Hmmm. Well, I think the vast amount of attention the news media pay to popes and all their doings is absurd and bad, but having said that…if the new guy is going to annoy Trump, I can’t help a little bit of (entirely secular) schadenfreude.

The first American-born pope is not a fan of the Trump administration.

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV, has multiple posts on his X account that criticize or outright rebuke the words and policies of President Trump.

In February, he shared an article from the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” in response to Vance’s bastardization of the concept of ordo amaris, a narrow interpretation of love that Pope Francis himself admonished.

In April, he reposted Catholic writer Rocco Palmo, who wrote, “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to [aid] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident, once an undoc-ed Salvadorean himself, now-[Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington, D.C.] asks, “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”

Pope Leo was also critical of Trump’s family separation policy. In 2018, he retweeted a scathing post from Cardinal Cupich: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”

Of course there’s a lot that’s Christian about it, taking Christianity as a whole and after all these centuries, but a rebuke of Trump is a rebuke of Trump and it is some consolation for all this pope-watching nonsense.

Ok that is funny.

When Trump met Carney:

Trump, who in the meeting with Carney said he considered himself a “very artistic person”, insists that he is inspired by the potential beauty of a unified continent.

“When you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together … you know, I said, ‘That’s the way it was meant to be’,” the president said.

Ahhh yes, that does indeed demonstrate that Trump is a very artistic person. It works the same way with packets of hundred dollar bills, and barrels of diamonds.

Mind you, there is some truth to the idea that the straight-line borders that appear so often in US maps are kind of irritating. We all know damn well they don’t reflect anything about the land in question, unlike all those squiggly lines that are obviously rivers as well as boundaries. They look wrong. Maps should be of the earth earthy; they should be irregular and bumpy and not drawn with a ruler.

A glance at the map of North America reveals the clean, crisp and unbroken line that spans the Lake of the Woods and then reaches to the Pacific Ocean, neatly tracing the 49th parallel.

That line was agreed on over the course of a string of negotiations between 1783 and 1846, when much of the relevant region had still not even been seen by European settlers.

“It’s not like the British and the Americans had a map and they drew a ruler on it. They didn’t have a map, and they just agreed upon this imaginary line: the 49th parallel. They just projected these imaginary lines further on to a geography that they didn’t know anything about,” said Bown.

Surveys of the lands would have revealed a far more complicated reality, which in many places makes the border nonsensical on the ground. In some place, it cuts the wrong way through mountain valleys; elsewhere, rivers wind back and forth across the frontier.

Squiggly. Bumpy. Organic.

NHS Sussex has a “gender service.” Of course it does.

About the Sussex Gender Service

The Sussex Gender Service is staffed by an experienced multi-disciplinary team and receives clinical support from the gender identity clinic at Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health. We have care navigators with lived experience that work with people who access our services to provide support and signposting to local organisations. 

The service follows the same service specification from NHS England as other gender service pilots, which is similar to the existing gender identity clinics.

So come on in and let us trash your bodies and lives.

Our values at the Sussex Gender Service

1. Our service strives to be anti-oppressive

We recognise and acknowledge the historical and ongoing harm that the transgender community experiences. We think very carefully about privilege, power and intersectionality and provide training on this to our team. We do all that we can to take a stand against any form of transphobia.

What they don’t do, I’m guessing, is warn their patients about drastic changes to their bodies prompted by belief in magic switchable gender.

Now for the article itself.

For Amelia Short, Jamie Hughes, Alice*, and Anaya Bangar, women’s cricket promised to be a place where they could thrive as their true selves.

Or to put it another way, women’s cricket promised to be a place where they could give themselves an unfair advantage by pretending to be women.

That was before the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) extended the ban on transgender women and girls from the top two tiers of women’s domestic cricket to the third tier and recreational level last Friday.

Though the ECB acknowledged the “significant impact” of the decision and said it would work with recreational cricket boards to support those affected, it has contacted none of these players.

Oh yes? Did any of these players contact the women they displaced? Or the women they cheated?

Open and mixed cricket remains available, but that provides little comfort.

Short is a 20-year-old trans woman who has loved cricket since she was nine, as well as scoring and coaching more recently.

This season, one year into hormone replacement therapy (HRT), she joined Lindow Cricket Club and has relished training and matches with the women’s first XI.

Of course he has. Cheating is fun when it’s encouraged by newspapers and the government and all the rest of the trans fan club.

“Cricket was escapism. It allowed me to relax and not worry about the real world and have fun, enjoy myself, and socialise with others. That has been taken away,” she tells The i Paper.

“It has affected me quite heavily mentally to the point that I don’t want to be involved with cricket at all. I’m very close to turning my back. I contemplated selling my equipment, ­moving on, and not picking up any other sport.

“Most sports are not an environment trans people want to be in. Open cricket is predominantly men and is not the nicest place for women to play cricket. It involves prejudice.”

Hey you know what else is not the nicest place for women to play cricket? Teams that are inclooosive of men who claim to be trans women.

I’m not the only one who notices.

Male. Male male MALE. It’s the male bit that matters, and journalism needs to stop leaving it out. It doesn’t know it needs to, but we do.

Uh oh. Parliament has a new bill coming up that will torpedo women’s rights all over again.

Women’s rights campaigners have been warning ministers that the bill, which is intended to introduce a new digital ID system, will play havoc with the ability of companies such as gym chains and public bodies like the NHS and police to ascertain someone’s sex – just after the Supreme Court ruling intended to bring much-needed clarity.

The bill will allow people to prove their identity and facts about themselves by using a new voluntary Government app that is linked to what the bill calls “digital verification services” (DVS), backed by a government “trustmark”. It will draw data from a number of sources but the bodies being presented with the app won’t be able to tell which documents it is relying on.

That means that if the app states that the user is “female”, that information could, in theory, either be based on the sex stated on their passport or driving licence – which can be changed relatively easily from someone’s biological sex – or a birth certificate, which can be changed but only if the individual first obtains a formal gender recognition certificate (which has to be approved by a panel made up of lawyers or medics.) 

To worsen matters, says Helen Joyce, of the women’s rights charity Sex Matters, under the new system the app will have to be “treated as more authoritative than any pre-existing record – or the evidence of your own eyes.”

It’s like a religion. Believe the magic words, not the reality you can see with your own eyes.

On Wednesday, the Conservatives attempted to amend the bill so that sex data would be taken solely from birth certificates. The amendment was defeated by 363 votes to 97, meaning the bill will now move onto its final stage – the third reading – before becoming law.

Tory MPs had previously warned that “inaccurate data entrenched by the Bill” could “pose a risk” to vulnerable people, but the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, was among many Labour MPs who criticised the Opposition amendment, calling it “a targeting of the trans community which is deeply regressive.”

Aaaaaaaaaargh! Female Labour MP throws women overboard yet again! While calling the women regressive!

Heather Binning, chief executive of the Women’s Rights Network, agrees with the Conservatives’ concerns. She says that the new law will essentially introduce gender self-identification – a system which involves the state adopting whichever gender an individual chooses to be known by – “through the back door”. “It flies in the face of the Supreme Court ruling,” she says. “It will be mayhem if it goes thorough as it is. If official documentation says a man is a female with the new system, employers and others will be inclined to accept it. This part of the Bill needs to be scrapped.”

Scrapped and buried and forgotten.

Well great: they’re just going to go on enforcing trans dogma anyway.

Women’s rights campaigners have been warning ministers that [a Government bill days away from becoming law], which is intended to introduce a new digital ID system, will play havoc with the ability of companies such as gym chains and public bodies like the NHS and police to ascertain someone’s sex – just after the Supreme Court ruling intended to bring much-needed clarity.

The bill will allow people to prove their identity and facts about themselves by using a new voluntary Government app that is linked to what the bill calls “digital verification services” (DVS), backed by a government “trustmark”. It will draw data from a number of sources but the bodies being presented with the app won’t be able to tell which documents it is relying on.

That means that if the app states that the user is “female”, that information could, in theory, either be based on the sex stated on their passport or driving licence – which can be changed relatively easily from someone’s biological sex – or a birth certificate, which can be changed but only if the individual first obtains a formal gender recognition certificate (which has to be approved by a panel made up of lawyers or medics.) 

To worsen matters, says Helen Joyce, of the women’s rights charity Sex Matters, under the new system the app will have to be “treated as more authoritative than any pre-existing record – or the evidence of your own eyes.”

Sigh. It just never ends. The most important cause in the world is making sure men can pretend to be women and force everyone else to agree and act accordingly, no matter what. The dangers and injustices this cause imposes on women just don’t matter. All that matters is the bliss of the man who gets to play Let’s Pretend all day every day.

On Wednesday, the Conservatives attempted to amend the bill so that sex data would be taken solely from birth certificates. The amendment was defeated by 363 votes to 97, meaning the bill will now move onto its final stage – the third reading – before becoming law.

Tory MPs had previously warned that “inaccurate data entrenched by the Bill” could “pose a risk” to vulnerable people, but the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, was among many Labour MPs who criticised the Opposition amendment, calling it “a targeting of the trans community which is deeply regressive.”

Oh hell. The twanz communniny is more important than anyone else on the planet, the end, shut up, we can’t hear you.

Trump and his toads continue their push to grab Greenland.

The U.S. is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America’s spying apparatus into President Trump’s campaign to take over the island, according to two people familiar with the effort.

Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island. 

As one does before an invasion.

 The Greenland order, which went to agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, underscores the administration’s apparent commitment to seek control of the self-governing island. It forms part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member and a decadeslong ally.

Yeah the same way Hitler “sought control” of the Sudetenland.

Asked by NBC News in an interview that aired Sunday whether he would rule out seizing Greenland by force, Trump demurred. 

“I don’t rule it out,” he said. “I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything. No, not there. We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security.”

And if we say we need it very badly, that means we get to grab it.

Denmark is asking questions.

Denmark’s foreign minister says he will summon the US ambassador to address a report that Washington’s spy agencies have been told to focus on Greenland amid Donald Trump’s threats to take over the island.

“It worries me greatly because we do not spy on friends,” Lars Løkke Rasmussen said, responding to the report in The Wall Street Journal.

(Don’t we? I bet we do.)

Rasmussen, who was attending an EU ministers meeting in Warsaw, said the report was “somewhat disturbing”.

“We are going to call in the US acting ambassador for a discussion at the foreign ministry to see if we can confirm this information,” Rasmussen said. “It doesn’t seem to be strongly rejected by those who speak out. That worries me.”

You and us both.

The Women’s Institute waves the incloosivvitee flag.

The WI (National Federation of Women’s Institutes)

NFWI Statement on Supreme Court ruling:

The WI works to connect, empower and support women, and we are committed to treating all our members with respect, dignity and understanding. In light of the Supreme Court ruling and interim update from the EHRC, we are taking time to consider carefully the implications for our organisation. While we consider and understand the impact of the judgement, our existing inclusion policies continue to apply. We encourage all members to continue supporting each other with respect and care at this time, as we have done throughout our 110 year history.

In other words we’re continuing to incloood men whether you bitches like it or not so ha.

The WI (National Federation of Women’s Institutes) limited who can comment on this post.

Of course it did.

From the Department of Random Sadism:

Lawyers representing a number of immigrants asked a federal judge on Wednesday to “urgently” block the Trump administration from deporting a group of people to Libya, Saudi Arabia or any other country where they are not citizens until the U.S. government gives them a chance to contest the removals.

The lawyers asked Judge Brian E. Murphy in Boston to rule quickly after reports that federal immigration officers were preparing to expel people from Vietnam, Laos and the Philippines to Libya, a troubled North African nation “notorious for its human rights violations, especially with respect to migrant residents,” their emergency motions says.

Libya??? Why Libya? Why not Vietnam, Laos and the Philippines? Just what it says on the tin, apparently: random sadism.

In their filing, the lawyers said they feared the removals were “imminent” and argued that such a move would violate the judge’s prior orders barring the Trump administration from sending anyone with a final deportation order to a country where they are not a citizen without first giving them a “meaningful opportunity” to seek protection in the United States.

Ok but judges and orders and barring and meaningful opportunity are all tedious and boring, while sending them to one of the shittiest places on the planet is almost as entertaining as The Apprentice.

Asked Wednesday about the reports of a deportation flight to Libya, President Donald Trump said he did not know about it and referred the reporter who asked the question to the Department of Homeland Security.

He says that a lot. He does horrifying things and then says he doesn’t know about it.

Oh good, it seems we’re spying on Denmark, and by spying of course I mean casing the joint.

Denmark has said that it will summon the US ambassador to Copenhagen to respond to reports that US intelligence agencies have been ordered to increase espionage in Greenland.

The Danish foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said on Wednesday that he was concerned about the report in the Wall Street Journal, telling the Ritzau news agency: “It worries me a lot, because we don’t spy between friends.”

Speaking on his way to a meeting in Warsaw, he added: “I can’t know if it’s true because it’s in a newspaper. But it doesn’t seem to be strongly rejected by those who speak out. That worries me.”

These are worrying people. It’s always safest to worry, with them in power.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency were all included in the message. It told chiefs to study Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes to American efforts to extract resources on the island, according to the Journal, citing two unnamed officials familiar with the matter.

Seasoned intelligence operatives say the Arctic island of about 56,000 inhabitants has not historically been a target of US espionage activity.

Well that was then, before they wanted to steal the Arctic island.

Trump, who has mused since his first presidency about the possibility of possessing Greenland, refused to rule out seizing the 836,000 sq mile territory by force in an interview with NBC that was broadcast last weekend.

“I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything,” he said. “We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security.”

Ok. I very badly need all of Trump’s money, so he has to give it to me. That’s how needing something works.

It’s like inviting people over for dinner and then insisting you want to buy their children.

Here was newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney making his first visit to the Oval Office to see President Donald Trump, who has spent months musing about turning America’s northern neighbor into the 51st state.

It didn’t take long for a reporter to ask about what was on everyone’s mind. Trump said he was still interested in annexing Canada, describing the border between the two countries as nothing more than an arbitrary line.

Well that’s true of a lot of borders. The exact spot where they’re drawn is sometimes “an arbitrary line” as opposed to a river or a canyon or an ocean. It doesn’t follow that they can be thrown out by a brainless egomaniac who likes to grab everybody’s stuff.

Carney’s campaign was fueled by a wave of anger at Trump’s aggressive rhetoric, and now was his chance to defend his country to the president’s face. He was polite and firm.

“Some places are never for sale,” Carney said. Canada is one of them, he added, and “it won’t be for sale, ever.”

Trump gave a little shrug and raised his eyebrows. “Never say never,” he responded.

Of course he did, because he’s a rude brainless crass bully.

We apologize, Canada. He’s not house-trained.

Well, that’s clear enough. Message received.

Is it the end of the road for stupid language games?

The NHS must use “plain English” in guidance for women and transgender people, Wes Streeting has said.

The Health Secretary stressed that women should not be “excluded or erased” in an effort for the NHS to be “trans inclusive”, such as by referring to “people with cervixes”.

He criticised the “totally misguided attempts” of NHS managers to be inclusive by removing the word women, which has included phrases such as “birthing people” and “chestfeeding”.

Misguided, idiotic, and profoundly contemptuous of women. You don’t be “inclusive” by erasing the female half of humanity.

Asked about NHS language on cervical screening, Mr Streeting said it had “annoyed lots of us”.

“Well, the thing that I’ve railed against is the erasure of women,” he told Times Radio. “So, when you’ve got well-meaning but totally misguided attempts to be inclusive of trans people by erasing women that, I think, has quite rightly and understandably, got a lot of women’s backs up.

“And not just women, I think it’s annoyed lots of us, because you don’t need to exclude or erase women in order to be trans inclusive.”

And if you did, you still shouldn’t, because 1. trans isn’t even a thing and 2. women are half of all humanity and people who claim to be trans are a much much much smaller fraction than that. You don’t get to erase half of all people in order to give a little thrill to a few thousand people. Those few thousand people will just have to get on with their lives without the treat of insulting women.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the words “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex, Mr Streeting said updated guidance from NHS England would be “issued before the summer”.

A series of investigations by The Telegraph has revealed the widespread failure of NHS trusts across the UK to provide single-sex spaces to both patients and staff following high profile disputes, such as the case of the Dr Beth Upton, in which transgender NHS staff have used women’s changing rooms or lavatories.

In which male transgender NHS staff have used women’s changing rooms or lavatories. Even the Telegraph refuses to get it right.

The very best most compassionate people support trans ideology.

Don’t worry, they also call her a cunt – no misogynist insult is neglected.

People are celebrating Magdalen Berns’s birthday today.

Here is a guest post of hers from January 2016:

Guest post: Let them call me whorephobic

What’s wrong with this claim?

It’s a ridiculous childish lie, that’s what. “Trans” is not an adjective like “tall” or “French.” It’s not even an adjective, in fact. It’s just a negation. It could be replaced with “not.” (“Not” is not an adjective.)

Trans is not a kind of woman, trans is a sneaky word that people use to pretend that sex is as fungible as length of hair or favorite color.

So, yes, actually, trans women are indeed a separate category that exists outside of womanhood. (Do we know what category that is? Why yes. The category is men. All trans women are men by definition.)

Oh no oh horrors queer Australians are staying home.

Queer Australians are axing travel plans to Washington DC’s World Pride festival, as Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting LGBTQ+ rights leads to fears of discrimination at the US border and potential attacks.

He isn’t actually targeting lesbian and/or gay rights though. I hate him as much as you do but that lede is just a lie. It’s the usual lie, the one that pretends lesbian and gay rights are the same as purported trans rights, when they’re not even close. Purported trans rights are about being believed and endorsed and pampered and worshipped as women if you’re men and men if you’re women. There are no such rights. There is no human right to force other people to participate in one’s games of Let’s Pretend.

The Guardian was contacted by LGBTQ+ Australians, including trans and same-sex couples, who had scheduled trips to the US to incorporate World Pride but in recent weeks ditched their plans.

Mik Bartels is among them. The University of Canberra student, who is examining LGBTIQ+ discrimination in healthcare for their PhD, was offered a scholarship that covered travel expenses to attend World Pride’s human rights conference.

Bartels had attended the conference at the 2023 World Pride in Sydney and found it valuable for their research. “It brings together people from all disciplines – community leaders, scholars, academics from around the world,” they said.

You’re impressed by the scrupulous attention to the “they”s and “their”s yes?

However, after an Equality Australia travel warning and recent reports of discrimination in the US, they decided to withdraw their acceptance of the funded trip.

“Given my appearance as identifiably queer, my academic profile being centred on LGBTIQ+ discrimination, and my online presence where I am openly queer, I was not confident that I would be able to get into the US without being detained,” they said.

What’s an appearance as identifiably queer? Wearing a T shirt with “QUEER” on the front? Wearing a baseball cap with same? Bits of metal through the lips and nostrils and eyebrows?

“I’m conscious of the US government’s list of banned words in academic research – my own research includes about 20 of those words.

“I’m also hyper aware of how I present myself online. I’m quite visibly queer in how I look and dress. I realised there was a very real possibility of being detained. I didn’t withdraw the acceptance lightly, but felt [that] for my own safety, I needed to.”

Oh gosh, they’s hyper aware of how they presents theirself online – you don’t say. Of course they’s hyper aware of how they presents theyself: they is hyper aware of everything to do with theyself because they is embedded in a wildly narcissistic ideology that teaches people to think and talk and do “scholarship” about nothing but their precious SELVES.

Missing out on the conference and World Pride was a “double whammy”, Bartels said.

“When you spend a lot of your life building the confidence to carve out a space for yourself, that becomes a lifelong journey. Opportunities to celebrate that journey and to demonstrate my relationship proudly are rare, so for this to be taken away, it can feel like a bit of a kick in the guts,” Bartels said.

Well, never mind, you’ll still have precious beloved Self, so you’ll never really miss out on anything important.

Ugh god this fucking guy.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told President Trump on Tuesday that Canada “is not for sale,” nor will it be.

Trump has repeatedly threatened Canadian sovereignty, but Carney’s Liberal Party staged a political comeback by rallying against Trump’s annexation threats.

“Never say never,” Trump responded, to which Carney repeatedly said: “Never.”

Don’t you tell me not to say never you disgusting bullying pea-brained pile of shit.

No doubt that’s what Trump has said to women as he slammed them up against a wall and tore at their clothes.

Ahead of the meeting, Trump criticized Canada-U.S. relations on Truth Social. During the meeting, though, he said, “regardless of anything, we’re gonna be friends with Canada.”

Not while he’s in the job we’re not.

That’s the ticket! Harass the scientists until they get fed up and leave. Who needs scientists? We want advertisers and PR geniuses and movie stars, not scientists.

As the Trump administration slashes support to research institutions and threatens to freeze federal funding to universities like Harvard and Columbia, European leaders are offering financial help to U.S.-based researchers and hoping to benefit from what they are calling a “gigantic miscalculation.”

“Nobody could imagine a few years ago that one of the great democracies of the world would eliminate research programs on the pretext that the word ‘diversity’ appeared in its program,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Monday.

One of the former great democracies. We’re one of the crappier autocracies now.

He was speaking at the Sorbonne University in Paris during an event called Choose Europe for Science that was organized by the French government and the European Union.

It was unthinkable, Mr. Macron said, alluding also to the withdrawal of researchers’ visas in the United States, that a nation whose “economy depends so heavily on free science” would “commit such an error.”

It may be unthinkable that the US would, but it’s all too thinkable that Trump would.

Alarms in Europe began sounding when the Trump administration slashed jobs and froze science grants at leading American institutions as part of cost-cutting measures. European dismay increased when the U.S. government attacked diversity programs and attempted to dictate to universities “whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” in the words of Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber.

Harvard has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its $2.2 billion federal funding freeze. Mr. Trump mused last week about ending Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

The U.S. government has also fired staff at U.S. centers deemed to be at the pinnacle of scientific research, including at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research.

At the same time, some federal agencies have removed words from websites and grant applications that were deemed unacceptable to the Trump administration. Among the terms considered taboo are “climate science,” “diversity” and “gender.”

Taken together, the actions have sent a chill through academia and research institutes, with scientists worried not just for their jobs but the long-term viability of their research.

Our loss is their gain.

Good move, Don.