Thoughts and prayers, Joly.

Oh my – I’m seeing headlines.

NYT: UK Supreme Court Says Legal Definition of Women Does Not Include Trans Women

BBC: Supreme Court backs ‘biological definition’ of woman

The Independent: Trans women are not legally women under the Equality Act, Supreme Court rules

CNN: UK Supreme Court says legal definition of ‘woman’ excludes trans women, in landmark ruling

!!!!!!!!!!

Mother Jones is way into trans ideology.

Three months into President Donald Trump’s second administration, anti-trans hatred has become inescapable for families like Kai’s, even in more liberal states like Connecticut. Parents—many of whom have spent years learning, advocating, and finding ways for their trans or nonbinary child to thrive—say their lives have been upended by a series of executive orders and actions targeting their children’s health care and support at school.

The actions from just the first week of April, gives an idea of the flurry of attacks. On April 4th, the pro-wrestling-executive turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon launched a Special Investigations Team focused on keeping transgender girls out of girls’ school bathrooms and off of girls’ sports teams.

So…it’s bad to keep boys out of girls’ school bathrooms and off girls’ sports teams?

Are we sure about that? Could we maybe pause for just a minute to think about it? Could we not possibly help kids who are unhappy about being male or female without harming girls? Could we not manage to remember for a single second that letting boys play against girls is in fact not fair to the girls?

And in a proclamation recognizing April as National Child Abuse Prevention Month, Trump declared that “gender ideology”—an empty signifier for anything related to trans people—was “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today.”

Stop right there, assholes. Much as I loathe Trump, “gender ideology” is far from an empty signifier. You buffoons are purveying it right here in this pathetic reporting. It is indeed an ideology to think and teach that unhappiness with one’s sex equals being the other sex. It does require an ideological bridge to leap from “My kid hates being a boy” to “my kid gets to play on the girls’ teams, thus ruining the girls’ sports.” It does take an ideology to be that coldly indifferent to the wants and needs of the female half of the population.

“Lily” Contino – the guy who makes videos of himself in restaurants picking fights with wait staff who fail to tell him what a pretty girl he is – thinks the fact that a large croissant is a croissant=a man is a woman. Yes really: that’s his argument.

Also, he pronounces it wrong. Completely utterly wrong. Just call it a pastry if you can’t manage the French “croiss” sound or even the French “ant” sound.

Or to put it another way –

Amnesty intensifies its campaign against women.

AMNESTY International has warned against “dangerous misinformation” ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman. 

The court is due to issue its judgement next week on how a woman should be defined in law. It is part of a court challenge brought by For Women Scotland (FWS) against the Scottish Government. 

FWS say sex-based protections should not apply to transgender people with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), while the Scottish Government argues they should be included.

As always, the reporting carefully hides the fact that the issue is men with a GRC, not “people” with a GRC. As always, the reporting goes to absurd lengths to muddy the waters, making their own story incomprehensible.

Amnesty International has intervened ahead of the expected ruling being handed down in London on April 16. 

In a statement, Sacha Deshmukh, chief executive at Amnesty International UK, said: “Amnesty wishes to highlight the amount of dangerous misinformation that remains around this case, as an eye-watering amount of time is spent by commentators berating trans people – who make up just 1% of the population.”

Sacha Deshmukh also hides the real issue, also pretends the issue is trans “people” when it’s men who claim to be women. It’s not trans people in general, it’s not trans people as such, it’s men. She knows that of course, but she carefully hides it.

Why would they hide it?

Because they know it’s anti-women, and they want to do it anyway.

Originally a comment by Holms on Speaking of “dangerous misinformation”.

…an eye-watering amount of time is spent by commentators berating trans people – who make up just 1% of the population.

Here’s another of the routine mistakes, or lies by framing. The reason there is so much attention on trans people is not because we recently became afflicted with hatred or fear of them, it is because trans people, or more importantly their political cause, gained a large amount of political traction in the last ten years or so. Consider the political state things in the 90’s – barely any attention was spent on the cause of trans people because it had no real visibility. The thing that changed was not a sudden surge in animosity against that population, but a sudden surge in the success of that political movement.

And the reason we oppose said movement should be obvious: it poses a real and imminent threat to the rights of women and their progress towards parity with men. Granting people a legal instrument by which they can ‘change sex’ – in addition to being an obvious absurdity – undermines demographic data collection and hence the ability to check for trends. Encouraging the idea that woman- or manhood is opt-in directly opposes efforts to fight sex-based crime and oppression. Every trans woman granted a position, award, shortlist position, promotion etc. that was reserved for women has bumped off an actual woman and so undermines efforts to reach parity… and so on.

Our opposition to the trans / gender identity movement seems out of proportion if and only if we are considering in terms of the number of trans people. When we bear in mind the movement attacks the rights and safety of a full 50% of the population, societal opposition is far below where it should be. It should never have seen the light of day, but now that it has, it needs to be quashed.

Obama went to Harvard. Trump did not.

Game on.

Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.

Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.

Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.

That is a fraction of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.

…

The administration’s fight with Harvard, which had an endowment of $53.2 billion in 2024, is one that President Trump and Stephen Miller, a powerful White House aide, want to have. In the administration’s effort to break what it sees as liberalism’s hold on higher education, Harvard is big game. A high-profile court battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.

Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.

“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.

Or the engineering school to hire magicians?

Check out the hands on “Charlotte” Clymer. It’s hilarious that he keeps waving them around when he should be hiding them.

I have seldom been so surprised in my life. How is this POSsible?

Amnesty throws women overboard again.

Amnesty says women don’t get to decide.

AMNESTY International has warned against “dangerous misinformation” ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman. 

The court is due to issue its judgement next week on how a woman should be defined in law. It is part of a court challenge brought by For Women Scotland (FWS) against the Scottish Government. 

FWS say sex-based protections should not apply to transgender people with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), while the Scottish Government argues they should be included.

What an obscure sentence. FWS says that men should not get protections intended for women, while the Scottish government says they should. Calling the protections “sex-based” instead of “intended for women” is pointedly opaque and confusing. Journalism is pathetically complicit in all this anti-woman garbage.

And now, Amnesty International has intervened ahead of the expected ruling being handed down in London on April 16. 

In a statement, Sacha Deshmukh, chief executive at Amnesty International UK, said: “Amnesty wishes to highlight the amount of dangerous misinformation that remains around this case, as an eye-watering amount of time is spent by commentators berating trans people – who make up just 1% of the population.”

Shut up. It’s not about “berating trans people.” It’s about not giving protections for women away to men in lipstick.

“Legal gender recognition, as it works now, is essential for trans people to enjoy the full spectrum of human rights each of us is entitled to, and live free from fear of discrimination.”

Bollocks. There is no “full spectrum of human rights” that depends on a right to idennify as the opposite sex and be treated accordingly.

“Amnesty has intervened in this case as it is a question of human rights, which affects us all.”

Indeed it is, and Amnesty is determined to trash women’s.

Well here’s a startling piece of information from an article by Anne Applebaum on how blatantly corrupt Trump is.

Trump’s Treasury Department announced last month that it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act, hampering recent congressional efforts to end money laundering, tax dodging, and other lawbreaking by anonymous investors. In an executive order, Trump suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American and foreign companies from paying bribes to do business.

Uh. That seems like an important piece of news.

Dang what a lot of contortions people go through to avoid telling the truth about men who pretend to be women.

FA resists calls to ban transgender players from women’s matches

First contortion right in the headline, as always. The calls are to ban male players from women’s matches. The calls really don’t give a damn how the male players idennify because the issue is that they’re male.

English football chiefs have introduced new rules on transgender players in women’s matches that stop short of a blanket ban but allow the FA to intervene if it believes there are issues around safety or fairness of competition.

If. Fuck you, dudes. Of course there are “issues”: that’s the whole point.

The updated policy came into force on April 1 and continues the practice of allowing transgender women to play in amateur women’s competitions if they have had reduced testosterone levels for at least a year.

Campaigners had wanted football to follow sports such as rugby union and hockey by restricting women’s matches to those who were born female, with an open category for all other players.

Instead, about 20 transgender women registered to play amateur football in England can continue to do so if their testosterone levels are below 5nmol per litre for at least 12 months. However, a change to the regulations means the FA can step in if it has any concerns and ask its Transgender and Non-Binary Eligibility Committee to make a decision.

Because god forbid they should just say no men in women’s sports, the end.

Still can’t get the headline right.

Trans people who self-identify as women face single-sex space ban

Men. Men who self-identify as women. Not generic “people” but men: men only. Women don’t need to “self-identify as” women because we just are women. One’s sex isn’t a matter of self-identifying any more than one’s species is.

Organisations will be told that they can no longer call a space single-sex if they admit transgender people who do not have a gender recognition certificate.

Updated guidance from the equality watchdog will say that services described as being single-sex will not be able to make the claim if they also allow transgender women to use them on the basis of self-identification.

Sigh. Why the exception? What is the point? A certificate doesn’t and can’t change what sex a person is. Gender-recognition is meaningless.

A source said of the guidelines: “The upshot [of the guidance] means it’s not lawful to have a self-ID service. The fact is that if you let a man in, it’s no longer a single-sex service, and that includes trans people without GRCs [gender recognition certificates].”

But it also includes trans people with GRCs.

The change would prevent those who rely on self-ID from being able to access women-only care homes or domestic abuse refuges without an exceptional reason. Those with a GRC may still be allowed because that is the present position in law. However, this could change in a ruling due this week after a case in the Supreme Court, in which only those born female may be afforded sex-based rights.

Well let’s fucking hope so, seeing as how a certificate does not and cannot change a person’s sex.

For Women Scotland, the campaign group backed by JK Rowling, has argued that sex-based protections should only apply to those born biologically female. However, the Scottish government countered that the definition of a woman should include those with a GRC.

Because the Scottish government is pickled in reality-denying gender ideology.

Hm. Mediaite describes the cognitive test Trump aced rather differently. What it describes is very basic indeed.

On Sunday, the White House released a report from the president’s personal physician, Capt. Sean Barbabella. Dr. Barbabella found that “President Trump remains in excellent health, exhibiting robust cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and general physical function.”

Included in the report were the results of the cognitive exam Dr. Barbarella administered to Trump.

“Cognitive function, assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), was normal with a score of 30 out of 30,” Dr. Barbabella wrote.

Trump has frequently boasted about having aced previous cognitive tests. Speaking with reporters on Air Force One over the weekend, Trump again boasted about his performance on this most recent exam.

“I don’t know what to tell you other than I got every answer right,” Trump said. He added, “I think it’s a pretty well-known test. Whatever it is, I got every one — I got it all right.”

Yes but sir what were the questions? How easy is the test?

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment is a fairly simple exam used to detect early dementia and mild cognitive dysfunction. Respondents are typically asked to recall the date, identify pictures of animals, and count backwards by seven starting at 60.

Oh.

Oh I see.

And Trump is bragging about being able to do those very basic things.

Which kind of shows us how impaired his cognition really is.

Trump is pretty much supernaturally healthy, we’re told.

As a part of Friday’s nearly five-hour medical examination at the Walter Reed hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, Trump received several blood tests, a cardiac examination and ultrasounds, said his doctor.

“His active lifestyle continues to contribute significantly to his well-being,” Dr Barbabella wrote in the memo released by the White House on Sunday.

“President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State.”

What “active lifestyle”? He doesn’t have an “active lifestyle” – he’s not active. Golf doesn’t count. He doesn’t walk the course, he squats in a golf cart. He doesn’t walk at all apart from moving from one room to another. Remember that time in his first term when he met with colleagues in Taormina and they all went for a walk except for Trump, who rode in a youknowwhat? That is not a guy with an active lifestyle.

The president received neurological tests on his mental status, nerves, motor and sensory function and reflexes. He was also given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and scored 30 out of 30, said the memo.

The test is commonly used to detect cognitive decline and early signs of dementia and has tasks such as naming animals, drawing a clock and repeating words back five minutes later.

So it’s not decline, it’s pre-existing stupid. Noted.

Kathleen Stock does that pesky feminist thing of noticing politicians who try to draw a polite veil over religions that see women as dangerous whores.

First we were told there couldn’t be a national public inquiry into grooming gangs, because there were going to be at least five local ones. This week, considerable confusion emerged about whether there would even be any of those. Buried within a statement about tackling child sexual abuse and exploitation generally, Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, announced with smooth customer-service rhetoric that “following feedback from local authorities”, instead of local inquiries, there might be “more bespoke work”. 

I bet we can guess what that “feedback” was feeding back.

To many eyes, this was a cowardly reversal to avoid offending core Labour voters — not least, perhaps, ones in Phillips’s Birmingham Yardley constituency. Some of these tend to get defensive when attention turns to facts about the predominant ethnic heritage (Pakistani) and religion (Muslim) of the men who have been conducting the systematic rape and abuse of white working-class girls in British cities for years. Sikh girls have also been targeted by groups of Muslim men.

Religions have consequences. Religions are forms of group idennniny, and when idenniny enters the picture people get very cautious. This does not apply, of course, when the idennniny is female. Religious idenniny is massively important and valuable; female idenniny is a tragic mistake.

In the ensuing fallout, a familiar, frustratingly counterproductive approach from political leaders has been taken, which I call the “zoom-out” protocol. The unspoken rule seems to be: whenever there’s a negative social issue mainly involving members of a non-white ethnic or religious minority, zoom out as if you were operating a wide-angle lens and talk about the problem as a general one, rooted only in human nature. If, on the other hand, you are talking about a negative issue involving mostly white people, relax about any unflattering angles; feel free to zoom in with as high definition as your camera provides.

When the negative social issue is to do with male people predating on female people then even non-white female people lose out, no doubt because their male relatives don’t allow them to riot.

But not every mention of ethnic minorities involves an invidious general comparison. Sometimes we just need to better understand criminal offences in a relatively circumscribed cultural context, particularly where it is a matter of accountability and learning lessons. This should include examining any aggravating factors related to ethnicity and religion — for instance, the silencing effects of tight-knit kinship structures, or the hostile targeting of victims perceived as sinful non-believers.

Or a Holy Book that is riddled with misogynist rage.

Here’s the thing: the holy books were written by men, because men were the ones with the power to write holy books. Men left to their own devices have two burning grudges against women: they won’t spread their legs on command, and they’re whores. Naturally their god agrees with them, and so humanity ends up with sacred books that reinforce hatred of women.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Muppet applauds like a seal.

Time for a re-read of your own books.

Sure, let’s do that. One recurring theme throughout the Harry Potter series is people being falsely accused of things they haven’t done:

• The Chamber of Secrets: Hagrid accused of releasing Slytherin’s monster into Hogwarts, Harry accused of being the heir of Slytherin.

• The Prisoner of Azkaban: Sirius Black spending years in prison for Wormtail’s crimes.

• The Goblet of Fire: Harry accused of cheating his way into the Tri-Wizzard Cup.

• The Order of the Phoenix: Harry accused of lying about Voldemort’s return.

• Etc. etc.

In all these cases, the lack of conclusive evidence* is not going to stop the mob, including The Daily Prophet**, from eagerly and enthusiastically parroting back the accusations and demanding the witch be burned. Sound familiar? In the fictional universe of the books Tim Quartier would be among the people wearing the “POTTER STINKS” badges in The Goblet of Fire.

The Order of the Phoenix is basically a book about institutional capture and cancel culture. The Ministry of Magic is interfering at Hogwarts to suppress the inconvenient truth of biological sex Voldemort’s return, punishing those who speak out, and threatening to fire any teachers who fail to go along with the official dogma. Sound familiar? As I have previously written, there may not be a real-world equivalent of Voldemort (too much of a super-villain), but there sure are a lot of Draco Malfoys and Cornelius Fudges and Dolores Umbridges and Rita Skeeters out there.

* In the Hogwarts universe there is, of course, pretty much always a magical way to fake the evidence anyway.

** Obviously representing the mainstream media.