A woman wonders, very tentatively, if there’s anything at all sexist about the ever-escalating trend (aka pressure) for women to spend much of their time and money repairing putative flaws in their faces breasts genitals buttocks legs arms hands feet nails teeth hair.

It’s nothing shocking now for women of my age (30) and younger to seek out anti-ageing procedures. To feel troubled by this puts you in strange territory.

I feel sometimes there is a feedback loop in feminism. Issues first raised by second-wave feminism – and perhaps broached too prescriptively – were later reconsidered under the idea that feminism should allow women to do what they want. Take body hair removal. Quite rightly, feminists over the years have highlighted shaving and waxing as an area of inequality, a thing women generally have to bother with if they don’t wish to face ridicule or worse. Later this idea was readdressed, with some third-wave feminists arguing that if shaving feels good to an individual woman, then it shouldn’t be seen as oppressive – it could, for her, be an act of empowerment.

In other words to throw out feminism altogether. “Third wave” feminism isn’t feminism at all, it’s just the same old shit with the label “choice” added. Shaving doesn’t “feel good” to an individual woman out of nowhere, it “feels good” because she’s aware of the social expectations and the punishments for not meeting them. Doing what those expectations dictate is not “empowerment.” Hairless legs and crotches do not equal power.

I have no moral high ground here: the only reason I don’t commit to all those ways of rendering yourself standardly attractive to society is that I’m too lazy or too cheap, not because I’m above doing it. I have no admonishment whatsoever for individual women who get to feel a bit happier about their appearances, and I don’t believe it is morally wrong to get cosmetic procedures. At the same time, I think we are foolish to accept the mainstreaming of cosmetic intervention without querying what it will do to us. 

That “at the same time” is doing a lot of work.

Forget it. Forget trying to appease the choosy-choice pseudo-feminists. You can’t do it anyway, so don’t bother to try.

I also feel this way about the uncritical discussion of rough sex and BDSM practices.

You mean men strangling women? That “rough sex”? The kind that too often ends up with a dead woman and a live man who says oops and goes on his way rejoicing?

I’ve seen young women whose politics I share disavow contemporary feminism altogether, because all they see in the movement are self-interested white women who exclude trans people, sex workers or other demographics that don’t include them. 

That’s not what you’re seeing though. Feminist women don’t “exclude trans people”; we refuse to “include” men in the category “women,” because that category is for women (and so not men). Feminism is for and about women, not men who say they are women. And feminism doesn’t exclude women exploited by the sex trade, it excludes pimps. And this feminism – the real feminism – is not exclusively white, either.

Frank Bruni at the Times says Tucker Carlson is trying to be the new Trump – i.e. the new guy who says stupid shit to rile people up. Grab some popcorn, kids, it’s another episode of Who’s the Biggest Troll?

Case in point: Carlson’s endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.

“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart,” Carlson railed. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse.”

So what we should do, no doubt, is deny him the attention he’s obviously seeking, but then again it’s not as if that will make him go away any sooner.

Like Trump, he has decided that virality is its own reward. And he’s being amply rewarded, as exemplified in this very column. I’d prefer to ignore him, but I face the same irreconcilable considerations that all the others who aren’t ignoring him do.

To give him attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich. In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host — ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow — and it meant that he was both capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.

Quite so.

The amount of real estate that Carlson occupies in political newsletters that I subscribe to seems to have grown in proportion to the amount that Trump has lost. (That’s my own replacement theory.) And it proves that we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.

Is it that we need villains of that kind? Or is it that villains of that kind are very bad and so they motivate us to say how they are bad. I don’t feel much of a need for smug conceited cruel people, but when they’re wielding their smug conceited cruelty like a battering ram then I feel a need to talk about it.

#CreepyTucker is trending on the Twitterbox, and this is why.

Obama is “some creepy old guy.”

A cheerful prospect.

The New York Times did an offensively bad and one-sided job of Explaining the moves to prevent boys from competing against girls in school sports. To put it more bluntly, they argued for allowing boys to compete against girls as if it were just obviously fine and not at all unfair.

I’m quoting from the transcript. It’s worth listening to some, to hear how emphasis is used to tip the scales even more.

Just four months into 2021, Republican state lawmakers across the country have already proposed more bills restricting the lives of transgender youth than in any previous year. Today, Sabrina Tavernise spoke with our colleague, Dan Levin, about what’s behind these bills and the impact they could have on the children and families that they target.

This is a transcript of a podcast, which is why they start every single exchange with “so” – which a producer or someone should teach them to stop doing.

Sabrina Tavernise: So, Dan, can you start by telling us what are these bills we’ve been seeing around the country?

Dan Levin: So, the big national picture is, since January, in often Republican-controlled legislatures in over 30 states, lawmakers have introduced more than 80 bills that focus on the rights of transgender youth. And these bills kind of fall into two main baskets. The first focus is on trans youth in sports. And the other big basket of bills is around transgender medical care.

Sabrina Tavernise: So, Dan, let’s start with the first basket. Tell me about the sports bills.

Dan Levin: So these bills have been introduced in states from Texas to Florida to West Virginia, Kansas, and Missouri. And the major focus of these transgender sports bills is that they aim to prevent transgender athletes, and really, in most of these cases, transgender women and girls from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity.

Sabrina Tavernise: So let me make sure I understand this. This would bar a girl who was called male at birth from playing on a female soccer team.

No, it would bar a boy who calls himself a girl from playing on a female soccer team. The magic story we’re being told about Trans Girls is just that: a magic story. It’s not true. Justice and fairness don’t require adult journalists to pretend it is true.

Dan Levin: Exactly. These bills would ban transgender girls on a high school soccer team or a middle school soccer team or in a college team from playing on women’s teams.

That is, boys.

Dan Levin: The main argument of proponents of these bills is that they’re all about ensuring fair competition in sports.

They play a clip of a legislator saying it’s not fair to girls.

Dan Levin: They say that women and girls might be physically outmatched by transgender women and girls.

Might??

Sabrina Tavernise: Dan, is there any truth to the argument that trans women have certain advantages in sports? Tell me about that.

Dan Levin: So this is a highly debated question. And there isn’t enough research done on transgender athletes to say definitively. But what we do know is that the American Academy of Pediatrics has stated that kids should play on sports teams that match their gender identity. And sports associations like the N.C.A.A. and the International Olympic Committee already have policies in place to really ensure that athletics can be inclusive of transgender women, while also ensuring fair competition.

No they don’t. They have policies to do with testosterone, which is only part of the advantage males have. Less or more testosterone won’t do anything about the bigger bones and muscles, the greater lung capacity, and the other hard-wired physical advantages.

Many school athletics associations are saying this is not really an issue. And they have come out against these bills, saying they are based on stereotypes and are actually not really needed. And trans advocates also say that these bills are incredibly invasive in that many of them would allow anyone to contest a student athlete’s gender. And that student would then be required to undergo, say, a genital exam, other kind of testing that would just be incredibly stigmatizing and invasive.

ST: Wow. How often does this question of transgender athletes playing on sports teams even come up, Dan? Are there a lot of schools encountering this?

DL: There really aren’t. Transgender youth make up less than 2 percent of the population, according to recent estimates. And trans athletes are even fewer. Last month, the Associated Press reached out to sponsors of these anti-trans sports bills in more than 20 states. And many of these sponsors could not cite a single instance in their state or their region where the participation of transgender athletes has caused problems.

Oh well that’s ok then. It will happen to only a few girls, at first, so that’s fine. Who cares anyway, when they’re only girls. The really important people are boys who say they’re girls.

Bastards.

About Australia’s travel ban from India…

Scott Morrison has continued his “don’t worry about the India travel ban” media tour this morning on Nine’s Today show, where he was asked about former test cricket opener Michael Slater’s comments that the prime minister has “blood on his hands”.

…

The decision to make attempting to return to Australia within 14 days of being in India a criminal offence punishable with up 5 years in prison and fines as high as $60,000 has been roundly criticised. Morrison has been going to great lengths to water down this rhetoric this morning.

The likelihood of any sanction, anything like that is extremely remote.

If the law is on the books the law is on the books. It’s not much comfort to claim that the likelihood of enforcement is extremely remote. If that’s the case why is the law the law?

Maybe it won’t be for long.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull says Australians must have the right to come home, appearing on ABC News Breakfast to criticise the government’s India travel ban.

Well, look, it must be a fundamental right for every Australian citizen to be able to come home. The… song “I Still Call Australia Home” sounds ironic now, doesn’t it? It has a bitter taste to it.

That is the first thing – Australians must have the right to come home. The Commonwealth has the obligation to make it safe for them to do so.

The thing is, it’s not a universal rule.

Scott Morrison has been asked why Australia didn’t ban travellers from the US or UK despite similar rates of infection during their respective spikes, and if the characterisation of the Indian policy as “racist” is fair.

Morrison’s tactic when asked this is to talk about China, which by the most generous of characterisations is only vaguely related to the issue.

Ok how about Thailand? Sri Lanka? Kenya? Are we getting warmer?

But it’s not dehumanizing.

But it’s not dehumanizing. Women are human. Saying a woman is a woman isn’t dehumanizing her. You can call it rude or unkind if you like, but it’s not even slightly dehumanizing. Women and men are both human.

He’s 38 years old. I do find that slightly shocking. People should be reasonably adult by that age.

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic sought out some vax-refuseniks to explain their thinking.

The people I spoke with were all under 50. A few of them self-identified as Republican, and none of them claimed the modern Democratic Party as their political home. Most said they weren’t against all vaccines; they were just a “no” on this vaccine. They were COVID-19 no-vaxxers, not overall anti-vaxxers.

Many people I spoke with said they trusted their immune system to protect them. “Nobody ever looks at it from the perspective of a guy who’s like me,” Bradley Baca, a 39-year-old truck driver in Colorado, told me. “As an essential worker, my life was never going to change in the pandemic, and I knew I was going to get COVID no matter what. Now I think I’ve got the antibodies, so why would I take a risk on the vaccine?”

Because thinking you’ve got the antibodies doesn’t sound like much of a magic protection? Because COVID is a bigger risk than the vaccine?

Many people said they had read up on the risk of COVID-19 to people under 50 and felt that the pandemic didn’t pose a particularly grave threat. “The chances of me dying from a car accident are higher than my dying of COVID,” said Michael Searle, a 36-year-old who owns a consulting firm in Austin, Texas. “But it’s not like I don’t get in my car.”

But there is no vaccine for a car crash. If there were, wouldn’t it make sense to get it?

And many others said that perceived liberal overreach had pushed them to the right. “Before March 2020, I was a solid progressive Democrat,” Jenin Younes, a 37-year-old attorney, said. “I am so disturbed by the Democrats’ failure to recognize the importance of civil liberties. I’ll vote for anyone who takes a strong stand for civil liberties and doesn’t permit the erosion of our fundamental rights that we are seeing now.” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, also told me he didn’t vote much before the pandemic, but the perception of liberal overreach had a strong politicizing effect. “When COVID hit, I saw rights being taken away. So in 2020, I voted for the first time in my life, and I voted all the way Republican down the ballot.”

Civil liberties are important, but you can’t exercise them if you’re dead, and they’re not so important that they override our duties to other people.

But the no-vaxxers I spoke with just don’t care. They’ve traveled, eaten in restaurants, gathered with friends inside, gotten COVID-19 or not gotten COVID-19, survived, and decided it was no big deal. What’s more, they’ve survived while flouting the advice of the CDC, the WHO, Anthony Fauci, Democratic lawmakers, and liberals, whom they don’t trust to give them straight answers on anything virus-related.

The no-vaxxers’ reasoning is motivated too. Specifically, they’re motivated to distrust public-health authorities who they’ve decided are a bunch of phony neurotics, and they’re motivated to see the vaccines as a risky pharmaceutical experiment, rather than as a clear breakthrough that might restore normal life (which, again, they barely stopped living). This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites‪.

The thing about one’s own mind is that it’s just one mind. Epidemiology is the work of many minds, part of whose job it is to check each other’s work. Do I trust my own mind on epidemiology more than I trust a whole institution of epidemiologists on epidemiology? The question answers itself. Institutions can get things wrong despite all the checking, of course, but so can individual minds.

We can’t have herd immunity because people are too stupid.

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

Like car crashes and flu and diabetes, I suppose.

The sad joke is, the more modest goal will be another reason for people to decide not to get vaccinated, which will make the modest goal harder to reach.

The endpoint has changed, but the most pressing challenge remains the same: persuading as many people as possible to get the shot.

So it’s too bad that so many “influencers” are shouting on social media that it’s all a deep state plot, or even Nazism.

“Kapos” ffs.

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre puts the lotion on its skin.

Who wouldn’t be delighted to welcome a man as head of a rape crisis centre?

Trevor Phillips warned of the problem back in 2018.

The disaster of the public consultation process on gender recognition has revealed a government so terrified of being labelled transphobic that it is ready to destroy half a century of painstakingly assembled anti-discrimination legislation to the detriment of every woman, person of colour and disabled individual in Britain. Under the current law, a change of gender requires a two-year period of reflection, medical checks and possible physical alterations. It is a gruelling process and proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act rightly aim to make the process less bureaucratic.

However, agitation by a guilt-tripping band of “trans” activists has corralled MPs into contemplating a wholly unnecessary and dangerous further step. It is seriously being suggested that we should do away with any objective test of gender, and leave the decision as to whether an individual should be treated as male or female entirely in the hands of the person themselves. In short, a man would be able to declare himself a woman, and immediately have every right to enter spaces reserved for women — changing rooms, lavatories, prisons.

And lo it came to pass!

The problem is this: if self-declaration becomes established as a principle for one protected characteristic — gender — why should it not apply to all of the other eight, including disability or race?

How indeed? Nobody has actually said, other than shouting louder.

I can already hear outrage at the comparison. The activists will complain that equating gender with disability is yet another example of galloping transphobia. But why shouldn’t a society ask individuals to pass objective tests to acquire identity status? Without criteria other than personal preference, it would be impossible to decide whether some groups truly suffer disadvantage — a big issue for women and people of colour.

Can confirm.

So apparently Rudy Giuliani should be allowed to break whatever laws he chooses now, because if he’s not then that’s fascism?

Attorney Alan Dershowitz on Sunday criticized federal agents’ raid on Rudy Giuliani’s apartment last week, telling radio host John Catsimatidis that it was reminiscent of conduct seen in authoritarian countries.

“In banana republics, in Castro‘s Cuba, in many parts of the world when a candidate loses for president, they go after the candidate, they go after his lawyers, they go after his friends,” Dershowitz said. “That’s happening in America now. They’re going after Rudy Giuliani.”

So Rudy Giuliani should have permanent total immunity now? Because he was Trump’s lawyer and fixer and enforcer? Is that how that works?

Federal agents seized electronic devices in an early-morning raid on Giuliani’s apartment on Wednesday, as part of an ongoing Justice Department investigation. Agents sought communications between Giuliani and a number of Ukrainian officials, along with evidence related to former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Investigators are reportedly pursuing a theory that Giuliani pushed to oust Yovanovitch as ambassador at the behest of Ukrainian government officials, in exchange for information on Biden family business dealings in Ukraine. Such an action could be considered a violation of federal lobbying laws, however Giuliani has strenuously denied the allegation.

But Giuliani is not the most trustworthy witness in the world, is he. He did a lot of lying for Trump. We don’t have to believe his denials, even the strenuous ones.

More on Mridul Wadhwa, from Stuart Campbell at Wings Over Scotland:

Party insiders like the former Trade And Industry spokesman Iain Lawson have been shining light on the arcane and opaque processes of “vetting”, whereby people who want to be candidates themselves astonishingly have the power to block potential rivals and where “woke” candidates are receiving extremely preferential treatment, but the fait accompli is almost complete – by the time the party belatedly elects a new NEC in six weeks, candidates will be in place and it’ll be too late to change anything.

And of course, what’s revealing is who HAS been passed to stand for nomination as well as who hasn’t. Readers, meet a man called Mridul.

The person in the picture above with Nicola Sturgeon is both biologically and legally male – he has no Gender Recognition Certificate. His name is Mridul Wadhwa (Mridul is a male name in India, where he’s from) and he’s the manager of Forth Valley Rape Crisis, a job he obtained by concealing the fact that he was a man – something he appeared to enjoy bragging about before suddenly deleting his tweets on the subject.

He said no one asked but that’s not true: the application form does ask. Also the job description does specify a woman.

(Schedule 9, Part 1 of the Equality Act 2010 is the section which specifically allows employers to limit applicants to those of a particular biological sex, even if they’ve undergone legal gender reassignment, which Wadhwa has not.)

So he never should have had that job at all, much less been jumped to the new job – never should have even in their own terms, let alone the terms of women who don’t agree that men become women by saying so.

And there’s more.

On and on it goes, ratcheting ever up.

Hooray hooray as a man is named CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.

Mridul Wadhwa takes over from Caroline Burrell who has led the organisation for 16 years.

Mridul said: “I am very excited to be moving to ERCC. Having been involved in the violence against women and equality sectors in Scotland since 2005, I am really looking forward to leading the committed team of women who do such incredible work supporting survivors of sexual violence. 

“I am especially pleased to be joining the organisation at a time when it is seeking to increase its accessibility to and inclusion of survivors of gender based violence from marginalised and easy to ignore communities. As a passionate, loud and consistent advocate for the rights of trans women and Black Minority Ethnic women, I look forward to working alongside my new colleagues to ensure that we provide inclusive and flexible support.

Ah yes those marginalised and easy to ignore communities such as men who pretend to be women and steal their top jobs in organizations that exist to protect or lobby for actual women. It doesn’t get a whole lot more in your face than that. “Hahaha bitch I’m the boss of your fancy ‘rape crisis’ club now so you’d better get used to it.”

This business of men who pretend to be women portraying themselves as an extra-marginalised kind of woman because of their being men – it’s such a brilliant con game and so fucking infuriating because it is. Women are now the privileged powerful domineering callous aristocracy tormenting the quivering helpless exploited…men. And the men are getting away with it.

Kathryn Dawson, Chair of ERCC’s Board of Directors, said: “Mridul brings a wealth of experience to ERCC, from her work in the wider rape crisis and women’s movements, to her activism and campaigning on trans rights, BME rights and other equalities issues. We are delighted that a woman with such a strong track record in improving the lives of women and campaigning against all forms of inequality will be leading our organisation into the future.”

But he’s a man. That job should go to a woman, not a man. That should be too obvious to say.

I don’t believe that pianos can become oranges, but I do believe that trans oranges are oranges. Just like trans apples are apples.

If a bunch of cranks can just decide by fiat that the word that has always named the female half of humanity now includes men, then they can decide by fiat that anything means anything and we will never be able to make any kind of sense ever again.

The word “women” is already taken, and random Michaels don’t get to grab it away from us.

Just another woman.

A serving police community support officer whose body was found in woodland died from “significant head injuries”, police said.

The body of Julia James, 53, was found in Akholt Wood, Snowdown, near Dover, on Tuesday.

…

Ms James, whose body was found a few hundred yards from her house, had been taking her dog for a walk when she was killed. The pet was found unharmed at the scene.

…

Ms James joined the force as a PCSO in 2008 and had more recently been working with victims of domestic abuse while based in Canterbury.

Mr Richards said: “She was a hugely-devoted, passionate individual who was completely committed to serving the people of Kent.

But also a woman, so, you know.

The UN points out that the torrent of online threats and abuse aimed at women journalists is not a good thing.

The avalanche of misogynistic abuse and threats is not only damaging women working in media, it is also weaponised “to undercut public trust in critical journalism and facts in general”, a report commissioned by the UN’s cultural agency Unesco has found.

‘The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence Against Women Journalists” draws on interviews with 901 journalists from 125 countries. Journalists from diverse backgrounds faced particularly intense attacks, as misogyny mixed with racism, homophobia, religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination, the report found. “Online violence against women journalists is designed to belittle, humiliate, and shame; induce fear, silence, and retreat; discredit them professionally, undermining accountability, journalism and trust in facts,” the report found, adding that it also aimed to freeze women out of public debate.

See also: Karens, TERFs.

In-depth case studies analyse more than 2.5 million posts on Facebook and Twitter directed at two prominent women journalists. The first is Maria Ressa who heads the news outlet Rappler in the Philippines, and was recently awarded the Unesco annual press freedom prize. Her reporting has made her a target of her country’s judiciary and online hate campaigns, and at one point she was receiving 90 hate messages an hour on Facebook, the report found.

The second is the award-winning Carole Cadwalladr who writes for the Observer and the Guardian in the UK. The report found more than 10,000 instances of obvious abuse on Twitter alone, nearly half laced with sexist and misogynistic language.

Well you can’t expect people to abuse women without sexist and misogynistic language. Tools for the job, innit.

[The report] also detailed how online violence is increasingly spilling offline. Case studies included the vandalising of an academy run by Sri Lankan journalist Sharmila Seyyid, and people coming to the home and workplace of April Ryan, White House correspondent for the Grio, specifically to abuse her.

The report analysed multiple forms of online violence, including threats of sexual and physical violence, harassing private messages, coordinated “dog-pile” attacks from large groups, hacking and “doxxing” – publishing personal information online.

As a result of the exposure of personal details, a number of journalists had to move home or even country, with cases in the US, Sri Lanka, the UK and South Africa.

The report also covered less well known forms of attack, including misrepresentation through spoof accounts and manipulated or fake content, and flooding search results on sites like Google with false and hateful content to drown out professional journalistic work.

Yes but never forget, they have cis privilege.

Okay then! There are very tall men, therefore it’s fine for men to compete against women in women’s sports. We can all go home now.

Rachel Cooke at the Guardian talks to David Bell:

Bell, a distinguished psychiatrist and practising psychoanalyst, is the doctor who in 2018 wrote a controversial report about the activities of the gender identity development service (GIDS), a clinic at the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust in north London, where he worked in adult services from 1995 until his retirement earlier this year.

That’s the one that Keira Bell sued.

(The Tavistock is to appeal; the case will be heard in June. David Bell will be what is technically called an intervenor in the appeal, which means he can give evidence.)

Bell’s report anticipated the concerns of the high court and he feels vindicated by its judgment. “It was jaw-dropping,” he says. “Because it was very strong.” As he read it, he was struck by details that have not been widely reported, particularly those involving a lack of data, a problem he had raised himself (GIDS was unable to produce for the court any data relating to outcomes and effects, whether desirable or adverse, in children who had been prescribed puberty blockers; nor could it provide details of the number and ages of children who had been given them). But the experience was painful, too: “I felt concerned that we’d moved away from the values [of care] the trust has embodied for so long.” He is astonished the judgment seems to have had so little effect on the organisation of GIDS. “Ordinarily, heads would roll,” he says. “The management structure has changed slightly, but it feels like window-dressing.”

Instead of rolling, the heads tried to bully and silence him.

There is anger on both sides of the debate. But given his politics – Bell describes himself to me as a “Corbyn-supporting Jew” – he has been most shocked by the reluctance of the left to engage with the issues. “They think this is to do with being liberal, rather than with concerns about the care of children. Mermaids and Stonewall [the charities for trans children and LGBTQ+ rights] have made people afraid even of listening to another view.” It surprises him that the left is unwilling to consider the role played by big pharma. In the US, a journal that published a paper about the effect of puberty blockers on suicide risk recently had to disclose that one of its co-authors received a stipend from the manufacturer of another drug.

It’s as if the left itself has taken a powerful drug that erases the brain’s memory of what it used to know. “Financial interest? What does that mean?”

When he appeared on Channel 4 News earlier this year, Bell was asked if he feared being on the wrong side of history. “I’ve often thought about that question,” he says. “It’s a good one. Psychiatry has a sad past. Homosexual men were given behavioural therapies and so on. But history isn’t always right. What matters is the truth. I hate the weaponisation of victimhood, the fact that the fear of being seen to be transphobic now overrides everything.” The current campaign to ban so-called gay conversion therapy is, he believes, likely to become a Trojan horse for trans activists who will use it to put pressure on any clinician who does not immediately affirm a young person’s statement about their identity, decrying this, too, as a form of “conversion”. For Bell, the prospect of not being able to talk openly about such things is a tyranny: just another form of repression. “This is about light and air,” he says. “It’s about free thinking, the kind that will result in better outcomes for all young people, whether transgender or not.”

More light.

Lest we forget –

The administration of former President Donald Trump obstructed an investigation looking into why officials withheld about $20 billion in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, one of the deadliest U.S. natural disasters in over 100 years, a new report says.

Or to put it another way, the Trump administration withheld about $20 billion in desperately needed hurricane relief for Puerto Rico and then obstructed an investigation into this brutal theft.

The Trump administration’s OMB also insisted on overhauls to Puerto Rico’s property management records, suspension of its minimum wage on federal contracts and other prerequisites to access relief funds, according to the report. Some HUD officials worried such requirements were potentially beyond HUD’s authority to impose on grantees.

Trump steals millions if not billions, and shields his billions from taxation, while he makes sure to prevent people in Puerto Rico from getting the minimum wage for federal work.

Throughout his term, Trump repeatedly opposed disaster funding for Puerto Rico while disputing and failing to acknowledge Maria’s death toll. Trump had also told top White House officials “that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico,” the Washington Post reported in 2019. “Instead, he wanted more of the money to go to Texas and Florida.”

More white people there, you see. More people like Trump there.

The federal government has allocated nearly $69 billion to help the island recover from Maria as well as other disasters that have hit the island over the past few years. But most of the money, specifically funds for housing and infrastructure relief, hasn’t made its way to communities on the island. Puerto Rico has received $19 billion, according to the Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency.

$50 billion here, $50 billion there, and pretty soon it starts to add up.

H/t Holms

As Skeletor mentioned in Miscellany Room, Caitlyn Jenner got something right for a change.

Guess who doesn’t approve.