The Times version of the Martine Croxall/pregnant people clash:

A BBC News presenter who corrected the phrase “pregnant people” to “women” while live on-air has had 20 complaints about her upheld.

Martine Croxall, 56, was introducing a news item in June about a study into protecting vulnerable people in hot weather conditions when she made the change to the wording contained in the report and appeared to roll her eyes.

Not roll exactly. More do that thing where you twitch the skin around the eyes – it’s more a glare than a roll. She definitely doesn’t turn her eyes up toward the ceiling like a teenager. If you blink you miss it. If she hadn’t also uttered the word “women” no one would have noticed the slight twitch.

But now the broadcaster’s Editorial Complaints Unit [ECU] has censured the presenter for breaching its rules on impartiality. It concluded that her reaction, which it said “has been variously interpreted by complainants as showing disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation” revealed her personal viewpoint on the controversies surrounding the debate over transgender people.

Oh do shut up. There wouldn’t be any controversy if you idiots would stop pushing this ridiculous ideology on us. There shouldn’t be any debate over whether or not men can be women. They can’t; the end; don’t slam the door on your way out.

The Telegraph starts its article on the libel suit against Owen Jones with a hilariously absurd photo of him shouting into a microphone and brandishing a posh fist. It sums him up nicely.

A BBC editor has sued Owen Jones, the journalist, over an article claiming the corporation is biased towards Israel.

The article about coverage of the conflict in Gaza has caused the BBC’s online news editor for the Middle East to receive death threats, documents in a High Court libel claim allege.

Raffi Berg, who joined the BBC in 2001 and has been Middle East editor for its news website for 12 years, is suing Mr Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published on the Drop Site website in December last year.

Mr Jones spoke anonymously to 13 BBC staffers who claimed Mr Berg “plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’”. Mr Berg denied the claims.

The article also said that staff had told Mr Jones that Mr Berg “reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images” and “repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity”.

Did Jones speak anonymously to the 13 staffers or did the staffers speak anonymously to Jones? The first makes no sense so it’s probably the second.

I don’t know anything about Raffi Berg or the BBC Middle East desk, but I have heard and seen a lot from Jones and I’m not an admirer. May the better journalist win.

Now there’s a headline – and a BBC headline at that.

Martine Croxall broke rules over ‘pregnant people’ facial expression, BBC says

You might wonder what a pregnant people facial expression even is, but it’s the BBC saying, so it must be true.

The BBC has upheld 20 impartiality complaints over the way presenter Martine Croxall altered a script she was reading live on the BBC News Channel, which referred to “pregnant people” earlier this year.

Croxall was introducing an interview about research on groups most at risk during UK heatwaves, which quoted a release from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

The presenter changed her script to instead say “women”, and the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) said it considered her facial expression as she said this to express a “controversial view about trans people”.

Ahh yes. Of course. The “view” that women are the people who get pregnant is a view, while the ridiculous fantasy that it’s “people” in general who get pregnant is not a view but just the obvious reality.

The presenter said: “Malcolm Mistry, who was involved in the research, says that the aged, pregnant people … women … and those with pre-existing health conditions need to take precautions.”

In other words the subject here is safety and precautions, so clarity is absolutely necessary, but never mind that, it’s wicked to say “women” when you mean “women”.

The ECU said it considered Croxall’s facial expression laid it open to the interpretation that it “indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans ideology.”

Blah blah blah fucking blah. Knowing that women are women and men are not women is not a “viewpoint.” Knowing that rocks are not food is not a viewpoint, knowing that jumping off a tall building will make you go splat is not a viewpoint, knowing that rain is wet is not a viewpoint. We know some basics or we don’t survive.

The ECU said Croxall’s facial expression after she said “pregnant people” had been “variously interpreted by complainants as showing disgust, ridicule, contempt or exasperation.”

It added that “congratulatory messages Ms Croxall later received on social media, together with the critical views expressed in the complaints to the BBC and elsewhere, tended to confirm that the impression of her having expressed a personal view was widely shared across the spectrum of opinion on the issue”.

It’s not a “personal view” that women are women. It’s basic human knowledge. It’s basic mammalian knowledge. It’s not fancy, it’s not arcane, it’s not something you have to have a PhD in to understand. We all exist because of a woman. We all emerged from a woman. It’s not mean or reactionary to know that and to say it.

No you may not ask that question.

A woman has been blocked by Bristol city council from asking Green Party leaders whether “predatory men” could enter single-sex female spaces by posing as trans women.

Helen, a university academic in the city, submitted a question to ask at the full council meeting on Tuesday evening but was told it was “offensive” and would not be allowed.

I’ll tell you what’s offensive. City councils telling women we can’t ask questions about men in women’s spaces is offensive. Why is it offensive? Because it makes it so blindingly obvious that women just don’t matter and that our safety is overruled in favor of men’s determination to intrude on us against our will. What does that sound like? Oh yes, rape. It sounds like rape.

Bristol city council, led by the Green Party, has criticised the Supreme Court ruling in April that the words “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act refer to sex at birth.

Ok so then what are the words for people whose sex at birth is one or the other? If “woman” and “man” are not the right words, what are the right words? Please inform.

The council has been openly aligned with trans activists since it passed a motion in July 2022 to “recognise and affirm trans men are men, trans women are women”…

An entire city council actually passed a motion “affirming” that women are men and men are women if they say so. Might as well “affirm” that the sun is a warm yellow sphere a mile above the earth and the earth is a platform ten miles wide.

Tony Dyer, the Green council leader, claimed the Supreme Court ruling “falsely pitted women’s safety against trans rights” and said the “guidance does not achieve the necessary clarity and risks driving further exclusion and division for some of the most marginalised and vulnerable people in society”.

By which he means trans people, especially the male ones. He does not mean women, except for the few of them who call themselves men. He thinks men who pretend to be women are more vulnerable than women.

BBC Middle East editor sues Owen Jones for libel at High Court over Gaza article

An article by journalist Owen Jones about the BBC’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza has caused the corporation’s Middle East editor to receive death threats, documents in a High Court libel claim allege.

Raffi Berg, who joined the BBC in 2001 and has been Middle East editor for its news website for 12 years, is suing Jones over an article titled The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza published on the Drop Site website in December last year.

The claims in the article, which Berg denies, include that BBC staff told Jones that Berg “plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’”.

I can’t help feeling just a little Schadenfreude at OJ’s being tripped up. He is such a smug dismisser of women, you know.

Mr Stables said that following the article’s publication, an online petition was launched calling on the BBC to suspend Berg, who was targeted by protesters at the corporation’s premises in January this year.

The barrister continued that the BBC had since put “workplace security measures” in place for Berg and that police were investigating death threats made towards him.

But of course post hoc is not propter hoc. It’s a fallacy to claim that chronology=causality. The fact that a petition was launched after OJ’s article was published doesn’t necessarily mean the latter triggered the former.

One to watch.

Gordon Rayner at The Telegraph:

The BBC’s trans coverage is subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters who refuse to cover gender-critical stories, one of the broadcaster’s own advisers has warned.

BBC staff have expressed concerns that the LGBT desk – which is shared by all the corporation’s news programmes – has been “captured by a small group of people” promoting a pro-trans agenda and “keeping other perspectives off air”.

This has led to “a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories … celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”, a leaked internal BBC memo concludes. It said it reflected a “cultural problem across the BBC”, which treats issues of gender and sexuality as “a celebration of British diversity” rather than a complex and contentious subject.

Not to mention a pernicious attack on women’s rights.

The debate around transgender rights, and children being given irreversible medical interventions such as puberty blockers, has been one of the most highly charged issues in politics, society and medicine in recent years.

It led to a Supreme Court ruling that “sex” referred to biological sex rather than gender identity, and the independent Cass Review of gender identity services, which resulted in the closure of the controversial Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock clinic in London.

But stories reflecting the views of people who challenged the concept of gender identity were largely suppressed by the BBC’s LGBT reporters, according to a memo written by a former member of the broadcaster’s editorial guidelines and standards committee.

Also according to many of us sweaty commoners who keep saying women’s jobs should go to women and prizes for women should go to women and promotions meant for women should go to women, ad infinitum.

The Telegraph has seen a copy of the 19-page memo, which was sent to members of the BBC Board last month and is now circulating in government departments.

It was compiled by Michael Prescott, who until June was an independent adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, and sent to executives because of his “despair at inaction by the BBC executive when issues come to light”.

It warns that the BBC is not only risking bias in its coverage of trans issues, but is confusing viewers by failing to make it clear that transgender women are biological males, or even transgender at all.

In other words the BBC is not making it clear that some of the people it refers to as women are in fact trans women i.e. men. It just straight up calls them women/she/her and leaves it at that.

Stonewall, the LGBT rights charity, has attracted growing controversy in recent years over its increasing focus on trans rights, resulting in all government departments, as well as the BBC, withdrawing from its Diversity Champions scheme for equal opportunity employers.

Mr Prescott had already noticed that stories raising difficult questions about the trans agenda were not being covered by the BBC, even when they were being widely reported elsewhere. 

We too had noticed. Day in and day out for years we’ve been noticing and saying.

Among stories ignored by the BBC was the leaking of documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in March 2024 that raised concerns about the quality of care given to gender-distressed children, which was covered by The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Economist, the Observer, the Washington Post, The Times and others.

The BBC also failed to cover the story of Darlington nurses who took their employer to court for allowing their changing rooms to be used by biological males, or the story of biological male police and prison officers allegedly conducting strip searches on women and girls.

Instead of giving viewers, listeners and readers a balanced view of the trans debate, the BBC gave them “a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories, usually news features, celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”, the leaked memo says.

As many of us have been pointing out for years.

The leaked memo also says that the much-debated concept of gender identity is often presented in BBC reporting as “an established fact rather than contested”.

This was put down to a cultural problem across the BBC: “That too many of its staff have never considered the idea of ‘gender identity’ to be either spurious or offensive to many people.”

No not either spurious or offensive; both spurious and offensive.

Will anything change?

Trump does a magic.

We’re in good hands.

Slowly slowly slowly the disavowals trickle in.

Pan Macmillan has taken the unprecedented step of apologising to its former author Kate Clanchy four years after it parted company with the writer. Clanchy left her publisher Picador in January 2022 after her book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was accused of perpetuating racial stereotyping, an accusation she denies.

The statement put out by Joanna Prior, CEO, Pan Macmillan – who took on the role in 2022, a year after the controversy flared – read: “This was clearly a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past. I’m sorry for the hurt that was caused to Kate Clanchy and many others.” 

Jeezus. If you’re going to apologize then apologize. Don’t make a half-assed feint at apologizing while distancing yourself from the very apology you’re pretending to make. If you can’t manage to say you’re sorry for the harm Pan Macmillan did then don’t say anything. Above all don’t hint that your victim is a whiney baby who gets her feelings hurt too easily.

Also don’t translate “Pan Macmillan behaved horribly” to “a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past.” If the lawyers won’t let you say it bluntly and clearly, then fire them or ignore them or quit the job. Whatever. Just don’t do this all too familiar thing of pretending to apologize while carefully not actually doing so. Have some guts. Have some sensitivity to language, which is after all the field you’re in.

A six-part BBC podcast on the events that took place in 2021 – Shadow World: Anatomy of a Cancellation – is to be aired from 12th November, and features interviews with many caught up in the episode, including authors Philip Pullman and Monisha Rajesh. In a preview of the series now on the BBC, Clanchy says she was “scapegoated”, while one unidentified voice calls what happened to her as a witch hunt. Others, though, saw it as a reckoning at a time when publishers were still responding to the killing of the US Black man George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.

When publishers were still responding to the killing of George Floyd by randomly punishing authors in a different country thousands of miles from Minnesota.

Ripple effect. Pink News excitedly reports

The parents of transgender teenagers in the UK have denounced the effect the ban on puberty blockers is having on their children.

According to North West Bylines, the parents of children receiving gender-affirming care at GP surgeries in East Sussex, have described life as “horrific” and “inhumane”, in the wake of the indefinite ban on new NHS prescriptions for puberty blockers for anyone under the age of 18, imposed by health secretary Wes Streeting last December.

But North West Bylines has withdrawn that article by “Sophie Molly” so your source is currently not a source.

They identify as journalists.

Hahahahahaoops

Via Occupy Democrats:

Donald Trump gets publicly humiliated as his takeover of the renowned Kennedy Center results in a total collapse in ticket sales — with tens of thousands of seats left empty at the primary performance venues.

So much for making the center “hot” again. And of course it gets even more embarrassing…

“This downturn isn’t just about pricing or programming — it feels directly tied to the new regime’s leadership shift and the broader political climate,” one current staffer told The Washington Post. “I’ve heard from ticket buyers who say they’re choosing not to attend because of what the Kennedy Center now represents. The brand itself has become polarizing, which is unprecedented in my experience.”

43% of the once thriving center’s tickets remain unsold according to an analysis conducted by the Post on the Opera House, Concert Hall, and Eisenhower Theater from September 3rd to October 19th.

“That means that, at most, 57 percent of tickets were sold for the typical production — and some tickets may have been ‘comps,’ which are given away, often to staff members or the press. That compares with 93 percent sold or comped in fall 2024 and 80 percent in fall 2023,” write Travis M. Andrews, Jeremy B. Merrill and Shelly Tan in the Post.

But it’s not Trump’s money, so he won’t care. He had fun trashing the Kennedy Center, and that’s what matters.

Astonishingly, the Center has lost out on roughly $1 million in revenue just 45 days into show season and numerous artists have cancelled performances or outright refused to perform so long as Trump maintains his crooked iron grip over the center.

“Depressed ticket sales not only cause a shortfall in revenue; they also bode unfavorably for future fundraising revenue,” stated Michael Kaiser, former president of the Kennedy Center wrote.

The habitual lack of taste displayed by MAGA apparatchiks is also contributing to the center’s decline. With Trump ally Richard Grennell installed as interim president of the center, there has been an uptick in performances by “Christian artists” to combat the supposed trend of “woke” artistry. It’s worth pointing out that any “Christian” willing to support this cruel, fascist, murderous administration is Christian in name only.

Who wants “Christian” artists anyway? What are they gonna do, an all-singing all-dancing Pilgrim’s Progress? Paradise Lost starring Mel Gibson?

For some reason I find myself thinking about Brown v Board of Education today.

On May 17, 1954, a decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case declared the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. The landmark Brown v. Board decision gave LDF [Legal Defense Fund] its most celebrated victory in a long, storied history of fighting for civil rights and marked a defining moment in US history.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education occurred after a hard-fought, multi-year campaign to persuade all nine justices to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine that their predecessors had endorsed in the Court’s infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This campaign was conceived in the 1930s by Charles Hamilton Houston, then Dean of Howard Law School, and brilliantly executed in a series of cases over the next two decades by his star pupil, Thurgood Marshall – the man who became Legal Defense Fund’s first Director-Counsel and a Supreme Court Justice.

It was always a peculiar doctrine, of course. If equal, why separate? The answer was “Because you give us the squick, because we’re racists, because we’ve been raised that way, because of this country’s long history of highly active racism right down to enslavement and genocide.” That was the answer but it wasn’t entirely convenient to say it out loud, so the Supreme Court had to step in.

The lawyers marshalled expert witnesses to prove what most of us take for granted today, that state-enforced racial segregation in education “deprives [Black children] of equal status in the school community…destroys their self-respect, denies them full opportunity for democratic social development [and]…stamps [them] with a badge of inferiority.”

First there’s grasping the truth of that statement, and then there’s giving a damn about it. A lot of people didn’t give a damn then and too many still don’t give a damn now. Trump is encouraging and flattering the don’t give a damners because that’s who he is.

The gender wars are partly about a form of segregation, but it’s the obverse of the pre-Brown kind. Women don’t want spaces separate from men’s because we’re inferior but because we’re at a physical disadvantage. Little boys of course think that does mean girls are inferior, but some of them outgrow it.

The years and years of childish meaningless tantrum continue.

It has been just over 200 days since the Supreme Court ruled that a woman was defined by biological sex alone. This landmark judgment sought to end legal and practical uncertainty, particularly on protecting single-sex spaces for women such as changing rooms. After the ruling, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it would issue guidance for organisations to implement that welcome decision. Many arms of the state, such as the civil service and NHS, have been awaiting it before taking action.

What “guidance” do they fucking need? This isn’t a new surprise law that everyone must learn a new language overnight or fly a 747 from New York to London or teach a university-level physics class. It’s just a law that reminds laggards of the tautology that women (and women only) are women. It’s about as untricky and undifficult as you can get.

But of this guidance there is as yet no sign. As this newspaper reports, the women and equalities minister, Bridget Phillipson, received statutory guidance eight weeks ago, but has yet to publish anything. Part of the delay is due to the government deciding to conduct a “regulatory impact assessment”, which typically takes three to six months. Yet this assessment is not essential. No such work was done when the government decided to restrict the winter fuel allowance, for instance.

But when it’s a matter of restating the blindingly obvious it’s another story.

I wonder what it’s like, in a day to day living life way. I wonder what it’s like to be in government while having to pretend that who is which sex is a difficult tricky arcane subject as opposed to something everyone knows from infancy. How can it seem anything but childish and absurd?

It is now unlikely that guidance will be published before the end of the year. Baroness Falkner of Margravine, the outgoing chair of the EHRC, has warned that the government’s delay is allowing organisations to continue to illegally allow trans people to enter single-sex spaces.

Of course it is, because that’s the whole point – continuing to let “trans people” do whatever they want while refusing to let women have rights we’ve relied on for decades.

One potential reason for the lack of clarity is that trans activists are stubbornly refusing to ­accept the Supreme Court’s ruling and continue to lobby hard against it.

Gosh ya think? Trans activists stubbornly doing whatever they want all the time is how we got in this mess, so of course it’s also how we can’t get out of it even after the Supreme Court has ruled that women are women.

But it is not only activists who wish to challenge the ruling. Nearly 50 Labour MPs are reported to have written to Peter Kyle, the business secretary, complaining of a “minefield” of competing rights.

Oh fuck off. The rights are only “competing” because fools have allowed trans ideologues to demolish women’s rights.

Government insiders claim it is “total nonsense” to suggest any delay is deliberate, and that any hold-up is due simply to a complex document requiring careful consideration.

What is complicated about “men are not women”?

Pamela Paul at The Wall Street Journal on the gender rebellion:

But when [Benjamin] Appel later enrolled at Columbia University, eager to learn about the theories behind his activism, the rhetoric he encountered felt more like dogma than inquiry. “According to queer theory, if you’re a man who behaves in ‘unmasculine’ ways or wears eyeliner you must be a woman inside, which I thought was regressive,” Appel, who graduated in 2020, recalled. “Saying that those superficial attributes are what make women women, and that any variation on the rough he-man stereotype means you’re not a man, reinforces these rigid sex roles, and I thought we were supposed to be against those.”

In his book “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic,” which comes out next week, Appel argues that gender ideology is “illiberal, regressive and anti-gay”—as much a cult as Lambs of God, the fundamentalist sect in which Appel was raised—and one that he and an increasingly vocal group of gay men, lesbians and bisexual people reject. 

And anti-woman. Extremely, wildly, maddeningly anti-woman.

While gay and lesbian people emphasized that they oppose discrimination and harassment of transgender adults, they resent being “force teamed,” “taken over” or “erased” by trans and queer ideologues, especially when gay people constitute 90% of those Gallup categorizes as LGBTQ+. In private chat groups and burgeoning LGB organizations and on podcasts, many question whether same-sex attracted people should have allied themselves with trans and queer identities in the first place. To most LGBTQ+ groups this attitude is nothing short of trans exclusion and antithetical to their principles.  

Which, of course, is just the same problem recirculated. As always. There is no “LGBTQ+” that is a coherent or natural grouping, there is only the obstinate determination to mash the LGB and the TQ+ together, which is where we started.

We are allowed to exclude categories from other categories. We are allowed to exclude baseball from a discussion of climate change, and vice versa. We are allowed to notice and mention differences. It’s not automatically hostile or unfair to talk about X without adding any Y or & or cat emoji.

These disagreements stem from radically different ways of viewing identity. Gay people typically see their homosexuality as fundamentally grounded in biology and based on attraction to people of the same sex. Transgender people instead prioritize gender identity, defined by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither.”

Note the goopy coercive “innermost” – the trans version of “sacred”. If it’s “innermost” no one can dispute it, because hey, it’s innermost – so inner you can’t see it or hear it, so you just have to shut up and believe it.

No we don’t.

“For those of us who work in this field as advocacy-focused political activists, these are hard conversations we have to have as a movement,” said Cathy Renna, communications director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, which was founded in 1973 as the National Gay Task Force. “To me, this is often about fear of the other, and nobody understands that better than queer people.” As for gay people who don’t believe in gender identity, Renna says, “It’s fine not to believe in it, but why do you have to impose what you believe on everyone else?”

Oooooh, that’s the easiest question I’ve seen in a long time. Because they are imposing it on us. Because if we don’t believe in it and say so, we are bullied and ostracized and punished and fired from jobs. That’s why. We’re not the ones imposing “what we believe” on everyone else, we’re the ones resisting being forced to adhere to a childish magical belief in disembodied gender.

“Everyone is hellbent on sticking together because they think there’s strength and validation in numbers, but that’s not true,” says Arielle Scarcella, a 39-year-old Brooklyn-based YouTuber who frequently posts videos critiquing gender theory and trans activism to her 800,000 followers. “I think there’s safety in sanity, because people can understand things that make sense, and none of this makes sense. You now have straight people calling themselves queer because they have purple hair and are non-monogamous.”  

Everybody wants to be special.

Many gays and lesbians say gender identity strips same-sex attraction of its meaning. “Transgender and queer activists have disappeared the idea of sex, and that means getting rid of the idea of sexual orientation and the whole basis of being gay,” says Ann Menasche, 72, a civil-rights lawyer and lifelong gay rights activist based in San Diego. “I’m on the far left, but this really is not progressive.”

In 2022 Menasche was fired from her job at Disability Rights California after objecting to the omission of the word “women” in a statement her employer put out in favor of abortion rights and speaking out about sex-based rights. “I was called a bigot and a transphobe and such a danger to staff that I was refused unemployment,” she said.

Because she said women should not be omitted from statements on abortion rights. How did we get here?

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.

Matthew Yglesias writes at The Argument magzine:

Bigots in the tent

The article serves mostly as a rejoinder to a sentiment common on the US political left, “Some people don’t want a tent so big that it includes bigots”. Yglesias points out, correctly, that Americans are divided in inconvenient ways on certain topics, and demanding ideological purity on every issue tends to alienate almost everyone.

He ends up concluding: “Yes, I do want a tent so large it contains a lot of bigots. That’s the only tent that ever wins.”

However, nowhere does he ever question the whole wisdom of calling all people who disagree with you “bigots”. He doesn’t consider that, maybe, just maybe, they have a point or a perspective that differs from yours, and maybe it isn’t so magnanimous to say “Hey, bigots are welcome here”.

For a key example, he writes of the gender ideology (my words) issue:

According to Gallup, 69% of Americans and 41% of Democrats believe that transgender athletes should be required to play on teams that match their birth sex. In Pew Research Center’s data, the conservative position is slightly less popular overall but also less polarized, such that 45% of Democrats agree.

The fact that virtually no Democratic Party elected officials or associated elites publicly hold a view that is overwhelmingly popular with the public — and not particularly unpopular with their own base — is a testament to the power of progressive persuasion, successful intracoalitional politics, and, frankly, bullying.

Those who secretly hold less-progressive views and those who are sympathetic to the plight of trans people but are worried about winning elections are hesitant to speak more plainly for fear of being cast out of the tent. Instead, they quietly hope that someone else will solve this problem.

These views are “popular with the public”, and are “less-progressive”, or perhaps pandered to by politicians “who are sympathetic to the plight of trans people but are worried about winning elections”. These views are not considered valid ways of thinking about the issue except as a political tool. He is eager to be “sympathetic to the plight of trans people” but apparently doesn’t understand the conflict between that stance and the rights of women; his use of the phrase “birth sex” is further indication. But he doesn’t appear ready to consider that maybe he doesn’t understand the issue, and he slaps the label “bigot” implicitly on people who do understand the issue and disagree with his stance.

I want a tent so large it contains people who have some significant disagreements, and isn’t managed by those who call everyone who disagrees with them a “bigot”. Is that too much to ask?

Well you can’t do both. Pick one, or pick the other; you can’t pick both, just as you can’t be both here and gone, both alive and dead, both a rabbit and a snake.

It’s trans inclusion or women only. Not both.

(But what about women who claim to be men? If they claim to be men then they don’t belong in a women’s college. Quislings.)

Cambridge University’s oldest women-only college is allowing trans women to enrol.

Newnham College opened in 1871 and first allowed trans women students to join in 2017. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, it has decided to continue with its pre-existing policy.

…

Campaigners have pledged to report the college to the Charity Commission over a possible breach of the law for this decision.

Postgraduate student Maeve Halligan, who co-founded a single-sex feminist group, the Society of Women, at the university, told the Mail on Sunday that the decision proved the college is no longer “an all-female college”.

A letter to students from principal Alison Rose reportedly claims the trans policy of the college is “cleared by the college’s lawyers”.

“We are a women-only college, under the provisions of Schedule 12 of the Equality Act 2010 and our Charter and Statutes,” the college writes in its gender policy on students, published last month. “We are open to all female applicants.”

Men are not female.

It’s simple: the more items you pile on the less meaning there is. Adding more doesn’t make a claim more true, it makes it less so.

A row has broken out after a council rejected a motion to support the county’s LGBTQIA+ community.

Wiltshire Council’s councillor Helen Belcher, who transitioned several years ago, said rejecting the motion that would have ensured LGBTQIA+ people felt represented was “disgraceful”.

But there are no LGBTQIA+ people. Obviously. People can’t be both lesbian and gay male. What is Q supposed to mean? I is a medical condition, not a sexual orientation. A is just nothing – we don’t talk about disliking books or Portugal or horses as an idenniny so why pretend not liking sex is an idenniny? The LGBTQIA+ label cancels itself out by being so overloaded.

The original motion, which was presented before a full council meeting at County Hall in Trowbridge on Tuesday, stated: “[It] has been introduced to clearly affirm that, under the new administration, Wiltshire Council remains fully supportive of our LGBTQIA+ community and the diverse nature of our population.”

Well which is it? Diversity or communniny? You do realize they pull in opposite directions, right? Don’t you?

The Beeb unwisely includes a photo of Belcher, which failed to persuade me that he’s a woman.

Councillor Belcher said changing the proposals to a “bland, everyone matters” motion was “disgraceful”. “One of the speeches started talking about how we’re all the same, nobody’s different, we’re all human beings and my response to that was ‘I don’t get attacked because I’m a human being, I get attacked because I’m trans because some people don’t think trans people like me should exist’.”

More sloppy (and pathetically effective) catastrophizing. It’s not that people think Belcher shouldn’t exist, it’s that they know he’s not a woman. Those are two quite different things.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist on the ministerial foot-dragging:

Regulatory impact assessments are normally carried out in order to assess the effects of a proposed change in the law. The government should not need to be told that an EHRC Code of Practice does not change the law. Neither should it need to be told that a Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of a 15-year-old act of parliament does not change the law. In For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers, the Supreme Court has authoritatively interpreted the Equality Act 2010; that means it has told us what the Act meant ever since 2010.

…

A code of practice that is demonstrably erroneous (as the EHRC’s 2011 Code, which the current draft is intended to replace) is worse than useless: it’s still admissible in legal proceedings, and courts and tribunals have a duty to take it into account so far as relevant, but they are bound by the Supreme Court judgment. So the defunct Code of Practice will continue to rattle around confusing people — or in some cases providing them with the excuse they want to continue to act in defiance of the law. But every time a claim actually comes to court, the judge will still have to follow the law as set out by the Supreme Court. 

…

The proposed regulatory impact assessment looks remarkably like an act of simple cowardice. The government knows that a code of practice doesn’t make or change the law, but only explains it. It knows that this is not what regulatory impact assessment is for. It knows that many employers and institutions are currently delaying complying with the law until the new code is issued. It knows that many thousands of individuals are suffering ongoing legal wrongs because of the ongoing delay. It knows that a proportion of those will continue to bring claims, and the courts and tribunals will clog up with cases, and public authorities and private employers will continue to pour legal fees into defending them. 

But it also knows that the new code of practice will be unpopular with many of its supporters. It is seizing on the idea of a regulatory impact assessment to delay the inevitable; and to redirect the fury of its activists to the courts and tribunals, and to the brave individuals who will have to go to court at great personal cost, often one by one, sometimes in groups like the Darlington nurses, to enforce their rights. It’s a craven exercise in blame-shifting. 

It’s a toddler ploy. Toddlers can come up with endless reasons they can’t put their shoes on or get out of that mud puddle or stop teasing the dog. Magic gender is a toddler ideology.

Wonkypolicywonk points out that it’s fatuous to do an Impact Statement on…obeying the law.

Women & Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson is in town, and – having already lost the Labour Party deputy leadership election – she’s now lost her moral compass.

Yep, rather than lay before Parliament the revised Code of Practice that the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) delivered to her two months ago, Bridget the Moral Midget, the Queen of the Transgender Blues, has instead demanded that the EHRC produce a Regulatory Impact Assessment – an analytical tool used by government departments to quantify the costs and benefits of proposed new legislation – on the revised Code.

…

But even it only took one month, one week or even just one day, it would still be an utter waste of time and effort. Because what would be the point of the EHRC’s hard-pressed staff calculating the Net Present Social Value and Business Net Present Value of businesses and organisations ‘following the law’, when the only other policy option is for businesses and organisations to ‘ignore the law’, and ‘ignoring the law’ is not actually an option that is open to businesses and organisations?

The point would be virtue signaling. The point would be telling onlookers that Women & Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson is not one of those horrible people who think women have rights.

Daniel Sanderson at the Times has background on Tom Harlow.

When Tom Harlow launched the Cabaret Against the Hate Speech at the start of 2023, it was badged as a symbol of “queer joy”, which aimed to inject a bit of fun into politics and even tempt opponents to “dance along”.

Two and a half years on, however, the Glasgow-based drag queen has rapidly become one of the most polarising combatants in the crowded field of Scotland’s culture wars.

Except of course that one whole side of that particular “culture war” is not a combatant at all. It’s not rival gangs squaring off, it’s one gang trying to demolish the rights of half of all human beings. We – women – didn’t start any war. We just abandoned our role as the sex that doesn’t matter, the sex that is weak and clueless, the sex that can be raped and mocked and choked.

Harlow, whose real name is Thomas Michael Moncrieff Carlin, has carved out a niche counter-protesting events, often organised by gender-critical women, by blasting loud music at them from a huge, portable sound system.

Yeeeaahhh that’s not counter protesting. That’s preventing. That’s silencing. That’s drowning out. It’s hostile and rude and aggressive. It’s not cute.

Until September he was only really known to those embedded in the Scottish arts scene or LGBT activism.

That changed in early September when he attended a protest organised by For Women Scotland at Holyrood. What appeared to be a minor altercation with Susan Smith, one of the group’s directors, has mushroomed into a political row.

On that day outside the Scottish parliament Smith approached Harlow urging him to turn the music down. Harlow allegedly shoved a rainbow umbrella towards her face. When she grabbed it, Harlow attempted to yank it away. Getting nowhere, Smith simply walked off.

He then filed a complaint with Police Scotland, alleging he had been “harassed and intimidated” by Smith, a 54-year-old former financial worker.

But of course he’s the one who was doing the harassing. He disrupted a protest by women, he was asked to stop by a woman, he shoved an umbrella in the woman’s face. He is the instigator; he is not a victim.

Campaigners argued that the far more serious issue was the police’s alleged failure to protect their right to free speech by allowing one man to disrupt the event. Despite these concerns and initial low expectations for the case to proceed, police have now apparently sided with Harlow, issuing an ultimatum to Smith: accept a formal warning or potentially face being prosecuted for vandalism.

Women have a protest, man makes noise to drown them out, police side with man and threaten woman.

It might as well be 1957.