Oh oh oh but what about the immense tragic suffering of the tranz commmunniny?

And, yes, I know that women lost their jobs for voicing their beliefs on biology. That was a wrong that required to be righted. But suffering is not binary in the way the court has decided sex is. Trans people have been under attack, too. Their besiegement has been amplified by the same judgment that has lessened yours. 

Right. Ok. So the woman was raped, I get it, but the rapist has been under attack too. Now the rapist has been convicted and it’s your fault – you have amplified his besiegementitude.

Trans women won’t cease to exist because five judges decided the legal definition of a woman within the Equality Act 2010 does not include them, even if they hold Gender Recognition Certificates. 

And now they have to navigate a world that is crueller than it was before. It doesn’t matter where you place the blame for that: with politicians, the media, extremists on either side of the culture war divide. There’s still a field out there strewn with casualties. 

The world is crueller than it was before because men who pretend to be women can no longer grab all of women’s rights for themselves? How does that make sense? How is it cruel to tell men that they can’t take what belongs to women? Think.

Now Musk is interfering with people’s health care.

The U.S. DOGE Service is putting new curbs on billions of dollars in federal health-care grants, requiring government officials to manually review and approve previously routine payments — and paralyzing grant awards to tens of thousands of organizations, according to 12 people familiar with the new arrangements.

The effort, which DOGE has dubbed “Defend the Spend,” has left thousands of payments backed up, including funding for doctors’ and nurses’ salaries at federal health centers for the poor. Some grantees are waiting on payments they expected last week.

…

Some officials have been told that only Trump political appointees can sign requests to disburse funds, even if a career official has already approved it, adding an additional layer of review. The justification for each payment also must include an explanation of how the money will be used to advance Trump administration priorities, according to two employees in separate agencies who received high-level briefings on the process.

If that’s the case then most payments will be ended entirely, because they have nothing to do with Trump admin priorities. Naturally public health is not a Trump priority.

Among those immediately suffering consequences are federal health centers, which provide services for low-income people and those who lack insurance, the employee said. Those centers rely on regular drawdowns for their operational expenses, such as doctors’ and nurses’ salaries and basic medical supplies.

Among those immediately suffering consequences are federal health centers, which provide services for low-income people and those who lack insurance, the employee said. Those centers rely on regular drawdowns for their operational expenses, such as doctors’ and nurses’ salaries and basic medical supplies.

If the funding delay continues much longer, the situation will grow dire for such centers, imperiling their ability to assist the poor, the employee said.

Now that is a Trump priority.

Graham Linehan nails it in his Spiked article on the For Women Scotland ruling.

Sitting in court on Wednesday, I was especially delighted to hear the word ‘incoherence’ repeated in the judgement again and again. The incoherence of trans ideology wasn’t just an insult to me as a man who cared for the women in my life, it was also an affront to me as a writer. In standing for women, the Supreme Court stood up for all of us who need words to have meaning.

That. The incoherence and the sheer blinding stupidity. It’s been a grating maddening frustrating outrage all along, and will go on being all that until it dies entirely or the planet dies entirely. It’s incoherent, it’s absurd, it’s childish; why are we being bullied and pushed to sign up to something so ludicrous and stupid? The emperor is buck naked and he’s not a woman so get tf out of here and leave us alone.

This was the decade in which British history repeated itself. For their heresy in standing up to male power, these women lost jobs and friends, were thrown in cells, made the subject of mockery and smears by the press. The state broadcaster, the BBC, simply decided they didn’t exist. Feminist Jenni Murray was removed from her seat at Woman’s Hour, which then proceeded to talk about anything other than the unprecedented assault on rights already won. The most important feminists of the day were denied a platform and told there was ‘no debate’.

Women were told this return to Edwardian values was progress, that they should dim themselves so that men could shine. They were expected to make themselves smaller so men could crowd into their spaces. Eddie Izzard felt bold enough to recast the story of a group of young girls objecting to his presence in a woman’s toilet as an act of bigotry. None of his fellow comedians contradicted this, because to do so would be career-ending.

As Graham knows all too well.

The real Sophie Molly in action.

He’s not massively charismatic.

It’s quite a good laugh when his feet finally do appear.

Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union.

To repeat – Jo Grady is general secretary of the University and College Union.

What is an enemy? What is an alien?

Sometimes we need to know.

The US Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to pause the deportation of a group ofalleged Venezuelan gang members.

A civil liberties group had sued to stop the removal of the men, currently in detention in Texas, saying they had not been able to contest their cases in court.

Donald Trump has sent accused Venezuelan gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president power to detain and deport natives or citizens of “enemy” nations without usual processes. The act was previously used only three times, all during war.

We’re not at war with Venezuela, or with El Salvador. We’re not even at war with Mexico or Panama, although we act as if we are. Let’s see what the Brennan Center has to say about the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

In wartime, the United States must protect its people and territory. Doing so may require actions that might not pass legal or political muster in peacetime, such as the preventive detention of enemy combatants for the duration of the war. But the Alien Enemies Act, an authority that permits summarily detaining and deporting civilians merely on the basis of their ancestry, goes too far and must be reconsidered. Passed in 1798 as a part of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, the Alien Enemies Act is a deeply flawed authority with a sordid history.

Ancestry is a funny thing. Some people care deeply about it but others don’t. That’s a consequence of modernity and technology and the like – many people are not fixed in the same place as their parents, let alone their ancestors, and they don’t always feel obliged to consider their ancestors’ enemies their enemies. Feuds and rivalries that go on for centuries depend on low tech. Once people can just leave, lots of them do, and family ties can weaken over time. That can be sad but it can also be liberation. Not all parents are good parents; not all children owe their parents. In short it is no longer a slam dunk that all people of X nationality are loyal to other people of that nationality rather than to the different set of people they now live among. It’s miles from a slam dunk. Some people cling to the ancestors but some just don’t, and that’s a fact.

Back to the Brennan Center.

The law was last invoked in World War II as the legal authority for interning noncitizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. Those internments — along with internments during previous wars — were shameful episodes in our nation’s past. The Alien Enemies Act and complementing authorities have allowed presidents to target people on the basis of their identity, not their conduct or the threat they pose to national security. In 1988, when Congress apologized and provided reparations for Japanese internment, it acknowledged that the policy was rooted in “racial prejudice” and “wartime hysteria,” not valid security concerns. Congress would later describe Italian internment as a “fundamental injustice,” and the Department of Justice would recognize that German noncitizens had been targeted “based on their ancestry.”

The Japanese-Americans got the worst of it because they looked more different than Italians and Germans – that’s how thoughtful humans can manage to be. We think we know better now, but if we’d been born in 1900 who knows what we would have thought of Manzanar.

Notwithstanding this widespread condemnation, the Alien Enemies Act was not repealed or amended after the war. Indeed, the law has not been substantially modified since its adoption. If the United States were to declare war in the future, the president would be able to invoke the Alien Enemies Act’s vast detention and deportation power. Worse still, the language of the law is broad enough that a president might be able to wield the authority in peacetime as an end run around the requirements of criminal and immigration law.

Yup, a president might, and oh gosh golly gee, he is.

The White House called challenges to using the law for mass deportations “meritless litigation”.

Nope. The litigation has merit. We haven’t done this before, and there are good reasons to think we should never do it.

The BBC on the ruling and its consequences:

The Supreme Court case was brought by a group called For Women Scotland. It wanted to overturn Scottish legislation which said 50% of members on public boards should be women – and trans women were included in their definition.

The group lost its case in Scotland’s highest court but appealed to the UK Supreme Court. The case was heard towards the end of last year.

“What we wanted was clarity in the law – when something is described as a single-sex service, a single-sex space, that this relates to biology,” Susan Smith from For Women Scotland told the BBC.

We wanted things for women to be for women.

Over time the arguments over how a woman is defined had become increasingly angry, bitter and divided, because the stakes were high for all involved.

For transgender people, who say they often face victimisation and harassment, the battles were rooted in attempts to win better legal protection.

No they weren’t, not really. They were rooted in determination to take everything away from women. Every single thing.

I can agree that that may have stemmed from the “trans women are women” dogma, but I don’t really care. If trans women really were women they would have enough empathy for women to get why we can’t just ignore the physical realities. Instead they attack us in every way possible and do their level best to take everything that’s ours. We’re not the instigators here.

Crucially, the ruling provides a clear framework for what equality laws mean. The EHRC says it is “working at pace” to update its guidance, and expects that to be ready by the summer.

It has already made it clear that if a single-sex space, like a toilet or changing room, is women-only, that means biological males who identify as women should not use it. It says instead that trans people should use their “powers of advocacy” to campaign for third spaces, such as unisex toilets. And it has said it will pursue the NHS if it does not follow the latest ruling.

Health service guidance on single-sex wards currently says that “trans people should be accommodated according to their presentation, the way they dress, and the name and pronouns they currently use”. Currently this allows trans women to be offered beds on women-only wards. The NHS says its policy is under review.

It was always a horrible policy.

For trans people there is also a lot of uncertainty. They will have been used to using spaces which correspond to their gender identity – changing that may be difficult and, for some, frightening.

Now think about how women have been feeling all this time.

The trans communinnnnee is out demonstrating how solidarityish it is toward women.

Trans rights activists defaced a statue of Millicent Fawcett during a protest over the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of a woman.

That’s the spirit! Deface a statue that represents women’s struggle for equality! Make it both personal and anti-feminist!

Thousands of protesters marched through central London on Saturday in an “emergency demonstration”. Draped in blue, pink and white, they chanted calls for trans liberation, blocked traffic and held up placards which read “No feminism without trans women” and “Biology is not binary”.

No: all feminism without trans women. No feminism with trans women because they have demonstrated themselves to be saturated in hatred and contempt for women. All this bullying and shouting and taking away has not made us love them. Surprise!

Maya Forstater, the CEO of human-rights charity Sex Matters, told The Telegraph: “Yet again the trans rights activists show us who they are. This is not a peaceful request for the right of a marginalised group to live quietly and with dignity; it’s a violent anti-women mob. 

“They’ve defaced the statue of  Millicent Fawcett, who represents women’s suffrage, to make their point that they will not respect women’s boundaries, even when the law requires it. Once again, they prove why women need male-free spaces and services – to keep men like this out.”

Funny how they don’t make the connection, isn’t it. I guess it’s because they see us as The Power and themselves as the crushed bleeding working class or persecuted race or exhausted pacifists or all three. Dudes: listen up: we are not The Power and you are not our victims. Women are not tyrants who keep men helpless and imprisoned.

Joanna Cherry KC, a former SNP MP who opposed the party’s trans policy, said the activists had shown “appalling misogyny”.

She posted on X: “Anyone doubting the appalling misogyny of trans activists need only look at this evidence. The handmaidens should hang their heads in shame.”

Should but of course won’t. They never ever do.

Jolyon Maugham hitting new peak Jolyon Maugham.

Sadly for him he’s on record saying what the Supreme Court rules is the law.

Really?

But…he never objected to “trans women” searching women did he? Wasn’t that his whole point? Yes, it was. So why is he so horrified that men will be searched by male officers? If it’s ok for women how can it be so terrible for men? Why are people who support that “disgusting human beings” while people who support trans women searching women are the very best enlightened compassionate human beings?

Can anyone explain?

Look at this horrible grizzling whining man doing his affected woman-imitation while threatening women and promising to abuse them.

“I, as a trans woman, will always use female spaces no matter what,” he says, underlining that he will terrorize women because he can and he likes it. The “no matter what”=no matter how desperately women object. It’s the Bully’s Creed – “I will always do exactly what I want no matter how much you object.”

Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:

There seems to be a change in the air.

Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”

Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”

Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.

That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “[M]y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”

Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”

We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before.

In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West. The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress, and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the Slave Power would own the country.

The law was the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements—and even over the institution of slavery—came together to stand against the end of American democracy.

Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members didn’t agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas “should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

I think I’ll go for the cleaver.

Trump’s war on the law continues.

After attacking judges and repeatedly sidestepping their orders, the Trump administration has accused a federal judge in Washington of escalating tensions between the judicial and executive branches by seeking to hold the White House accountable for its courtroom behavior.

Because he thinks he’s a monarch and the law is subservient to him. He’s the prez but he doesn’t understand the separation of powers.

The accusation against the judge, James E. Boasberg, came in a court filing early Friday morning by the Justice Department. In it, department lawyers asked the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Boasberg to prevent him from opening an expansive contempt inquiry into whether the White House violated an order he issued in March to stop flights of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador under the authority of a powerful wartime statute.

Wawawa let us do whatever we want, you’re just judges and we have the golden throne.

Much of the filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia read like a normal legal brief, laying out the government’s challenge to a judicial order it did not like. But in its opening line, department lawyers made clear that they believed Judge Boasberg’s recent threat to open criminal contempt proceedings in the deportation case represented another salvo in an increasingly bitter battle between the White House and the courts.

“‘Occasions for constitutional confrontation between the two branches should be avoided whenever possible,’” the department lawyers wrote, failing to mention their own role in fostering such confrontations. “The district court’s criminal contempt order instead escalates the constitutional stakes by infringing core executive prerogatives.”

Or, to put it another way, the administration’s refusal to comply with the judicial order escalates the constitutional stakes by infringing core judicial prerogatives.

All of this and more prompted a conservative Republican jurist, writing for a federal appeals court that reviews Judge Xinis, to scold the Trump administration on Thursday for repeatedly taking an aggressive and recalcitrant approach to the courts and to court orders.

“The respect that courts must accord the executive must be reciprocated by the executive’s respect for the courts,” the appellate judge, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote. “Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.”

That’s Trumpism for you. Just ignore any orders you don’t like and accuse everyone else of disrespect and disobedience. He considers himself a dictator and that’s all there is to it – the rules might as well not exist.

This guy is such a gift. He will force himself on women and if cops show up to stop him he will scream “rape” at them.

And of course Willoughby says “Yeah!”

Brendan O’Neill is frankly gloating.

No sooner had the Supreme Court said what even the Neanderthals knew – that men are men and women are women – than these blokes were fuming. First out of the traps was thin-lipped loon India Willoughby. He branded the court’s decision ‘evil’. Yes, it is apparently wicked and immoral to say that if you have a todger you’re a fella. Willoughby spent the day furiously doubling down on his delusions of womanhood. ‘I have always been a woman’, he said. Tell that to the jizz you sired your kid with.

It’s a ‘grim day’, they cry. The ruling threatens trans people’s ‘safety’, they say. That’s big talk from a movement that expects female prisoners to live cheek by jowl with rapists and girls to share changing rooms with hulking blokes in ill-fitting bikinis. There are dark mutterings about ‘fascism’. Munroe Bergdorf shared a post saying: ‘There is no trans debate. There are trans people and there are fascists who wish to dominate and eliminate trans people.’ Dude, it’s not fascism to say women should be free to seek rape counselling without fearing there’ll be a weirdo in a boob tube listening in.

Listening in or just plain doing the counselling (see Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre for details).

Some of the angry fellas say they intend to carry on going into women-only areas. ‘You will never stop me accessing female spaces. It is my right to use them’, says one. Not anymore it isn’t, you prick. Trans activist Charlie Craggs says it’s terrible that he’ll now be expected to ‘use men’s spaces’ alongside ‘predatory men’. How can TERFs sleep at night, he says, knowing ‘they’re sending transwomen into bathrooms with predatory men’. What depthless gall. The men who demanded that women throw open their changing rooms, refuges, swimming pools and sports to any bloke who fancied waltzing in are now blubbing that they’ll have to share spaces with those very same blokes. Honestly, what these people lack in XX chromosomes they more than make up for with brass neck.

Sauce for the goose sauce for the gander eh wot?

Then, best of all, came ‘the allies’. Is there anything funnier than a fiftysomething public-school arse trying to stay relevant by saying ‘transwomen are women’? Barrister Jolyon Maugham – famous for killing foxes and losing cases – declared in his haughty headmaster’s drawl that the court’s ruling is ‘profoundly unfair’. LBC knob jockey James O’Brien asked TERFs how they feel being on the same side as Donald Trump on the trans issue. I don’t know, James, I think I’m happier being on the side of Trump than on the side of a movement that mutilates young lesbians, calls women cunts and puts rapists in women’s jails so they can rape more women.

I certainly don’t like the Team Donald Trump aspect of this, but when so much of the left is so determined to be so stupid, what choice do we have?

It begins.

Rapists will no longer be able to identify as women following a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court.

Forces are now expected to begin recording criminals’ birth sex rather than preferred gender in official crime statistics following the ruling, which stated that trans women are not the same as biological women under equality laws.

It will end a situation where some police forces record rapists as being women, even though the legal definition of the crime requires a penis.

Finally the police will have to stop forcing rape victims to call their rapists “she/her.”

How ugly. University and College Union spits on women.

Medscape explains how clueless and reckless Bad Kennedy is.

In an interview earlier this year, RFK appeared on Fox Nation to talk about a range of issues, but he spent much of the time discussing infectious diseases and the measles outbreak in particular. We took a closer look at the secretary’s comments quoted in his own words and fact-checked them with some leading infectious disease specialists.

RFK: “The safest application of vitamin A is through cod liver oil because you’re getting it through food and the toxicity issue is no longer an issue. You can test people at the hospital for vitamin A.…There’s a lot of good studies out there to show that even as a prophylaxis it’s effective in early treatment.”

Vitamin A is a micronutrient that enhances immune function and cod liver oil is high in vitamin A. Research conducted over several decades has shown that while vitamin A may be helpful in some cases for the treatment of measles, it is not a substitute for vaccination. And cod liver oil should not be used as a source of vitamin A because it would be highly impractical due to the high volume that would need to be ingested to obtain a therapeutic dose of the nutrient, which is 200,000 international units given over two consecutive days.

Also – just a reminder – Kennedy is neither an MD nor a scientist. He has no actual expertise here, just opinions, of the kind any random person on the bus might have.

RFK: “There is malnutrition in West Texas, in Gaines County, and in the Mennonite community. The doctors that I’m talking to on the ground, the leaders in the community are reporting that the people who are getting sick are people who are umm and the little girl who died, where malnutrition may have been an issue in her death. There’s a lot of poverty in that area and the food is kind of a food desert. The best thing that Americans can do is to keep themselves healthy. It’s very very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person.”

One, yes, it’s a good idea for people to keep themselves healthy. Seeking to be unhealthy is a mistake. Those are true statements. However, they are not statements that create a barrier to measles infection. Two, surviving measles is not as good as never having measles at all.

The 6-year-old girl who died from the measles in Gaines County was healthy before she contracted the measles, so recommending a healthy diet in lieu of vaccination is both misleading and dangerous, Offit said. 

“[RFK Jr] is of the false belief that if your nutrition is good, you cannot die from the measles. I have no idea where he gets this,” Offit said. “Measles killed 500 children a year before there was vaccination and most of those children were previously healthy.”

We all know where he gets this. He pulls it out of his ass. He’s a conceited fool who thinks his folk wisdom is better than substantive knowledge.

RFK: If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times because we have nutrition, because we have access to medicines. It’s very, very difficult for any infectious disease to kill a healthy human being.”

And God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

It never seems to occur to Kennedy that he doesn’t know as much about it as the professionals do. Why is that? The rest of us don’t prance around thinking we know all about electrical engineering and dark matter and how to fly planes, we understand that there are professionals and experts who have taken the time to learn a subject or skill and we can’t be professionals and experts without doing the same thing.

He thinks he knows better why rates of autism have risen. Why does he think that?

In remarks laced with scientific inaccuracies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday that autism was preventable while directly contradicting researchers within his own agency on a primary driver behind rising rates of the condition in young children.

Mr. Kennedy made his comments at a news conference, responding to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that rates of autism had increased to one in 31 among 8-year-olds, continuing a long-running trend.

Blaming environmental risk factors for the uptick, he accused the media and the public of succumbing to a “myth of epidemic denial” when it came to autism. He also called research into the genetic factors that scientists say play a vital role in whether a child will develop autism “a dead end.”

How would he know? He’s not a scientist. How would he know better than scientists who work in the field? How does he manage to think he knows better?

Dr. Eric Fombonne, who is a longtime autism researcher and professor emeritus at Oregon Health & Science University, called Mr. Kennedy’s claim “ridiculous.”

“Autism is not an infectious disease. So there aren’t preventive measures that we can take,” said Dr. Joshua Anbar, an assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University who helped collect data for the C.D.C. report.

…

Researchers said there is no one reason autism rates have risen, but that increased screening was likely a large factor.

“The more you look for it, the more you find,” said Dr. Maureen Durkin, a professor of population health sciences and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has long studied autism. Dr. Durkin is one of the authors of the C.D.C. report.

Mr. Kennedy repeatedly dismissed the idea that screenings had driven the uptick as a “canard” and chastised “epidemic deniers” for focusing on genetics instead of environmental factors.

Why did he do that? How does he think he knows better?

Narcissism is a dangerous drug.