The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.
So they finally figured that out, eh? Well done, but we already knew about those there permanent physical advantages of being born male. We knew and we said, over and over.
The BBC is beginning to sound oddly like Pharyngula…
As calls for reform mount, two former BBC employees have spoken to The Telegraph on condition of anonymity, offering a rare glimpse into the culture at the corporation.
Former employee #1
“There was something of a Left-wing cabal – and if you were more centrist in your politics, your opinion wasn’t appreciated. Eventually, you just stopped speaking up. They would absolutely talk about diversity of voices, then shut down anybody who didn’t agree with them.
…
“There was also this clamouring for diversity that made a bit of a mockery of it. They had a diversity scheme, but when they couldn’t find enough external candidates they just put internal people on it who wouldn’t have got through in a fair competition. Suddenly, people who weren’t particularly good at their jobs were in really sought-after positions simply to fulfil quotas and make things look a certain way.”
And time goes on and those people see to it that the BBC has extremely thorough coverage of the drag communinny but ignores women entirely.
“I also saw a certain worldview carried forward in programming. There were documentaries that were supposed to be about discovery, but they started from a fixed view and followed it through to the end – so then you’d have whole films built on confirmation bias.”
Oops.
Former employee #2
“I don’t think some of what I’ve been reading of late is representative of the corporation. What I do think is that there was a period when younger generations were over-empowered, and it skewed certain outcomes. People with very little experience were given far more say in decision-making than they should have had, mainly because older, white and middle-class staff were paranoid about the ‘optics’ of saying no.
“The fetishisation of youth meant that, regardless of whether they were any good, the assumption was that young people must know the answer. They don’t – or not yet, anyway. In some cases, there were people in very senior jobs who were far too inexperienced, making big mistakes with compliance and duty of care, and they were protected by the managers who’d put them there. Being young became a qualification in itself.”
I’ve talked about this often, I think. There’s this pattern – the changes that came about in the 60s and 70s and beyond were often sparked by young people, or by broad movements that featured a lot of young people and were energized by young people. Civil rights, feminism, LGB rights, anti-colonialism via opposition to the war in Vietnam – all featured young people in leadership roles. There was a pattern: older people are used to everyday racism so it doesn’t shock them the way it shocks younger people. It should but it doesn’t. Everybody got very used to that pattern, so this tacit belief formed that the old guard is always wrong, is always ignoring some burning injustice because they just can’t see it, therefore, young people are the ones who have to educate them or kick them aside or both, because young people always get this stuff right.
It’s taking us way too long to learn that they don’t.
President Donald Trump has pardoned a long list of his political allies for their support or involvement in plans to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin.
The individuals listed in a proclamation, which Martin posted on X late Sunday, include high-profile figures like former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and the president’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, among dozens of others.
Filth. We’re in the filth up to our eyeballs. A filthy corrupt kleptocratic state, with no escape open.
“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” read the document, which gives the date of November 7 in its text and the president appears to have signed.
Like hell it does. It doesn’t reconcile me in the least; on the contrary.
On the upside –
Presidential pardons only apply to federal charges, not state or local charges. None of the people on the list are currently charged with federal crimes, though some were named as unindicted co-conspirators in special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion case against Trump, which prosecutors withdrew after Trump’s 2024 election victory.
However, state-level criminal charges are still pending against Giuliani, Meadows, many of the 2020 fake electors, and others on the pardon list. (They deny wrongdoing.) These 2020-related state prosecutions are ongoing in Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. These figures will likely try to use the pardon to aid their defense, though a presidential pardon doesn’t cover state crimes.
The mills of justice grind slowly.
Speaking of the dear darling beloved BBC…
Two men agreeing with each other that the word “women” includes trans women, how cuddly and sweet. No need to consult women of course.
Transgender women to be banned from all female Olympic events
They never should have been allowed. Obviously.
The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.
Come on. They didn’t need a science-based review. They’ve always known about the permanent physical advantages. Everyone has. Letting men who pretend to be women compete against women was always a terrible idea. Everyone knew that, but way too many people were happy about it anyway.
I recommend playing the clip.
At 1:04 Tim Davie gets passionate and says we have to be kind and caring in this – and in context it seems pretty clear that he means kind & caring to the men, not the women. We have to be kind & caring to the men because they struggle under the burden of being the sex that can beat up women if it chooses to. Women are just the boring bitches who can get beaten up, which is obviously far less tragic than being the ones can do the beating.
At 1:16:
I mean for goodness sake, let’s get real here. This is this is this is being whipped up as well around us in a way that’s deeply deeply damaging to civilized debate about these topics.
In other words women who object to being replaced by men in their own sex, and thus losing rights and opportunities and safety and the list goes on – those women are whipping up “this” in a way that’s deeply deeply damaging to civilized debate so let’s first of all make the women shut up.
I’m glad he’s out.
Not parody? Really? Are we SURE???
Good Law Project’s Xmas card that it’s promoting.
I particularly love the framed portrait of a pencil stub. It’s probably Euan’s tiny pencil, right? A profound and beautiful work of art.
Euan pretends he’s a journalist but he would flunk 3d grade English. The man is barely literate.
Hadley Freeman on the witchfinders:
In 2021, when lockdown was driving people insane, Clanchy’s 2019 book about working with children, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was suddenly derided on social media as racist, because she used physical descriptions like “chocolate-coloured skin”. The charge was led by three women: Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, all middle-aged, middle-class writers, like Clanchy. Pan Macmillan, Clanchy’s publisher through its Picador imprint, abjectly apologised to them and parted ways with its writer…
…When The Sunday Times interviewed Clanchy in 2022, Rajesh tweeted, “Jesus f***ing Christ. Picador have just emailed to let us know that @thesundaytimes will be running an interview with Kate Clanchy this weekend.” She then grossly insulted those responsible. Quite why Pan Macmillan felt the need to tell these bullies anything is one puzzle. Another is how on earth it became the norm for adults to behave like emotionally incontinent tyrants. When The Times ran an interview with Clanchy last week, Rajesh posted a video of herself weeping.
But the good news is this time it didn’t work for her.
Ursula Doyle, an editor who felt hounded out of her job in 2024 after publishing Kathleen Stock’s feminist book Material Girls, says: “There had been highly political issues in publishing before — cultural appropriation, Brexit, MeToo, Black Lives Matter. But never anything before like the trans issue, where even to question it meant you were an evil person.”
And also where the putative wrongdoing is not in the same category as sexism and racism and xenophobia and the like, but a new and peculiar category of refusing to lie about a very basic fact about human beings. To avoid being yelled at for sexism, for example, there is the option of not being sexist, which is not all that onerous. To avoid being shunned as a terf you have to tell a stupid childish lie, not just once but forever. The rules are both more demanding and more ridiculous.
For once the police back down.
Police have apologised to one of Scotland’s most prominent gender-critical campaigners for threatening to prosecute her over claims she vandalised a trans activist’s umbrella.
Susan Smith, one of the three directors of For Women Scotland, had earlier been informed she would have to accept a formal warning or face court action over an altercation with Tom Harlow, who attempted to drown out speakers at one of the group’s rallies with amplified music.
And by doing so harassed those speakers and attempted to deprive them of their right to protest being erased by people like…him.
…following a major backlash to news that Smith was facing prosecution, the national force said it would launch a “review” into the matter.
On Friday morning, Smith received a notification, via her lawyers, that the matter had been dropped. Police Scotland confirmed it was “now satisfied that no crime has been committed” and has also issued an apology to Smith.
“now” satisfied, they say, as if it hadn’t been obvious all along that Tom Harlow was the aggressor, and the piggy attempted silencer of women. It was obvious but the cops got the vibe wrong. They thought it was still open season on women.
Smith said she was relieved at the outcome but said Harlow’s allegations should never have been taken seriously in the first place.
Video footage showed that his umbrella had been damaged before the brief confrontation with Smith, who was asking him to turn down his music.
His “music” which he was playing at high volume in order to silence women. The cops should have turned his damn music off and told him to go away.
“While I am delighted that Police Scotland have dropped this case, it is concerning that an individual who came with the express intention of disrupting our rally and drowning out our speakers was taken seriously, especially when extreme, credible threats to women are frequently overlooked,” Smith said.
Exactly. I am sooooooooo tired of it. We all are.
The thing about this is the air of confident certainty and enlightenment – in short the staggering vanity. She talks the most unmitigated bilge and she carries herself as if she were Hannah Arendt and Nelson Mandela combined.
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on And producers let them.
Prescott notes an in-built censor: instead of a story on, say, the side-effects of puberty blockers being covered by health reporters, or the legislation by the political team, all gender stories were routed through an LGBT desk.
They need to find out who decided on this “routing” and fire them. It’s like giving control of editorial content to a bunch of astrology activists, who are going to present everything they cover through thei filter of their pseudoscientific world view, and who are never going to allow astrology-critical stories to see the light of day. All the while, the reputation and cerdibility of what was supposed to be a news organization, goes down the toilet.
One ex-BBC correspondent tells me: “They’d say ‘we’re covering that’. But they wouldn’t. They’d sit on it. So no one did.”
Why were these people who said they were going to do something, but did not, permitted to continue working? It must be nice to get paid for not doing your job because you don’t want to, or object to the beliefs of people whose viewpoints you’re supposed to be reporting on. How did this “T” desk get so much power to shape the policy and workings of the entire corporation after just a few months on the job? Did they have compromising photos of all of their managers, superiors, and supervisors? Were all of their bosses, at all levels, so afraid of the meaningless, content-free accusation of “transphobia” that they handed over the keys to the editorial suite, letting these people do whatever the hell they liked? Why did they surrender to people who should have been sacked?
Presumably the BBC had and has rules about standards, neutrality, and objectivity. Why weren’t those rules followed? Why were these delusional ideologues exempted from them? Who gave them blank cheques and carte blanche to push their reality-denying, Lysenkoist, parasitic party line, using the BBC as a host body? What did the BBC, or members of staff and management who could have said “No”, but didn’t, get out of it? Why did they sell their professional standards and standing so cheaply? And for what? Ludicrous bullshit that had to be protected from any and all examination or criticism, lest it implode through the exposure of its manifest contradictions and incoherence. At this point, the BBC stopped being a news organization and became the official, state propaganda arm of trans “rights” activism, taking on board its preferred, obfuscatory, counterintuitive language and framing, while confusing and gaslighting its audience in the process. How could this abdication of responsibility and control have ended up as anything other than a disaster for the BBC, its mandate, and its reputation? How were they so blind as to not foresee this? Who decided to let these children run around with lit sparklers on the Hindenburg?
BBC gender correspondent tried to block coverage of trans criticism
The BBC’s “gender and identity correspondent” sought to block coverage of a campaign group aiming to protect women-only spaces, The Telegraph can reveal.
Megha Mohan, who has held the specialist role since 2018, emailed a co-worker raising concerns about their plans to film a debate by the group Woman’s Place UK.
Apparently women are not part of the genner ann idenniny beat. I guess only men have genner ann idenniny?
In the email – sent months after she started her role – Ms Mohan wrote: “There’s some concern from LGBT+ about giving this group a platform, they are seen as a more extreme organisation that we would be legitimizing (sic).”
In a follow-up email, she added: “A couple of LGBT contacts have told me about Woman’s Place and called them transphobes in the past.”
Oh well then. There’s no more to be said. Thus the wise decisions of the BBC are formed. A couple of people who are lesbians and gay men and bisexual and trans called Woman’s Place transphobes. Who could possibly ignore that as meaningless gossip from random unknown parties?
Ms Mohan’s intervention can be revealed this week as The Telegraph published revelations from a leaked internal BBC memo that details numerous instances of apparent bias at the broadcaster.
The 8,000-word letter was sent to members of the BBC board by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser. He wrote of his “despair at inaction by the BBC executive” over widespread evidence of bias.
…
The leaked dossier includes claims that its trans coverage was biased towards stories “celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”.
It claims the BBC’s trans coverage is subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters who refuse to cover gender-critical stories.
Oh that kind of specialist – the kind that ignores all dissent and correction.
Ms Mohan was one of the first journalists hired by the BBC to report specifically on sexuality and gender. She is a World Service correspondent reporting primarily on global stories.
…
She was appointed alongside Ben Hunte, who was made “LGBT correspondent”. The pair have reported extensively on transgender issues, in numerous instances focusing on the transgender experience or detailing the abuse the community suffered.
Ms Mohan interviewed transgender soldiers banned from the US army, while Mr Hunte wrote about the “distressing” waits for children to have gender reassignment treatment at the controversial Tavistock gender clinic.
The Telegraph could find no examples of the pair having written articles that focused on people who had de-transitioned or expressed concerns around transgender women using female-only spaces.
I am all astonishment.
Janice Turner on The Eyeroll That Shocked a Nation:
The BBC executive complaints unit was spot on. When the newsreader Martine Croxall had to utter the words “pregnant people”, her facial expression — as she added, for clarity, the word “women” — did convey “disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation”. Because whose face doesn’t when confronted with the idiotic, ideological terms that dog the NHS and erase women even from motherhood?
I know the answer to that one – the faces of the people who have bought into the ridiculous destructive trans ideology and its Core Command that Everyone Must Tell the Lie. There are still lots of them, including many who work for major news media.
Back in 2019, when Theresa May’s government was holding a public consultation on amending the Gender Recognition Act to include self-ID, and feminists were trying to raise concerns about how this would affect women’s prisons, sports and safety, the BBC ignored stories or voices that did not endorse LGBT activist demands.
Frustrated by this, James Kirkup, of the Social Market Foundation think tank, and I met Kamal Ahmed, then news editorial director, James Angus, director of the BBC world service, and Richard Burgess, now director of news content.
We first asked them to watch a report by Megha Mohan, one of their recently-hired “identity correspondents” about a so-called school for trans children in Chile. One girl with short hair says: “When I was growing up my family started to push feminine things, like dresses, long hair, makeup — and I am not this.”
Mohan never wonders if such girls, or the fey boys who liked drawing butterflies, weren’t actually retreating from macho, homophobic South American culture. It was self-evident: these kids were trans.
The three bosses watched this expensive mess in discomfort. The problem, they said, was young and inexperienced journalists balked at balance, refusing to include any views counter to their own. And producers let them because they were terrified of vicious complaints from the LGBT staff network.
Why? Why were they terrified? Have BBC producers ever been terrified of complaints from women or Other races or workers or Jews? What is so particularly terrifying about yelping from “LGBT” whatevers?
BBC guidelines are clear: “In applying due impartiality to news, we give due weight to events, opinion and the main strands of argument.” Yet on gender they let activist reporters dictate coverage, and suppress any stories that raised difficult questions. Prescott notes an in-built censor: instead of a story on, say, the side-effects of puberty blockers being covered by health reporters, or the legislation by the political team, all gender stories were routed through an LGBT desk. One ex-BBC correspondent tells me: “They’d say ‘we’re covering that’. But they wouldn’t. They’d sit on it. So no one did.”
So why didn’t they fix it? Why didn’t they then rout the stories through the health desk or political desk or whichever desk was relevant and would actually cover it?
BBC staff who have fought to bring balance to gender coverage speak of unofficial blacklists: high-profile feminists or women’s groups were kept off the centralised contact database, hence never called. Activist journalists like Mohan — still at the World Service — put pressure on colleagues who planned to cover an event by the feminist group A Woman’s Place in 2018, calling it “transphobic” and an “extreme organisation”. Gender-critical speakers were booked then dropped at the last minute; phone-ins screened out callers who opposed males in women’s sport.
So the question remains: why? Why this one set of people and not others? Why, espcially, not women, who are after all not some tiny pressure group but half of all human beings. Women are the literal source of all human beings. Why have women never had this kind of veto power at the BBC?
The journalists I speak to stress that lately much has improved: “There are good people at the top who have listened.” The BBC left the Stonewall champions scheme and has removed website links to the transgender Mermaids charity; gender is now covered largely by the more professional social affairs desk. The style guide has removed activist terminology such as “cis”.
But ideological capture is hard to unpick. Reluctance to air feminist voices endures: after their landmark Supreme Court victory, which ruled sex is biological, the feminist group For Women Scotland appeared on just one BBC news programme. The Darlington nurses, who seek only single-sex changing rooms, were grilled on Woman’s Hour like war criminals. The BBC site still describes trans-women sex offenders or murderers as “women”, though these are clearly crimes of male violence.
Most baffling is the executive complaints unit itself. Why was Croxall’s face guilty of bias, not the scriptwriter who typed the non-BBC-style term “pregnant people”? Why was the Today presenter Justin Webb reprimanded for saying “trans women, in other words males” in a discussion about gender rules in chess? The complaints process needs reform: placating a handful of activist letter writers has a chilling effect on journalism and public debate.
It is time the BBC acknowledged its failings of impartiality, that gender is a subject with more than one side. It must restore trust, before the nation’s eyes roll right out of its head.
Nailed the landing.
The current state of play in Trump’s campaign to starve us into submission:
The Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to withhold about $4 billion in funding for food aid for 42 million low-income Americans this month, as the effects of the longest government shutdown in history continue to ripple across the country.
Oh good. How nice of the court to let Trump starve people.
The court’s ruling, known as an administrative stay, came after the Trump Administration appealed a federal judge’s order to fully fund the program by Friday.
The administration had previously agreed to a judge’s order to partially fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP or food stamps, by about $5 billion from a contingency fund, but it has objected to paying another $4 billion to fully fund the program.
…
The ruling will keep millions of Americans who are reliant on food aid on a knife’s edge. The benefits lapsed at the beginning of this month for the first time in the program’s 60-year history…
Well they should have thought of that before they decided to be poor.
The SNAP program has become a political bargaining chip in the ongoing government shutdown, which has dragged on as Republicans refuse to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans, which are set to expire at the end of the year.
Look, you have to keep people poor one way or another. It’s what God intended.
Trump is doing his No YOU’RE the racists number again.
Donald Trump has said the US will not attend the G20 summit in South Africa over widely discredited claims that white people are being persecuted in the country. The US president said it was a “total disgrace” that South Africa is hosting the meeting, where leaders from the world’s largest economies will gather in Johannesburg later this month.
South Africa’s foreign ministry described the decision by the White House as “regrettable”. None of South Africa’s political parties – including those that represent Afrikaners and the white community in general – have claimed that there is a genocide in South Africa.
Ah yes “the white communinny” – who knew there was one?
Never mind. The important thing is that Trump knows better than any mere South African person; if he says there’s a genocide against white people in South Africa then there is one.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has repeatedly accused South Africa of discriminating against its white minority, including in May when when he confronted his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office.
The Trump administration has given Afrikaners refugee status, stating a “genocide” is taking place in South Africa. Last week, the White House announced plans to caps refugee admissions at a record low, and give priority to white South Africans.
He’s teaching us a lesson. We are meant to learn that that whole history of kidnapping into slavery and centuries of forcible enslavement and then another century of profound race-based exclusion and persecution never happened – it was all a big story told to abuse our darling virtuous white country.
Police Scotland have finally backed off.
Police Scotland has been left humiliated after it was forced to drop its case against a famed women’s rights campaigner for allegedly damaging an umbrella. Susan Smith was told she would face charges unless she accepted a police recorded warning for vandalism after a confrontation with infamous trans activist Tom Harlow.
He disrupted a women’s rights protest outside the Scottish Parliament in September by playing loud music in an attempt to drown out speakers. He was asked to turn it down by Ms Smith, with pictures and footage showing him jabbing a rainbow-coloured brolly towards her face.
Despite which, the cops went after her instead of him.
According to the FSU, cops will take no further action against Ms Smith and have even invited her for a meeting with senior officers to discuss the case and wider issues like women not feeling like they are protected by law enforcement. Complaints were made about their inaction when protests are hijacked by trans activists.
Good. Educate them until their faces are SCARLET.
Ms Smith said: “I am relieved that I can now draw a line under this episode and I am incredibly grateful to the Free Speech Union and my lawyer Neil Hay for all their help and support. This has highlighted how difficult and frightening such an action must be for those who are not able to draw on the help of FSU and who cannot hope to have the same level of public, political, and press support I was fortunate enough to receive.
“While I am delighted that Police Scotland have dropped this case, it is concerning that an individual who came with the express intention of disrupting our rally and drowning out our speakers was taken seriously, especially when extreme, credible threats to women are frequently overlooked.”
Not to mention extreme bullying and silencing of women, like for instance Tom Harlow’s determined effort to disrupt a women’s rights protest.
The Trump administration on Friday asked a federal appeals court for an emergency pause on a federal judge’s order to fully fund SNAP benefits this month.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell ordered the administration on Thursday afternoon to deliver payments in full to states by Friday, chastising it for delays that he said have likely caused SNAP recipients to go hungry.
No no no please don’t make us pay for poor people to eat food!
“People have gone without for too long. Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable,” McConnell said, adding: “This should never happen in America.”
This is the first time SNAP benefits have lapsed because of a government shutdown in the program’s 61-year history. Some families whose EBT cards were due to be reloaded already this week have reported skipping meals or subsisting on the meager foods remaining in their pantries, such as cereal or ramen.
Or brioche.
More on the “Shall we erase women? No let’s not” controversy.
In other words it wasn’t necessarily political, or exclusively political – it may also (or entirely) have been about not befuddling the listeners.
Language matters.
The BBC’s “gender and identity correspondent” sought to block coverage of a campaign group aiming to protect women-only spaces, The Telegraph can reveal.
Sorry to interrupt but what tf is a “gender and identity correspondent”? A correspondent in meaningless but trendy abstractions? Did the BBC have an actual women correspondent at all?
Megha Mohan, who has held the specialist role since 2018, emailed a co-worker raising concerns about their plans to film a debate by the group Woman’s Place UK.
In the email – sent months after she started her role – Ms Mohan wrote: “There’s some concern from LGBT+ about giving this group a platform, they are seen as a more extreme organisation that we would be legitimizing (sic).”
Oh I see. She was a silencing women correspondent. How very BBC.
Isn’t it odd how we’ve gone from sturdy conventional mainstream ignoring of women to exciting trendy enlightened ignoring of women? You’d think we could have had a year or two of actual non-hostile attention, but I guess Karens just never manage to deserve that.
In a follow-up email, she added: “A couple of LGBT contacts have told me about Woman’s Place and called them transphobes in the past.”
I don’t suppose it occurred to her to talk to a couple of women contacts? No, of course not, that would be retrograde and despicable.
Ms Mohan’s intervention can be revealed this week as The Telegraph published revelations from a leaked internal BBC memo that details numerous instances of apparent bias at the broadcaster. The 8,000-word letter was sent to members of the BBC board by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser. He wrote of his “despair at inaction by the BBC executive” over widespread evidence of bias.
…
The leaked dossier includes claims that its trans coverage was biased towards stories “celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”. It claims the BBC’s trans coverage is subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters who refuse to cover gender-critical stories.
…
[Mohan] was appointed alongside Ben Hunte, who was made “LGBT correspondent”. The pair have reported extensively on transgender issues, in numerous instances focusing on the transgender experience or detailing the abuse the community suffered.
Ms Mohan interviewed transgender soldiers banned from the US army, while Mr Hunte wrote about the “distressing” waits for children to have gender reassignment treatment at the controversial Tavistock gender clinic.
The Telegraph could find no examples of the pair having written articles that focused on people who had de-transitioned or expressed concerns around transgender women using female-only spaces.
Mohan is still the BBC’s genner and idennniny correspondent.
