Just shameless lies in the Guardian.

The article is a toe-curling pile of flattery of a fantasy writer called Jessica Townsend, so of course it has to fling some sewer scrapings at Rowling in the process.

Townsend is going into her press tour for Silverborn at a time when the world’s most famous children’s author, JK Rowling, is publicly railing against the rights of trans people.

Liars liars liars. No she is not. She is publicly railing at attacks on the rights of female people, and explaining how trans ideology is incompatible with women’s rights.

“I’m very happy to be quite blunt about it: I’m gutted. It is so upsetting and it’s so perplexing, and I will never understand it,” she says. But Rowling’s ugly crusade has only reinforced Townsend’s innate sense of duty towards the “tiny brains and hearts” in her audience.

The tiny brains and hearts that are all in the wrong bodies, no doubt.

Solidarity for…whatever, but for sure not women.

Britain’s largest teaching union has voted to campaign against the Supreme Court ruling on gender, insisting trans women in schools must be allowed to use ladies’ toilets.

In other words insisting that women must lose their rights to privacy and safety. For the union makes men strong.

Daniel Kebede, General Secretary, said: ‘The NEU is looking carefully at the Supreme Court ruling and its implications for employment. A toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.’

No, men are acknowledged to be a potential threat to women in small enclosed spaces with their pants down. It is the case that some men – far too many men – do take advantage of settings like toilets to spy on or photograph or assault women. The NEU should look carefully at that.

The court ruling, on April 16, came too late to be debated at the NEU annual conference – so it was instead discussed at a meeting of the National Executive at the weekend.

The 52 executive members, mostly regional reps, voted in favour of a motion called ‘trans rights are human rights’.

The motion says the ruling ‘contradicts human rights and dignity of trans and other gender-diverse staff and encourages discrimination, harassment and hate crimes’.

And what about women?

Pffff. Obviously the union doesn’t give two shits.

Oh has he now.

That teacher is in the wrong job then. The very very very wrong job. Teachers are not there to teach the children how to focus all their attention on the teachers’ idenninies. That’s not what school is for. Teachers are conduits for learning, not the subjects of learning. Nobody should be burdened with having to remember someone’s luxury idenniny, and that goes triple for children in school.

And that’s true times a billion when what the teachers are trying to force the children to learn is a pack of lies, and personal narcissistic look-at-me lies at that. Teachers should no more be telling children about their idenninies than they should be telling them about their sex lives or their cocaine habits or their grudges against their parents. Grade school is not a theater, it’s school.

And no, the child should not be gently reminded of the preferred idenniny of this adult; the subject should never come up at all.

Bill Kristol on Trump and emoluments:

I’m old enough to remember when this was a republic. A proud republic. We were proud to be different from the principalities and powers of the old world. We were confident of our superiority to the hereditary aristocracies and monarchies that had dominated political life everywhere on the globe, and that still did in many places.

…

Now, the president of the United States is boasting of receiving as a gift a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. The plane will be upgraded to serve not as the Air Force One but as his Air Force One, since it will only be available for use by the government of the United States during his time in office. It will then revert to him—well, nominally to his presidential library, but it will of course be totally at his disposal—after he leaves office.

This sure seems like a “present” or “emolument” to a person holding “an office of trust” from “a King, Prince, or foreign state.”

But not to worry. Attorney General Pam Bondi—once a registered lobbyist for Qatar, as it happens—has concluded that the transaction is permissible under U.S. law and the Constitution.

Interesting. Are we to conclude that AG Pam Bondi nudged Qatar into bestowing this tiny negligible blink and you’ve missed it bribe on Trump?

Trump can’t really conceal his contempt for the old republican ways. Last night, he posted this on social media:

So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. 

Note that he even points out that the “gift” to the Defense Department is only temporary. He doesn’t point out that it’s actually a permanent gift to him, which the DD gets to use only while he’s squatting in the Filthy House.

This is the voice of old-world autocracy. Those who take seriously the constraints and requirements of republican government are fools. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.

It’s the voice of the old-world autocracy stripped of any semblance of nobility or basic dinner-table manners. It’s the voice of old-world autocracy quacked out by a psychotic puppet.

BBC Woman’s Hour today talked to trans “woman” Robin Moira White about the Supreme Court ruling on whatisawoman. The chat is the first in what it says will be a series of such chats. I have to wonder why the Beeb starts this series with a man who pretends to be a woman. Why is he at the head of the queue? Why not talk to women first and men last? Or indeed why talk to men at all?

So anyway, obviously I’ll have to listen to the whole annoying thing and share the worst bits.

First question – what’s his opinion on the Supreme Court ruling that woman means woman?

Well – I don’t think the Supreme Court ruling will survive a trip to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. … What we have is a situation now where that recognition is not effective and will need to be corrected

Nuala McGovern: But on what grounds would the court on human rights potentially overrule the judgement?

White: Well if you are a trans person that acknowledgement of your changed gender has to allow you to live appropriately and with dignity and if you go to the cinemar or the supermarket and you are forced to use facilities that are not appropriate to your gender, then firstly

Ok wait. Before we hear what happens “firstly” let’s interrogate this issue of being forced to use facilities that are not appropriate to your gender. Here’s the problem with that: if the Robin Moira Whites get to use what they consider facilities appropriate to their magic notional fictitious gender, then actual women are forced to use facilities that are NOT appropriate to their actual sex. Men in dresses win, women lose. Why should men in dresses get to win??? Why does his “appropriate” matter more than ours?

He goes on:

Your rights to privacy are compromised, and your rights to live in dignity are compromised.

See above. What about our rights to privacy and dignity, you oblivious selfish shit?

McGovern sort of hints at this little problem and they go back and forth a bit. RMW sums up:

The problem is, that it’s all very well having fundamental human rights, but if in your workplace you’re forced to go – you’ve very specifically rejected your birth gender, and now you’re forced into facilities that reflect that, that is devastating.

Slightly muddled, as live conversations can be, but he means forced into facilities that reflect that other wrong rejected gender. So anyway – it’s the same thing again. Yes, and if you’re not forced into those facilities, then women are forced to put up with you in their facilities. Why does your distress matter more than theirs? There’s one of you and more than one of them, and also, you’re a man and they’re women. Why does your distress matter more than theirs???

Cheeringly, McGovern does make this point.

I mean – there are people who would say it is devastating to have to share facilities – same sex facilities – with a biological man.

His response is frankly incoherent. The solution is additional accommodations, he drones. Yes that will work: all those “additional accommodations” will just spring into being, at no expense or inconvenience or loss of space needed for other things. That’s why this has been happening all along oh wait no it hasn’t.

Then he goes on to bleat about people being “unpleasant” by which he means calling a man a man. He sounds quite…dim. Pompous, because he has the voice for it [a male attribute by the way, and he deploys it without apparent shyness], but fatuous.

Then he calls Stephen Whittle and someone else “eminences grises” pronounced “eminence greezez”. Hahahahahasorryhahahahaha

Then McGovern asks him about calling Sex Matters “evil” and he squirms a bit and that’s the end. He has a little talent in the department of talking slowly in a gravelly voice so that he sounds thoughtful (and deeply male, to underline the point), but he wasn’t even slightly persuasive.

Completely normal. Not corrupt at all. No risk of favors in exchange for a tiny gifty. Just a kind gesture from a dear friend. Clean as a whistle.

Trump to accept luxury jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One

Sure; why not? Heads of state accept little prezzies from other countries all the time. A huge luxury airplane isn’t worth much at all – not as much as a nice dinner at the local Chipotle.

Given the massive value of a Boeing 747-8, the move is unprecedented and raises substantial ethical and legal questions. A Qatari official said the plane is technically being gifted from the Qatari Ministry of Defense to the Pentagon, describing it more as a government-to-government transaction instead of a personal one. The Defense Department will then retrofit the plane for the president’s use with security features and modifications.

All totally impersonal. It’s about like donating some concrete slabs to the Pentagon to patch a sidewalk.

The plan is for the plane to be donated to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office, ensuring he can continue to use it, according to a person familiar.

You what? He gets to keep it?

Stone the crows. That’s a bribe.

Democrats quickly condemned the news Sunday, with the Democratic National Committee describing it in a news release as “Trump’s latest grift.”

“Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a statement. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with extra legroom.”

And solid gold plating.

Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the potential move is a sharp departure from the playbook presidents have followed to ensure they stay in line with the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bans foreign payments to a sitting US president.

“We’ve never seen something on the level of a $400 million plane,” he said. “It is a scale well beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”

That’s Trump for ya. From nothing to a luxury jumbo jet in one jump. Tentative he is not.

Enough.

Same, except not so much every so often as multiple times every day.

It seems there’s a thing called the Met Gala. The two words together are very slightly familiar, but I can’t say I’ve ever paid much attention to it. Hadley Freeman was caught in Manhattan last week while the Gala was galaing.

What was once a low-key fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in Manhattan has become an annual warning about the dangers of being too rich, too thin and too obsessed with Instagram. Every year there’s a jaunty dress code “theme” — shudder — but most of the female celebrities simply do what they always do at these things, which is look as naked and/or uncomfortable as possible.

Ya. That’s a thing that’s been bugging me forever – as in, the whole of my adult life. Why do women still do that? Feminism is a thing, and has been for decades. Why, then, do women’s clothes just get more and more insultingly impractical and torturous and sex-focused? Why do women’s clothes look as if they’re designed by pimps while men’s clothes don’t? Why don’t women refuse?

What I couldn’t cope with was the homogeneity of the bodies and faces. Even in a year that was ostensibly meant to celebrate “diversity”, the women at the Met Ball were all shrinking to a vanishing point, their faces so smooth it’s impossible to tell anyone’s age any more. Is Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian Klan, 20 years old? Fifty? I’d believe either. Anne Hathaway looked as if she’d been drawn by AI. Demi Moore’s clavicles were more prominent than her facial features. And yet, it’s considered “body-shaming” to notice what is being thrust in front of our faces, and so, in the name of diversity, we all have to pretend we are blind and that it’s totally normal that twentysomethings are full of fillers and fiftysomethings have no body fat. 

And we all have to pretend it’s fine that women must represent Sex while men get to represent Work or Cultivated Leisure. We all have to pretend not to notice that that divides the sexes into the consumer and the consumed, the subject and the object. Women have to dress for the male gaze, men have to dress as the sturdy male gazer. Women’s clothes might fall off at any moment, men’s clothes are firmly secured. Who agreed to this arrangement? Why didn’t it get canceled at least half a century ago?

It’s a branch of anthropology I find peculiarly irritating.

Once artists rebelled against old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and femininity, like Boy George, KD Lang and Madonna. Now those who don’t fit into today’s Kardashianised mould of celebrity beauty, such as Ramsey, Sam Smith, Emma Corrin and so on, describe themselves as “non-binary”, as if not having pumped-up breasts or biceps de-sexes them. The irony of the “non-binary” term is it reinforces today’s binary ideas about how women and men should look and behave.

So women have two choices: torture-clothes or trendy bullshit.

The arrests have begun.

It all went down on Friday afternoon when Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark and Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor, was arrested outside an ICE facility alongside three members of Congress.

While the congresspeople—New Jersey Democratic Reps. Rob Menendez, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and LaMonica McIver—were inside the Delaney Hall detention facility waiting to be given a tour, Baraka waited outside in a fenced-in parking lot as protestors gathered on the other side of the fence. He was told to leave the fenced-in part of the parking lot and, despite complying with the request, was then detained by ICE agents.

Interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and Trump advisor Alina Habba said on X of the arrest, “The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

Oh really? Trump has broken multiple laws, as has Musk.

In her own statement, Rep. Watson Coleman explained that she and her fellow members of Congress were exercising their legal oversight function as they have previously done at the Elizabeth Detention Center “without incident,” she noted.

A city mayor doesn’t have that legal oversight function, I suppose, but arresting this one still looks like massive overkill.

Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security, called the protest a “bizarre political stunt” and described the politicians as having stormed the gate of the center.

Oh we’re the ones who are bizarre. Not Trump’s gang of sadists but the people trying to monitor their sadism and report it to the citizenry.

Appearing on Fox News, McLaughlin said that the people detained at Delaney Hall were “the worst of the worst” and included members of the MS-13 gang. She described the claim that the group were exercising their legal oversight rights as “laughable.”

How is it laughable? Trump is not an emperor; Congress does have the power to monitor what he’s doing. Checks & balances.

In a statement shared to social media, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said that he was outraged by Baraka’s arrest and called for his immediate release. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) described the scenes outside Delaney Hall as an “absolute outrage” and also called for Baraka’s immediate release.

New Jersey Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim both released statements on Baraka’s arrest, with Booker also calling for Baraka’s release and describing his arrest as, “disturbing, unnecessary, and indicative of tactics that are undermining the safety and security of our communities.”

Trump’s people are acting as if he already is an absolute dictator.

Sweet.

There’s just one small problem.

Forced teaming and Vatican rags:

In the eyes of many LGBTQ Catholics

I have to stop you right there. Seven words in and you’re lying already. There are no LGBTQ Catholics. There can’t be. It’s not a thing. LGB is sexual orientation, Q means nothing, T is genner idenniny which is 1. bullshit and 2. incompatible with LG.

NBC of course found someone to explain with all due ponderous verbiageification what the new pope means to him her them us you insert chosen pronoun somewhere.

Jason Steidl Jack, a gay Catholic and an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York, described his reaction to the election of Pope Leo, the first-ever American to lead the Holy See, as “cautiously optimistic.”

“I do see him continuing Pope Francis’ legacy, especially of dialogue and synodality,” Steidl Jack said, describing synodality as “this idea of journeying together” and “listening to one another.” However, he said the new pope’s election “doesn’t assuage all of the fears that I have as an LGBTQ Catholic.”

“The church’s teaching, even under Pope Francis, remains incredibly homophobic, and the church goes on inventing new ways of being transphobic as it really avoids learning about trans people and their experiences,” he said, adding, however, that the new pontiff seems “open to dialogue and inclusion” given his remarks on Thursday.

Learning what “about trans people and their experiences”? That people continue to know the differences between women and men? That not everyone is eager or willing to change the definitions of “woman” and “man” such that they mean their own opposites? That most people still understand why women don’t want men taking over everything that used to belong to women?

I see I’m not the only one who wonders.

Of course.

Plenty of irritated women were on hand to say no, you damn fool, that’s not the ruling.

Ok what does this mean?

Meanwhile Labour peer and former women and equalities minister Harriet Harman, also chair of the Fawcett Society, said the verdict “correctly interprets” current legislation and ministers’ intentions when it was drafted under the last Labour government. ”

She added: “Single sex spaces for women are important and can exclude trans women but only where necessary. The Act, and ruling, protects rights of women while also respecting the rights of trans women.”

It’s at the end of a piece about a “trans Labour councillor” who “has resigned from the party, accusing it of having ‘“thrown transgender people under the bus.'” It’s the usual nonsense, but what I want to know is what does “but only where necessary” mean?

I suppose it means what it appears to mean. I suppose it means “women are whiny bitches so all right they can have their precious single sex spaces but only when it’s really truly necessary and the rest of the time they just have to put up with unwanted uninvited men invading their book groups and feminist meetups.”

Of course it is.

White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus — the constitutional right to challenge in court the legality of a person’s detention by the government — for migrants.

Miller’s comment came in response to a White House reporter who asked about President Donald Trump entertaining the idea of suspending the writ to deal with the problem of illegal immigration into the United States.

Asked when that might happen, Miller responded: “The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of invasion.”

“So, I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said.

A number of pending civil cases challenging the Trump administration’s deportation of undocumented immigrants in the United States are based on habeas claims.

People challenge the Trump administration because the people have rights, so the Trump administration gets to work making sure the people stop having rights. Of course it does.

The writ has been suspended only four times since the U.S. Constitution was ratified. And in all but one of those instances, Congress first authorized the suspension.

The idea of habeas corpus originated in English common law. “No man shall be arrested or imprisoned…except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land,” a provision in the Magna Carta, signed by King John in the early 13th Century, says.

The U.S. Constitution, in Article 1, section 9, says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Miller’s use of the word “invasion” reflects the Trump administration’s argument that the U.S. faces an “invasion” of undocumented migrants.

And the Trump administration’s eagerness to lock up and punish migrants.

Sigh. Of course he is.

The first group of white South Africans who[m] the Trump administration is classifying as refugees are expected to arrive in the United States on Monday.

President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions from most other nations when he took office. But in a February executive order, Trump said the U.S. would establish a plan to resettle “Afrikaners” and their families as refugees in the United States.

Afrikaners are mainly of Dutch descent. The Trump administration has accused the South African “government-sponsored race-based discrimination” and pledged to cut off all aid and assistance.

Other refugees can fuck off, but the racist ones with the loathsome history are more than welcome.

According to the New York Times, a group of 54 Afrikaners were due to depart from Johannesburg on Sunday. The Washington Post reported that a group of 60 Afrikaners would be arriving on a State Department plane on Monday to an airport just outside of Washington.

The State Department declined in an email to confirm the reports or say how many South Africans would be coming and when they would arrive.

Don’t even think about giving me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The hell with them. But your uncomfortable racists? The doors are wide open!

A spokesperson said in response to a request for comment that the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa had been conducting interviews and processing applications of individuals who have expressed interest in moving to the United States. The State Department said in its statement that it is prioritizing Afrikaners in South Africa who[m] it views as victims of unjust racial discrimination.

Does USA Today have a rule against ever using “whom”?

Trump has given yet another Fox News “personality” an important government job.

Trump has appointed Fox News host and former New York prosecutor Jeanine Pirro as interim US attorney for Washington DC. The announcement comes after Trump withdrew his first pick for the job after he lost key Republican support in the Senate, which votes on such positions.

After Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden, Pirro made false statements about the election that were part of a lawsuit against Fox News by a company that makes voting machines. The case was settled for more than $787m (£594m). Trump called Pirro “a powerful crusader for victims of crime” in a social media post announcing his selection. Meanwhile, critics described her as unqualified.

Well sure but Trump doesn’t want qualified, he wants in the bag. He wants people who like what he’s selling.

In the Truth Social post on Thursday night, Trump noted that she previously served as a Republican district attorney in Westchester, New York, as well as a judge. He also touted her roles on various shows on Fox News, including on The Five, which he called “one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television”.

Yup that’s the important thing. TV fame is what matters.

Democrats were quick to criticise the appointment of Pirro, the second Fox News host with to receive a high-profile federal job after Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, raising questions about her credentials for the role and about her career outside of broadcasting.

“Which Fox News host will get the next federal appointment,” Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat representative from California, wrote on X.

The Democratic National Committee wrote in a statement: “Jeanine Pirro is yet another unqualified TV personality with a history of putting Trump and violent insurrectionists above the rule of law.”

Democrats are so boring that way, expecting government hires to be qualified and experienced and good at what they do. Pffffffff.

The Beeb reports that men are banned from women’s toilets in Holyrood. In other news, water is wet and fire is hot.

Trans women will no longer be able to use the women’s toilets in the Scottish Parliament building.

Facilities designated as male or female-only would now be interpreted as meaning biological sex, the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) said.

So strange, to go by actual physical sex as opposed to the pretend fantasy in the head kind.

Decent governments don’t do things this way. If people identify as horses, we saddle them and ride them to work. If people identify as cars we jump in and drive them to work. If people identify as chocolate we eat them on our way to work. Identifying as defeats reality every time.

The SPCB said it had agreed “practical changes of minimal cost” to toilets and changing facilities following an interim review of Holyrood services.

The presiding officer set out the changes in a letter to MSPs and staff. It said:

• All Scottish Parliament toilets designated as male or female would now be interpreted as meaning biological sex.
• A bank of three existing toilets in the public area of the building would be designated as a gender-neutral facility.
• These will be in addition to female-only toilets, male-only toilets, an accessible toilet and a changing places facility.

Peace in our time.

I like the title.

The Green Party is a sinister mob. Take it from me, its former deputy leader

Shahrar Ali, that is.

After the resignation of Carla Denyer, the Green Party is facing a leadership contest for which the membership has had their opportunity for genuine debate about its policy platform and electoral priorities artificially restricted. No activist or spokesperson who dares to stand up for the rights and protections of women, girls and children – especially, in the context of a decade of trans rights overreach – will escape the wrath of the totalitarian mob within.

I should know. In 2024, I won a landmark gender critical protected belief discrimination case against the Party, the first of its kind in politics, after I was unlawfully removed as front bench spokesperson for justice.

And what’s “green” about that? No one knows.

Not content with marginalising 52 per cent of voters, Green politicians have sought to alienate another 51 per cent. That’s the logical consequence of a political movement which resorts to identitarian flag-waving and is in thrall to queer theory luxury beliefs. In the days following the Supreme Court judgment, the Green Party leadership demonstrated utter contempt for the rights and protections of women and girls.

On BBC’s Any Questions, parliamentarian Siân Berry – who prides herself with having a science background – described sex in humans as “not entirely binary”. On BBC Radio 4’s Today, Co-Leader Adrian Ramsay refused to answer Nick Robinson’s direct question, “Are Transwomen Women?” four times. The view that trans women are women has been the policy of the Greens since 2016. It offers up a Stonewall campaign slogan as a literal truth, and conflates sex and gender identity. For his refusal to pronounce this holy dogma, officers of the Young Greens rewarded him with calls for his resignation.

They’re competing for who can be the most ridiculous?

Zack Polanski, who reportedly once set himself up as a hypnotherapist for breast enlargement, has recently launched his campaign to be Leader. I would challenge him on how a party can remain credible for telling the truth on climate science but continue to tell lies about what constitutes a biological woman.

That. Exactly. How can anyone? How can anyone for instance denounce the nonstop lying of Trump but continue to tell lies about what constitutes a biological woman? How can anyone reject the absurdities of religion but continue to tell lies about what constitutes a biological woman? How can anyone try to educate the public on global warming but continue to tell lies about what constitutes a biological woman?

Well doesn’t that just sum up the whole problem.

MPs seek assurances from UK equalities watchdog over gender ruling

Exclusive: transgender activists concerned that a literal approach is being taken to supreme court decision

Boom. Literal. A literal approach. A literal approach to the law is a bad thing. What we’re supposed to do is take a metaphorical approach, a fairy tale approach, a daydream approach, a play along with my fantasy approach.

Wrong. Wrong wrong wronigitty wrong. Life is literal. Sex is literal. Bodies are literal. Fantasy and fiction are very good things in their place, but the law is not that place. Laws need to be literal. The supreme court decision was not a bit of poetry or a chapter of a novel; it was literal. There is no non-literal approach that can or should be taken.

A cross-party committee of MPs has written to the UK’s equalities watchdog to seek assurances that its guidance on how organisations interpret the landmark supreme court ruling on gender issues does not ignore the needs of transgender people.

What needs are those? You mean like the need to shove women aside and steal all our rights? That’s not a need, it’s a misogynistic outrage.

The letter from the Commons women and equalities committee to Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), also urged her to extend the two-week timetable for people to submit views on how the EHRC’s code of practice for organisations should work, saying this should be at least six weeks.

It follows concern from transgender activists and a number of MPs that Falkner and her organisation have thus far taken an overly literal approach to last month’s supreme court decision, which ruled that “woman” in the Equality Act refers only to a biological woman.

We have been seeing for the last ten years or more that if you don’t take a “literal” approach to this question of who is which sex then you get a grotesquely fictional approach that literally destroys women’s rights. The “literal” approach is the whole point. Men are literally not women. Next stupid question?

While ministers have welcomed what they called the “clarity” of the ruling and guidance, a number of MPs have raised worries about the implications for transgender people, for example whether people who had lived as women for decades would suddenly have to start using men’s toilets.

People? There’s the Guardian carefully doing the same old obfuscation. The Guardian doesn’t mean people who have lived as women, it means men who have pretended to be women. Women don’t “live as women”; women are women. It’s only men who have to avail themselves of the silly childish “live as” trope. It would be nice to see the Graun just stop the sly dishonest wording and nudging and manipulation.

And men who “lived as women for decades” remain men. It doesn’t matter if they “live as women” for centuries; they’re still men.

Sarah Owen, the Labour MP who chairs the women and equalities committee, has said many transgender people were “anxious and unsure about where this ruling leaves them”.

So much for chairing the women and equalities committee, eh? Women should just shut up and sit down and let the men do the womaning, right?

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Trump plans to buy the pope.

It didn’t take long for right-wing media figures and MAGA provocateurs to cry out in rage over the election of Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV after it was revealed that he’d publicly criticized Vice President JD Vance and expressed sympathy for immigrants and George Floyd.

1

I think we all knew that just about any Pope would be antipathetic to MAGA and all it stands for. After all, the Pope holds sway over a far bigger crowd, a more beautiful crowd, the greatest crowd anyone has ever seen.

Now, data shows American Catholics are split unlike any other major religion.

Because for decades, the architects of the so-called religious right in the United States have been building a coalition of church-going voters.

These Americans can be relied upon to show up on election day and to vote for the candidate who promises to uphold the idea of traditional Christian family values.

Their politics and their faith are fused.

2

Of course, when asked to define “traditional Christian family values”, they usually fall back on the same old misogyny, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and an aversion to social justice. Of all those, it is only the latter that Jesus spoke of, and he was very much in favour of social justice. Assuming, for the sake of argument, there was a bloke called Jesus and he said those things attributed to him.

Laura Loomer, the “proud Islamphobe” and far-right extremist who appears to have the president’s ear lately, spent much of Thursday afternoon raging on social media about the newly elected pontiff’s views on immigration and social justice.

“The new Pope once retweeted a post about how we need to keep praying for career criminal & drug addict George Floyd,” she raged. “The tweet said, ‘May all hatred, violence and prejudice be eradicated.’ What prejudice? Is that another way to spell FENTANYL OVERDOSE? MARXIST POPE!”

In additional tweets, Loomer lamented about the “WOKE MARXIST POPE” and claimed he “is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis,” adding that it’s “GROSS” that he is now in charge of the Vatican.

While other right-wing activists and media personalities cried on social media that “they chose a globalist and woke Pope from the West ON PURPOSE” to criticize the president, the anti-pope narrative began leaking onto MAGA broadcasts.

1.

Because, Dog forbid, there should be a Pope who refuses to kiss Trump’s ring.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/maga-woke-american-pope-leo-xiv-b2747600.html

2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/trump-maga-want-conservative-pope-to-replace-francis/105210268