Karen Ingala Smith, who is an expert in the field, reminds Jo Swinton of a couple of things:

I am pig sick of people who have not run refuges (and probably spent little if any time in them) saying that allowing men in to women’s refuges is a matter of individual risk assessments. No. No it isn’t.

What are women’s refuges refuges from? Not from grasshoppers or missionaries or loud music.

As for @joswinson saying that abuse in lesbian relns is same as men’s violence against intimate partners, how dare you?
How many women are killed by female partners/exes? Hardly bloody any.
How many women in UK are killed by male partners/exes? On average at least 1 every 4 days.

Ok but women engage in the violence of talking back, which if you think about it is really the worst violence of all.

@Scottish_Women tweeted:

Case study from NHS policy. If a woman is agitated cos there is a man on her ward then staff should ‘re-iterate that the ward is female only & that there are no men present.’ If she continues to be vocal then ‘Ultimately it may be the complainant who is required to be removed.’!

The Gender Reassignment Policy Review page 16:

Inpatient Scenario:

A nurse is summoned to a patient’s bed in a female ward. The patient appears to be agitated. When asked what’s concerning her, the woman explains she didn’t expect to be sharing the ward with a  man and points to the bed opposite. She states it’s inappropriate to have ‘him’ in the ward with the other women. She tells the nurse she can’t relax and wants ‘him’ removed from the ward. If this doesn’t happen she’ll make a formal complaint – the hospital has a duty of care to look after her and they’re not taking this seriously by putting her in this situation.

The nurse listens and tells the woman she’ll see what she can do. She says that she understands having a transgender person on the ward will be upsetting to other women and leaves to talk with a senior colleague about the matter.

The response to the patient’s concern isn’t appropriate and breaches legislative protection afforded to transgender people. Someone’s trans status can not be disclosed to a third party without the express permission of the trans person and the assumption that others in the ward will feel uncomfortable is unfounded. In this instance there is no need to either disclose or seek permission to disclose gender identity. The nurse should work to allay the patient’s concerns – it would be appropriate to re-iterate that the ward is indeed female only and that there are no men present. Her duty of care extends to protect patients from harassment and should the woman continue to make demands about the removal of the transgender patient and be vocal in the ward it would be appropriate to remind her of this. Ultimately it may be the complainant who is required to be removed. The nurse should check with the transgender patient and sensitively ask if everything is ok. If the transgender patient has heard any of the discussions it is imperative that she is given every assurance that the matter will be dealt with. If the transgender patient is visibly upset and there is spare capacity, it would be appropriate to offer her the option to move to a single room, though this must be with the interests of the patient in mind rather than conflict avoidance.

General appreciation of transgender issues is relatively low within our communities and often this is used as a rationale for behaviour that is essentially transphobic. If a white woman complained to a nurse about sharing a ward with a black patient or a heterosexual male complained about being in a ward with a gay man, we would expect our staff to act in a manor that deals with the expressed behaviour immediately.

Emphasis mine.

Notice that there is no requirement to talk sensitively to the woman who doesn’t want to be in a ward with a man. Notice that the nurse is told to tell the woman that the ward is indeed female and there is no man present WHEN IT’S NOT AND THERE IS. Notice that the woman is discussed as a disruption at best and an evil bigot at worst. Notice that all the concern is for the man.

A woman not wanting to be in a hospital ward with a man is not the same as not wanting to be in a ward with a black person or a gay person. It is not the same.

I seriously hope we can do a lot better than Joe Biden.

During a campaign event in Greenwood, South Carolina Thursday night, former Vice President Joe Biden told a protestor who confronted him over the Obama administration’s mass deportation policies to “vote for Trump,” prompting outrage from immigrant rights groups and activists.

“You should vote for Trump,” Biden repeated as Carlos Rojas, an organizer with Movimiento Cosecha, urged the former Vice President to depart from the destructive record of the Obama White House and support a moratorium on deportations.

I suppose that’s Biden Demonstrating That He’s Not Some Crazy Radical?

Biden was also confronted by climate activists from Friends of the Earth during the Greenwood event, which came a day after the 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Atlanta.

“Please don’t take money from corporations,” said a woman in the audience.

“I do not take money from corporations,” replied Biden, whose campaign last month greenlighted the creation of a super PAC organized by corporate lobbyists who serve clients in multiple major industries, including fossil fuels.

“You listen to Bernie too much, man, it’s not true,” added Biden, referring to rival 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Oh please. Of course he takes money from corporations.

Joe Biden’s campaign is drawing more support from big-ticket donors than any other candidate in the race — yet he still can’t match his rivals’ cash flow.

Biden has raised $20.7 million from contributions of at least $500 — $1.5 million more than his nearest competitor, despite entering the race later than all of them — thanks to the former vice president’s strong connections and goodwill among the traditional donors who have long financed the Democratic Party. Biden drew donations from 114 former big money fundraisers for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the third quarter, the most of any Democrat, according to a POLITICO analysis.

But it’s been nowhere near enough to make Biden the leader of the fundraising pack. In fact, his big-dollar dominance, and his reliance on those donors, is more evidence of how quickly small-dollar donations have become the most important component of political fundraising in a sprawling, fractured Democratic race. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg are all outraising Biden, and stockpiling cash significantly faster than him, on the back of major support from online donors that Biden has been unable to build.

But hey you listen to Bernie too much, maaaaaaaaaan.

Julie Bindel tweets:

This shows how grotesquely unethical these so-called feminist pro-BDSM academics are. Shame on her: Grace Millane trial: expert on sexual culture testifies

So I read the linked article. Dear god.

The defence team representing the man accused of murdering Grace Millane has called an academic to speak about sexual culture.

The man is on trial in the High Court at Auckland, charged with murdering Ms Millane on the night of 1 and 2 December last year.

It is not disputed that the British backpacker died in his apartment or that he later buried her body in a suitcase in the Waitākere Ranges.

The Crown’s case is that the accused strangled her to death, while the man’s defence says her death was accidental after they engaged in consensual choking during sex.

Stop right there.

They engaged in consensual choking during sex? Oh really? Yet only she ended up dead. Was it “consensual choking” or was it he choked her? At least be clear about it.

So the defense called Professor Clarissa Smith of the University of Sunderland to explain about consensual choking in which only the woman ends up dead.

The court heard she had been asked by the accused’s defence team to speak about modern male and female sexuality, and BDSM practices, breath play and erotic asphyxia.

Prof Smith told the court attitudes about sexuality and sex were constantly changing and had moved on from “a powerful mythology” that sex had a single purpose.

“So it’s not just reserved for one’s life partner or marriage but it can be extremely pleasurable for people who are not in a long term relationship.”

Hello, that’s not the issue. Long term, short term, that’s not the issue. The issue is strangling and death.

Professor Smith said BDSM was an “umbrella term” for a range of sexual practices including bondage, domination and sadomasochism.

One of the man’s lawyers Ron Mansfield asked the professor if it was true that such practices were humiliating or violent towards women.

Prof Smith said the practices were about exploring the experiences of humiliation and violence in a “safe environment” without genuine intent to humiliate or be violent.

How did that work out?

Eh?

How did that work out for Grace Millane?

How well did that “safe environment” work out for her?

Prof Smith said public discussions of “kinks” had become widespread after the popular novel 50 Shades of Grey was published.

Mr Mansfield also asked the professor if breath play – a practice whereby breath is restricted during sex – was aggressive or an assault.

“It would be if it’s without consent but where two people have consented to take part in that then it absolutely is not. But that’s the same for any kind of sexual act. Within BDSM it is very important that consent is given and that a couple agree on what they’re going to do.”

Cool cool cool cool, so then everything will be fine, except that Grace Millane ended up dead and buried in a suitcase.

Whatever; it’s kink; don’t be kink-shaming now, that would be terrible.

The Times:

Joanna Cherry, the Edinburgh South West candidate who successfully campaigned for her Labour opponent Frances Carmel Hoole to be deselected for posting a derogatory tweet, said there was a “big dose of misogyny” in the debate over whether people can declare their own gender without medical certification.

Ms Hoole posted a picture of Ms Cherry with the words: “Bang and the Terf is gone”.

This one:

Ms Cherry said the debate had become “utterly toxic” and she had received death threats.

The row spilled over into a full-page advertisement in The Herald yesterday calling on Joan McAlpine, the SNP MSP, and Jenny Marra, the Labour MSP, to resign because of claims that they invited transphobic speakers to the Scottish parliament.

The advert, written in Scots and promoted by an organisation called Anent Transphobia, accused the MSPs of “emotional abuse” of the “vulnerable trans community”.

As opposed to the women community, which is notoriously invulnerable.

All three politicians said they would not be silenced by transgender lobbyists. On the Political Thinking podcast, hosted by the BBC journalist Nick Robinson, Ms Cherry said: “I am a lesbian and have been out for 30 years, and came out at a time when people were losing their jobs as a result of being gay, and when there weren’t equal rights for gay people.

“I also come at it as a feminist, and I have never said that I was not in favour of trans rights. In my former life as an advocate I worked for three years as a specialist sex crimes prosecutor, and prosecuted for rape, sexual offences and a large number of historical sex abuse cases.

“So I have good reason to understand the vulnerability of women and girls to sex abuse from male-bodied individuals — from men.”

…

“Like many other feminist politicians, and indeed male allies in the SNP and the Labour Party and indeed now the Lib Dems, I have concerns that rushing through self-identification legislation without looking at the impact on the Equalities Act could have unintended consequences.”

She criticised Twitter for suspending the accounts of women who “say things like ‘women don’t have penises’, stating a biological fact”.

“There is a big dose of misogyny in this debate, and I am just not prepared to give in to it. I won’t be bullied, and I won’t be silenced,” she added.

The bullying makes some of us louder instead of quieter.

In a joint statement, Ms McAlpine and Ms Marra called the advertisement “another attempt to smear and silence women for talking about their rights”.

They said: “It will not succeed. The Declaration of Women’s Sex Based Rights, a document that underlines the fact that much of the discrimination and violence that women experience globally — including FGM [female genital mutilation], selective abortion, rape, sexual exploitation and maternal mortality — is related to their sex at birth, not their ‘gender identity’.

“It is not ‘transphobic’ to discuss these matters and to ensure that the laws we pass protect all groups of people, including women.”

Tide turning?

@Girlguiding tweeted:

1 in 3 girls told us they don’t want to be leaders, as women who speak out are harassed. The women standing in the election are doing so despite the abuse female MPs receive. We need a world where girls feel confident – and safe – using their voices.

Linking to a Guardian article headlined “‘I’m not going to be bullied into silence.’ The women defying abuse to stand as MPs.”

Hmm. Bullied into silence, eh. A world where girls feel safe using their voices, eh. Another Guardian article, this one from last year:

The Girl Guides have spoken out against claims they are putting girls at risk by introducing a policy to allow transgender people to join the organisation.

The policy has been criticised by some of the group’s 500,000 members, with two leaders having their membership withdrawn after they publicly objected to it.

Hmm.

Replies on Twitter were sharp.

Just here for the ratio. You utter utter hypocrites.

Oh so now you know the difference between male and female

You are hypocrites. When women have spoken out about the need to protect women and girls by maintaining single-sex spaces, you are part of the chorus against them. You are helping teach girls not to stand up for their rights.

Have you considered that by eroding their boundaries & telling them they can’t say no to having a male in their space you’re the ones disempowering them?? They’ve seen YOU silence women who spoke out about it.

I actually cannot believe you had the gall to post this. Ex leader here.

Same feeling. Also ex leader.

The only people feeling confident & safe using their voices in @Girlguiding have penises. Girls have been told they don’t matter. ‍♀️

Nothing boosts a little girl’s confidence like being forced to sleep and shower with biological boys or stay at home. So empowering.

Teaching girls that they must not believe what they know to be true and removing their boundaries in favour of males, does nothing to encourage or prepare them for leadership.

I don’t send my daughters to Guides, although I went, because you have proved yourself incapable of demonstrating leadership on the matter of what a girl is, or can be, and because they will not join an organisation that doesn’t safeguard properly.

I also went to Guides but my daughter will not be for this reason

Using their voices.

Who is John Solomon?

Top diplomats have repeatedly linked President Donald Trump’s posture toward Ukraine to John Solomon, the journalist whose reports gave false credence to a number of Ukraine-related conspiracies that have found a receptive audience in Trump and some of his closest allies.

Solomon, 52, had been working until recently as an opinion writer at The Hill and is now a Fox News contributor. His columns were cited three times in the whistleblower complaint that helped spur House Democrats to open their impeachment investigation into Trump.

He sounds like more of a trans journalist than a real one.

On Nov. 19, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., opened the second week of public impeachment hearings by citing Solomon’s scoops and findings as fact.

“Solomon’s reporting on Burisma, Hunter Biden and Ukraine election meddling has become inconvenient for the Democratic narrative,” Nunes said in his statement, which came just one day after The Hill announced it would be reviewing, annotating and correcting Solomon’s columns.

What Solomon does is “reporting” while what the impeachment inquiry is doing is “narrative” – according to the strikingly untruthful Devin Nunes.

So, who is John Solomon? The veteran Washington, D.C., reporter has become a regular on Fox News and a go-to source of information for Trump. A series of springtime articles he published about Ukraine helped kickstart the events at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

His columns alleged corruption by Biden and a former ambassador and accused Democrats of working with Ukraine to hurt Trump’s chances in 2016. They gained traction as Trump, his allies and various Fox News hosts talked about them on TV and social media.

Never mind whether it’s true or not, it’s being talked about.

Solomon won an award in 2002 for a series on what law enforcement knew ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks. But media critics also questioned his early work, saying he had a “history of bending the truth to his storyline” and “massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals.”

Solomon’s commentary for The Hill has generated the most buzz. In 2017, he played a major role in pushing the inaccurate Uranium Oneconspiracy, alleging that Hillary Clinton sold a share of America’s uranium to Russia in exchange for a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.

The Hill started labeling Solomon’s work as opinion in 2018.

Then, in March and April 2019, Solomon published a series of columns alleging conspiracies involving Democrats and Ukraine.

One of his key sources, apparently, was former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.

According to the New York Times, Giuliani, whose activities were central to the administration’s efforts to get an investigation launched into Trump’s political rivals, gave Solomon a cache of information on Biden, his son Hunter and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

“I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,” Giuliani told the New York Times.

I suspect it was more “stuff” than “information.”

Senior State Department official George Kent later testified that what he had described as the “campaign of slander” against former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch began with one of Solomon’s articles and ended with Yovanovitch’s removal.

And Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, said he became concerned about Giuliani and the narratives he was pushing in part because of Solomon’s columns. State Department official Catherine Croft said the same.

…

Solomon’s opinion articles on Ukraine have advanced a number of unsupported allegations about Yovanovitch, the Bidens and supposed Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election.

He has had an assist from Fox News host Sean Hannity, Giuliani and Trump, who tweeted about Solomon’s work four times and recently suggested he should win a Pulitzer Prize.

Solomon has appeared on Hannity’s primetime TV show at least 55 times since March 20, according to our search via Nexis. He has been mentioned many more times, as well.

On March 20, Solomon went on Hannity’s show to promote a column he had published that day based on an interview he conducted with Yuriy Lutsenko, then the top prosecutor in Ukraine.

The column quoted Lutsenko falsely claiming that Yovanovitch gave him a list of people he should not prosecute, a charge the State Department denied and Lutsenko has since retracted. The column also claimed Yovanovitch had privately bad-mouthed Trump, citing a letter from former Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Yovanovitch denied both allegations during her testimony.

And Trump called in to Fox News yesterday to repeat the same filthy lies about Yovanovitch on the air.

Other impeachment witnesses have criticized Solomon’s writing on Yovanovitch. Kent testified that Solomon’s article “was, if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs.” He later said he had “every reason to believe it was not true.”

Vindman said all the “key elements were false,” noting that Solomon’s columns “smelled really rotten” before joking, “His grammar might have been right.”

Similar objections have been raised in testimony about two articles Solomon published about Biden in April, which were also referenced in the whistleblower’s complaint.

Etc etc etc. There’s no end to the slime.

Where Congress failed, FOIA succeeded.

An ethics group late Friday published nearly 100 pages of previously unreleased State Department documents that the group says shows “a clear paper trail” between President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before a Ukraine ambassador was abruptly recalled.

The documents were published by American Oversight, which calls itself a non-partisan and nonprofit ethics watchdog and Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump administration.

And they’ve been litigating away like mad while we’ve been watching Trump yammer at everyone, and they have virtual warehouses of documents.

They appear to show two calls between Giuliani and Pompeo in March, around a month before former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, an anti-corruption expert, was abruptly called back to the U.S. in April and then removed from the post.

David Hale, undersecretary of state for political affairs, testified on Wednesday that Pompeo and Giuliani spoke on the phone twice in late March.

The information released Friday “reveals a clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against a U.S. ambassador,” Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement.

Yovanovitch has told members of Congress in an impeachment inquiry that her reputation was smeared by Giuliani, including false allegations that she badmouthed Trump and was blocking corruption investigations by circulating a “do not prosecute” list and stymieing investigation into the Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

And they’re still doing it, at least Trump is. Remember yesterday he told Fox News that that Bad Woman Yovanovitch refused to hang his photograph in the embassy? That’s a lie. The administration delayed sending the photograph for months; it was hung as soon as it arrived.

The emails also show that before the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, took the job he was among six former Ukraine ambassadors who objected to “recent uncorroborated allegations” about Yovanovitch.

The April letter from Taylor and the five others says, “these charges are simply wrong.”

Taylor told Congress he was asked to return to lead the embassy in Kyiv in May by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In his testimony, Taylor said his initial reservation about taking the job was because of the poor treatment of Yovanovitch.

The April 5 letter from Taylor and the former ambassadors cited recent articles by John Solomon, who at the time was an opinion contributor for The Hill, that claimed the embassy under Yovanovitch interfered with the ability of the Ukrainian prosecutor to investigate anti-corruption cases, and that she criticized Trump.

Who is John Solomon and why was he telling lies about Marie Yovanovitch?

American Oversight says this is just the first round of disclosures.

“The evidence is only going to get worse for the administration as its stonewall strategy collapses in the face of court orders,” Evers said in the statement.

Bring it on.

Metaphors and slogans are all very well, but it helps if they get it right.

Dawn Butler:

I think I would replace pie with cake. @UKLabour

EQUAL RIGHTS

FOR OTHERS

DOES NOT MEAN

LESS RIGHTS

FOR YOU.

IT’S NOT PIE.

Fewer rights, they mean, but never mind that. Pie or cake, whichever, it’s still not true. It’s not true because it depends. Anything can be called a right, and it’s not difficult to imagine purported rights that would indeed mean fewer or no rights for other people. Look at US history for example – the ruling class in the South and much of the rest of the white population thought the federal government was violating their “right” to own slaves. They considered themselves to be the aggrieved party.

Think of “right to work” laws. What those are in fact is laws that weaken unions, and weak unions means employers are free to impose dangerous working conditions and crap pay and benefits. The word “rights” can be used to disguise exploitation or oppression. It depends.

Laws against domestic violence interfere with the “rights” of husbands to bash their wives. Laws protecting children interfere with parents’ “rights” to bash the kids when they make too much noise.

It’s depressing that a Labour MP and Shadow Women and Equalities Secretary doesn’t get this, or pretends she doesn’t.

gender is harmful tweets:

It seems, the promotion of violence against women is, quite literally, ‘in Vogue’… at least in visual form, in an article for @voguemagazine.

This is how emboldened, patriarchal violence against women has become folks. Here it is in plain sight for a Vogue article. 👀

The article is not about baseball.

Yet again, Meghan Murphy tries to explain.

In Canada, famous for niceness, feminist Meghan Murphy is a woman whose words are weapons — or such is the cry from activists for trans­gender rights who see nothing odd about using threats of violence to try to silence her.

Murphy has no quarrel with trans people having rights or freedoms. “Really, it’s about public policy and legislation,” she says.

“It’s one thing to live your life the way you want, it’s another thing if you’re going to start forcing people to say you’re literally ­female when you’re male and that means you should be allowed to enter women’s and girls’ spaces (such as toilets, change rooms, shelters, refuges or prisons).”

And that means you have just as much to say about women’s experiences, women’s rights, policy regarding women, women’s sport, and so on as women do, and that you should and must be “included” in all women’s projects and events and gatherings and politics, whether women want you there or not. It means your presence on a panel or in government or on an all-women’s shortlist equals the presence of a woman, thus displacing actual women from efforts to make the world less male-dominated.

Like other “gender-critical” feminists wearily familiar with harassment, death threats and being miscast as merchants of hate speech, she is still gobsmacked by how upside down the world of trans identity politics has become.

“Hate speech is a specific thing; it’s inciting violence or genocide against a group of people — I’ve never done that. It seems a lot of people just don’t value free speech. In progressive circles they seem to think they can determine which speech is acceptable,’’ Murphy says.

She’s no rightwinger, and as a graduate and journalist, she’s dismayed to witness mainstream media outlets and universities not challenging evidence-free campaigns to shut down debate.

And she’s not the only one.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Trump in his long conversation with Fox News repeated his lie that Ukraine blah blah blah.

Trump called in to “Fox & Friends” and said he was trying to root out corruption in the Eastern European nation when he withheld aid over the summer. Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president is at the center of the House impeachment probe, which is looking into Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate political rivals as he held back nearly $400 million.

But he repeated his assertion that Ukrainians might have hacked the Democratic National Committee’s network in 2016 and framed Russia for the crime, a theory his own advisers have dismissed.

“They gave the server to CrowdStrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian,” Trump said. “I still want to see that server. The FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing.”

CrowdStrike is not owned by any Ukrainian, rich or poor or supernatural or anything else. It’s a California company.

In fact, company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Russian-born U.S. citizen who immigrated as a child and graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

So that makes him Ukrainian. Don’t you get it? That’s how they fool us!

The president repeated his claim one day after Fiona Hill, a former Russia adviser on the White House National Security Council, admonished Republicans for pushing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill testified before the House impeachment inquiry panel. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

And that’s why Trump is echoing it.

Jane Clare Jones has more on the Labour are they or aren’t they question.

I think we all have a right to be wondering what the hell is going on. As I tweeted earlier, from my perspective – and based on conversations with people who were involved in getting the pledge into the manifesto – what is going on is the surfacing of a fundamental split inside the party, which mirrors the basic division over the debate. That is, I believe that those who were instrumental in getting the pledge put into the manifesto did so with genuine intent, and that the TRA-faction lost the debate on this point at the ‘Clause V’ meeting when the manifesto was formulated (see here for info on Clause V). However, it is evident that not everyone in the party is on board with the results of that process, and have, effectively, decided to start legislating Labour party policy from the frontbench, in direct contravention of the party’s own internal democratic procedures. (Julie Bindel quotes several Labour Party insiders on this here). Given the utter contempt for due democratic process we have witnessed from TRAs and their allies over the years, I have to say I find this behaviour not even remotely surprising.

None of this tells us anything about how this will play out. I will say that I don’t think it’s the result of the Labour Party pulling some kind of deliberate bait and switch or making pronouncements to mollify us which they never intended to honour. Rather, as I said, I think it evidences the genuine divisions inside the party, and how completely impossible it is to get people dosed up to their eyeballs on the Kool-Aid to abide by any social or democratic conventions which don’t serve their ends. This may well not reassure anyone, and I think we are all wise to be sceptical here, especially given the contempt with which we have been treated by all major political parties on this question. Given what is happening now, people are right to question if the pledge made in the manifesto would have force were Labour to win the election, and to judge where to place their vote as their both their conscience and intuition dictates. They are also right to worry about how this would interact with the ongoing commitment to reforming the GRA. Even if the pledge in the manifesto stands, there would need to be a great deal of concerted work to ensure that the exemptions could be practicably enforced given how thoroughly Stonewall et al. have muddied the water by running all round the country disseminating legal bullshit.

Concise account of the worry: if people can “identify as” the other sex and thus legally be the other sex, how will women still be able to have single-sex changing rooms and toilets and the like? Reform of the GRA stands for identifying as being all it takes.

That all said, even with my most pessimistic hat on, I do think yesterday’s announcement is significant. Firstly because I think a Labour Party that is openly split on the issue is still a massive improvement on a Labour Party that is unthinkingly reciting TRA-dogma and straightforwardly colluding with the silencing of women’s legitimate concerns. This may not help us all make a decision with respect to this benighted election. But with respect to the long slow grind of this conflict, it is a move in the right direction. For those of us born and bred on the left, who have been putting sweat and soul into making the case for why the trans rights movement is neither progressive, nor good for women, it’s important that the debate is now squarely, and openly, situated inside the Labour Party. We’ve spent the last several years being called Nazis and fascists and segregationist bigots, enduring endless lectures from blue-haired anime avatars about how our position could only indicate a fundamental conservatism. That story no longer stands up. The left is divided on this question. Just as we have always maintained.

The second thing is even more significant. All that the Labour Party did yesterday was reaffirm its commitment to upholding our existing rights as given in law. And the consequence of a political party affirming its commitment to our existing rights in law is an enormous amount of screaming, obfuscation and witch-burning bullshit. What this demonstrates decisively – what this clearly unconceals – is that the objectives of the present form of the trans rights movement is the removal of our existing legal rights.

Why yes, so it does.

Anti-intellectualism, indeed anti-thought, flourishing in the University and College Union, the UK trade union and professional association for academics, lecturers, trainers, researchers and academic-related staff in higher education:

UCU’s Equality Groups Conference is meeting in Birmingham today – members are currently hearing from General Secretary Jo Grady about the wide range of work the union is doing to tackle inequality in FE and HE and beyond 1/

…

Jo also reaffirmed the union’s unequivocal support for trans rights and trans inclusion 4/

And for not asking what it is we’re supporting:

“We need to shift our focus away from definitions and abstract debates about competing rights, and try to quantify and understand the real violence and discrimination that bears down on marginalised groups in our society” /5

But if we shift our focus away from definitions how do we know what we’re talking about? How do we know we’re all talking about the same thing? How do we know what “discrimination” is, what “marginalised” means, what we’re talking about when we talk about “our society”?

Alessandra Asteriti nailed it:

Privileged people can eschew definitions. Because they define reality around them and do not need to be defined by it. This is really making me boil with rage

Her field is international law, so she would know.

The Guardian live is startled by Trump’s performance on Fox “News” this morning.

Donald Trump has had quite a morning of it already. The president called into Fox & Friends for an extraordinary, at times bizarre, 55-minute interview during which Trump:

•Reiterated the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election

•Said his own EU ambassador’s sworn testimony was “total nonsense”

•Called Nancy Pelosi “crazy as a bedbug”

•Suggested he wanted to be impeached, saying: “I want a trial”

•Complained that former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch took too long to hang his picture in the Ukraine embassy

•Said people praised Yovanovitch – a highly regarded official – because “she’s a woman, you have to be nice”

•Described Rudy Giuliani as “one of the great crime fighters of all time”

The Fox & Friends hosts were largely bystanders during what effectively became a Trump monologue.

Trump sounded slightly hoarse as he ran through some of his greatest hits: his 2016 election victory, how much he has invested in the military and the highly dubious claim that “no one” has done as much during their first term.

He sounded very hoarse. He usually does. The reason is obvious: he never shuts up. He’s That Guy Who Never Shuts Up. What does that tell us? How profoundly narcissistic he is. Normal people understand that others have things to say too; narcissists think They Alone are interesting.

What he said about Yovanovitch:

This ambassador, who everybody says was so wonderful, she wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy, ok? She’s in charge of the embassy, she wouldn’t hang it, it took like a year and a half or two years for her to get the picture up. She said bad things about me, she wouldn’t defend me, and I have the right to change an ambassador – and Rudy didn’t say good things but he wasn’t crazy about her, it wasn’t like you know a major topic – but I have the right to change. This was an Obama person – didn’t want to hang my picture in the embassy,  it’s standard is you put the president of the United States’ picture in an embassy, this was not an angel, this woman, OK? And there were a lot of things she did that I didn’t like, and we will talk about that at some time.

Bad things, I have the right, good things, the right, Obama person, my picture the picture my picture the president of the United States’ picture, a lot of things.

In that one passage you get the hatred of women, the narcissism, the tiny shrunken vocabulary and thought process, the bullying, the emptiness and spite and rage. It’s a disgusting collection.

There is much confusion right now about Labour and its position on women and what exactly it is trying to say.

Yesterday @Womans_Place_UK tweeted:

WPUK is pleased to see that @UKLabour recognises the importance of the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act is committing to upholding them. https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Real-Change-Labour-Manifesto-2019.pdf 1/2

But now there is waffling, or there isn’t but there is the appearance that there is.

Dawn Butler, Labour Women & Equalities Secretary, says nothing has changed.

.@UKLabour will reform the GRA to introduce self-declaration for trans people.

We will remove outdated language from the Equalities Act.

And there is no way spaces will be permitted to discriminate against trans people. That is illegal and it will stay illegal.

So when they say single-sex based exemptions (such as changing rooms and toilets) will be enforced they don’t mean it? Or they do, and Dawn Butler is resisting? The situation is unclear.

Sarah Ditum observes:

Labour putting a sensible-sounding position on gender identity and women’s rights in the manifesto, then giving an outrider the contradictory version the faithful want to hear, is such a dishonest idiot’s version of politics

I mean, it’s smart in that it puts the sane version where the sane people will see it, and the one for the Twitter nutters where the Twitter nutters can see it, and both groups get tell themselves they’re the wife and the other one’s the mistress

But if Labour is ever in power, there is no way here to write a functional policy. Then again who gives a fuck about policy when it only affects that capricious group of semi-humans called women

Kathleen Stock:

Like @helenlewis I’m deleting earlier tweets suggesting @UKLabour finally recognise that women are distinct group who need legal protection. I continue to hear from well-placed people this doesn’t reflect intention of manifesto but position’s destructively ambiguous to say least.

Do they? Don’t they? It’s up in the air.