of Hindu nationalist rioters in 1992.

That did not go well.

On Monday, police and security services moved into the area and cleared it of people, then brought in bulldozers and demolished the mosque buildings. Debris was then thrown into a river, according to images and local accounts. Security services have been deployed to prevent anyone coming within a mile of where the mosque stood.

The state government of Uttar Pradesh is controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which also governs at national level.

The BJP is horrible. Hindu nationalists are theocrats just as Islamists are theocrats. Theocracy is bad, because gods cannot be held accountable or voted out of office.

The University of Melbourne.

The student union.

The women’s department of the student union of the University of Melbourne PRESENTS

Menstruation Beyond the Binary.

Oh goody I cannot wait. I am so sick of those selfish bitches – women – keeping menstruation all for themselves. There’s no privilege like cramps privilege! Feeling that uterus contract to expel the sludge is just the best damn thing, second only to the sheer fun of catching the sludge and then disposing of it without attracting attention or flies or anything else untoward.

You think I’m joking. No such luck. It’s two days from now.

The gendering of menstruation needs to stop, periodt.

I don’t know if “periodt” is a typo or some new bit of gender-special jargon, like the asterisk.

Anyway yeah, the gendering of menstruation needs to stop, and so does the gendering of testicles, and the gendering of lactation, and the gendering of who gets pregnant and who impregnates, and the gendering of who does the work of pushing the baby out of a small opening in the body.

Are your experiences being sidelined due to the language around menstruation? Or do you want to learn more about this issue? Organised by UMSU Women, Menstruation Beyond the Binary is a workshop to share and learn, with snacks provided!

Well, are they??? Are your experiences of menstruation being sidelined by people who have the colossal fucking nerve to talk about it as something that female people, and female people only, do? Well come on ahead to our meeting where we explain that men can totally menstruate, and have some tortilla chips and Tang!

Oh, one of those. Jeff gave Bill advice on how to get away from That Woman.

Bachelor sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein gave Bill Gates advice on ending his marriage with Melinda after the Microsoft co-founder complained about her during a series of meetings at the money manager’s mansion, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Gates used the gatherings at Epstein’s $77 million New York townhouse as an escape from what he told Epstein was a “toxic” marriage, a topic both men found humorous, a person who attended the meetings told The Daily Beast.

Bros before hos.

The people familiar with the matter said Gates found freedom in Epstein’s lair, where he met a rotating cast of bold-faced names and discussed worldly issues in between rounds of jokes and gossip—a “men’s club” atmosphere that irritated Melinda.

“[It’s] not an overstatement. Going to Jeffrey’s was a respite from his marriage. It was a way of getting away from Melinda,” one of the people who was at several of the meetings said, adding that Epstein and Gates “were very close.”

How sweet.

Matt Gaetz’s buddy pleaded guilty.

Joel Greenberg, a former Florida tax collector and close confidant of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, formally pleaded guilty on Monday morning to six federal charges in a court hearing, admitting to a federal judge that he had knowingly solicited and paid a minor for sex.

…

The guilty plea from Greenberg, a former Seminole County, Florida, tax commissioner, comes after he struck a deal with federal prosecutors to avoid some of the other 33 federal charges he had faced that ranged from identity theft to fraud and bribery allegations.

He sounds nice.

As part of the plea, Greenberg has agreed to give “substantial assistance” to prosecutors as part of their sprawling investigation, including by testifying at trials or in federal grand juries if needed and in turning over all documents he might have that could help the federal inquiry.

Federal investigators are still examining whether Gaetz broke federal sex trafficking, prostitution and public corruption laws and whether he had sex with a minor. Gaetz has not been charged and denies any wrongdoing.

Previously, CNN reported that Greenberg had been providing information to investigators about how he and Gaetz had encounters with women who were given cash or gifts in exchange for sex.

Tick tick tick.

Foxkiller giving us our orders again.

Employers should protect staff from bigotry, yes, but what are we defining as “bigotry”? Foxie of course is defining not believing that men are women as “bigotry,” which is just silly. He doesn’t expect us to believe he’s a woman, so why does he expect us to believe other men are women simply because they say they are? He’s a lawyer ffs: surely lawyers are sharply aware that people often say things that are not true.

And no, replacing “trans” with “gay” or “disabled” in the phrase “staff who question trans rights” doesn’t help. Why not? Because we’re talking about different things. Gay rights and disabled rights are the familiar kind – no persecution or bullying, no refusal to hire or serve in a shop or rent accomodation to, no exploitation or oppression. Trans “rights” are a different kind of thing altogether: they’re about forcing us to agree that they are what they say they are even though we know they’re not; they’re about “including” them as the sex they say they are even though we know they’re not; they’re about taking women’s prizes and jobs and facilities even thought they’re men. They’re not actually “rights” at all, they’re more like a con game.

Maya’s views are not “a problem.” Maugham’s on the other hand…

Deborah Cameron has an interesting post about “a longstanding feminist bone of contention: the use of the terms ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’ to address teachers in UK schools.”

You can see where the contention comes in: “Sir” ain’t comparable to “Miss.”

In other contexts the female address term analogous to ‘Sir’ is not ‘Miss’ but ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’: though ‘madam’ has undergone some semantic derogation (it has acquired the specialised meaning ‘woman in charge of a brothel’), as an address term it retains a higher degree of formality and gravitas than ‘Miss’. That’s presumably why the related form ‘Ma’am’ has become the standard address term for senior female officers in the armed forces and the police. ‘Miss’ does not suggest deference to someone senior…

Even if you don’t find it belittling, it’s less deferential than ‘Sir’. As the feminist linguist Jennifer Coates commented in 2014, ‘Sir is a knight, but Miss is ridiculous–it doesn’t match Sir at all’.  She added:

It’s a depressing example of how women are given low status and men, no matter how young or new in the job they are, are given high status.

But it’s complicated. Do we level up, or do we level down?

One complicating factor is our old friend the sociolinguistics of status and solidarity. The non-reciprocal use of any title marks the existence of a status hierarchy (if you call me ‘Professor’ and I call you ‘Susie’ it’s a safe bet that I outrank you), and feminists tend to be ambivalent about that, caught between resenting the way respect-titles are often withheld from women when men get them automatically, and feeling we shouldn’t care, because after all, we believe in equality. In that egalitarian spirit, some of the people who answered my question on Twitter said they’d prefer to be called by their first names. Though these commenters were critical of ‘Miss’, their objection was more to status-marking in general than to the sexism of ‘Miss’ in particular. This brought them into conflict with other people who were more interested in levelling up (ensuring that women teachers got the same respect as men) than levelling down (flattening the hierarchy by eliminating titles).

Speaking of “Miss” and “Madam” and their connotations…

The connotations of “Mind your place” are all too chillingly obvious.

Bad.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider a major rollback of abortion rights, saying it will decide whether states can ban abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The court’s order sets up a showdown over abortion, probably in the fall, with a more conservative court seemingly ready to dramatically alter nearly 50 years of rulings on abortion rights.

The court first announced a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and reaffirmed it 19 years later.

The case involves a Mississippi law that would prohibit abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. The state’s ban had been blocked by lower courts as inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent that protects a woman’s right to obtain an abortion before the fetus can survive outside her womb.

If she identifies as a man will she get an exemption?

Brenda Brooks at Feminist Current on the Oprah interview with Ellen “Elliott” Page:

I watched the Oprah interview with interest, hoping that Page might be encouraged to discuss the nature of the compelling urge that led to such a seminal modification in herself. I wondered: what were the specifics that define a woman or a man so clearly that altering one’s body to eliminate one set of discrepancies, and confirm others, made sense? A clear definition between the two would be required, wouldn’t it, in order to choose to go forward in life as one sex, rather than the other? Was transition a mostly psychological event, or primarily physical? I wondered what changes would occur in future relationships. Would the previous role of “woman” be rescinded in some way? Was there something we might call a male essence that now existed within? If so, could it be described?

Those are interesting questions. Why is it not enough to reject the stereotypes that limit both sexes and just try to be whatever kind of human feels the most like you? What is the feeling that requires more? Tell us about it, explain it to us.

At a 2014 conference in support of LGBT youth, Page commented on the criticism she sometimes received for refusing to dress according to feminine standards, “There are pervasive stereotypes about masculine and feminine that define how we’re all supposed to act, dress, and speak, and they serve no one.” I hoped that Oprah might probe this observation. If Page truly saw gender stereotypes for what they are (superficial, damaging assumptions about what it is to be male or female) on what basis was the decision made to “change sex,” even going so far as to undergo the removal of her breasts? I hoped that Winfrey wouldn’t miss the opportunity to have the nuanced, complex discussion such decisions would seem to warrant, and, in a broader societal sense, require.

Winfrey didn’t ask the questions I would have liked to hear, but in this case I could hardly blame her. Page seemed too vulnerable, even fragile, to warrant a probing inquiry of any depth. In addition, Winfrey may have felt uncomfortable questioning the topic of “trans” too deeply for fear of blowback. Her mandate, as is true for media generally, was to affirm Page’s decisions and beliefs, not inquire into them in order to gain a deeper understanding.

And why is that the mandate? I can only assume it’s because that “blowback” is so ferocious and so damaging.

She tells Winfrey “I feel like I haven’t gotten to be myself since I was 10 years old.” In that moment it occurred to me that Page’s physical appearance was closer to an androgynous adolescent than a 34-year-old man (or woman, for that matter) — as if, after winding things up with Oprah, she might head off to get the school picture taken. I found myself wondering if what was truly being longed for were the lost years of childhood, those days when, for a magical, blessed time, we are neither boys or girls — we simply are.

That seems all too likely, and sad. Leaving childhood behind is difficult, but dang, surely being stuck in it forever is worse. It’s difficult for adolescents because they still are partly children, but that doesn’t go on being true forever. That ol’ prefrontal cortex does its slow developing and eventually the child is just gone, and the adult may like to remember her childhood but she doesn’t want to literally revert to it.

Like Page, I too want children to have the opportunity to be themselves at 10 and beyond — to be able to observe themselves in a mirror and see their true selves, to persevere in this crazy world long enough to understand a simple truth: it is not possible to be born in the wrong body. It is only a matter of being born in the wrong time — a time when damaging and dangerous stereotypes have risen once again in conjunction with society’s ability and willingness to perform invasive and irreversible medical procedures.

And make a lot of money doing it.

Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Elliot Page is a disturbing reminder that, under the guise of inclusivity, kindness, and affirmation, children are being led by a Pied Piper blend of media, medicine, politics, and celebrity, into a world of catastrophic self-loathing instead.

Catastrophic self-loathing and self-mutilation.

Trust Ash Sarkar for that. Woman’s Hour talks to a couple of women and Sarkar intervenes to tell it to talk to different people instead. Self-hating woman rebukes Woman’s Hour for not being as self-hating as she is.

Right, because we never hear from “trans and nonbinary” people, apart from all the fucking time. It’s mandatory to interrupt women who are talking about how something affects women to say shut up about women when are you going to talk about “trans and nonbinary” people instead? Women don’t matter, women are old news, women are Mommy and we hate Mommy, women are privilege, women are Karen, women cause all the problems, women are the worst, shut up about women shut up shut up SHUT UP.

Some warped legal reasoning here from a University of Alabama law guy:

Laws that prohibit physicians from providing treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-hormone therapy to minors are bad public policy. Their advocates claim that these are efforts to protect kids, who they argue may later change their mind, from medical treatments they characterize as irreversible. But these arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny: The laws—such as the one Arkansas just passed and those that more than a dozen other states, including Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, are actively considering—will certainly harm transgender children, denying them medical care that they need and causing them psychological pain. That should be reason enough to oppose these laws.

Wait a second though. It’s hotly disputed whether puberty blockers and cross-hormone “therapy” are “treatments” at all. What’s the disease they’re treating? There is no disease, there’s an idée fixe about being the “wrong” gender and wanting to “change sex” to correct the mistake. It’s a delusion, and it’s not at all clear that it’s in the patient’s best interest to treat the idée fixe as real and needing “treatment” in the form of fiddling with the genitals and breasts and hormones.

The most obvious, and compelling, constitutional objection to Arkansas’s Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act and laws like it arises from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. That guarantee means, among other things, that a state government may not target one group of residents for discriminatory treatment arising from animus, dislike, or irrational fear.

Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has consistently rejected moral disapproval of a particular group of individuals as a constitutionally legitimate basis for imposing targeted legal burdens on the group. Thus, when Congress attempted to, in the Court’s assessment, “prevent so-called ‘hippies’ and ‘hippie communes’ from participating in the food stamp program,” the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the ban for otherwise eligible “hippies.”

But this isn’t that. The laws are meant to benefit the putative trans teenagers over the long haul, because most adolescents who say they are trans desist as they get older.

It may also be true that some legislators find trans dogma irritating, but the rest of us out here in the big world are watching in horror as activists breezily dismiss all concerns about for instance what about this teenager’s future sex life and reproductive life? Is it really a good idea to destroy both forever just because the teenager claims to be this thing called “trans”? Isn’t it possible that the legislators – even Republican ones – are right to see that as a problem? Isn’t it possible that legislators who take the other view are being appallingly reckless with other people’s futures?

In clear contradiction of this constitutional rule, Arkansas’s SAFE Act singles out one group in need of medical care—transgender children—and makes the provision of that care within the state unlawful.

But it isn’t medical care. It isn’t medical care. It isn’t. Cutting off healthy breasts and penises isn’t medical care.

How do they not see this?

Trans identifying Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir is shocked shocked that anyone thinks people have a right to say that men are not women.

Last week a court in the UK heard an appeal from a tax researcher called Maya Forstater who lost an employment tribunal in 2019 – she was sacked after tweeting that transgender women can’t change their biological sex.

…

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) saw reason to intervene. In my view it is bizarre that they found it important to speak up for someone who clearly holds hostile views towards a vulnerable minority. 

It’s not “hostile” to say that men are not women. It’s also not a mere “view” that men are not women. It’s a fantasy, and a silly one at that, that people can become the other sex. People can’t become tables or goats or jumbo jets, and it’s not hostile to say that. People can’t become wizards or ghosts or time-travelers, and it’s not hostile to say that.

And I’m becoming less and less able to believe that trans people are really a “vulnerable minority.” I think it’s more that they’re an entitled demanding aggressive minority.

The EHRC assert that they protect people from discrimination, even if their beliefs might be controversial or offensive — but do say this does not include extreme beliefs such as ‘a belief in racial superiority’. 

I honestly find it quite shocking that the EHRC would intervene and suggest that ‘gender critical’ views should be protected beliefs that aren’t extreme — because ‘gender critical’ beliefs are in my mind the exact definition of extreme views. As the judge said in the original tribunal, they ‘are not worthy of respect in a democratic society.‘

Yes but the judge was wrong, and rather horribly wrong at that. It’s not “extreme” to think and say that men are not women – it’s central to the meaning of the word “men” that it excludes women, and vice versa. Humans are female and male, and the one is not the other.

Like that. Many species have female and male, and humans are one such species.

The whole foundation of being ‘gender critical’ is to be vehemently against the right of trans people to participate equally in society as their gender, whether that is socially or legally. The ideology centres first and foremost on the exclusion of trans people and renunciation of everything they are.

No it isn’t. He certainly does tell a lot of lies, doesn’t he. Maybe it’s because he’s so vulnerable and minor? “Vehemence” has nothing to do with anything, and the point of the gender critical position is to say no to men who try to take prizes and institutions and jobs and facilities that are reserved for women. We have a right to refuse to share those. Men don’t have a right to force us to share them.

At the heart of ‘gender critical’ views is the repeated claim that ‘sex cannot be changed’ – which certainly isn’t being stated as a neutral or objective observation or fact by them. It is said to be deliberately offensive and disrespectful to trans people.

No, that’s back to front. We say it because it’s true. The fact that some trans people fly into a rage when we say it is not our fault, and it’s certainly not a reason for us to stop saying it. Our stuff is our stuff, which it’s taken us thousands of years to get, and no we don’t have to share it. Sharing it would be a betrayal of all the women who helped us get it.

Alan Sokal points out (not for the first time) a certain insouciance about the difference between facts and fantasies.

For millennia—since at least ancient Greece—philosophers have debated what constitutes knowledge and how one can legitimately acquire it. But when philosophers returned from their seminars back into the real world, even the most ardent anti-realists generally adopted the common-sense view that there do exist objective facts—situations in the external world that are independent of our beliefs—and that, sometimes at least, we can obtain reasonably reliable knowledge of those objective facts, through evidence and reasoning.

But, starting about 40 years ago, a small coterie of social-constructivist sociologists of science began to break this consensus, with radical claims like:

-The validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence.

-The natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge.

-For the relativist (such as ourselves) there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such.

These ideas were in turn picked up by postmodernist scholars—mostly in departments of literature, it must be said, not philosophy—and from there percolated into the rest of society. There, they became part of the mother’s milk—the unexamined conventional wisdom—of some sectors of the “woke” left. “There is no objective, neutral reality,” writes Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling White Fragility.

What goes around, comes around. Now everyone—Trumpists included—can have their own “alternative facts.”

Which, he emphasizes, isn’t to say that Trumpists are students of postmodernism or that postmodernists are to blame for Trumpism, but:

When all is said and done, postmodernist academics and their activist followers are not to blame for any of the evils of today’s right wing. What postmodernist relativism has wrought is, rather, something more insidious: by devaluing the concept of objective truth, it has undermined our own ability to combat objective untruths—to develop herd immunity to a pandemic of viral disinformation, as one writer eloquently put it.

Now the genie is out of the bottle, and I honestly don’t know how to put it back in.

He doesn’t mention the ideology of fungible sex/gender, which is why I just did. Same genie, same bottle, same difficulty putting it back.

Antisemitic and antifemale, too.

A police investigation has been launched after a video was circulated on social media showing antisemitic chants being shouted from a convoy of cars in north London.

Finchley Road, to be exact.

Politicians condemned the footage, which was posted on Twitter and showed the cars travelling through the St John’s Wood area of north London on Sunday afternoon. The cars were covered in Palestinian flags with a speaker blasting out antisemitic slurs and threats against Jews.

Threats against Jews and “their daughters” – which is a telltale way of putting it.

The Metropolitan police said of the incident in Finchley Road:. “We are aware of a video appearing to show antisemitic language being shouted from a convoy of cars in the St John’s Wood area this afternoon. “Officers are carrying out urgent enquiries to identify those responsible. This sort of behaviour will not be tolerated.”

This isn’t cancel culture or no-platforming. Screaming “rape their daughters” is incitement.

The housing and communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, said the video was “deeply disturbing”. He added: “Vile, criminal hatred like this must not be tolerated.”

In a statement, Jenrick continued: “Whatever your view of the conflict in Israel and Gaza, there is no justification for inciting anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim hatred. The incidents of antisemitism we have seen in recent days have been shameful.

Yes but focus. It isn’t the hatred itself, which the law can’t really touch; it’s the driving through a heavily Jewish neighborhood screaming “Fuck the Jews, rape their daughters.” It would be equally shameful and unjustifiable to drive through Tower Hamlets screaming “Fuck the Muslims, rape their daughters.”

Fair Play for Women on the fad for putting a few men in women’s prisons:

In July 2019 a specialist unit was opened on the Downview women’s prison estate to house high-risk transgender prisoners. We obtained the Equality Impact assessment through a Freedom of Information Request. The document is now available to view here: Equality Analysis Document E Wing Version 16.0 for publication.

…

‘E-wing’ was the solution to a problem of where to accommodate high-risk male prisoners who have acquired a GRC and so need to be treated as “female for all purposes”. Some of these prisoners are dangerous sex offenders who under normal circumstance would be considered too high-risk to mix with women. But the MOJ decided that their GRC meant they had to be treated differently from the trans prisoners without a GRC.

In other words the MOJ decided that their GRC mattered more than the safety of female prisoners. That’s a deeply weird thing to decide.

An operational need to find a long-term solution that appropriately balances the rights of men who say they are women and the rights and safety of the female prisoners. Just look at that. Women have to compromise on their rights and safety because a small subset of men says it Identifies As women. Real women have to give up their rights and safety because some men are pretending to be women.

They might as well just give up altogether. They might as well just say women have to “appropriately balance” their rights with the rights of violent abusive men at home and at work and on the street and everywhere else because the violent abusive men say so.

It is then confirmed on page 5 that the MOJ considers trans prisoners are “required to be located in the women’s estate because they hold a GRC”. No acknowledgement of the single-sex exemptions that enable males to be excluded from female-only spaces, even if they do have a GRC.

“Given the need to advance equality and eliminate discrimination” – against men who say they are women, that is. Plain ordinary boring actual women, the ones who just are women, don’t matter. There’s no need to advance their equality or eliminate discrimination against them. They have been moved to the class “Karens” for ease of forgetting. The only women who matter now are the male ones.

Parody? Must be? But apparently not.

As if anybody wants to ask this fool about anything.

(The underlying message, on the other hand, is the usual absurdity. “Don’t interpret my genitals as determining my sex. I have Magic Gender so I’m Special, and you have to genuflect.”)

Trump is chewing the wallpaper.

mole at the counter is hilarious.

OUT OF DATE BUFFET CAR SAUSAGE ROLL FILMS hahahahahahaha