Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • And a pony

    Is the ACLU 6 years old?

    What are “trans kids”? Adults who call themselves children?

    What does it mean to say that X people should be able to exist freely, fully, and joyfully? It sounds nice at first blush, but if you pause to think about it it becomes nonsensical. Everyone “should” be able to be [any number of things] but there are often obstacles to being [any number of things]. It’s not just a matter of power or permission or refusal of same, it’s also a matter of reality, ability, chance, history, in short of what is possible and what isn’t. You might as well claim that people should be able to be birds or whales or the solar system.

    Children who claim to be the other sex should be free to play with gender norms, but they aren’t able to be the other sex, and they should be made aware that they should not be free to force their gender fantasies on other people. Soppy blather about living fully and joyfully doesn’t change that.

  • Without interference by the president

    The NY Times stumbles over its own feet.

    Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission member whose firing was upheld by the Supreme Court on Monday, warned that the justices allowed for the possibility of abuse of presidential power.

    That makes no sense. They mean either “the justices allowed the possibility” or “the justices failed to allow for the possibility”. If they were allowing for the possibility then they wouldn’t have upheld her firing.

    Anyway. The Supreme Court, folks: let the abuse of presidential power commence…or rather continue and intensify.

    Independent agencies like the F.TC. were created to act as watchdogs of powerful corporations, without interference by the president, the former Democratic commissioner said in a statement shortly after the decision was handed down.

    “Today’s ruling makes it possible for presidents to fire watchdogs who won’t put politics over principle, and replace them with lap dogs,” Ms. Slaughter said. “It’s a recipe for corruption; working families will pay the price.”

    The Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 decision in the case, Trump v. Slaughter, effectively gives the president free rein to fire members of more than 20 independent federal agencies, which are typically led by members of both parties. The decision overturned a 90-year-old law restricting presidents from firing officials without cause.

    My first thought was why don’t they realize they’re allowing The Other Team to mess with independent agencies too, and my second thought was they are confident there will never again be an Other Team.

  • He’s taking it well

    The fuming has commenced.

  • Let the fuming commence

    Supreme Court Lets $5 Million Sex Abuse Verdict Against Trump Stand

    The Supreme Court on Monday declined a request by President Trump to review a $5 million civil judgment against him after a jury found in 2023 that he sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.

    …

    Monday’s decision is a major blow to Mr. Trump, likely marking the end of his legal efforts to contest the jury verdict finding that he assaulted Ms. Carroll in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room.

    Or maybe not the end of his efforts but the end of his lawyers’ willingness to assist his efforts. He could continue screaming into the wind until he chokes on his last Big Mac.

    In response to the decision, Mr. Trump posted on social media, calling Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit “a Fake Case.” He added that he would “continue the fight against this Weaponization and Lawfare Case against me, including the ridiculous claim of Defamation, with all of my power and strength.”

    Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said that the decision “affirms once and for all the jury’s unanimous verdict that President Donald J. Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll. His multiple efforts to appeal that verdict have all failed, and today’s ruling ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions.”

    Part of the evidence against him was that notorious “You can grab them by the pussy” remark. One boast too many…

  • Adjudicated rapist

    Finally.

    The rest of Conway’s post:

    The highly respected district judge who tried the case, the Hon. Lewis A. Kaplan, correctly stated multiple times that the jury’s finding of sexual abuse under New York law meant that, in common parlance and under the law of most jurisdictions, Donald Trump was found to have raped E. Jean. So henceforth and forever more, it will be completely accurate—and utterly inactionable under the common and constitutional law of defamation—to state the following fact: DONALD J. TRUMP IS AN ADJUDICATED RAPIST.

  • Despite a Supreme Court ruling

    Defiance.

    NHS hospitals will still allow biological men who are transgender to use female-only wards and lavatories despite a Supreme Court ruling against the practice, The Telegraph can disclose.

    West London NHS Trust has instructed patients that they can use single-sex facilities based on their “legal gender”.

    That’s not what the Supreme Court said but oh well, who cares about silly old laws, eh? Just do whatever you want all the time.

    Critics say the new policy is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s ruling that the term “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex. This has been widely interpreted as meaning that people who were born men should not be allowed to use female facilities.

    On account of how female facilities are for female people and men are not female people. How many trillion times do we have to say this before it sinks in?

    Claire Coutinho, the shadow equalities minister, said it was “astonishing that an NHS trust has adopted this unlawful policy”.

    “Biological males must not be allowed into single-sex female spaces, but more than a year on from the Supreme Court ruling, the Government has completely failed to get a grip on public services that are still flouting the law,” she said.

    “Many women and girls in hospital will be particularly vulnerable and need to know that their safety and privacy is being protected. The Health Secretary must demand the immediate withdrawal of this policy, and issue the new national guidance that is more than a year overdue.”

    Oh let’s not be hasty here. It’s only women. How about we go on letting men go wherever they want for now, and maybe we can take another look in a century or two.

    Fiona McAnena, the director of campaigns at Sex Matters, said the policy was “doing everything in its power to circumvent the law on single-sex spaces”.

    “The term ‘legal gender’ has no basis in law or medicine, and it’s extraordinary that NHS bosses at West London think that they can test the law by writing rules using bogus terminology,” she said.

    “A patient or staff member could have a good case if they decided to challenge the trust in court. But it shouldn’t take legal action by individuals for public institutions to ignore demands from trans activists and fulfil their legal obligations.

    “If this policy is permitted to stand, other NHS trusts across the UK may follow suit. The sooner NHS England brings out a revised policy that complies with equality law and protects sex-based rights, the better.”

    How about July 2076? Are you busy that month?

  • Yet you persist

    Oooh look, I bagged one.

  • The chimes at midnight

    Trump rants and rages about a book he hasn’t read.

    Trump unleashed a lengthy attack on journalist Maggie Haberman at midnight Saturday over a new book about him, dismissing the work as fiction and hurling insults at the New York Times reporter who has covered him for years.

    In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he had been briefed on the book and was unimpressed, deriding both the project and its author — whose name he mangled throughout the post.

    “Based on a very quick and boring briefing concerning the Magot Hagerman book about me, it is mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things she has written about me for so many years,” Trump wrote.

    He’s so stupid he tells us he hasn’t read it and proceeds to trash it without having read it. He informs us that he’s so lazy and dim-witted he gets people to give him “briefings” on books because ew, so many pages, so many black squiggles on white paper. The man is functionally illiterate.

  • A profound failure

    Nick Wallis on the BBC’s coverage of trans issues:

    Just over a week ago, the BBC quietly acknowledged a profound failure of journalism in one of its online news reports. The apology ostensibly focused on a single crime story, but its detail and length appears to signify a cultural shift in an area which has been tearing the BBC apart for more than a decade. 

    The story concerned a 21-year-old man called Darren Rigby who had indicated he was preparing to act on his apparent murderous hatred of women and girls. Over the course of a week, in January this year, Rigby sent terrifying messages to three all-girls schools on Merseyside. Rigby told one: “I am on my way… with a revolver and a machete and I’m going to shoot and stab all of your girls. You terfs are going to learn to stop mocking, deadnaming and misgendering transwomen like me.” Terf stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, a derogatory term for women who do not accept that biological males can be women.

    In another email, Rigby said his intention was “to injure and kill as many girls as I can”.

    There was a trial; he confessed to three charges of sending communications threatening death or serious harm. There was a BBC reporter at the trial.

    Despite the newsworthiness of the details revealed in court, the BBC’s write-up of Rigby’s crimes ignored Rigby’s self-declared trans status. His apparent motive, so-called terfs “misgendering” him, was not mentioned. The article didn’t even make clear that Rigby’s violent threats were aimed exclusively at women and girls in single-sex schools.

    Um…an unfortunate oversight. He wasn’t feeling 100% that day. He couldn’t find his pencil.

    The omissions [might] have gone unnoticed were it not for another journalist sitting in court that day. Jamie Lopez, who writes for an online publication called The Southport Lead, published his piece on Rigby’s sentencing two days after the BBC. It contained all the details the BBC piece had left out. Lopez was mystified by the BBC’s take on the story. “It had gone up very quickly,” he told me, but the content was “bizarre”. The disparity between the articles was soon highlighted on social media and complaints were made.

    …

    On June 17, significant changes were made to the BBC report. Quotes from Rigby’s emails were added. His targeting of all-girls schools was recorded. The formal BBC apology written below the “updated” report noted: “This article was originally published without including key details about this case due to miscommunication between BBC reporters in court and the writers.”

    That’s quite the “miscommunication”. You’d think those key details would be key enough to report.

    One journalist working in BBC national radio complains that they are “still stuck with the chilling effect” of the complaints unit ruling against Justin Webb for explaining that “trans women” were “males” and Martine Croxall for rolling her eyes at the words “pregnant people” in a script. “We still need unambiguous messaging that restores proper public-service journalism,” the journalist said.

    Indeed they do.

  • Trying to go out in a bra and camisole

    Classic.

    “if I try to go out in a bra and camisole with eyeliner”

    WHY WOULD ANYONE go out in a bra and camisole with eyeliner?

    The answer is obvious: to attract sexual attention. It’s not neutral, it’s not just what one wears to go out, it’s not comfortable or practical or simple, it’s signaling. It’s signaling a certain kind of alluring sexy hot girl look at me vibe. It’s stupid enough when women do it; it’s cosmic stupid when men do it.

  • Discovery cuts both ways

    MeidasTouch writes:

    TOTAL BACKFIRE: BBC makes Trump PAY for $10 BILLION defamation lawsuit.

    Trump just opened the door to discovery over his actions around January 6th, and the BBC decided to walk right through it.

    Donald Trump sued the BBC for $10 billion over its coverage of January 6. Now, the BBC is making it clear that discovery cuts both ways.

    The broadcaster has asked the court to require Trump to turn over his phone records, private schedules, daily diaries, and other communications spanning the period from the 2020 election through January 20, 2021.

    The BBC argues that if Trump claims its reporting damaged his reputation, then the facts surrounding January 6 are directly relevant. In other words, they’re asking whether Trump’s reputation was harmed by the BBC, or by his own conduct surrounding the Capitol attack.

    Gosh, that’s a tough one, isn’t it. No, it isn’t. Yes, it was his own conduct that harmed his reputation. The fact that the American people in their wisdom re-elected him anyway is a separate matter.

    Trump’s lawyers are accusing the BBC of trying to turn the defamation lawsuit into a January 6 trial. But that’s how discovery works: when you file a lawsuit seeking billions in damages, you open the door to scrutiny of the claims you’re making.

    Trump wanted a $10 billion payday. Instead, his lawsuit could force him to produce records that shine a new spotlight on one of the darkest chapters in presidential history.

    Let’s fucking hope so.

  • It was a comment piece

    Euan Weddell aka Sophie Molly lost.

    1. Sophie Molly complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that The Sunday Times breached Clause 1 (Accuracy), Clause 3 (Harassment) and Clause 12 (Discrimination) of the Editors’ Code of Practice in an article headlined “How the ex-Green stole Christmas”, published on 21 December 2025.

    2. The article – which appeared on page 12 – was a comment piece which commented on a Christmas card that had been withdrawn from sale. The card reportedly said: “This Christmas I’m identifying as a Grinch”. The article said, “Here’s how censorship happens” and a “lunatic objects to the card, saying it ‘belittles the identity of trans and non-binary people’. Sainsbury’s immediately removes the card from sale and issues a cringing apology stressing how inclusive it is.” The article went on to say: “There is no evidence to suggest that anyone in the country was remotely disquieted by the card except for the lunatic, a bloke called ‘Sophie Molly’, who was considered too extreme for the Green Party. But Mr Molly gets his way, because that’s how it works.”

    That’s how it works because for some unfathomable reason, the fad known as “being trans” is currently seen and approached as the most vulnerable and wounded and deserving of every sympathy and assistance and a pony.

    The article under complaint appeared within a larger column where the columnist expressed his views on a number of subjects. It said:

    “We have had three centuries of congenital idiots deciding who should run the country and our local authorities, and the result of the last general election must have made it clear to Sir Keir Starmer that the public had, through its electoral lunacy, lost the right to decide who was in charge henceforth. ‘We got a landslide. And some people even voted for Ed Davey. Goes to show the electorate has completely lost its marbles, so no more elections,’ said someone who identified as a spokesperson for Labour but actually isn’t one and is instead me.”

    4. It also said: “These days when one of them says, ‘Mice can easily be taught to play the cello,’ or, ‘Manchester is only seven miles from London, as the crow flies,’ or ‘Anybody can have a cervix’, I just smile benignly, say, ‘How very right you are,’ and let them get on with it.”

    …

    7. The complainant was the individual referenced in the article. She said the article breached Clause 1 as it was inaccurate to refer to her as a “bloke” and “Mr Molly” as she is a woman. She also said it was inaccurate to refer to her as a “lunatic”.

    He said. He said the article blah blah blah. And of course he’s wrong: he is a bloke and he is at the very least chaotic and fanciful in the things he says. I would put it more strongly but I don’t want to be extradited and forced to argue with him in person.

    8. The complainant also said the article breached Clause 12 as it referred to her as a “bloke” and “Mr Molly”, which she considered to be a pejorative and prejudicial reference to her gender identity.

    He can consider things to be whatever he likes, but he doesn’t get to force everyone else to agree. That applies to pretty much anything he could say, because it’s all likely to be wrong.

    In addition, she said referring to her as a “lunatic” was a prejudicial reference towards her protected characteristics. She said it implied she was mentally ill, as she is a trans woman. She also believed the term was misogynistic and a pejorative reference to her disability.

    Well, there again – he acts lunatically, so what can he expect? If you want to be seen as not a lunatic, don’t carry on in public as if you were wearing a billboard with LUNATIC on both sides in bright orange lettering.

  • All-caps don’t make it so

    Retake 10th grade history.

    Not true. Not even close to true.

  • Self is all they can see

    Missing the obvious much?

    Aki doesn’t want to get raped but doesn’t pause to consider the fact that putting men in women’s prisons makes women vulnerable to rape.

  • Make it more shiny

    It’s always even worse than we thought.

    The pathway that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office has long been paved in Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.

    But that wasn’t true. Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, and is part of a $1.3 million project that included repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors. A year earlier, in a separate “Rush project at request of POTUS,” the Park Service spent $347,503 to remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that cleared the way for Trump to affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.

    This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from national parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees.

    For the sake of adding more and more glitz to a building that was never supposed to be that kind of glitzy. The presidency was supposed to be the opposite of royalty, not a pathetic vulgar imitation of it.

    But as Trump attempts to adorn his immediate surroundings with taxpayer-funded improvements, other parks are going without. Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”

    Oh well, so a few tourists fall into Black Canyon, so what? More glitz for Trump is essential to our survival as a nation.

  • Guest post: Actually, you did, bro

    Originally a barn-burner of a comment by Artymorty on Their own unnerstanding of their genner idenniny.

    Yeah but but but

    It’s all so far away. It’s all about some vague, distant “they, them, those people” off in the hazy distance somewhere. The hazy trans distance.

    I hate it.

    The rest of us have a right to SEE PEOPLE’S SEX, clearly.

    WE CAN SEE IT!!!

    You are free to play whatever pretend games you want about your “soul” or our “body thetans” or your “gender identity”. Go the fuck ahead.

    But we are free to visibly observe your actual material sex and make our own decisions about you based on it. Whether or not to date you, or to let you into our private circles and spaces, for example. That is our right.

    And a lot of people who think they’re being allies — upstanding citizens, good little liberals, virtuous pillars of progressivism — they forget that trans extremists aren’t just meekly asking for permission to play pretendzies in front of us, they’re demanding that we LEGALLY comply with their sex-pretend roleplaying game, to such an extreme that we are obligated to pretend it’s literally true, on pain of social and criminal punishment.

    Of course our transwoman friends have a right to believe they’re “real women” in the privacy of their minds! That’s religion 101. My Muslim and Christian friends are free to believe in their crazy (frankly gross) shit, too. Duh! I manage to have religious friends despite finding their religions gross, and they no doubt don’t buy into my beliefs either. But we make it work. That’s cosmopolitanism 101.

    And we’re not obligated to believe the same as each other. That’s secularism 101.

    I’ve found a little hack to get this point through to straight men, and it works incredibly well. Seriously, I’ve pulled this rhetorical move a few times now, in a few different instances of arguments with straight guys about the trans thing, and the result has been instantaneous and jarring. It’s a powerful move:

    Straight guys describe transwomen in terms of “letting” “them” (way over there somewhere) have their little beliefs. It’s all about letting some distant people do their freaky eccentric thing, from a distance.

    So I ask these straight men blunt sexual questions about their attraction to transwomen over actual female women. When straight men say, “transwomen are women,” I challenge them: surely they mean it truly, all the way down to finding them sexually attractive in the same way that actual women are, right? Of course, you find a neovagina consructed out of a young gay man’s anus flesh the same as an actual vagina, right?

    Of course they don’t, and of course they’re not even willing to lie about it.

    It’s instantaneous. “That’s not what I meant when I said transwomen are women! I only meant they are allowed to believe they’re women to themselves! I never said ***I*** have to believe they’re female!”

    Actually, you did, bro. You implied it so strongly, that that’s why these gay men went out and got neovaginas, and that’s why the industry carries on. Because men like you ARE TELLING VULNERABLE GAY MEN THAT THEY CAN BE “REAL” WOMEN IN ***YOUR EYES***, BECAUSE YOU ARE PUBLICLY SAYING SO.

    Well, you are publicly avoiding contradicting it, in any case. And you’re either attacking those of us who do, and/or siding with those who attack us.

    And then you sneak off and abandon the trans people you pretended to support, once it comes time to actually date and fuck them.

    You are the assholes.

    It works surprisingly well, to remind these bystanders that they aren’t entirely bystanders when they play along with gender woo…

  • Their own unnerstanning of their genner idenniny

    Seen on Facebook:

    People should be free to make their own choices and to be who they are, including their sexuality and gender identity; without other people trying to pressure them into a different sexuality or gender identity.

    The point is to allow people to help others reach their own understanding of their sexuality and gender identity, and to stop people trying to ‘direct’ others towards a predetermined outcome.

    Sounds cuddly, but is confused. People thinking they have a “gender identity” that is the opposite of their sex are suffering from a delusion. Freedom broadly speaking is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that every idenniny we can invent for ourselves is either real or beneficial. Freedom to pretend to be a woman when you are in fact a man is a violation of the freedom of women to avoid men in some circumstances.

  • Commemorating what?

    Egomania strikes again.

    President Donald Trump unveiled a new rendering of a special commemorative US passport bearing his likeness Friday, debuting a limited-edition passport to mark America’s 250th anniversary this year.

    “The U.S.A.’s New Passport, which says, ‘Welcome, but be good!’” Trump posted on Truth Social.

    He included a sample passport page featuring an image of him looming over the Resolute Desk, the text of the original Declaration of Independence in the background and his signature on the bottom. The opposite page has an image of the “The Declaration of Independence” painting by John Trumbull.

    Sigh. Passports aren’t supposed to have priddy pikshers of the current president scowling into a camera.

    The new passport appears to feature a rendering of Trump based off of [on] the president’s portrait from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and differs from renderings released by the State Department earlier this year, which featured a different image of the president.

    The image, of course, is ludicrous – Tump’s familiar petulant scowl, aka constipated baby face.

    The new limited-edition travel document was first announced in April as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration. It was billed as “a limited-edition U.S. passport to commemorate the historic occasion of America’s 250th anniversary,” featuring “custom artwork and enhanced images on the front, back, and inside covers.”

    Yeah yeah 250 whoopee, only it’s not looking so much like a celebration now, is it. The U.S. is now the deeply sick country that elected this horrendous man not once but twice. What’s to celebrate?

  • Notwithstanding legal recognition as male

    What kind of selfish goon would want it to be otherwise?

    Matrix Chambers news:

    The European Court of Human Rights has declared inadmissible an application challenging the UK’s requirement that a transgender man with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) who gives birth must be registered as the child’s “mother”.

    What kind of horrible self-adoring person would want make sure her kid had no mother?

    The case followed domestic proceedings culminating in the Court of Appeal’s decision in R (X) v Registrar General for England and Wales [2020] EWCA Civ 559, which held that a transgender man who carried and gave birth to a child is to be recorded as “mother” on the birth certificate, notwithstanding legal recognition as male.

    Just goes to show how incoherent and confused this ridiculous ideology is. Be as dudely and non-conforming as you want – I even sympathize, having never felt comfortable in the more girly-coded dress and appearance conventions for female people – but don’t even consider making your child think it never had a mother.

    The Court underlined that when hearing cases brought by a parent and/or their child, national courts cannot only take into account the interests invoked by the parent but must take into account the best interests of the child as a primary consideration.

    Gosh, ya think?

  • Sir have you read it at all?

    Wrong.

    As thousands of people line up to say: Yes it is too so in the Constitution, not in those words, but for sure in that meaning.

    “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

    The second clause probably has a lot to do with why and how the Catholic church has been able to get away with so much evil shit for so long. If Dan Patrick had a brain cell he would realize that the First Amendment is a gift to religion, as well as a constraint on its power.