Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Silly me, I thought I had already posted about this hours ago, promptly after listening to it. I thought wrong.

“Women’s spaces are for women. That’s non-negotiable.”

Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) speaks to @BBCNuala on Woman’s Hour @BBCWomansHour about the Supreme Court ruling on the clarification of sex. pic.twitter.com/Z6z4P07Qk8

— Sex Matters (@SexMattersOrg) May 14, 2025

Foreign man allowed to go out in public again.

A federal district court judge in Virginia ordered the release of Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri on Wednesday, marking at least the third time a detained student or academic targeted by the Trump administration because of their protest activity or affiliation was released from immigration detention.

Khan Suri was detained by masked federal officers outside his home in Rosslyn, Virginia, in March. Khan Suri was moved across multiple state lines shortly after his arrest and has been held in custody in a Texas detention center.

Well obviously we don’t want students and scholars in this country, so no crossing of state lines is too much to punish them. Also the masking is fine because it just is.

He is an Indian national postdoctoral fellow and was in the United States on a valid visa before his arrest. He is married to a US citizen.

That’s no excuse! Having a valid visa is not good enough! You have to have at least ten of them, and be missing an arm.

Suri has not been charged with a crime, but the Trump administration revoked his student visa and accused him of having ties to Hamas, a terrorist organization.

Khan Suri’s attorneys filed multiple motions with the court challenging the legality of his detention, arguing their client was targeted in part because his wife is a Palestinian American. Khan Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh is also a former employee of the Qatari-based news network Al Jazeera, according to court documents.

Saleh said she posted on social media to show her support for the people of Gaza after the start of the Israel-Gaza war, court documents show.

Therefore it was necessary to drag her husband from Virginia to Texas and lock him up and throw away the key. What a beacon of human rights we are.

Originally a comment by Papito on Dragging more people into the maelstrom.

The trans ideology is at its worst when it draws the line of battle with women and the same-sex attracted right across the bodies of children.

The idea of “trans children” came about because adult men who modify themselves surgically to look more like women never pass as women, so they think if only they had started the modification before puberty they’d pass. So they project their inner turmoil, self-hatred, and sexual kinks onto other people’s children. Children are easy to manipulate, and the nerdy ones are always looking for an explanation as to why they don’t fit in. Throwing them a glitter party and calling them brave if they say the reason is because they’re trans is irresistible to many. Some of the parents are likewise gullible and will become boosters of their own children’s sterilization and mutilation; some are not, and this cult may break those families.

The next step after convincing a kid to say they’re trans is to elevate that statement above any other. A kid can say they want to be a musician and the parents say that’s great, let’s get you lessons, knowing that by the time college graduation rolls along the kid will likely have found a profession that pays. A kid can say they want to be an astronaut and parents will say that’s great, you have to study calculus and get in shape. A kid can say they’re emo, not goth, and the parents will say super, we’ll save on white pancake makeup. Anything a kid identifies as, parents understand it might change, and in the long run it doesn’t matter, a kid has to go through a lot of different phases, and can be motivated to learn things from any of them. But the job of the trans cult is to make sure the kid never grows out of saying they’re trans, which they would without intervention.

That’s what the gender centers are for, and the puberty blockers. Their stated function is to prevent the puberty that would develop secondary sex characteristics, and thus make the eventual trans adult pass better. Their practical function is to prevent the adolescent brain from growing, and prevent the kid from growing out of the phase where they identify as trans. Can we lock in a poet phase, or a scout phase, or a train-lover phase? No, but we can lock in a trans phase, medically. And we can train a generation of doctors to lie to children and parents and say they will kill themselves if we don’t.

Every day a new family is thrown into years, and perhaps a lifetime, of pain because someone has sold the trans lie to their child. There will never be a righting of this wrong, there will never be accountability for all the doctors and teachers and therapists who pushed this snake oil, who decided the line of battle for a kink ideology had to be fought over the bodies of children.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on How to make a right.

There is no such thing as specifically “trans” rights. There can’t be, because “trans” is a fiction, and because making that particular fiction a basis for rights would obliterate women’s rights as well as lesbian and gay rights.

A big part of the problem stems from people’s mistaken conception of “trans people” as a fixed subset of the population — directly analogous to gay people: a small group of individuals who were born with an innate and harmless condition that caused them to be discriminated against and persecuted by the rest of society — when in fact “trans people” are an open identity group whose membership can grow or shrink depending on its appeal at any given time or place, just like political movements, religious movements, and subcultures like hippies and punks.

The number of people who loudly announce themselves to be transgender (or who quietly drop the label) is directly dependent on the pros and cons of doing so. Every time you change a policy to make it “more trans inclusive,” you’re not easing the burden on a small, fixed group of people who can’t help but be innately “trans” and who would otherwise struggle to cope with their day-to-day lives without the concessions that supposed trans “rights” offer. Instead, you’re incentivizing more people who’d otherwise have carried on just fine to hop aboard the trans train.

You can see how the conflation of “trans rights” with gay rights came to be. It was a very clever marketing ploy by the trans activists to hitch their wagon to the gay rights movement:

There have always been men and women who, in the privacy of their minds, were far more attracted to members of the same sex. Some of them found the prospect of opposite-sex relationships to be completely unbearable to the point of impossibility, whereas others managed to carry on “in the closet” and go through the motions of heterosexual life, despite their private longings. The number who “came out” publicly was correlated to how well society included and accommodated them. But the number of people who were innately homosexual never actually changed. And no one has been able to identify any drawbacks to legally and culturally incorporating them into society.

The same cannot be said for the following groups of “closeted” people:

There have always been straight men who, in the privacy of their minds, find it sexy and appealing to imagine themselves as women and who would love to make everyone else imagine them as women, too. There have always been men who secretly enjoy crossdressing. There have always been men who fantasize about getting naked in women’s locker and shower rooms. There have always been men who predate sexually on children and who dream of having the kind of unsupervised access to children that women are freely granted and that men are prohibited from.

There have always been teenage girls who long to be boys — to escape from the ever-present burden of objectification. There have always been lesbians who long to move through the world free of the everyday grind of homophobia and misogyny they’re subjected to, simply for looking and acting the way they naturally do.

There have always been gay boys and young men with naturally feminine attributes, for whom the thought has crossed their minds, “If only I were a beautiful young woman, hunky young men would find me attractive instead of repulsive, and I’d be so much more popular! I’m so ashamed to be gay. I feel like a freak…”

There have always been social chasers, people who need to be at the centre of the party, who get unbearable FOMO at the sight of a big glittery rainbow parade they weren’t invited to.

None of these people are innately transgender. None of them need special sex-denialist privileges in order to carry on with their lives. None of them. In fact, everyone — all of society — is far better off if none of them are designated as a separate class of special people who are granted special “rights” to force everyone else pretend not to see their sex. Automatically granting “trans rights” to some of these groups of people poses an immediate threat to the safety of women and children: making “trans” a no-questions-asked all-access pass to women’s safe spaces does just that. Granting “trans rights” to others undermines women’s rights and gay rights by disincentivizing society from its responsibilty to address the burdens of societal prejudice unfairly carried by women and gays, and instead pushes unhappy women and gays to simply modify themselves and irreversibly damage their bodies in order to conform to the status quo. This is what the bogus concept of “trans kids” does.

These supposed “trans rights” are just dragging more people into the growing maelstrom. It’s threatening to drown us all.

Classic Trump.

“It’s a great gesture from Qatar,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’”

Point completely missed SIR. Point not even within striking distance SIR.

To put it another way, you’ve just gone on the record as happy to accept any and all bribes from any and all parties.

The issue is not whether or not you would like a free lavish gift. We know you would love a free lavish gift. We know you’re greedy. We know you’re corrupt. We know you’re reckless. We know your brain is a puddle of grease. You don’t need to tell us any of that.

The issue is that you’re not allowed to accept bribes. The issue is that you’re especially not allowed to take bribes from other countries.

This is a bribe, you dumb fuck. It’s not a loving present from people who admire you, it’s a massive public bribe. It’s not a “free airplane”; it’s a hook lodged deep in your throat for Qatar to reel in whenever it chooses.

The Society for Women in Philosophy UK is not for women in philosophy. It’s for that other thing – the opposite.

It offers a “statement of solidarity and support in response to the recent UK Supreme Court ruling and EHRC guidance” which is not a statement of solidarity with women but rather a statement of solidarity with men who call themselves women.

(There’s no link to the statement because apparently they don’t do links; just scroll down – there’s not much on the page.)

What’s their philosophical take?

The Society for Women In Philosophy UK (SWIP UK) condemns the recent Supreme Court ruling on 16 April 2025 determining that the term ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010 refers to a binary and biological notion of ‘sex’, and the subsequent interim guidance published by the EHRC on 25 April 2025. 

Ah yes a “notion” – a peculiar eccentric addle-pated notion that sex refers to sex. Silly Supreme Court; if only they studied the works of professional trans ideologues like “India” Willoughby instead of relying on sexual dimorphism for their definition.

This ruling and the guidance undermine the human rights and safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people and are also detrimental to cis women. Trans women are women, and belong in feminist organisations. There is no fight against sexism and misogyny separate from the fight against cissexism and transmisogyny.

In what way is it detrimental to women to know what women are? In what way is it not detrimental to women to pretend that men can be women? Deep philosophical questions which the Gang for Women in Philosophy don’t bother to answer, or even ask.

SWIP UK membership, in line with our recognitions and aims, has for many years been open to trans women and to other trans and/or non-binary people who feel the category of ‘woman’ is relevant to their experiences, and this will not change under any circumstances. 

Oh. Really? So it’s not the Society for Women in Philosophy. Why do they call themselves that while they disavow it? If it’s not for women why do they say it’s for women?

Ironically, that’s about the most obvious contradiction one could come up with, and philosophers are supposed to be alert to contradictions, and avoid them. It seems kind of cringey to feature and underline one right there on their website.

If you’re a woman and a teacher in the UK you don’t have a union that looks out for your interests.

Britain’s largest teaching union has voted to campaign against the Supreme Court ruling on gender, insisting trans women in schools must be allowed to use ladies’ toilets.

The Left-wing National Education Union (NEU) resolved on Saturday to advocate for trans teachers to continue to choose toilets according to ‘gender identity’.

Which is a massive “fuck you” to women.

The judgement, which states a woman is defined by biological sex, effectively means a male-born trans person can be excluded from female-only spaces.

However, the NEU’s resolution means it may now intervene to provide legal assistance for trans teachers if they are banned from female toilets or girls’ changing rooms.

Not legal assistance for women who don’t want to take their clothes off with men in the room, but legal assistance for men who want to take their clothes off with women in the room. Solidarity Forever eh what?

Daniel Kebede, General Secretary, said: ‘The NEU is looking carefully at the Supreme Court ruling and its implications for employment. A toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.’

Go to hell, Mr Kebede. Men are a threat to women if they’re insisting on invading women’s spaces and watching them take their clothes off. Men who are not a threat to women don’t want to do that. Do you get it now? The adamant insistence on intruding on women is a guy thing, and it’s revolting to see men lining up to defend it and encourage it.

The 52 executive members, mostly regional reps, voted in favour of a motion called ‘trans rights are human rights’.

The motion says the ruling ‘contradicts human rights and dignity of trans and other gender-diverse staff and encourages discrimination, harassment and hate crimes’.

What about the human rights and dignity of women?

It’s so interesting how they simply take for granted that “trans rights” get to cancel women’s rights.

Wrong.

That little nugget of wisdom is floating around on social meeja. It’s idiotic.

There is no erosion of the human rights of trans people, i.e. the human rights that everyone has. There is no such thing as specifically “trans” rights. There can’t be, because “trans” is a fiction, and because making that particular fiction a basis for rights would obliterate women’s rights as well as lesbian and gay rights. It’s unworkable to make it a “right” for men who pretend to be women to force everyone else to agree. It’s unworkable because it’s not true and it drives a tank through women’s rights.

Imagine if trans ideology faded out, to be replaced by an ideology that claims people are whatever military rank they say they are. If I say I’m an admiral, I’m an admiral. Would that be workable? No. How about an ideology that claims people can fly if they say they can? I suppose we could shrug and say “Ok whatever” because it would harm only the roof jumpers, but what if they started taking babies up onto that roof? So, no again.

The slogan sounds cute to people unaccustomed to thinking, but it’s not workable.

Welcome to Racism Import Theater.

The first group of White South African refugees arrived in the U.S. on Monday under President Trump’s executive order mandating they be prioritized for resettlement — even as the broader refugee program remains largely on hold.

The 59 Afrikaners, descendants of mainly Dutch colonists, underwent expedited reviews that took months, were brought to the U.S. on a government-chartered flight, and were greeted at Dulles International Airport by federal officials — all unconventional steps for the refugee resettlement program, which can take years to process.

In other words, refugees don’t normally get expedited reviews, they don’t normally get here on a government-chartered plane, and they are not normally greeted at Dulles by federal officials. It seems fair to assume that the “unconventional steps” are a way to rub our noses in the fact that the Trump regime welcomes white racists and has contempt for their victims.

Nose duly rubbed. We get it. You hate us and you love racists. You’re going to do all the harm you can in the next four years, and that will be a lot of harm. We can’t do a damn thing about it. We get it.

Among his first executive actions, Trump temporarily paused the refugee resettlement program. Various agencies including the State Department have also paused disbursing funding for critical services such as the home, job and school assistance the Afrikaners are poised to receive.

The pause sent the refugee resettlement agencies into turmoil as refugees already cleared to arrive in the U.S. received notice their flights had been cancelled.

Among those left in limbo were Afghans who worked with the U.S. military, a move that some Republicans have criticized. Judges have ordered the government to at least resume the refugee program for those who had already been approved to travel, but the administration is fighting the court order.

Fighting the court order while ostentatiously parading Afrikaner “refugees” from post-apartheid South Africa. Noses rubbed.

Just shameless lies in the Guardian.

The article is a toe-curling pile of flattery of a fantasy writer called Jessica Townsend, so of course it has to fling some sewer scrapings at Rowling in the process.

Townsend is going into her press tour for Silverborn at a time when the world’s most famous children’s author, JK Rowling, is publicly railing against the rights of trans people.

Liars liars liars. No she is not. She is publicly railing at attacks on the rights of female people, and explaining how trans ideology is incompatible with women’s rights.

“I’m very happy to be quite blunt about it: I’m gutted. It is so upsetting and it’s so perplexing, and I will never understand it,” she says. But Rowling’s ugly crusade has only reinforced Townsend’s innate sense of duty towards the “tiny brains and hearts” in her audience.

The tiny brains and hearts that are all in the wrong bodies, no doubt.

Solidarity for…whatever, but for sure not women.

Britain’s largest teaching union has voted to campaign against the Supreme Court ruling on gender, insisting trans women in schools must be allowed to use ladies’ toilets.

In other words insisting that women must lose their rights to privacy and safety. For the union makes men strong.

Daniel Kebede, General Secretary, said: ‘The NEU is looking carefully at the Supreme Court ruling and its implications for employment. A toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.’

No, men are acknowledged to be a potential threat to women in small enclosed spaces with their pants down. It is the case that some men – far too many men – do take advantage of settings like toilets to spy on or photograph or assault women. The NEU should look carefully at that.

The court ruling, on April 16, came too late to be debated at the NEU annual conference – so it was instead discussed at a meeting of the National Executive at the weekend.

The 52 executive members, mostly regional reps, voted in favour of a motion called ‘trans rights are human rights’.

The motion says the ruling ‘contradicts human rights and dignity of trans and other gender-diverse staff and encourages discrimination, harassment and hate crimes’.

And what about women?

Pffff. Obviously the union doesn’t give two shits.

Oh has he now.

A male teacher at a primary school in the UK has told off a nine-year-old boy for calling him "sir". The teacher says he is 'non-binary' and demands to be called 'they / them'. He also sometimes wears women's clothing from the waist down at the school pic.twitter.com/PwwlQCMEKZ

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) May 12, 2025

That teacher is in the wrong job then. The very very very wrong job. Teachers are not there to teach the children how to focus all their attention on the teachers’ idenninies. That’s not what school is for. Teachers are conduits for learning, not the subjects of learning. Nobody should be burdened with having to remember someone’s luxury idenniny, and that goes triple for children in school.

And that’s true times a billion when what the teachers are trying to force the children to learn is a pack of lies, and personal narcissistic look-at-me lies at that. Teachers should no more be telling children about their idenninies than they should be telling them about their sex lives or their cocaine habits or their grudges against their parents. Grade school is not a theater, it’s school.

And no, the child should not be gently reminded of the preferred idenniny of this adult; the subject should never come up at all.

Bill Kristol on Trump and emoluments:

I’m old enough to remember when this was a republic. A proud republic. We were proud to be different from the principalities and powers of the old world. We were confident of our superiority to the hereditary aristocracies and monarchies that had dominated political life everywhere on the globe, and that still did in many places.

…

Now, the president of the United States is boasting of receiving as a gift a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. The plane will be upgraded to serve not as the Air Force One but as his Air Force One, since it will only be available for use by the government of the United States during his time in office. It will then revert to him—well, nominally to his presidential library, but it will of course be totally at his disposal—after he leaves office.

This sure seems like a “present” or “emolument” to a person holding “an office of trust” from “a King, Prince, or foreign state.”

But not to worry. Attorney General Pam Bondi—once a registered lobbyist for Qatar, as it happens—has concluded that the transaction is permissible under U.S. law and the Constitution.

Interesting. Are we to conclude that AG Pam Bondi nudged Qatar into bestowing this tiny negligible blink and you’ve missed it bribe on Trump?

Trump can’t really conceal his contempt for the old republican ways. Last night, he posted this on social media:

So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. 

Note that he even points out that the “gift” to the Defense Department is only temporary. He doesn’t point out that it’s actually a permanent gift to him, which the DD gets to use only while he’s squatting in the Filthy House.

This is the voice of old-world autocracy. Those who take seriously the constraints and requirements of republican government are fools. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.

It’s the voice of the old-world autocracy stripped of any semblance of nobility or basic dinner-table manners. It’s the voice of old-world autocracy quacked out by a psychotic puppet.

BBC Woman’s Hour today talked to trans “woman” Robin Moira White about the Supreme Court ruling on whatisawoman. The chat is the first in what it says will be a series of such chats. I have to wonder why the Beeb starts this series with a man who pretends to be a woman. Why is he at the head of the queue? Why not talk to women first and men last? Or indeed why talk to men at all?

So anyway, obviously I’ll have to listen to the whole annoying thing and share the worst bits.

First question – what’s his opinion on the Supreme Court ruling that woman means woman?

Well – I don’t think the Supreme Court ruling will survive a trip to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. … What we have is a situation now where that recognition is not effective and will need to be corrected

Nuala McGovern: But on what grounds would the court on human rights potentially overrule the judgement?

White: Well if you are a trans person that acknowledgement of your changed gender has to allow you to live appropriately and with dignity and if you go to the cinemar or the supermarket and you are forced to use facilities that are not appropriate to your gender, then firstly

Ok wait. Before we hear what happens “firstly” let’s interrogate this issue of being forced to use facilities that are not appropriate to your gender. Here’s the problem with that: if the Robin Moira Whites get to use what they consider facilities appropriate to their magic notional fictitious gender, then actual women are forced to use facilities that are NOT appropriate to their actual sex. Men in dresses win, women lose. Why should men in dresses get to win??? Why does his “appropriate” matter more than ours?

He goes on:

Your rights to privacy are compromised, and your rights to live in dignity are compromised.

See above. What about our rights to privacy and dignity, you oblivious selfish shit?

McGovern sort of hints at this little problem and they go back and forth a bit. RMW sums up:

The problem is, that it’s all very well having fundamental human rights, but if in your workplace you’re forced to go – you’ve very specifically rejected your birth gender, and now you’re forced into facilities that reflect that, that is devastating.

Slightly muddled, as live conversations can be, but he means forced into facilities that reflect that other wrong rejected gender. So anyway – it’s the same thing again. Yes, and if you’re not forced into those facilities, then women are forced to put up with you in their facilities. Why does your distress matter more than theirs? There’s one of you and more than one of them, and also, you’re a man and they’re women. Why does your distress matter more than theirs???

Cheeringly, McGovern does make this point.

I mean – there are people who would say it is devastating to have to share facilities – same sex facilities – with a biological man.

His response is frankly incoherent. The solution is additional accommodations, he drones. Yes that will work: all those “additional accommodations” will just spring into being, at no expense or inconvenience or loss of space needed for other things. That’s why this has been happening all along oh wait no it hasn’t.

Then he goes on to bleat about people being “unpleasant” by which he means calling a man a man. He sounds quite…dim. Pompous, because he has the voice for it [a male attribute by the way, and he deploys it without apparent shyness], but fatuous.

Then he calls Stephen Whittle and someone else “eminences grises” pronounced “eminence greezez”. Hahahahahasorryhahahahaha

Then McGovern asks him about calling Sex Matters “evil” and he squirms a bit and that’s the end. He has a little talent in the department of talking slowly in a gravelly voice so that he sounds thoughtful (and deeply male, to underline the point), but he wasn’t even slightly persuasive.

Completely normal. Not corrupt at all. No risk of favors in exchange for a tiny gifty. Just a kind gesture from a dear friend. Clean as a whistle.

Trump to accept luxury jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One

Sure; why not? Heads of state accept little prezzies from other countries all the time. A huge luxury airplane isn’t worth much at all – not as much as a nice dinner at the local Chipotle.

Given the massive value of a Boeing 747-8, the move is unprecedented and raises substantial ethical and legal questions. A Qatari official said the plane is technically being gifted from the Qatari Ministry of Defense to the Pentagon, describing it more as a government-to-government transaction instead of a personal one. The Defense Department will then retrofit the plane for the president’s use with security features and modifications.

All totally impersonal. It’s about like donating some concrete slabs to the Pentagon to patch a sidewalk.

The plan is for the plane to be donated to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office, ensuring he can continue to use it, according to a person familiar.

You what? He gets to keep it?

Stone the crows. That’s a bribe.

Democrats quickly condemned the news Sunday, with the Democratic National Committee describing it in a news release as “Trump’s latest grift.”

“Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a statement. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with extra legroom.”

And solid gold plating.

Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the potential move is a sharp departure from the playbook presidents have followed to ensure they stay in line with the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bans foreign payments to a sitting US president.

“We’ve never seen something on the level of a $400 million plane,” he said. “It is a scale well beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”

That’s Trump for ya. From nothing to a luxury jumbo jet in one jump. Tentative he is not.

Enough.

Enough. No more putting the needs of men who identify as female – and want to be validated in that identity to the extent of demanding access to women's changing rooms – above the needs of women who've been sexually abused as children. Enough.https://t.co/kBY8ekSHs5

— Sonia Sodha (@soniasodha) May 11, 2025

And that's not even the worst part of this story. pic.twitter.com/dwYLv8Twv2

— Sonia Sodha (@soniasodha) May 11, 2025

Every so often I feel incensed with anger that the needs of these men have been so blatantly prioritised over the needs of women, especially when it's women who are far, far more vulnerable than them, and reading this story was one of those moments.

— Sonia Sodha (@soniasodha) May 11, 2025

Same, except not so much every so often as multiple times every day.

It seems there’s a thing called the Met Gala. The two words together are very slightly familiar, but I can’t say I’ve ever paid much attention to it. Hadley Freeman was caught in Manhattan last week while the Gala was galaing.

What was once a low-key fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in Manhattan has become an annual warning about the dangers of being too rich, too thin and too obsessed with Instagram. Every year there’s a jaunty dress code “theme” — shudder — but most of the female celebrities simply do what they always do at these things, which is look as naked and/or uncomfortable as possible.

Ya. That’s a thing that’s been bugging me forever – as in, the whole of my adult life. Why do women still do that? Feminism is a thing, and has been for decades. Why, then, do women’s clothes just get more and more insultingly impractical and torturous and sex-focused? Why do women’s clothes look as if they’re designed by pimps while men’s clothes don’t? Why don’t women refuse?

What I couldn’t cope with was the homogeneity of the bodies and faces. Even in a year that was ostensibly meant to celebrate “diversity”, the women at the Met Ball were all shrinking to a vanishing point, their faces so smooth it’s impossible to tell anyone’s age any more. Is Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian Klan, 20 years old? Fifty? I’d believe either. Anne Hathaway looked as if she’d been drawn by AI. Demi Moore’s clavicles were more prominent than her facial features. And yet, it’s considered “body-shaming” to notice what is being thrust in front of our faces, and so, in the name of diversity, we all have to pretend we are blind and that it’s totally normal that twentysomethings are full of fillers and fiftysomethings have no body fat. 

And we all have to pretend it’s fine that women must represent Sex while men get to represent Work or Cultivated Leisure. We all have to pretend not to notice that that divides the sexes into the consumer and the consumed, the subject and the object. Women have to dress for the male gaze, men have to dress as the sturdy male gazer. Women’s clothes might fall off at any moment, men’s clothes are firmly secured. Who agreed to this arrangement? Why didn’t it get canceled at least half a century ago?

It’s a branch of anthropology I find peculiarly irritating.

Once artists rebelled against old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and femininity, like Boy George, KD Lang and Madonna. Now those who don’t fit into today’s Kardashianised mould of celebrity beauty, such as Ramsey, Sam Smith, Emma Corrin and so on, describe themselves as “non-binary”, as if not having pumped-up breasts or biceps de-sexes them. The irony of the “non-binary” term is it reinforces today’s binary ideas about how women and men should look and behave.

So women have two choices: torture-clothes or trendy bullshit.

The arrests have begun.

It all went down on Friday afternoon when Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark and Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor, was arrested outside an ICE facility alongside three members of Congress.

While the congresspeople—New Jersey Democratic Reps. Rob Menendez, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and LaMonica McIver—were inside the Delaney Hall detention facility waiting to be given a tour, Baraka waited outside in a fenced-in parking lot as protestors gathered on the other side of the fence. He was told to leave the fenced-in part of the parking lot and, despite complying with the request, was then detained by ICE agents.

Interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and Trump advisor Alina Habba said on X of the arrest, “The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

Oh really? Trump has broken multiple laws, as has Musk.

In her own statement, Rep. Watson Coleman explained that she and her fellow members of Congress were exercising their legal oversight function as they have previously done at the Elizabeth Detention Center “without incident,” she noted.

A city mayor doesn’t have that legal oversight function, I suppose, but arresting this one still looks like massive overkill.

Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security, called the protest a “bizarre political stunt” and described the politicians as having stormed the gate of the center.

Oh we’re the ones who are bizarre. Not Trump’s gang of sadists but the people trying to monitor their sadism and report it to the citizenry.

Appearing on Fox News, McLaughlin said that the people detained at Delaney Hall were “the worst of the worst” and included members of the MS-13 gang. She described the claim that the group were exercising their legal oversight rights as “laughable.”

How is it laughable? Trump is not an emperor; Congress does have the power to monitor what he’s doing. Checks & balances.

In a statement shared to social media, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said that he was outraged by Baraka’s arrest and called for his immediate release. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) described the scenes outside Delaney Hall as an “absolute outrage” and also called for Baraka’s immediate release.

New Jersey Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim both released statements on Baraka’s arrest, with Booker also calling for Baraka’s release and describing his arrest as, “disturbing, unnecessary, and indicative of tactics that are undermining the safety and security of our communities.”

Trump’s people are acting as if he already is an absolute dictator.

Sweet.

There’s just one small problem.

A boy is ranked #1 in the girls’ long jump, triple jump, & high jump in California.

His mother? Proud

Proud her son dominates girls.

Proud they look to him for “guidance.”

She even tells the girls: Don’t sit out.

Give it your all, girls! Then he can humiliate you properly. pic.twitter.com/vEVySYHpnS

— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) May 10, 2025

Forced teaming and Vatican rags:

In the eyes of many LGBTQ Catholics

I have to stop you right there. Seven words in and you’re lying already. There are no LGBTQ Catholics. There can’t be. It’s not a thing. LGB is sexual orientation, Q means nothing, T is genner idenniny which is 1. bullshit and 2. incompatible with LG.

NBC of course found someone to explain with all due ponderous verbiageification what the new pope means to him her them us you insert chosen pronoun somewhere.

Jason Steidl Jack, a gay Catholic and an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York, described his reaction to the election of Pope Leo, the first-ever American to lead the Holy See, as “cautiously optimistic.”

“I do see him continuing Pope Francis’ legacy, especially of dialogue and synodality,” Steidl Jack said, describing synodality as “this idea of journeying together” and “listening to one another.” However, he said the new pope’s election “doesn’t assuage all of the fears that I have as an LGBTQ Catholic.”

“The church’s teaching, even under Pope Francis, remains incredibly homophobic, and the church goes on inventing new ways of being transphobic as it really avoids learning about trans people and their experiences,” he said, adding, however, that the new pontiff seems “open to dialogue and inclusion” given his remarks on Thursday.

Learning what “about trans people and their experiences”? That people continue to know the differences between women and men? That not everyone is eager or willing to change the definitions of “woman” and “man” such that they mean their own opposites? That most people still understand why women don’t want men taking over everything that used to belong to women?