Reading something that mentions “gender dysphoria” I come to a stop to think about the label for a sec (not, of course, for the first time). It strikes me all over again what an absurd concept it is. You could use it for anything. I don’t like very hot summer days; is that Hot Days Dysphoria? No, wait, Thermal Dysphoria – so much more sciency and thus convincing.

I don’t like mosquito bites, and neither does anyone else; are we all mosquito bite dysphoric?

I detest Trump; am I Trump dysphoric?

We could play this boring game all day and never come to the end.

We all dislike some things. It’s the human condition – it’s the animal condition. If you’re sentient, there are sensations you don’t like. There are things about ourselves we don’t like – we would like to be taller or wiser or stronger or you name it; is it “dysphoric” to have preferences of that kind? That’s all we’re talking about – liking this rather than that. Calling it “dysphoria” makes it sound technical but guess what: it isn’t. It’s just life as a sentient being.

Beware of pseudo-technical labeling, that’s my advice.

SOLIDARITY WITH OUR TRANS SIBLINGS

Or

maybe something else.

Tough choice.

Well…ok, but…isn’t he still our trans sibling? I mean she – isn’t she still our trans sibling?

Trans people are the most vulnerable people of all, don’t forget.

Being trans is the equivalent of being 172 women in terms of who has the most Oppression Points.

So, you know, little quirks like trying to get into the pants of underage girls become just another way trans women are fabulous and also more vulnerable than anyone else by miles.

Irish Independent:

Jenny Maguire: If my rights as a trans woman can be removed in an instant, what does that mean for yours?

Well what are your “rights as a trans woman”?

You mean your “rights” to be in women’s spaces and take jobs set aside for women and play in women’s sports? That kind of “right”?

Well, kid, if those “rights” that aren’t rights are removed then they are restored to women, and I’m a woman, not the pretend kind, so that’s what that means for mine.

That’s not what you mean though. You think you have a right to take what belongs to women. Well guess what: you don’t. It doesn’t matter how cute you look when you dress up as a woman: you still don’t get to take our stuff.

Maguire is angry about the ruling.

Just under two weeks ago the UK Supreme Court ruled that all references to women under Britain’s Equality Act are to be interpreted as meaning “biological women”.

Gosh really? The UK Supreme Court ruled that “women” means women. Shocker!

The British Transport Police updated its policy to have male officers strip-search people like me if we are arrested. The rhetoric around the ruling has thus given a social licence to transphobia.

People like you? Oh you mean men! Yes, if the police arrest you and need to strip-search you, it should be a male cop who does the searching. Your fantasies about women in police uniform searching you will have to remain fantasies. Big deal.

If trans women like me cannot use women’s bathrooms, they aren’t just going to start using the men’s. They will just stay at home. This is backed by research, with major impacts being found on trans people’s employment, education and social lives.

So stay at home then. Nobody cares. Threatening us with it is like a toddler vowing never to eat again, aka a tantrum. Women’s lives matter just as much as yours does, so you don’t get to use your rage at being told “no” as a tool to get your own way.

If the law is used to remove trans people from bathrooms, changing facilities, or to access crisis services, then the law is not about reform. It is about the removal of trans people from public life. When minority groups are pushed to the margins, the harm done to them can go more unnoticed.

Men are not a minority group. Men are not a subordinate group. It’s not pushing anyone to the margins to say “you can’t use the women’s changing facilities, because you’re not a woman.”

During the abortion referendum campaign, a key talking point was the number of people who had to face the perilous journey of travelling to access abortion.

Ahhh look at you, saying “people” when you mean women. Trans doctrine is so interesting – we have to call men “women” and we have to refer to women as “people” – because men pretending to be women like it that way.

Then we reach peak stupid.

I am a woman. A trans woman. Like how my mam is a blonde woman. Or how Margaret Thatcher is a dead woman. None of these descriptors negate the word that comes after it. 

Except that that one descriptor of course does – because “trans” woman does indeed mean not a real woman.

Jeezus. Talk about grudging, resentful, one-sided, hostile.

FA update following the recent Supreme Court transgender ruling

As the governing body of the national sport, our role is to make football accessible to as many people as possible, operating within the law and international football policy defined by UEFA and FIFA.

Our current policy, which allows transgender women to participate in the women’s game, was based on this principle and supported by expert legal advice.

How was that policy “based on this principle”? Their policy made football inaccessible to the women displaced by men pretending to be women, and to women who didn’t want to play against men because they didn’t want to get smashed up by men. If the FA’s role really is to make football accessible to as many people as possible then they’ve been doing it wrong.

This is a complex subject, and our position has always been that if there was a material change in law, science, or the operation of the policy in grassroots football then we would review it and change it if necessary.

No it’s not. It’s not a complex subject. Men are not women. Simple.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the 16 April means that we will be changing our policy. Transgender women will no longer be able to play in women’s football in England, and this policy will be implemented from 1 June 2025.

We understand that this will be difficult for people who simply want to play the game they love in the gender by which they identify, and we are contacting the registered transgender women currently playing to explain the changes and how they can continue to stay involved in the game.

So much tender concern for the men who have been displacing women, and so zero concern for the women displaced. All the understanding and contacting and explaining is for men who have displaced women, and none of the understanding and contacting and explaining is for women who have been displaced.

It’s really astoundingly cold and insulting and rude to those bad women who actually are women.

They’ve got a nerve.

Amnesty International pisses all over women every chance it gets. Amnesty International drives a tank through women’s rights because it finds fictitious “trans rights” more glamorous and exciting. Amnesty International wants to be down with the kids. Never was a Readers added context more richly deserved.

Originally a comment by Patrick on Junior engineers say it won’t collapse.

One of the classic argumentative styles of the era goes like this. I’m going to number it out because I’m a nerd.

1. Your opponent says X. But you believe Y.

2. State, or at least imply, that these options exist in binary opposition such that either one or the other must be the case.

3. Restate X such that it is very specific. Keep Y vague for now.

4. Offer a variety of undercutting defeaters for X. “It’s more complicated than that,” is an evergreen attack because most things are more complicated than the short, specific statements to which you have reduced your opponents position.

5. After a while at this, declare X to be refuted.

6. State, or at least imply, that Y has therefore been proven.

7. Now that Y has allegedly been proven, get more specific.

I first noticed this from Christian apologists back in the 00s. They’d argue something like this: “Materialists think that the only things that exist are matter and energy, but, patterns exists, and they’re neither. Ideas exist and they’re neither. It’s more complicated than that. Now that we’ve established that materialism is false, let me tell you about a mystical spiritual dimension that our eternal souls inhabit after our deaths. I trust you’ll have no reason to doubt it since the only alternative has fallen.”

Once you start seeing this argumentative pattern you can’t stop seeing it.

Well you see we can’t say anything about the trans religion because we might get yelled at. You can’t expect a satirical magazine to risk getting yelled at!! Duh!!!

You might think that a Supreme Court ruling confirming the obvious fact that the word ‘man’ means ‘man’ and the word woman means ‘woman’ is a ripe subject for a satirist.

You might, unless that particular obvious fact had been magically transformed into a taboo enforced by sadists – sadists who rejoice in trashing people’s lives for saying men are not women.

Interlude for comparisons:

You can say apples are not carrots. You can say a hammer is not a wine glass. You can say France is not Idaho. You can say lakes are not mountains and vice versa. You cannot say men are not women.

‘It isn’t easy to do this particular subject, as Keir Starmer has found out,’ stammered an unusually flustered-looking Hislop. His teammate, guest Jo Brand, agreed:

‘I think this is a thing that a lot of people wouldn’t want to say anything (about), because it’s a very, sort of, venomous situation, and I think a lot of people are genuinely a bit frightened…no one really wants to get a death threat…’

Death threats from who exactly, Jo? Rabbits? Presbyterians? The Brighouse and Rastrick brass band? Not, I would strongly suspect, from the women who laboured for years at great personal and professional cost to raise the eye-watering sums of cash needed in order to get the highest court in the land to tell us what we all knew when we were two? The death threats, as anybody on the ‘gender critical’ side of this debate can tell you, flow thick and fast – and always from the other side.

Along with other kinds of threats, often having to do with jobs, careers, opportunities, alliances. The general idea is: everybody will hate you and you will starve on a rock in the middle of an ocean.

The admission of this fear, at long last, is an interesting first step. You’d think it would spark some reflection on the part of the cultural elite, because under our democratic system we are not supposed to be afraid to speak.

Well, yes and no. I agreed with that at first but then paused. It’s not really true. It’s not really possible to be totally unafraid to say X no matter what X is and no matter what kind of fear we’re talking about. Just to take one example, I have a deep fear of blurting something that would hurt someone’s feelings. Really really deep. I’ve told the story here at least once of blurting such a thing about an oldish man wearing an ugly tie to my mother only to have her whisper furiously “He heard you.” I glanced at his face and wanted to rip my own head off.

And starting from there it’s easy to think of lots of other examples. So it’s not really true. It’s generally true, other things being equal, yadda yadda, but it’s not an absolute.

But. Politically speaking, we shouldn’t be afraid to say things about claims that have massive implications for other people, especially other people who are of a race or nationality or status or sex that is considered inferior and/or subordinate.

It was fascinating to see all the varieties of awkwardness and denial on HIGNFY during the discussion on gender. Guest Richard Osman fell silent, with downcast eyes and the kind of terrified ‘please, please talk about something else, anything else’ look I’ve seen so many times in the last decade.

But then again, who can blame Osman? None of us should ever have had to deal with the madness of genderism. It caught comedians, and everybody else, unaware about ten years ago. Very quickly it became dangerous to even question it, let alone poke fun at it.

About ten years ago. Is that when I quit Freethought Blogs 5 minutes before they pushed me out? Why yes, it is.

In the days following the court’s judgment, for example, it’s been hilarious to watch political figures – Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, Green co-leader Carla Denyer, podcast centrist dad Rory Stewart – squirming and obfuscating, appearing to pretend that they simply don’t understand the ruling of the Court. The interim guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission following the ruling is written in Ladybird Book, Year 4-level English. Yet these luminaries are apparently totally foxed by it. Or are they just frightened? Either way, it is agonising, but very amusing, to behold. As the lawyer Dennis Kavanagh remarked on X, ‘We are not debating this movement. We are babysitting it.’

…

It’s unfair maybe to focus on the antics on a flagging old show like HIGNFY. The show’s cowardice is merely a symptom of wider institutional failure. But what is plain to see is that the unwillingness to joke about gender is a class issue. Comedians today seem desperate to cling on to upper middle-class fads, however barmy they happen to be.

In a healthy, functioning democracy, satire should play an important part in the political and cultural ecosystem – yet on genderism, it failed, and failed badly. If supposedly satirical shows like HIGNFY had been firm with this rubbish at the start, the gender madness might not, perhaps, have ripped through our institutions in the way that it did.

Just imagine. No India Willoughby, no Dylan Mulvaney, no Freda Wallace, no Lia Thomas, no Imane Khelif.

Originally a comment by Mark on Defy the reality.

Just as many conservatives dislike something solely because it is popular amongst the Left, there are those on the left who like something solely because the right dislike it. I believe the trans-rights movement is, in large part, a byproduct of such thinking.

I am someone who has loathed right wing, religiously driven thinking for most of my life, but just because my ideological opponents hold a position on an issue, it does not follow that I must have the 180 degree opinion on it. We all know the saying about broken clocks.

The “socialist” aspect of trans rights is, for many of them, simply because they know the right hates it. It’s just as shallow, knee jerk, thoughtless a reaction as when average right wingers hate electric vehicles, despite not being in the oil business – they hate electric cars because the “vibe” of caring about the environment and thinking beyond the end of your nose strikes them as “lefty”. Same with trans rights – the Left like it because it’s all about, allegedly, acceptance, sexual minority protection and because it makes the right wingers really mad, and the “vibe” it gives off is all about rebelling against “normies” and peace and love and supporting people

The fact that the trans movement is completely illogical, goes against commonly accepted definitions and ignores basic genetics matters not. The viiiibbbbeeeess man, its all about those feel good socialist vibes! It feeeeeeeels Left wing, it feeeeeeeels rebellious, it feeeeeeeeels so good to annoy the right.

You can’t argue with them on logic. They didn’t arrive at their conclusion by using logic.

Just a couple of questions.

What’s socialist about this?

What’s worker about it?

I just want to start the day with this one paragraph from an Atlantic piece on Trump by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer.

He had announced plans to pave over part of the Rose Garden, and he had redecorated the Oval Office—gold trim and gold trophies and gold frames to go with an array of past presidential portraits, making the room look like a Palm Beach approximation of an 18th-century royal court.

Small and yet so very…

Oh really?

Doctors brand Supreme Court trans ruling ‘scientifically illiterate’

Really? Then why haven’t all doctors always known that men are women if they say they are?

The subhead perhaps hints at a reason:

Junior medics claim binary divide between sex and gender ‘has no basis in science’

Ah. Junior medics. The ones who don’t want to be called harsh names by their friends.

The British Medical Association’s (BMA) resident doctors – previously called junior doctors – have voted to “condemn” the judgment, which ruled that trans women were not legally women.

Of course “legally” is not the same as “medically” so one wonders why doctors are butting in anyway. The Supreme Court is not a medical body, and ruling that men are not legally women is not a medical ruling.

The doctors passed a motion at a conference on Saturday criticising the ruling as “biologically nonsensical”.

The doctors claimed a binary divide between sex and gender “has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender-diverse people”, according to a motion seen by The Times.

And yet, men don’t get pregnant, and men don’t get woken up at midnight to nurse the baby. Neither legally nor medically.

The wing of BMA, which represents about 50,000 doctors in training, said it “condemns scientifically illiterate rulings from the Supreme Court, made without consulting relevant experts and stakeholders, that will cause real-world harm to the trans, non-binary and intersex communities in this country”.

Notice any stakeholders missing? Yeah: women. It’s funny how women are always missing from these discussions.

Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at Sex Matters, told The Times: “It’s terrifying that a group of young doctors, all of whom have been through several years of advanced education and training in biology, have been indoctrinated by trans activism to such an extent that they claim categorisation by sex – male and female – is ‘reductive’ and has ‘no basis in science or medicine’.

“These junior doctors are an embarrassment to their profession. What next: young geographers claiming that the Earth is flat, or junior vets who think it’s bigoted to suggest that cats can’t identify as dogs?”

Planets are lima beans! Oak trees are iguanas! Oceans are ginger ale!

So let’s read the Stonewall mush about the tragic fate of those poor sad vulnerable cherished people who just happen to think they’re not the sex they are.

The headline:

Following the Supreme Court ruling we must remember compassion and humanity

To whom? Women?

Hahahaha that’s hilarious, right? No of course not to women. Women are bitches, women persecute the poor helpless fragile men who claim to be women. Women don’t deserve compassion and humanity.

Trans people are our families, friends, neighbours, and colleagues; we share our workplaces, our communities, our pubs, cafes and places of worship with them. They are worried and frightened by the legal implications of the ruling, and its unknown consequences. 

Women are also our families, friends, neighbours, and colleagues

Women are also our families, friends, neighbours, and colleagues. We share our workplaces, communities, pubs, cafes and places of worship with them. We also share our buses, grocery stores, hospitals, schools, refuges with them – unless of course we’re so rich and privileged that we don’t need such things or get the servants to go if we do. Pubs and cafes are luxuries, and “places of worship” tend to be places of indoctrination, too. To put it another way, Stonewall’s manipulative choice of words is annoying, as it so often is.

Surprise surprise – Stonewall’s mission creep has crept so far it’s below the horizon.

I’m baaaaack!

Originally a comment by maddog1129 on Is this the day?

“You go out of the house thinking ‘is this the day that someone is going to shout at me, attack me?’”

Right. And women go out of the house thinking,

“Is this the day a man is going to kill me?”

“Is this the day that an entitled man is going to rape me in what’s supposed to be a women-only space?”

“Is this the day I’m going to become an involuntary porn actor with my image permanently on the internet, because men were allowed in women’s spaces to set up hidden cameras?”

“Is this the day that a male player will severely injure me when he participates in women’s sport?”

“Is this the day that my prison sentence includes rape and/or impregnation by a LARPing man in my cell/unit?”

Shouting at you is SO MUCH worse!

Ah yes “Emily” Bridges, the man who forced his way into women’s cycling. ITV thought he would be a good person to chat with about issues that affect women.

Emily Bridges, Britain’s best known transgender athlete, says last week’s Supreme Court ruling on gender has “painted a target” on the back of trans women.

Who says he’s best known?

If he is best known it’s for being a man who cheats by racing as a woman.

“It increases levels of vulnerability,” she told ITV News. “You go out of the house thinking ‘is this the day that someone is going to shout at me, attack me?'”

Oh really? Is that what it does? Now think about what it does for women.

She said she reacted to the court’s decision with disbelief: “I felt, like it has painted, like, more of a kind of target on our back since because it’s…..been wall to wall coverage across social media and across the news and, of course, the newspapers”.

Now think about how women feel.

But of course he won’t. Could not care less.

Bridges also believes the judgement stokes the toxicity and extreme views. “The public expression on both sides has increased in intensity and vitriol,” she said. “People are now feeling more comfortable to express hateful views. Not just trans people but about people of colour, immigrants, religious minorities and there’s been a massive rise in sexism.”

Much if not all of it coming from people who claim to be trans.

Bridges says, despite the ruling, she will continue to use women only spaces: “I am going to keep using the spaces I’ve always used. I’m perceived as female in the street, I am greeted with ‘Miss’, I’m perceived as a women, I’m going to use a female changing room, I’m going to use a female toilet.”

But how about the women who feel intimidated or unsafe by trans women using their changing rooms, what about their feelings?

Yes what about them? I mean us? Thank you for asking at last.

“I understand if you see someone you think is trans and you have a certain view, but how do you know who is trans? The policing of toilets which has already been happening, is if you’re not welcome in a toilet you’ll be asked to leave. That’s how it works.”

Beautiful compassion. I’m all verklempt.

Does he believe? Yes or no?

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer does not believe transgender women are women, his official spokesman has said. It comes after the UK Supreme Court ruled last week that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law.

In March 2022, when he was leader of the opposition, Sir Keir told the Times that “a woman is a female adult, and in addition to that transwomen are women, and that is not just my view – that is actually the law”. Asked if Sir Keir still believed that a transgender woman was a woman, the PM’s official spokesman said: “No, the Supreme Court judgment has made clear that when looking at the Equality Act, a woman is a biological woman.”

Well, to be more precise, or perhaps I mean truthful, it’s not just when looking at an Act that a woman is a “biological” woman. It’s all the time. A woman is always a woman; the “biological” part is redundant. There is no non-biological type of woman that a man can be. It was a mistake to divide women into biological and pretend. It was a mistake and an over-complication and an embarrassment. Women are women; men are the other thing. Works the same way in reverse: Men are men; women are the other thing. It’s called a binary, and it’s real. Without it, poof, no humans.

In 2023, Sir Keir told The Sunday Times that for “99.9%” of women “of course they haven’t got a penis”. Later that year he told BBC Radio 5 Live “a woman is an adult female”.

And in April 2024 he said Rosie Duffield, who quit the party last year, was right to say “only women have a cervix”, telling ITV: “Biologically, she of course is right about that.” Sir Keir had previously been critical of Duffield’s views on trans people when she was a Labour MP, saying in 2021 that she was “not right” to say only women have a cervix.

In short he said one thing one day and a different thing another day. The Guardians of Trans Virtue were always just a few inches away, with their pitchforks, breathing heavily. What’s a Prime Minister to do?

Asked whether Sir Keir would now use a trans woman’s preferred pronouns, the spokesman declined to comment on “hypotheticals” but insisted the PM had “been clear that trans women should be treated with the same dignity and respect as anyone else”.

Oh yes? So then they shouldn’t be addressed as the sex they’re not, and they shouldn’t be allowed to destroy women’s rights, and they shouldn’t take up all the oxygen? Good to know.

Labour’s Emily Thornberry said LGBT helpline calls had “skyrocketed in recent days” and highlighted that “the overwhelming threat to women and to all of the trans community is the violence that we suffer from cis men”.

No. Men who claim to be trans are not thereby automatically rendered not a threat to women. Some of those men threaten women on social media all the time. Some very violent rapists have claimed to be women.

Many Labour MPs will be uneasy about the comments from Sir Keir and Phillipson, although frustration did not seem to extend to being willing to criticise the government, but instead expressing concern about anxieties within the trans, non-binary and intersex community.

How about some concern about anxieties within the sick to death of hearing about the blah blah blah community? Eh? What about us? We have to buy a whole new set of teeth practically every week.

Talk about phoning it in – what a worthless contribution to discussion of the ruling:

Making trans women use male spaces will cause distress

Yes, thanks, we’re aware of Line One of the Trans Dogma Commands: they’re what we dispute and reject. We do not agree that men’s “distress” when women say no is a compelling or even halfway decent reason to let men take what belongs to women. Men’s presence in women’s toilets and organizations causes women distress, so how’s about you focus on that for a minute. You are a woman after all. Have some self-respect.

Plenty of people will perceive this clarification of meaning — or change of interpretation, as maintained by Melanie Field, who oversaw the drafting of the Equality Act in 2010 — as permission to be more openly hostile towards trans people, who are now “other” in the eyes of the law. 

Well trans people are “other” – that’s the whole point. That’s why so many gullible fools like you pay so much attention to them. Mere women are just boring dreary old women but trans women are special, exciting, different – that’s why we’re required to pamper them and shield them from even the mildest summer breeze.

I’ve already seen the ruling wielded as evidence of the validity of anti-transgender sentiments. It will be used, even if that is not the intention, to stoke an already fiercely incandescent culture war.

Oh will it. Have you noticed, by any chance, the way trans activists and their ardent fans talk about women? Did you watch “Sophie Molly” calling JK Rowling “biiiiiitch” the other day, with all the glee of a little boy dropping his sister’s favorite toy into a sewer?

This is just the beginning. Forcing trans women to use male single-sex spaces, or trans men to use female single-sex spaces, will cause more distress than the present set-up.

Like hell it will. What you mean is it will cause more distress to a very small number of men, as opposed to causing more distress to millions of women. Why do you prefer the second option?

The ship is turning around.

Trans women should use male toilets, the equalities minister has said, declaring that “services should be accessed on the basis of biological sex”.

Bridget Phillipson said businesses should ensure “they have appropriate provision in place”, which could mean unisex facilities.

But she said the Supreme Court ruling was clear about the basis on which services should be used.

Her comments came after a long-awaited judgment delivered last Wednesday in which the UK’s highest court confirmed the terms “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act “refer to a biological woman and biological sex”. It means transgender women with a gender recognition certificate can be excluded from single-sex spaces if it is deemed “proportionate”.

What “proportionate” means in that context I don’t know, nor do I know who will be doing the deeming.

Ms Phillipson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I know that many businesses, large and small, will ensure that they have appropriate provision in place. For example, many businesses have moved towards unisex provision or separate cubicles that can be used by anyone.”

She added: “There are important questions around, for example, the use of toilets, around the use of changing facilities, but there are also profound questions that I think are even more important about, for example, hospital provision, rape crisis centres, women’s refuges, where you are talking about people often being in that provision on an accommodation basis for an extended period of time. And I think it is important and welcome that the Supreme Court have put beyond doubt that providers can make sure that is done on the basis of biological sex.”

The terf communniny is wondering why she didn’t say so before, but it’s also rejoicing at the news.

It came as a minister condemned the “utterly unacceptable language” used by demonstrators as tens of thousands gathered to protest the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman.

Education minister Stephen Morgan was asked about a placard at a protest in Parliament Square that showed an illustration of gallows alongside a slogan suggesting “the only good Terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist)” is a hanged one. And the Labour frontbencher called for police action over what he said was the “completely and utterly unacceptable” language. Mr Morgan told Sky News: “It’s completely unacceptable language to be used, and obviously any matters that break the law should be reported to the police, and hopefully police action is taken.”

Where have they been these last 10 years? Why haven’t they been saying this all along?

Ms Phillipson said the Supreme Court ruling meant service providers “can now operate with absolute confidence in delivering single-sex spaces for biological women”. She told BBC Breakfast: “I do welcome the clarity that the Supreme Court judgment has brought in this area, making clear that biological sex is the basis on which single-sex spaces are provided.”

…

“Before I was a Member of Parliament I used to run a women’s refuge, so I know more than most how essential it is that women, particularly those who’ve experienced sexual violence and male abuse, are able to have safe, therapeutic environments, and that’s why there has always been protection there within the law for single-sex spaces.

“There has been some confusion. I’m glad that’s been cleared up, because providers can now operate with absolute confidence in delivering single-sex spaces for biological women.”

Why yes, there has been some confusion, and some bullying, and some shunning. Glad we got that straightened out.

Very healthy, very sane.

Council-funded sex education tells pupils ‘ask for consent before choking’

Actually it’s worse than that, because of course it is. The “sex education” tells boys to ask for consent before choking girls. There’s nothing about girls asking for consent to choke boys. That fact and what it hints at should be reason enough all by itself to Just Say No.

The disgusting thing is that the Telegraph apparently never notices the disparity. It certainly never mentions it. What are you thinking, you bozos?? If boys are wanting to choke girls then that itself is a problem and should be right at the center of your reporting.

Sex education materials taught to teenagers in schools included references to asking for consent before choking a partner.

And yet it turns out to be always a girl “partner” being choked and a boy “teenager” being told to ask first.

Should the boys also ask first before plunging a carving knife into the girl’s abdomen?

However they’re not wrong that the advice itself is horrifying.

The Times has seen a Powerpoint presentation intended for PSHE lessons at secondary schools telling pupils: “Consent should also happen every time sexual choking is an option, not just the first time.”

Wrong. Choking should be absolutely forbidden, period. It’s not a fun sexy game, it’s cutting off oxygen to the brain.

The presentation said: “It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first and giving them space to say no. Make it clear that they have a right to say no if they don’t want to be choked, and their no should be respected and if it’s not respected that is sexual assault. Consent under threat is not consent. Consent should also happen every time sexual choking is an option, not just the first time.”

No no no. It is never ok to choke someone at all. It’s been hideously normalized for years, and that needs to stop.

The fact that it’s boys who do it and girls who should be politely asked first should tell you all you need to know about the power dynamics involved.

Michael Conroy, the founder of Men At Work, which trains teachers how to deliver appropriate PSHE lessons, raised the material with local MPs.

He said: “This is not sex education, this is just advocacy for the porn industry. Imagine you are a 14-year-old girl and you have told your boyfriend you don’t want to be choked but then an authority figure comes into school and tells you it is OK.

“Choking cuts off oxygen to the brain and is incredibly harmful, it can even kill. Most schools will take it on trust that something endorsed by the local authority is OK.

“There is a rampant myth that choking can be done safely and is simply another option for a sexual act. It’s normalised in porn and served up to teenagers via social media algorithms. The practice of choking is rife and I have seen it become a much bigger issue in the last two years.”

Just stop it.