No.

The BBC has now adopted a policy of deliberately calling trans women ‘men’ – referring to women who have transitioned as who they no longer are. A person who doesn’t even legally exist anymore! This is being done purely for the purpose of trying to shame and humiliate trans people. Calling a woman a “biological male” or someone “who identifies as a woman” has got nothing to do with protecting women. It’s just base state-sponsored cruelty. A throwback tonthe 70s. How on Earth is that treating trans people with respect and dignity? It’s not. It is treating us with utter contempt. Please take 60 seconds to tell the BBC to stop, using the link in the tweet below.

The BBC has now abandoned the policy of referring to men who claim to be women as “women” – and that’s a good thing because of course a grownup news outlet should never have been calling men “women” in the first place, no matter what they called themselves. People can call themselves turnips, can-openers, fruit bats, planets, gods, messengers of god, and anything else that pops into their heads; we are not obliged to believe them.

Of course the news outlet’s policy of not calling men “women” is not done purely for the purpose of trying to shame and humiliate trans people. It’s done for the purpose of not lying. It’s done for the purpose of being a responsible adult news organization that doesn’t childishly and absurdly call grown men “women” because they try to look like women.

Ah yes of course he is. Trump is telling the DoJ to look for Epstein ties to………………..people he doesn’t like.

Trump said Friday he will ask Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to many other high-profile figures, including some of his perceived political opponents, again blasting Democrats following the release earlier this week of emails from the late Epstein that mention him.

Other high-profile figures – the ones whose names don’t begin with T and end with rump.

“Now that the Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures, I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

What an elegant writer he is. He doesn’t, abuse, his commas, at all.

Now why would he do that? One can’t help but wonder.

Trump puts intense pressure on Republicans to block release of Epstein files

Why? What’s it to him? They’re not his files. We know he doesn’t give the tiniest shit about anyone but himself. Why in hell would he put intense pressure on his team to keep shtum about Epstein?

Unless…

Trump has cranked up his intense pressure campaign on congressional Republicans to oppose the full release of the justice department’s files related to Jeffrey Epstein, before a crucial and long-awaited House vote on the matter next week that scores of Republicans are slated to support.

It couldn’t possibly be that there’s damaging information about him in there could it?

The belated swearing-in on Wednesday of the Democratic representative Adelita Grijalva – which the House speaker, Mike Johnson, had refused for almost two months during the government shutdown – brought the number of signatures on Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna’s discharge petition to the 218 needed to force a floor vote on legislation demanding the Department of Justice release all of its investigative files on Epstein within 30 days.

Will some unlucky Republican drop dead of unspecified natural causes today?

CNN reported that top officials summoned representative Lauren Boebert – one of four Republicans in the House who have signed the petition – to a meeting in the White House Situation Room with the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and FBI director, Kash Patel, to discuss her demand to release the files. Trump had also telephoned her early on Tuesday morning, a day before Grijalva was due to be sworn in and provide the crucial final signature.

Trump also reached out to Representative Nancy Mace, another of the Republican caucus in the House who have signed the petition, but the two did not connect. Mace instead reportedly wrote the president a long explanation of her own personal experience as a survivor of sexual abuse and rape, and why it was impossible for her to change her position on the matter. She wrote on X that “the Epstein petition is deeply personal.”

Trump, of course, could not possibly care less about Mace’s personal experience of sexual abuse and rape. He’s a sexual abuser himself, and a keen abettor of sexual abusers. How women feel about the matter is irrelevant in his world.

But even if the bill passes the House, it still needs to get through the Senate and be signed by Trump. Senate leaders have shown no indication they will bring it up for a vote, and Trump – who had long promised the release of the files on the campaign trail – has decried the effort as a “Democrat hoax”.

What kind of hoax is it to promise the release of the files and then block the release of the files? I guess that’s a Trumpat hoax.

Oh my god just look at him.

He’s doing a weary soldier after battle act.

He is such a phony I don’t know how anyone can bear to be in the same room with him.

You don’t say.

BBC News boss admits: We haven’t got our trans coverage right

Which means, at the very least, that you also haven’t got your women coverage right.

A senior BBC News executive has admitted the broadcaster made mistakes in its coverage of transgender issues.

Richard Burgess, the corporation’s director of news content, told journalists in an all-staff call on Wednesday that they must cover the gender debate impartially and consider the views of both sides.

Or, you could just stop pretending it’s a real controversy at all.

The BBC doesn’t cover both sides of disputes around settled knowledge. It doesn’t interview children on the vexed question of whether or not the Tooth Fairy is real. It doesn’t treat everything as a tossup between two points of view. Why is there any need to give a voice to people with delusional ideas about which people are women?

One of those genuine dropped jaw moments. From Commentary:

“The Damascus Affair” may sound like a John le Carré novel to today’s university students, but it was in fact a 19th-century blood libel with international implications and diplomatic intervention by the president of the United States.

Fortunately, some university students are being taught about the affair today. Unfortunately, they are being taught that it was true—that Jews killed a Syrian monk and sprinkled his blood onto their Passover matzah.

Welcome to University College London.

Samar Maqusi is a fanatical anti-Zionist academic who has been rewarded for her fanaticism with a research fellowship at University College. Earlier this week, according to a recording posted by StandWithUs, Maqusi gave a lecture on “the birth of Zionism” that was sponsored by the hate group Students for Justice in Palestine. Here are Maqusi’s comments:

“In 1838… there is a Christian priest called Thomas. He disappears in Damascus during what is called the Feast of the Tabernacles. So this is a Jewish feast. And the story goes—and, you know, again, these are things that you read, and again, as I said, do investigate, draw your own narrative. But the story is that during this feast they make these special pancakes, or bread, and part of the holy ceremony is that drops of blood from someone who is not Jewish, which the term is ‘gentile,’ has to be mixed in that bread. So the story is that a certain investigation was undergoing to try and find where Father Thomas is. He was found murdered, and a group of Jews who lived in Syria said that—admitted to kidnapping and murdering him to get the drops of blood for making the holy bread.”

And we can actually watch and hear her saying it.

I’m genuinely amazed too.

Updating to add: see Enzyme’s comment @ 6. “this wasn’t UCL teaching: she was invited to address a student society by that society.”

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Furor, I tells ya.

It highlights the big problem with gender ideology, and it’s a problem that I think even the best-intentioned psycholgists and psychiatrists didn’t quite understand as their profession became increasingly warm to the idea of sex changes for their patients. The problem is that it’s not about these people’s personal private ideas or their personal bodies, and it mostly never was. It has always been about getting everyone else to play along. People don’t go off and change their names and get surgeries so they can content themselves in solitude with their newfound “womanhoods” and “manhoods”. They do it so they can move through the rest of the world as though they’re the opposite sex. It’s all about everyone else’s cooperation, participation, obeisance to it.

Clinicians treated “gender identity” treatment like a simple, zero-sum thing: patient feels bad about their sex; patient gets sex change, patient feels better about their sex. In reality, it was more of a three-body problem type thing: patient feels bad about their sex because they see that there’s all these newfound “trans identities” everywhere; patient gets “sex change”; patient is happy because he is in a social environment that is rah-rah for trans; the landscape has thus shifted and this action leads to more patients coming in. Then eventually there’s a backlash in the social environment — the very one that drew so many people into “trans” culture in the first place — and now that environment is non-cooperative with their fantasy, and now the fantasy doesn’t seem at all worth the cost.

But there are no refunds on sex change operations.

The difference between trans people and detransitioners isn’t that they’ve reversed what’s been done to them; it’s that they’ve had a change of perspective on the world around them and how they fit into it. The vast majority of people who’ve already adopted trans identities and medicalized themselves would never have done so if they’d known that the cultural climate over the past few years was only a blip, and that the rest of the world was not going to go along forever with their pretend identities.

The only people happy about their trans surgeries are the ones for whom the penny hasn’t yet dropped. But it will soon enough for most of them.

It’s a tragedy, ultimately. Not so much in Willoughby’s case — he’s clearly a narcissist and he’s out to lunch — but for many others, it is.

World still racing toward the edge of the cliff:

The world is still on track for a catastrophic 2.6C increase in temperature as countries have not made sufficiently strong climate pledges, while emissions from fossil fuels have hit a record high, two major reports have found.

It’s not so much the absence of strong enough pledges that’s the problem as it is the absence of doing anything.

Despite their promises, governments’ new emission-cutting plans submitted for the Cop30 climate talks taking place in Brazil have done little to avert dangerous global heating for the fourth consecutive year, according to the Climate Action Tracker update.

Surprise surprise. We look around us; we see nothing changing. That could be because submitting plans for climate talks is just that. Talking, planning, submitting, promising – none of that is doing anything.

“A world at 2.6C means global disaster,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. A world this hot would probably trigger major “tipping points” that would cause the collapse of key Atlantic Ocean circulation, the loss of coral reefs, the long-term deterioration of ice sheets and the conversion of the Amazon rainforest to a savannah.

“That all means the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humidity,” said Hare. “This is not a good place to be. You want to stay away from that.”

But you can’t stay away from it, because nobody else is.

Donald Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax”, torn up climate policies at home and agitated for more oil and gas drilling in America and overseas. For the first time, the US has not sent a delegation to a Cop summit, to the relief of some delegates.

Well, look at it from his point of view. He’s not going to be around much longer, so why should he care?

And that applies to everyone else.

The Good Law Project on its latest project in lawfare:

Good Law Project has filed an application for judicial review against the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and the equalities minister Bridget Phillipson.

We’ve teamed up with trans and intersex people to challenge the interim guidance rushed out by the EHRC in the wake of the transphobic judgment handed down by the Supreme Court in April.

But…it’s not “transphobic”. You can’t call it phobic to know the correct definition of a word, especially of a word as central to human life as “woman”. I wonder if it’s ever crossed Jolyon Maugham’s mind that without women he wouldn’t exist and neither would anyone else. Women matter, and it’s not phobic to tell the truth about what they are.

This guidance, adopted by Phillipson, requires people to use toilets based on their “biological sex”. But we argue it’s either wrong in law, or it breaches the UK’s obligations under the Human Rights Act 1998 – and the High Court should declare this breach.

Blegh. They can’t even write over there. Should be “We argue either it’s wrong in law, or it breaches” etc.

Anyway, if it’s wrong in law the law is broken. How can it possibly breach any human rights act? If there are no women there are no humans and no human rights.

We’ve been inundated with stories from the trans community about the impact this guidance has had on their lives. 

Many people have told us they’ve been instructed to use different changing rooms and toilets at work, sometimes resulting in stress that has left them unfit to continue working.

Guess what: women feel stress when men intrude on their changing rooms and toilets.

National associations have excluded them from sports – against the wishes of local people in those teams – and previously inclusive services and clubs have bowed to external pressure, making trans people feel ostracised from their communities.

Yet more sloppy manipulative incomplete babytalk. Trans people aren’t excluded from sports; men are excluded from women’s sports. (Except of course when they aren’t, which is much too often.)

In many of these cases, those excluding trans people have justified their decisions by pointing directly at the EHRC’s interim guidance.

Again – it’s not about “excluding trans people”.

This gets so boring. A wrong-headed cause fueled by relentlessly dishonest wording.

According to Good Law Project’s executive director, Jo Maugham, there’s “a kind of visceral cruelty” to the EHRC’s statement. “We challenge that in legal terms,” Maugham said, “by pointing to the EHRC’s legal obligation to promote a world which is safe and kind for trans people.”

But no one else. Get out of here, “Jo”.

Poor India. He never thought he would see the day when we went back to that kind of language. What kind? The kind that calls men “men”. Shocking, isn’t it.

Pure evil.

Memorial panels honoring Black American soldiers at a military cemetery in the Netherlands are gone. Removed on orders from the Trump administration.

Today is Veterans Day.

That’s all it took. A complaint from the Heritage Foundation, the same organization that wrote Project 2025. The American Battle Monuments Commission removed them earlier this summer. Quietly. Dutch officials only learned about it last weekend.

Let me tell you what was on them.

August 5, 1943. Camp Phillips, Kansas. The 960th Quartermaster Service Company activated. Two hundred sixty Black soldiers. All under the command of white officers, as Army policy dictated in WWII. They trained on bivouacs, security, and night patrols. Then they shipped out.

Late 1944, they arrived at what would become the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten. Twenty thousand American dead were waiting for them. No coffins. Bodies on tarps. Many had been there for days, sometimes weeks. Mutilated beyond recognition.

The ground was so waterlogged from freezing rain that machinery was useless. They dug graves by hand. In mud. In flooding. They tied corpses in mattress covers because there were no coffins. Bodies coming apart in their hands. The smell everywhere.

…

For decades, nobody acknowledged what the 960th did. Finally, in 2024, memorial panels were installed. Partly because of pushes from then-U.S. ambassador Shefali Razdan Duggal.

The Heritage Foundation saw those panels and filed a complaint. Trump’s administration removed them.

This is Project 2025 in operation. The people who wrote that blueprint are inside the administration, filing complaints about memorial plaques, deciding which soldiers we’re allowed to remember on Veterans Day.

They found a memorial to Black soldiers and classified it as a diversity program. Not the Jim Crow apartheid that forced those men to bury people who wouldn’t eat with them.

Heritage filed their complaint in March. Trump issued the order. The panels came down over the summer. No announcement, no notification to Dutch officials. The soldiers who dug the graves disappear from the story—what’s left is clean, comfortable, white.

It’s heritage all right.

I still think they’re straining at a gnat but swallowing a camel here.

Nandy criticises BBC’s ‘inconsistent’ reporting standards

Mr Shah is set to write to the culture, media and sport committee on Monday to express regret for the way the Trump speech, made on the day of the Jan 6 2021 Capitol riot, was spliced together. The Telegraph has previously disclosed that both Mr Davie and Mr Shah were warned of the doctored footage in May but appear to have kept quiet.

…

The decision to issue an apology has raised questions about why it has taken them six months to admit viewers were misled.

But they weren’t really misled. The two things Trump said were widely separated as opposed to connected, but the substance remains the same. It’s definitely bad practice not to make it clear when two sentences are not continuous, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily misleading. Trump was ranting and raging about forcibly stealing the election, and the fact that he did so in more than one section of the very long tedious speech doesn’t change what he was saying or what happened as a result of what he was saying. Some people ended up dead because of what he was saying.

BBC reports: Trump says he has ‘obligation’ to sue BBC over speech edit

And Trump is notoriously scrupulous about heeding his obligations.

Trump has said he has an “obligation” to sue the BBC over the way a section of his speech was edited in a Panorama documentary.

Speaking to Fox News, he said his 6 January 2021 speech had been “butchered” and the way it was presented had “defrauded” viewers.

Nope. I’ve just read big chunks of it, and there is no fraud or defraud, on account of how the speech is absolutely packed with raging and boasting and blathering.

Appearing on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, the president was asked if he would go ahead with the lawsuit, responding “well I guess I have to, you know, why not, because they defrauded the public, and they’ve admitted it”.

Trump continued: “They actually changed my January 6 speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical.

No. As usual, he’s lying. It’s not “calming” at all. (It’s most certainly not beautiful. Trump talking ex tempore is never beautiful.)

BBC News has contacted the BBC for comment on the president’s latest remarks.

Ah but has the BBC contacted BBC News for comment? I’m getting dizzy here.

I got curious about the edit of Trump’s Let’s Insurrection speech, so I asked ctrl f to show me the two pieces. They are indeed very far apart. The speech as a whole however is not, how shall I put this – not a passionate plea to be calm and reasonable.

Part one, closer to the beginning:

And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution.

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.

Part two, much closer to the end:

But now, the caravans, I think Biden’s getting in, the caravans are forming again. They want to come in again and rip off our country. Can’t let it happen.

As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country.

We have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls. Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Our brightest days are before us. Our greatest achievements, still away.

I think one of our great achievements will be election security. Because nobody until I came along had any idea how corrupt our elections were.

And again, most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I want to thank you very much, and they go off to some other life. But I said something’s wrong here, something is really wrong, can have happened.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country.

So – they are indeed widely separated – but they are also indeed part of a deranged endless rant by a dangerous lunatic.

A Mighty Girl writes:

This Veterans Day, we’re paying special tribute to Admiral Lisa Franchetti and Admiral Linda Fagan, the two highest serving women in the military until they were both fired from their historic commands by the Trump administration with no explanation or justification. Former Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan, a four-star admiral, 40-year veteran, and the first woman to lead a military branch, was fired by Trump on Inauguration Day as one of his first acts in office. In February, Pete Hegseth — arguably the least qualified Defense Secretary in modern history — then fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti — a four-star admiral and the first woman to lead the Navy. These abrupt firings represented just the beginning of Trump and Hegseth’s sweeping military leadership purge — condemned by one military expert as “squandering an enormous amount of talent” and treating decorated officers with shocking disregard after their lifelong commitment to serving the American people.

Admiral Linda Fagan was sworn in as the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard in 2022, becoming the first woman to lead the Coast Guard in its 234-year history. During her 40 years with the Coast Guard, prior to becoming commandant, she has served on all seven continents; spent 15 years as a Marine Inspector; commanded Sector New York, controlling all Coast Guard operations in the New York metropolitan area and Albany; and served as the Coast Guard’s second-in-command as well as the commander of the Coast Guard Pacific Area.

After being fired by Trump on his first day in office, she was then abruptly evicted from her house at Joint Base Anacostia Bolling with just three hours of notice. She wasn’t even given enough time to gather her personal effects and household goods even though Coast Guard leaders had granted her 60 days to find new housing. According to Homeland Security officials, the unnecessarily swift and cruel eviction was because, as the base’s acting commandant was told, “the president wants her out of quarters.”

Shortly after Fagan’s eviction, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved into the Coast Guard commandant’s home at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Military experts have noted this unprecedented pattern of Trump administration officials taking over housing traditionally reserved for senior military officers, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and presidential adviser Stephen Miller have also done by moving onto military bases, as yet another concerning erosion of the boundaries between political appointees and military leadership.

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, spent roughly half of her 40-year long career at sea, rising to command the destroyer U.S.S. Ross, and later a destroyer squadron, two aircraft carrier strike groups, all naval forces in Korea and the U.S. Sixth Fleet. She became the 33rd chief of naval operations in 2023, making her the first woman to serve as a permanent member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ironically, this highly respected military leader with decades of distinction was fired by a former Fox News TV host with no senior military command experience, no experience managing large organizations, and no previous government service at any level. Hegseth’s only notable ‘qualification’ is his absolute loyalty to Trump.

It’s old news now but it’s stomach-turning.

Oliver Brown and Craig Simpson in The Telegraph:

BBC bosses “ignored” warnings about pro-transgender bias in its sports coverage, The Telegraph can reveal.

Messages seen by The Telegraph reveal that female staff repeatedly raised concerns over several years about the nature of reporting on gender issues.

BBC Sport bosses were told almost five years ago that stories about trans athletes were often uncritical and celebratory “puff pieces”, while glossing over any potentially negative impact on women’s sports.

However, insiders claim that the BBC persisted with overwhelmingly positive coverage of otherwise controversial athletes, including Lia Thomas, the biologically male swimmer, the weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, the cyclist Austin Killips and Imane Khelif, the boxer.

BBC staff have reported feeling ignored and feeling unable to voice opinions that went against the prevailing orthodoxy of affirming transgender identity.

We know. Boy do we know. I’ve been pointing it out loudly and rudely for what feels like several decades.

Insiders have expressed the hope that the scandal will force a culture change at the BBC, and that the trans issue will not be overshadowed by the treatment of the US president.

BBC Sport is currently led by Alex Kay-Jelski, who faced criticism for a column he wrote for The Times in 2019 while he was the newspaper’s sports editor.

In the piece, he wrote that Martina Navratilova, the nine-time Wimbledon champion, and the Olympic swimming medallist Sharron Davies, both vocal opponents of allowing biological males to compete in women’s categories, were “not experts” on the matter of trans participation in sport.

Hey you know what? You know who else is not an expert? Alex Kay-Jelski is not an expert on being a woman forced to compete against a man.

Ooooooh what do you know, suddenly the Beeb is aware of the Darlington nurses.

Oh gawd how they do get everything wrong.

Last week, a leaked memo to the BBC board from Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial standards committee, was published by The Telegraph – a British newspaper, with a rightwing editorial slant, that has long been hostile to the BBC.

In his memo, compiled this summer, Prescott laid out a long list of alleged shortcomings in the BBC’s news output, from alleged anti-Israel bias in its Arabic-language service to an overly progressive slant in its coverage of transgender people and their rights.

Wrong! Wrong wrong wrongity wrong! There’s nothing “progressive” about it – and in addition that empty bit of flattery tells the reader nothing about what the memo actually said.

Reuters summarizes it this way:

Prescott said stories raising “difficult questions” about transgender issues were often overlooked, even when they had been widely reported and debated by other media outlets. He also noted that some features presented the transgender experience in an overly one-sided manner, lacking sufficient balance and objectivity.

The memo said the BBC failed to cover a case in which a group of nurses sued their employer over a policy allowing a transgender woman to use the women’s changing room.

There’s nothing “progressive” about any of it.

The Telegraph on Jolyon Maugham’s campaign to destroy women’s sports.

Almost two weeks ago the Maugham-led GLP announced it had begun legal action against the England and Wales Cricket Board over the latter’s transgender participation policy. The threatened lawsuit is the latest attention-grabbing case taken on by the GLP, which was founded by Maugham, an arch-Remainer, in January 2017 in the wake of the Brexit referendum.

Best known for defeating Boris Johnson’s government at the Supreme Court over the then prime minister’s 2019 prorogation of parliament, the group is now determined to overturn the same court’s ruling that only those born female should be deemed women under the 2010 Equality Act.

It seems such an abject tautology, doesn’t it? That only those born female should be deemed women?

Confirming the GLP’s legal challenge would focus on the “grass-roots” level of cricket, he said: “We will say that if you have a team that has a trans player and that team is happy to have a trans player in there and their opponents are also happy to play a team that has a trans player, why is it anyone else’s business?”

News flash: the other team won’t be happy. Why? Because that would be an unfair advantage. His hypothetical is like asking if the other party is happy to be robbed or assaulted or slandered.

He went on to reveal the GLP had “been in touch with football players” and teams who were “upset” about losing trans team-mates since the FA banned those born male from the women’s game. 

Yes, because they’re losing their unfair advantage.

And he warned the FA it faced being sued as well if the GLP won its case against the ECB. “If it doesn’t fall into line in a world in which we have won, we will certainly bring proceedings against the Football Association as well,” he said, indicating the ECB case could be the first of many.

“It’s a test case brought at the grass-roots sports level, but I think it does have implications for all sporting codes and, indeed, at all levels. There is no basis, we think, in law to adopt a hard-and-fast rule that trans people aren’t allowed to compete.”

That isn’t the rule though.

The GLP’s legal action was condemned by Sharron Davies, a leading campaigner for the protection of the women’s category in sport. “I’m horrified,” she said. “Yet again, this is all about shoehorning males into sport for females. The law has made it clear, and science has proved, we cannot remove all male physical advantage. In a sport like cricket, where a male can bowl considerably faster and harder, it’s not safe or fair to have non-conforming males in any level of female cricket. We’ve already seen male-on-female injuries.

“We find girls and women self-exclude when they are treated as less worthy of protection. And we know including males excludes females from female sport. Females are constantly told they ought to move over, stay quiet and give up their rights. This can’t be allowed to happen anymore. It’s up to all sports governing bodies, including in cricket, to make non-conforming males feel safe and welcome in male sport.”

But Jolyon Maugham somehow manages to disagree with that.

The corruption is not universally popular.

Donald Trump’s unprecedented pardoning spree for political and business friends since returning to the White House has prompted warnings from ex-prosecutors and legal scholars of “corrupt” pay-to-play schemes, conflicts of interest and blatant partisanship.

It has included hundreds of Maga allies, a cryptocurrency mogul with ties to a Trump family crypto firm, disgraced politicians, and others who could yield political and financial benefits.

Other than that it’s totally aboveboard.

Recently, Trump has sparked strong criticism for commutations or pardons that seem increasingly aimed at boosting political allies and some Trump family business interests, say legal experts and ex-prosecutors.

Last month, Trump commuted a seven-year sentence of expelled House member George Santos, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to 13 counts including fraud and identity theft and had only served a few months.

Trump fueled more criticism last month when he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the multibillionaire who founded Binance, a huge crypto exchange that earlier this year inked a $2bn investment deal involving the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial that is expected to yield tens of millions yearly to the Trump family.

Now why would anyone criticize that?

“The corruption of the pardon process is one of the less visible but nevertheless important aspects of Trump’s sullying of the Justice Department,” said Philip Lacovara, who was counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor.

Lacovara called the commutation of Santos’ sentence after only a few months in prison “bewildering”. He stressed that Santos “never exhibited any remorse for his chain of frauds, and his sentence was well within the federal guidelines for his crimes”.

It’s not bewildering when you remember it was Trump who did it. This is who he is: a guy who considers fraud a smart way to get money.

Other legal experts see Trump’s pardon abuses as akin to a “form of bribery”.

“The pardon process as a method for granting executive grace for deserving criminal defendants has been replaced by a pay-to-play system that is a thinly disguised form of bribery,” said former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich.

Very very very thinly. So thinly you can’t really see it.