Hadley Freeman writes

Last week Fox Varian, a 22-year-old woman, was awarded $2 million by a New York court in a medical malpractice lawsuit against doctors who gave her a double mastectomy when she was 16 — not because it was medically necessary but because Varian was then identifying as a boy.

Varian’s mother, Claire Deacon, did not want her then teenage daughter to lose her breasts. She had seen her autistic daughter through a host of other problems, including anxiety and anorexia. Varian had cycled through name changes — Isabella to Gabriel to Rowan and finally to Fox — as if she were trying to find herself. Then she announced she was transgender. Instead of seeing this as yet another manifestation of Varian’s unhappiness, her psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, insisted it was the other way round: the unhappiness stemmed from her being the wrong gender, and told Deacon that Varian was at risk of “self-harm” if she didn’t have surgery.

Overlooking the fact that lopping off her healthy breasts would itself be harm.

Say what you want about putting vulnerable people on long-term, untested hormones, and subjecting them to unnecessary operations which will likely require lifelong additional surgical interventions, but it’s a great money-spinner. Money for the surgery, money for the follow-up: no wonder the medical establishment went all in on anti-science trans ideology. In 2022, Boston Children’s Hospital proudly posted videos promoting “gender-affirming hysterectomies” and its own doctors claimed “refusing to get a haircut” and “plays with the opposite gender toys” were signs a young child might be transgender.

Are we crazy to expect doctors to have better sense than that? Shouldn’t better sense than that be a core part of the job? The Hippocratic Oath must have a few words about it, no?

I recently heard a journalist on the radio say they found the gender debate “boring”. I can only assume this journalist hasn’t been paying attention, because this “debate” has become a medical, psychological, journalistic, linguistic, employment, safeguarding, educational, legal, social, financial, scientific and penal scandal.

And there’s always the nagging question: how can adults be this credulous and stupid? It’s a question we may get tired of, but it’s not boring.

I have been covering the gender scandal for (sigh) 12 years, but I will never stop being shocked by the number of people willing to trash the most basic safeguards, letting children be mutilated by venal doctors, letting women be put at risk again and again. Gender ideologues insist they can remake the human body on a whim. But, as ever, it is the bodies of women and children that are treated as disposable.

If we stop being shocked we’ve gone over to the other side. Stay shocked.

Oh hell no.

Growing up in India, I learned that thank yous are only for distant strangers, and that close friends and family get offended if you thank them. I would say thank you to a speaker delivering a formal talk but never to a friend helping during a crisis or a family member making me dinner. But living in the UK for two decades has forced me to adopt our incessant “thank you” culture. I now find myself saying thank you at least 10 times a day and sometimes many more. Nevertheless, there are some British “thank yous” that I would ban completely, if I could.

…

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t thank those who help us. The problem is that we thank too many people, often mindlessly, and innumerable times a day. Thank you, shop assistant (whose job it is to help you shop). Thank you, bus driver (who is getting paid to drive the bus). Thank you, cafe owner (whom you are paying for the food you have ordered). By what feels like the hundredth thank you of the day, the words lose their very essence.

That’s disgusting.

Of course shop assistants and bus drivers are paid; that is not a reason to withhold thanks! If anything it’s all the more reason to say thank you: to make it a human exchange as opposed to putting coins in a vending machine.

I had thought it was a Seattle thing to thank the bus driver; I’m pleased to learn it’s not. Driving a bus is hard work, and the drivers should get appreciation. They have to heave the bus around all those obstacles, and do it to schedule, and deal with people, some of whom are rude or angry or mentally ill or drunk or drugged. Yes of course we should say thank you when we hop off.

Imane Khelif’s latest propaganda campaign should fool nobody

That’s Oliver Brown in The Telegraph.

Protests against the athlete’s gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics were never about the transgender issue in the first place, but about a disqualification from the previous year’s world championships over sex test results indicating the presence of male chromosomes. Khelif has still not furnished any evidence to the contrary.

Instead, there has been only a cynical PR campaign, soft-soaping the Paris travesty by portraying Khelif – rather than the women smashed in the face by an opponent they could not even be sure was biologically female – as the victim. Worse, credulous news giants are still falling for it. Take this Mills & Boon aside in CNN’s write-up, seeking to confirm Khelif as unambiguously female: “She touches up her make-up (fashion and beauty are passions of hers, and she is the face of an Algerian beauty brand).”

Is this what we have come to? An interview giving greater credence to Khelif’s interest in eyeliner than to a document leaked last year that explicitly stated: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype”?

This is very much what we have come to. It has been all along. “Look! Look at her! She’s wearing lipstick! She has long hair! What more do you want?!”

…it is the IOC who bear heavy responsibility for this entire scandal, having decided in Paris that womanhood was dictated not by biology but by having an “F” in your passport.

It is my prediction that Khelif will be a long way from LA in 2½ years’ time. World Boxing, the governing body instituted in the wake of the Paris debacle, have belatedly limited female boxing events to biological women. How absurd that this should even have needed spelling out, in a sport fraught with mortal danger and where a man punches, on average, 2.6 times harder than a woman. Under the revised rules, there is no scope for boxers to enter bouts as female when there are tests asserting that they are genetically male.

I still think it’s odd and gruesome that there’s such a thing as a sport that’s fraught with mortal danger.

Khelif was supposed to lace up the gloves in Eindhoven last May, but pulled out as soon as World Boxing toughened their stance. There was also no sign of the 26-year-old at last autumn’s world championships in Liverpool. If Khelif can demonstrate something other than XY chromosomes, the male pattern, why not do so immediately?

Unfortunately, the Algerian’s team prefer to use a different tactic, using pliant sections of the media to amplify a false narrative. The end result is CNN’s panegyric, which deserves to be demolished piece by piece. Is Khelif genuinely an “unwitting lightning rod in the culture wars”? No. Khelif has a chromosomal abnormality that renders participation in women’s boxing not just unfair but fundamentally unsafe. Can Khelif be considered a woman purely on the basis of growing up in Algeria “as a girl”? No.

Is it ok for Khelif to keep bashing women? No.

CNN continues the campaign of cheating and insulting women.

The 26-year-old champion’s path from her humble roots in Algeria has been defined by determination and the courage to defy cultural expectations, including that a girl should not fight.

Now, Khelif has emerged as an unwitting lightning rod in the culture wars shaping elite sports and likely to influence new International Olympic Committee (IOC) policies on women’s eligibility. Those rules could establish whether to reintroduce mandatory genetic testing – determining not only whether Khelif is eligible to compete in the 2028 Los Angeles Games, but also how athletes whose bodies fall outside narrow expectations of what it means to be a woman are pushed out altogether.

Ah yes “narrow expectations” – like expecting men to stay out of women’s sports.

Khelif has never said she is a DSD athlete.

She does have naturally high testosterone levels, which she said she has been reducing under medical supervision since well before the Paris Olympics, rejecting claims that her hormones have determined her success in boxing.

“I was born like this. Of course, I have hormonal differences. But I decrease my testosterone levels based on my doctor’s recommendations,” Khelif said.

“Boxing does not rely on the level of testosterone. Boxing relies on intelligence, on experience and on discipline,” she added.

And size, strength, muscle mass have nothing to do with it? An intelligent experienced disciplined woman can whup a dumb novice lazy man every time?

I am unconvinced.

Alex Massie on the determination to put women in danger for the sake of male games.

Voters should know that if they vote for the SNP (or the Green Party), they really are voting for men convicted of some of the most heinous crimes to be housed in the female prison estate simply because these men have decided they are in fact women themselves.

Or, in fact, because these men have decided to pretend they think they are in fact women themselves, in order to be housed in the female prison estate.

Note that there’s no way to tell the difference. Note that the SNP and the Green Party don’t even care that there’s no way to tell. Note the concern for male fantasies [or deliberate deception] at the expense of female basic safety.

None of the practical arguments in favour of the government’s approach withstands the slightest scrutiny. The prison service has plenty of experience when it comes to managing difficult or vulnerable, or simply unusual, prisoners. It stretches credulity beyond snapping point to think that it cannot safely house male prisoners who wish to identify as women. Indeed, we know it can, as plenty of trans-identifying men are already incarcerated in male prisons. Rapists, such as the notorious Isla Bryson, are housed in the male estate.

…

As far as the government is concerned, women who object to this should know their place and pipe down. Ministers argue that testimony from female prisoners unhappy at being imprisoned alongside men is “irrelevant”. It is hard to see how the government could more clearly signal its contempt for women. Their rights are contextual and qualified, whereas the rights of men who think themselves women are absolute and unequivocal.

Men matter; women don’t.

Why is the SNP still fighting for a trans killer to be in a female jail?

In November 2013, the Scottish courts dealt with an “utterly depraved” murder. Eight months earlier, Robert Shankland, a “caring and vulnerable” 46-year-old in poor health, had been lured to a property in the town of Glenrothes, Fife.

There he was subjected to grotesque torture over several hours, including a sexual assault. After a ligature was tied around Shankland’s neck and a plastic bag pulled over his head, his three killers ate ham sandwiches alongside the body.

Among them was Paris Green, 22 at the time, who was born Peter Laing.

Another Paris, eh. Funny how they don’t name themselves Pittsburgh or Detroit or Grimethorpe.

Over three days last week, the case was back in the spotlight in a high-profile legal dispute involving the Scottish government.

But to the dismay of many, the taxpayer-funded KC fielded by ministers was not there to protect the public from Green. Instead, he was fighting the corner of the killer, and at least two other biologically male murderers who identify as women, in defence of what was presented as their inalienable right to be considered to serve their life sentences in female prisons.

Why is it considered any kind of right, alienable or not, for men who are criminals to serve their sentences in female prisons? Why, in particular, is that considered a right for someone who once spent an afternoon torturing someone to death???

Why have so many people lost their god damn minds?

The case has been brought by For Women Scotland, the feminist campaign group, which argues that after its seismic legal victory in the Supreme Court last April, when it established that under UK equalities law, sex is defined by biology, the practice in Scotland of housing biological men in women’s prisons is unlawful

Under Scottish prison rules, violent trans offenders, including murderers, are not automatically considered a risk to women if their victims were men. Only those with “a history of violence against women and girls” are ineligible for placement in the female estate, a situation many see as perverse. After repeated requests to the government to consider their position, the group says it felt compelled to take them to court once again.

What I would like to know is this: why risk it? Why not not risk it? Why is it so important to house violent male criminals with women that the danger to women is a minor side issue? Why not just house violent male criminals with other males instead? Why punish women for the violent crimes of men?

Updating to add, via Mike B: Paris Green is a poison.

Google provides details:

Paris green is a highly toxic, bright emerald-green copper-arsenic compound historically used as a vibrant pigment, insecticide, and rodenticide.

If you look at it the right way it’s true.

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centered on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.

Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.”

But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.

“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually,” he said. “And she had such support, it was so easy. And when I explained it to the powers that be: ‘Yes, sir, we will do it right away.’ I just wish I knew earlier. But it’s a big world with a lot of people.”

Now you may think that’s odd, seeing as how it was 2014 and he was just a tv blowhard then, but wiser heads know that on a deeper level it’s true.

For years, Trump has told fictional stories that feature unnamed people referring to him as “sir.” This was another one.

Ibrahim was released in 2014, during the Obama administration. Trump did not become president until January 2017. He was not even a presidential candidate until June 2015. There has never been the slightest indication that a private citizen in the US, a businessman and celebrity at the time, was the person who convinced Sudanese authorities to let her out of prison.

That’s because he’s so modest and self-effacing. He kept the intervention to himself, because that’s just how he is.

A former Obama administration official who served on the National Security Council in 2014 told CNN on Friday: “I neither had at the time nor have now any knowledge of Trump’s involvement whatsoever. It’d be very surprising if he were.”

That official is just jealous. They all are, every last one of them.

Trump doesn’t know what a mistake is.

The president said Friday that he had watched and passed along the video — which focused on claims of voter fraud until the final seconds of the clip — to unidentified “people” to post to his Truth Social account, but that he “didn’t see the whole thing,” including the brief portion that showed the heads of the Obamas edited onto the bodies of apes.

In response to a question from The Washington Post about whether he would heed the calls of some Republicans to apologize for posting the video, which was widely condemned as racist and offensive, Trump said he would not.

“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said on his way to Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend. “I look at a lot of — thousands of things. And I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine.”

Sir, sir, sir, that is a mistake. That right there that you just described: that is a MISTAKE. You looked at the beginning of it so you missed the disgusting bit at the end and that was a – say it with us – mistake.

JCO keeps right on demonstrating that nobody’s home.

So JCO has never had the faintest idea why toilets are designated for women or men? She’s never been assaulted or spied on in a women’s toilet? That would be odd, because it’s a very common experience for women. She thinks there’s no need for prevention, it’s enough to do something unspecified after it happens?

And she calls us “airy, vacuous”…

We’re supposed to believe this?

Oh come on. He’s notoriously a shameless liar. His assuring anyone of anything means nothing. Adding “clearly” and “unequivocally” to the verb does nothing to make it true. Trump lies as easily and readily as he sneers and mocks and insults and libels. And as for “He understands the painful and racist history in America of depicting African Americans as apes, a tactic long used by white supremacists to demean Black intelligence and humanity. He knows this is wrong, offensive, and unacceptable.” – no he doesn’t! Of course he doesn’t!

He doesn’t understand it cognitively, because his brain is mush, and he doesn’t understand it emotionally because he is an evil heartless self-centered malice-driven sadistic piece of shit. Why in hell are you defending him?

Oh and also, he’s a racist.

The President made it clear to me that this post was made by a staffer and not by him.

He has a staffer who posts racist dreck on the presidential account late at night? Does someone else cover the day shift?

My recommendation to the President was direct and firm. That staffer should be fired immediately, and the President should publicly condemn this action. This kind of insensitive and racist communication does not reflect the heart, values, or leadership of the President of the United States, nor does it represent the America we are striving to build.

Of course it reflects the heart, values, and leadership of the President of the United States: that is who he is.

Hey kids it’s time for Ontology Gymnastics!

Biological sex is an “artificial parameter” for deciding where prisoners should be held, Scottish National Party (SNP) ministers have told a court.

Gerry Moynihan KC, acting for the Scottish Government, argued that there should be flexibility to allow transgender women, who are biological men, to serve their sentences in female jails.

He told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that defining “a man as a man and a woman as a woman, without exceptions” was “artificial”.

I know I’ve already made fun of this, but it’s just so rewarding. Defining an X as an X is not so much artificial as it is a tautology. It’s the very opposite of a definition, because it’s just a repetition. What is an apple? It’s…well…you know, it’s an apple. That won’t get you an A on the test.

Granted, it doesn’t always matter. Maybe that’s what the poor fella is trying to say. You don’t always have to know which people are women and which are men. Much of the time it’s just not an issue.

Prisons are one place where it does matter.

Meanwhile Trump is continuing his unlovely campaign to plaster his filthy name all over everything.

Donald Trump has told the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, that he will unfreeze funds for major infrastructure projects in New York City if he supports renaming Dulles international airport and Penn Station after him.

The demand, which was first reported on Thursday by Punchbowl News, comes after the president in October halted $18bn in funding for a major subway line expansion in New York City as well as a new rail tunnel connecting the city to New Jersey. The funding freeze was announced on the first day of a 43-day government shutdown in which Schumer, who represents New York, played a major role.

It’s so trump to fail to grasp that publicly demanding and/or extorting an honor renders the honor nugatory.

No but it was a staffer, how many times do we have to tell you it was a staffer???

Following an intense backlash this morning, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a video showing a racist clip depicting the Obamas as apes.

Multiple outlets cite a senior White House official as saying:

A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.

The post was up for 12 hours.

So they’re telling us there’s a staffer whose job it is to post torrents of obnoxious drivel and insults and lies in the middle of the night???

Ok, news media: you know what you have to do now. Ask them why. Ask them why that’s a job. Ask them why there is any need for someone other than Trump to vomit out all this bile at 2 in the morning.

And then there was the spin.

Oh wait, third question – are you seriously telling us that someone else is posting the idiotic drivel that spews from Trump’s twitx every night? That idiotic drivel is part of Trump’s job?

At midnight.

Knowing that men are not women is just so random, ya know? What’s the point? Relax, enjoy the ride!

Biological sex is an “artificial parameter” for deciding where prisoners should be held, Scottish National Party (SNP) ministers have told a court.

They have? Really? Surely they meant “arbitrary”? Calling it artificial seems deranged even for them.

Gerry Moynihan KC, acting for the Scottish Government, argued that there should be flexibility to allow transgender women, who are biological men, to serve their sentences in female jails.

We need that flexibility so that men can have opportunities to beat up and rape women, right? It’s just common sense.

He told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that defining “a man as a man and a woman as a woman, without exceptions” was “artificial”.

Ah so that’s how “artificial” got into it. Naming things at all is “artificial”. Language is artificial. Pass the bong.

Listen up, Scottish government: the fact remains that women and men are women and men. Men can rape women; women can be impregnated by men against their will. Men have more punching power than women, by a wide margin. Men are a threat to women in confined spaces in ways that women are not a threat to men. None of this is artificial. You can call arrangements to protect women from these unpleasant realities if you want to, but that still doesn’t make them worthless, let alone bad.

Mr Moynihan argued that classifying a trans woman inmate as a man was “a fundamental denial of their choice of gender and it’s a fundamental denial driven only by semantics”.

Oh fuck off. That doesn’t matter. Compared to the safety and rights of women, that whiney crap just does not matter.

Under the current guidance, a trans woman in Scotland can be jailed in a female jail if they have not hurt or threatened women or girls, and there is no basis to suppose that they pose an unacceptable risk.

FWS argues that this is incompatible with last year’s UK Supreme Court ruling that the definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 is based on biological sex. It has applied to the Court of Session for a judicial review seeking to quash the policy.

SNP ministers have argued that excluding biologically male trans prisoners from female jails would breach the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Mr Moynihan rejected claims that housing trans inmates in women’s jails automatically breached female inmates’ right to privacy under Article 8 of the convention.

It’s so easy for a man to dismiss women’s right to privacy. No skin off his ass, is it! Run along, girls, we just don’t care.

Calling for inmates to be treated on a case-by-case basis, he said: “Where a transgender prisoner does not pose an Article 8 problem, does not threaten the rights of others, are we to have an absolute rule that says that they must be accommodated in a prison of their sex?

“Why? The sole reason is that they are to be classified as a man. Even though they live their lives as a woman. It’s a fundamental denial of their choice of gender. And it’s a fundamental denial driven only by semantics.”

What does he even mean, “they live their lives as a woman”? That’s not a thing! They may live their lives pretending to be a woman, but that doesn’t translate to everyone else having to play along. Adults playing let’s pretend are just that, and they have zero right to demolish women’s rights in the process.

He argued that SNP ministers had to make “very complex, difficult judgments” around prisons policy and could not risk an increase in suicides among trans prisoners.

What about an increase in suicides among women prisoners?

Mr Moynihan added: “What is being asked in this case is that they be put in a straitjacket. That their best prison management judgments are constrained by an artificial parameter, that they must define a man as a man and a woman as a woman full stop, without exceptions.

That’s because there are no exceptions. A man is in fact a man, and a woman is in fact a woman. Full stop, yes.

I tried to find a news outlet for this one but it turns out the swift image-first version does the job much better. The image is the story.

I didn’t know this.

Trump throwing more toys out of the playpen:

The U.S. ambassador to Poland is lashing out at the country’s parliament speaker for the offense of not supporting President Trump’s Nobel Prize aspirations.

Ambassador Tom Rose raged at Parliament Speaker Wlodzimierz Czarzasty in an X rant on Wednesday. In the post, Rose threatened that the US would “have no further dealings, contacts, or communications” with Czarzasty, due to his “insults directed against President Trump.”

What did he say?

Czarzasty made the alleged “outrageous and unprovoked insults” toward Trump on Monday while speaking to journalists.

The 65-year-old chairman of Poland’s New Left party said he would not support U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Israeli Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana’s campaign to rally heads of the European parliaments to nominate Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

Ah. So that’s it. He doesn’t think Trump should be nominated for a Nobel peesprize. Well neither does anyone else with a functioning brain cell. We also don’t think Trump should be stamping around the landscape demanding a Nobel Peace Prize. You don’t get to demand them, and it’s ridiculous and shaming to try. You’re supposed to be surprised when you get a Nobel, not content that your orders were obeyed. You can’t order one as if it were Big Mac.

Trump, 79, has been miffed since he didn’t win the 2025 Nobel Prize, which went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. He has used the snub as a cudgel against America’s Scandinavian allies—none of which have anything to do with the Nobel Peace Prize.

You don’t get to be miffed, either. You can be privately miffed, I suppose, if you’re that determined to be an asshole, but it ends as soon as you leave your Pouting Room. You don’t go public with your delusions of value.

…he tossed out his peace-loving posture in January when he wrote to Norway, “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”

“If you won’t givittame I’ll just bomb everything. I don’t give a shit about Peace, I just want my Prize.”

Oh good, we’re making Columbus great again.

Trump is taking steps toward installing near the White House a replica of a statue of famed explorer Christopher Columbus that had been tossed into Baltimore’s harbor during his first term amid protests against institutional racism.

It’s all this political correctness, you see, paying attention to the fact that Columbus was not an unmixed blessing to all the inhabitants of the landmass he bumped into on his way to China.

The White House declined to comment to the AP on plans for the statue but reaffirmed Trump’s affinity for Columbus, whose legacy has shifted as historians and educators amplify how white European figures and their descendants treated Native Americans and enslaved Africans to develop the New World.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” said Trump spokesman David Ingle. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.”

Well, you see, it’s like this. Columbus bouncing onto this continent and making himself at home was heroic, but other people doing the same thing are invaders. It all depends on whether their ancestors were from Germany and Scotland or Mexico and Venezuela. You can usually tell by looking closely at their skin.

Trump endorses a traditional view of Columbus as leader of the 1492 mission that marked the unofficial beginning of European colonization in the Americas and the development of the modern economic and political order. But in recent years, Columbus also been recognized as a primary example of Western Europe’s conquest of the New World, its resources and its native people.

Not to mention the fact that he was the wedge that opened the door. He’s a symbol of the arrival of all those annoying Europeans who bounced in without an invitation.

It seems that Trump has blown past some major milestone or barrier – whatever it is that inhibits people from jabbering nonsense in public.

The bit of transcript sounds coherentish. Trump talking does not. He’s fallen off a cognitive cliff.