Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • How everyone

    A couple of things…

    Dr Searle said: “I don’t agree we would have classed it as misbehaviour.”

    Ms Cunningham said: “I think you’ve already confirmed that email to Isla Bumba on December 8 was prompted by a conversation about Sandie removing herself from the changing room when he was there, that’s right?

    “You ask if there’s any policies around transgender staff and suggest Dr Upton might be keen to help develop some; is it fair for the tribunal to infer the possibility of developing policies to make it easier for Dr Upton to take matters further?”

    Dr Searle said: “No, I don’t agree. I think there needs to be an NHS Fife policy on how everyone can feel comfortable in changing areas of their choosing.”

    Sigh. There can’t be such a policy, because it’s not possible. Either you provide women-only changing areas or you don’t. Either way someone will feel not comfortable. You have to bite the bullet and decide which discomfort matters more. Should it be women’s discomfort with the presence of men? Or should it be men’s discomfort with the absence of women? Should women be allowed to undress without men ogling them? Or should men be able to ogle women undressing?

    You have to pick one. The two are incompatible, so you have to pick just one. There is no way of squaring this circle.

    Second thing.

    Asked by Ms Cunningham at one point whether she is female, Dr Searle said: “Female is on my birth certificate.”

    Asked to elaborate on how she came to have “female” on her birth certificate, Dr Searle replied: “It is usually a medical decision made at birth by the biological characteristics visually seen when delivering the baby. I am not an expert in it.”

    And yet you are a medical doctor.

  • A winning approach

    Threat level high.

    Trans activists have called for their community to be “armed” after a Supreme Court ruling barred biological men from women-only spaces.

    A protester on the London Trans+ Pride march on Saturday carried placards reading: “DIY or Die. Trans emancipation. Not rainbow capitalism. Arm trans people.”

    Another sign read: “Bitch trolls from hell,” with pictures of JK Rowling and the bosses of For Women Scotland, who won the Supreme Court case against the Scottish Government on gender in April.

    Ah well in that case we’ll change our minds and decide that trans people are the nicest, most reasonable, least demanding and entitled, best in every way people you could ask for.

    Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy for human rights charity Sex Matters, which campaigns for clarity about biological sex in law and life, said the signs revealed the “central hatred of women is to trans activism”.

    She said: “The reason this movement treats JK Rowling and the grassroots campaigners of For Women Scotland as enemies is simply that they dare to say no to men who want to transgress women’s boundaries. One side in this debate stands up for everyone’s rights to safety, dignity, and privacy in single sex spaces. The other calls for violence against women. It shouldn’t be hard for politicians and public figures to decide which side they are on.”

    Welllll but you have to take into account the fact that many politicians and public figures hate women, so they’re happy to jump on board a movement that puts women-hatred front and center.

  • Guest post: All resistance is good resistance

    Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.

    I don’t think there’s anything remotely “chicken” about Sackbut’s in-person strategy for handling the gender issue. I think it’s courageous and commendable. Yours, too, Mike B.

    This is a war! It really is. All resistance is good resistance. Even just “passive” non-compliance adds a bit of weight on the good side of the scale rather than the bad one. (By that I mean avoiding the use of coerced pronouns.) Anything at all to avoid putting one’s full weight on the other side of the scale is a win in this war. Size doesn’t matter. Even just not putting pronouns in one’s email bio. Or if even that could get one in trouble, avoiding them in Zoom meetings
 et cetera, et cetera. Any act of defiance, no matter how small, counts. It’s ok to be a civilian in a war — nobody’s obligated to throw all their personal responsibilities away to join the Resistance. Even neutrality is better than coerced compliance with the other side.

    The stakes are genuinely big to people’s livelihoods, no matter how metaphorical this war can feel at times. That’s what makes this war so strange — it feels simultaneously like the heaviest burden and the lightest one. It’s all-consuming weight — or perhaps it’s a bunch of abstract nothingness, mostly just online noise and academic ideas. Even many people who “kind of” see our point of view often accuse us of that. We’ve all encountered them, the ones who don’t disagree with any of our points, but who can’t see the weight of them when the whole picture comes together.

    That contradiction can claw at one’s self-esteem, making people feel guilty for perceiving the weight of it instead of its purported weightlessness. Fuck that! That’s why I won’t put scare quotes around the word war here. It’s perhaps a smaller war than, say, Viet Nam, but I want to emphasize the real cost to so many people — especially women — so I won’t diminish it. I refuse to treat the gender war as weightless or superficial.

    Once again, one of Graham Linehan’s many insights comes to mind: he compared this war to the many Young Adult fantasies in which there’s a secret war between vampires and werewolves or wizards or whatever, while the broader public carries on largely uninterrupted, blissfully unaware of the epic battle going on in its midst. (Rowling’s Harry Potter series is an example of this trope.) But because ours is a war that’s explicitly about reality rather than fantasy, even though the closest analogy to it is, well, fantasy
 it puts us rationalists in the trenches in a position that’s almost too difficult for even our own selves to compute. It’s so logically improbable and inexplicable, the contours of the Gender War. When virtually every single liberal media outlet calls us crazy, Occam’s Razor almost begs us to find a way to write ourselves off, to dismiss our own side’s point of view as too improbable to be real.

    But here we are. It’s all too real. But it’s much easier to fight this war online, in the domain of abstract ideas, than in the real world, where its absurdity feels so comically unreal and out-of-place it can short even the most robust circuits.

    How to deal with it in the real world as opposed to online is a question worthy of much, much more discussion, I believe. There’s much anguish about the IRL front, because the rules are completely different from online.

  • Who is funding your case?

    It’s all about class today.

    And today I learned that Jane Russell is married to John Russell, 7th Earl Russell and grandson of Bertrand Russell. It doesn’t get a whole lot more posh than that.

  • Revoke, rescind, repeal

    Yes good plan. Let’s do that with everything. Repeal the knowledge that people need oxygen to live; goodbye suffocation. Repeal gravity; we’ll be able to fly! Repeal agriculture; there are plenty of nuts and berries out there. Repeal the science of medicine; rely on miracles.

    President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday proposed revoking a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change.

    The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule would rescind a 2009 declaration that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.

    And by rescinding that declaration Trump’s administration would cause it to become not true. What a brilliant move!

    The “endangerment finding” is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.

    EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the proposed rule change on a podcast ahead of an official announcement set for Tuesday in Indiana. Repealing the endangerment finding “will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America,” Zeldin said on the Ruthless podcast.

    And any kind of regulation is a terrible thing. We must not regulate traffic, or commerce, or sports, or policing, or farming, or the use of rivers and streams, or anything else. Freedom freedom freedom!

    “There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” Zeldin said. “They created this endangerment finding and then they are able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources, to basically regulate out of existence, in many cases, a lot of segments of our economy. And it cost Americans a lot of money.”

    Yup they created it, they just made it up out of their own heads, the way Trump makes up everything he says. It’s not based on any science at all whatsoever.

  • Daddy’s a pedo

    Reduxx tells us:

    A widely circulated video showcasing a gay couple’s “surrogacy journey” has revealed that a baby boy is currently in the custody of a registered child sex offender. The couple, Logan Riley and Brandon Mitchell, gained viral attention after posting a video introducing their newborn son. It has since emerged that Mitchell is a convicted pedophile.

    Guess what. Surrogacy=anyone can get possession of a baby, no questions asked.

    I hadn’t really understood that before. It’s not like adoption. There is no screening process.

    The video, which was initially shared by the couple on their own social media platforms, was meant to offer a heartwarming glimpse into the first year of their newborn’s life. However, it quickly drew scrutiny after being reposted on July 27 by Irish right-wing activist and political figure Derek Blighe on X (formerly Twitter).

    So there was pushback, but then the facts came out.

    But just 24 hours after the video went viral on social media, it has been confirmed that one of the men in the video is a registered child sex offender.

    Brandon Keith Mitchell is a Tier 1 sex offender in the state of Pennsylvania, and was arrested in 2016 after attempting to solicit a 16-year-old boy for sexual abuse. The victim in the case was a student at Downingtown West High School, where Mitchell had worked as a chemistry teacher. He was 30 years old at the time.

    Well, maybe surrogate baby will have 15 good years before it all goes wrong?

    Mitchell pleaded guilty to felony child pornography possession and one court of Corruption of Minors, and was sentenced to up to 23 months of incarceration. But court records show that he was granted parole just two months following his conviction.

    Part of his conditions included that he have no unsupervised contact with minors and that he surrender his teaching license. He quickly moved on to obtain a job as a chemist at Eurofins BioPharma Product Testing in Lancaster, where he has worked for the past 9 years.

    …

    Reduxx reached out to the division Pennsylvania State Police responsible for maintaining Mitchell’s registration, and was informed that the state does not automatically forbid individuals convicted of sex crimes from having children, gaining custody, or exercising parental rights.

    While Pennsylvania’s adoption law does prohibits sex offenders from adopting or fostering children, gestational surrogacy circumvents any such laws through pre-birth parentage orders.

    So there you go. That kid is doomed.

  • Dirty cops worked with the gangs

    The cops raped the rape victims.

    Five women who were exploited by grooming gangs in Rotherham as children say they were also abused [by] police officers in the town at the time.

    One says she was raped from the age of 12 by a serving South Yorkshire Police (SYP) officer in a marked police car. He would threaten to hand her back to the gang if she did not comply, she says.

    If only she had thought to idennify as a man.

    We have seen written accounts from these women, plus testimony from 25 other victims of grooming gangs, with some of them saying that corrupt police officers worked alongside the gangs or failed to act on child sexual exploitation.

    At least 1,400 girls in Rotherham were abused by gangs of men, identified by victims as being of mainly Pakistani heritage, between 1997 and 2013 – the landmark Jay Report concluded in 2014.

    And by “mainly Pakistani heritage” the Beeb means “mainly Muslim.” Allah despises women. Any woman not in a niqab is a slut and fair game.

    A new criminal investigation into the involvement of police officers in the Rotherham grooming scandal is now being led by SYP’s major crime unit, under the direction of the police watchdog.

    Prof Alexis Jay who led that independent inquiry into abuse in the town has told the BBC she is “shocked” that SYP is investigating its own former officers and says the criminal investigation should be handed to another force or independent body.

    In response, Hayley Barnett, SYP assistant chief constable said: “We know how hard it must be for a victim or survivor, who has been so badly let down in the past, to put their faith into the South Yorkshire Police of today.”

    But she added that victims and survivors were “at the heart” of the investigation, with all actions being taken in their best interests.

    Ah well that’s fine then.

  • Can confirm

    Brilliant McLuhan moment.

  • Breaking: the wind is bullshit

    Trump is really really pissed off at wind. Yes, wind. He thinks wind is a great big loser. He thinks wind orders the filet mignon and then won’t pick up the tab.

    Trump spent part of his weekend in Scotland reviving his old grievances against wind power, even claiming at one point that it was “killing” Americans.

    During a meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Trump abruptly detoured from immigration to wind turbines. “And the other thing I say to Europe: We will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States,” Trump said. “They’re killing us.”

    Also, besides, in addition, we refuse to drink Dubonnet.

    He complained that wind turbines “rust and rot in eight years” and then can’t be “buried” because they will harm the soil.

    “The whole thing is a con job,” he said. â€œIt’s very expensive. And in all fairness, Germany tried it and wind doesn’t work.”

    Much of what the president said was wildly inaccurate: Germany gets more than a quarter of its energy from wind, turbines last about 30 years (not eight), according to the U.S Department of Energy, it’s not the most expensive form of energy, and they’re not “almost all” made in China.

    Ok but besides that it was all true. Mostly. I guess.

    Trump has previously taken his anti-wind stance to absurd extremes, such as in 2019, when he falsely claimed wind turbines cause cancer.

    “The wind, the wind, it sounds so wonderful,” he said last year. “The wind, the wind, the wind is, the wind is bullshit, I’ll tell you.”

    Except when it’s his wind of course.

  • What are the hours?

    In the theocracy section of the job ads:

    A job advert for a role in a sharia court posted on a government website has caused major controversy, with critics saying it promotes a separate Islamic legal system in the UK.

    Well yes, separate and Islamic, but more to the point, women-hating and theocratic. It wouldn’t be nearly so alarming and disgusting if, say, a job advert for a role in a Quaker organization were posted on a government website.

  • Be sure to punch women

    Such a progressive movement.

  • In shirts bearing messages

    The left hates women and the right hates women. Sucks to be us.

    Darts drama as three protestors dragged away during World Matchplay match involving transgender player

    Yebbut what kind of “transgender player”? Even GB News won’t say it’s a man cheating women. Instead it sneers at the women who objected.

    Three individuals from the “Save Women’s Sport” campaign protested at the Winter Gardens during Noa-Lynn van Leuven’s quarter-final darts match at the Women’s World Matchplay on Sunday. The demonstrators, dressed in shirts bearing messages opposing the 28-year-old’s involvement, made their feelings clear as the Dutch competitor prepared to face Lorraine Winstanley.

    The protest occurred as van Leuven appeared at the Blackpool venue for the third time.

    Security staff responded immediately to the disruption, forcibly restraining two of the protesters whilst a third person filmed the confrontation. A banner saying ‘he’s a man’ was also visible.

    Which he is, so why not say so? Merely mentioning a “transgender player” doesn’t do that.

    Security staff responded immediately to the disruption, forcibly restraining two of the protesters whilst a third person filmed the confrontation. A banner saying ‘he’s a man’ was also visible.

    Because he is. GB News should woman up and say so.

    The incident appeared to have no impact on van Leuven’s competitive focus or performance.

    The darts star delivered a commanding display against Winstanley, winning the quarter-final match with a comprehensive 4-0 scoreline.

    Yes, because he cheated.

    The left hates women but don’t worry, the right also hates women.

  • He broke new ground!

    Oh gee how exciting another man beat another woman competing in a women’s sport.

    A dominant display indeed.

  • New boss just like the old boss

    Oh here we go – the old “women are sluts whores harlots slags” routine.

    Yebbut don’t forget to support your trans siblings.

  • Sit right here in front of the target

    The union idennifies as a union but it doesn’t protect the workers the way unions are supposed to do.

    It doesn’t come right out and say our support is for team trans only, but the mawkish wording is all too typical of that particular brand of “support.” The right-thinking people these days see trans people as needing endless declarations of love and support and sympathy and more love, while they see women who know men are not women as The Evil Other needing nothing but rebuke and punishment. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to “share my thoughts” with them.

  • Not just any blue gown

    NPR has further details on the updated Statue of Liberty.

    Artist Amy Sherald is canceling an upcoming show of her work at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Sherald’s boldly colored portraits documenting the African American experience have graced magazine covers.

    She is best known for her painting of Michelle Obama commissioned by the museum.

    Amy Sherald: American Sublime was scheduled to be on view at the National Portrait Gallery for five months beginning Sept. 19. Described as “the largest, most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date,” the exhibition was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA, and is currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

    Sherald is canceling the show because of a dispute over her painting of a trans woman with pink hair and a blue gown holding a torch, called Trans Forming Liberty, 2024.

    That’s not quite all there is to say about the painting though. About that blue gown…

    See there’s more to it than just swapping a “trans woman” in for the woman in the original. There’s also the pose.

    The original stands squarely on her two feet, holding the torch of liberty aloft with one strong arm and a tablet bearing the date of the American Declaration of Independence in the other. She is not, repeat not, poking one leg out of a split skirt in a “wanna fuck me?” manner, nor is she holding a vase of posies next to her ear, nor is she clutching her hip with the other hand, nor is she lifting her left heel off the floor for no reason in the manner of India Willoughby.

    Censorship is bad; in other news, that painting is a woman-hating piece of crap.

  • Guest post: Trans Liberty

    Originally a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany Room.

    Sometimes it’s hard to know whose metaphorical bed to jump into. On the one hand, Amy Sherald, the celebrated painter best known for her official portrait of Michelle Obama, has canceled an upcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, citing concerns that the museum might remove an artwork that could further provoke the Trump administration as it seeks to exert control over the Smithsonian Institution.

    Sherald and a Smithsonian spokesperson Thursday confirmed that Sherald had withdrawn her exhibition, “American Sublime,” from the museum.

    The artist said she had been told that the museum — whose director, Kim Sajet, resigned after President Donald Trump called for her ouster for being “a highly partisan person” — might remove a painting


    The government really shouldn’t be in the business of censoring art. The Smithsonian is supposed to be an independent institution, without any direct interference from the president, especially this president.

    But on the other hand,

    
might remove a painting that depicts a transgender woman posing as the Statue of Liberty from the exhibition, which was slated to open in September after touring at museums in San Francisco and New York.

    Why? Why does everything have to be transed? What is the underlying metaphor here–that brave men have to take everything from women, including (especially?) liberty?

    And, as it turns out, the Smithsonian wasn’t even proposing that the painting be removed, but just that some context be added.

    The New York Times first reported news of Sherald’s withdrawal. According to that report, Sherald said Smithsonian head Lonnie G. Bunch III proposed replacing the painting with a video discussing the piece, which she understood “would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility.”

    But the Smithsonian spokesperson told The Washington Post that Bunch wanted the video to accompany the painting — not replace it. The spokesperson added that the museum offered to spend more time contextualizing her work, but Sherald chose to remove herself from the show.

    So it’s self-censorship.

  • Throw her in the slammer

    It just keeps getting worse. This one takes the breath away. Daniel Sanderson in The Times:

    One of Sandie Peggie’s bosses wanted her to be reported to police for confronting a transgender doctor in a hospital’s female changing rooms.

    A male doctor, god damn it. The problem was not “transgender”; the problem was male. Peggie did not want to have to take her clothes off in front of a man.

    So anyway – for the crime of not wanting to undress in front of a man, one of Peggie’s bosses thought the police should be called. Not to arrest the man spying on the woman, of course, but to arrest the woman telling the man to get out. Welcome to 1890.

    Peggie confronted Upton in the women’s changing rooms at the A&E department at Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy, on Christmas Eve 2023, telling Upton she believed they had no right to be there. 

    What, both of them?

    She believed he had no right to be there. Because he’s a he.

    Previously, the tribunal was told on several occasions that Upton had discussed with senior colleagues the possibility of reporting to police what was viewed internally at NHS Fife as a potential hate crime.

    However, it was not previously apparent that figures within NHS Fife were actively encouraging the step.

    It’s so filthy.

    On December 30, 2023, days after the Christmas Eve row between Peggie and Upton, Doyle emailed a number of colleagues to tell them he had found the doctor’s initial formal report of the incident, which it emerged had been typed by the A&E consultant Kate Searle, “very difficult” to read.

    The report, known within the Scottish NHS as a Datix, described a “hate incident” concerning “transgender identity” and claimed that Peggie’s “aggressive and confrontational manner” was an “escalation of prior behaviours”.

    He endorsed placing Peggie on “special leave”, meaning she could not return to work, and described the incident as a “potential hate crime” that was “not acceptable” and not to be “tolerated in any circumstance”.

    Doyle added: “Such incidents should also be reported to Police Scotland, which I believe the staff member raising [the] complaint has been advised to consider, and we could also support if needed.”

    Because a woman didn’t want a man in the room when she changed her clothes.

    Tess White, the Scottish Conservative equalities spokeswoman, said the emails offered “further alarming evidence of the witch-hunt” against Peggie. White claimed the nurse, who had 30 years of previously unblemished service, had been “vilified by bosses at NHS Fife for standing up for her rights”.

    “The behaviour of her employers is frankly indefensible,” White said. “Who in their right mind would think it’s appropriate to call the police because a female nurse didn’t want to share a changing room with a biological man?”

    Well exactly! It’s grotesque!

  • Immenth dithtreth

    Hunnnnnnnnnh

    Do you accept that calling this man a man is likely to cause immense distress?

    No, I fucking do not. I think it causes him irritation and vanity-bruising at worst, and more likely a nice little thrill of righteous indignation. Meanwhile, do you accept that bullying women into agreeing with a man who says he’s a woman is harmful to women in general? Because that’s a far less fanciful petulant self-involved claim than his claim of “immense distress”?

    I mean come on. He’s an adult. He’s a doctor. Surely he’s expected to have enough resilience and sense of proportion to accept that he can’t force his colleagues to participate in his fantasy about himself? Times a million when it’s this particular fantasy and it’s women he’s trying to bully into participating? Where are all the grown-ups???

  • Scottish Feminist Network gets it

    One minute I compare trans ideology and its coerced beliefs racket to the Catholic church and its coerced belief racket, and the next minute I drop in on twitX and find

    WE ARE NOT COMPELLED TO BELIEVE IN THE GODS OF OTHERS.

    Those days are over. Our ancestors were so compelled, but we are not. You are not the pope of us, you are not the Taliban of us. Your religion is stupid. Shut up.