Oh good god.

Darlington nurses win

A group of nurses who complained about a trans colleague using single-sex changing rooms at work suffered harassment, an employment tribunal judge has ruled.

The judge found the nurses’ dignity was violated and they encountered “a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment” at work.

The seven female nurses, who work at Darlington Memorial hospital, brought a claim against their employer, County Durham and Darlington NHS foundation trust. It stemmed from their objection to another nurse, Rose Henderson, a trans woman, being allowed to use the women’s changing facilities.

It stemmed from their objection to a man, who calls himself Rose Henderson and claims to be “trans”, being allowed to use their changing facilities.

In a judgment handed down to the parties on Friday, Judge Sweeney said: “The trust subjected the claimants to harassment related to sex and gender reassignment by permitting the claimants’ biological male, trans woman colleague to use the female changing room and requiring the claimants to share that changing room without providing suitable alternative facilities.”

The ruling said the trust also subjected the nurses to harassment by not taking their concerns seriously. “This included referring to the need for the claimants to be educated on trans rights and to broaden their mindsets, the later provision of inadequate and unsuitable changing facilities for those who objected to sharing the female changing room with that colleague.”

Sweeney said: “The above conduct had the effect of violating the dignity of the claimants and creating a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment for them.”

All because they’re women who don’t want a man watching them change their clothes at work.

In a judgment handed down to the parties on Friday, Judge Sweeney said: “The trust subjected the claimants to harassment related to sex and gender reassignment by permitting the claimants’ biological male, trans woman colleague to use the female changing room and requiring the claimants to share that changing room without providing suitable alternative facilities.”

The ruling said the trust also subjected the nurses to harassment by not taking their concerns seriously. “This included referring to the need for the claimants to be educated on trans rights and to broaden their mindsets, the later provision of inadequate and unsuitable changing facilities for those who objected to sharing the female changing room with that colleague.”

Sweeney said: “The above conduct had the effect of violating the dignity of the claimants and creating a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment for them.”

Which is part of the point, isn’t it. It’s part of the fun of being a “trans woman”. It doesn’t work that way for women who claim to be men, but for men who dislike women it’s a gift.

The tribunal also upheld the nurses’ complaint of indirect sex discrimination in that women were more likely than men to experience fear, distress or humiliation if they were required to change in front of a member of the opposite sex.

Exactly so. Good to see someone finally notice.

The Darlington nurses win.

NHS bosses discriminated against a group of female nurses by allowing a trans colleague into their changing room, a tribunal ruled on Friday.

In what the eight nurses’ legal team described as a “landmark judgment”, a specialist employment law judge also said the women were harassed by managers at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, who unlawfully required them to share the female-only facilities with Rose Henderson, who was born a man but identifies as a woman.

It shouldn’t take any kind of specialist to know that.

Judge Seamus Sweeney said that trust managers had “engaged in unwanted conduct”, that the policy had the effect of “violating the dignity” of the nurses and that it created “a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment”.

And all this on behalf of a grotesque, unfair, women-hating dogma that men’s pretend-gender gets to cancel women’s rights to safety, privacy, dignity.

The judge, who was part of a three-strong panel, said the trust had behaved unlawfully “by not taking seriously and declining to address” the nurses’ concerns, which had been raised in 2023 and 2024.

And why did the trust do that?

Don’t look at me for an answer; I’ll never understand it. It’s just a silly greedy whim on the part of men who like to dress up as women, while for women it’s the most basic and necessary right to safety from men in general.

Rallying.

Several European NATO countries are deploying small numbers of military personnel to Greenland to participate in joint exercises with Denmark as US President Donald Trump ramps up his threats to forcibly annex the Arctic island.

Trump’s declarations have thrown Europe’s decades-old, US-led security alliance into crisis, raising the prospect of NATO’s largest and most powerful member annexing the territory of another.

And that another is very far from being NATO’s next largest and most powerful.

Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland’s defense, has warned an attack on Greenland would all but end NATO, and announced on Wednesday that it was expanding its military presence “in close cooperation with NATO allies.”

Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands and Finland have all since confirmed they are sending military personnel to Greenland this week.

Canada and France have also said they plan to open consulates in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, in the coming weeks.

The Magnificent Seven for bureaucrats.

News of European deployments to Greenland came as Danish and Greenlandic officials met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance Wednesday, hours after Trump said on Truth Social “anything less” than US control of Greenland is “unacceptable.”

“NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES,” Trump wrote early Wednesday, arguing US control of Greenland would also benefit NATO.

With Trump at the helm? I think not.

France will open a consulate in Greenland on February 6, a move that has been in the works since last year, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on RTL radio Wednesday, according to Reuters news agency.

Barrot urged the US to stop threatening Greenland, Reuters reported.

“Attacking another NATO member would make no sense, it would even be contrary to the interests of the United States … and so this blackmail must obviously stop,” Barrot said on RTL.

But it won’t. Once Stupid starts a fight, Stupid keeps going.

Oh ffs.

Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, has “presented” Donald Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize as she attempted to woo the US president. 

Sigh. Look. That’s not how this works. The object is not the point. It takes someone pathetically literal-minded and obtuse to think it is. In fact, if you think about it for five seconds, it becomes obvious that being in possession of someone else’s prize is more a disgrace than an honor. It’s like being a toddler whining about not getting any presents at another toddler’s birthday party.

Mr Trump has made no secret of his desire to be awarded the honour, which has been bestowed on several former presidents including Barack Obama.

Yes, he’s made no secret of his infantile greed, in other words he’s made a public fool of himself many times by whining about it.

Ms Machado, whose liberal Vente Venezuela party is widely believed to have won the 2024 election, was given the award for “promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela”.  

Which is not a reason anyone is ever going to cite for giving an award to Donald Trump.

Days earlier the Nobel Institute had ruled against Ms Machado’s previous suggestion of transferring last year’s peace prize to Mr Trump. Earlier in the day the Nobel organisers posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”

Last week, Mr Trump said he could not think of “anybody in history that should get the Nobel Peace Prize more than me”.

Well no shit, he can’t think of anybody in history period.

Trump is spoiling for a fight.

Trump threatened on Thursday to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces in Minnesota after days of angry protests over a surge in immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis.

Confrontations between residents and federal officers have become increasingly tense after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a U.S. citizen, Renee Good, in a car eight days ago in Minneapolis, and the protests have spread to other cities. Trump’s latest threat came a few hours after an immigration officer shot a Venezuelan man the government said was fleeing after agents tried to stop his vehicle in Minneapolis.

Rumor has it that immigration officers aren’t empowered to shoot people who are fleeing. They’re not cops.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT,” Trump wrote on social media. Trump, a Republican, has for weeks derided the state’s Democratic leaders and called the Somali community in the area “garbage” who should be “thrown out” of the country.

That’s interesting, because lots of people think that a guy who calls groups of people “garbage” is himself quite garbage-like.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 is a law allowing the president to deploy the military or federalize soldiers in a state’s National Guard to quell rebellion, an exception to laws that prohibit soldiers being used in civil or criminal law enforcement.

Well this isn’t that. Rebellion is what the Southern states tried to do; this is not that.

If Trump sends soldiers to Minnesota, he would almost certainly face legal challenges by the state. The Minnesota attorney general’s office has already sued the Trump administration this week, saying the ICE surge was violating Minnesotans’ rights, and on Wednesday asked U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez to issue a temporary order restraining it.

Brian Carter, a lawyer for Minnesota, told the judge that Trump’s agents were engaged in a “pattern of unlawful, violent conduct,” including racial profiling and forced entry into residents’ homes without warrants. “They are foisting this crisis onto us,” Carter said.

In a social media post on Thursday morning, Trump said incorrectly that the judge had “declined to block” the ICE surge. In the hearing, Judge Menendez ordered the Trump administration to respond by Monday to Minnesota’s complaints, saying she would rule after that, calling the issues raised by Minnesota’s lawsuit “enormously important.”

Telling the truth is for lesser mortals.

What a bizarre headline:

Trump would want military action in Iran to be swift and decisive, sources say

Oh, so he doesn’t want it to be slow and futile? What a surprise!

Dumb headline aside, the subject is the usual Trump failure to grasp reality.

Trump has told his national security team that he would want any U.S. military action in Iran to deliver a swift and decisive blow to the regime and not spark a sustained war that dragged on for weeks or months, according to a U.S. official, two people familiar with the discussions and a person close to the White House.

Yes, bro, so would anyone, but somehow the other team never gets the message. That’s why there are so few three hour wars in the history books.

“If he does something, he wants it to be definitive,” one of the people familiar with the discussions said.

But Trump’s advisers have so far not been able to guarantee to him that the regime would quickly collapse after an American military strike, the U.S. official and two people familiar with the discussions said, and there is concern that the U.S. may not have all the assets in the region it would need to guard against what administration officials expect would be an aggressive Iranian response.

Have so far not been able to guarantee him – but if you just give them a few more days they’ll be able to say it?

Much as I hate having to agree with Josh Hawley…god almighty “Doctor” Verma is a smug lying evasive enemy of women.

Mike Haubrich at Miscellany Room:

Hey, there’s even more alarming fuckery coming from the Trump admin, from the EEOC no less. They are demanding a list of Jews at UPenn.

The Guardian:

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

Daily Kos:

I hope that I don’t sound disrespectful or glib when I suggest that handing over any information about one’s religious identity to this administration almost guarantees that it’s ended up in the wrong hands in the first place, never mind with whom it might share that information without notification or consent. 

Even if the EEOC’s ostensible original motivation for seeking this information is a response to a wave of anti-Semitic protests on campuses following Israel’s invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s 7 October 2023, attack, it gets hard to square that motivation with so many of Trump’s own statements and those of members of his administration, and the statements and actions of so many of his supporters. To put it mildly, their commitment to stamping out antisemitism is mixed, at best. 

Back to the EEOC’s subpoena. It requests, in part, the following:

a list of all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation
groups (hereinafter referred to as “organizations”) related to the Jewish religion, faith,ancestry/National Origin. For each organization listed, produce the followinginformation:

a. Name of organization;
b. Indicate if the organization is run by employees and/or volunteers;
c. Identify the organization Point of Contact by first and last name;
d. Produce the organizations Point of Contact’s contact information to includephone number, email address and mailing address;
e. Produce a roster of organization members. For each member listed, indicate ifthey are a University employee or volunteer;
f. For employees identified on the roster, produce their last known contact information to include personal phone number, email address and mailing address; and,
g. Produce the organization’s website, if applicable.

If EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas is unfamiliar with why Jewish citizens would feel deeply uneasy at the idea of a federal government demanding such an extensive, detailed list of Jewish Americans, she is either (a) unfit to lead an agency known as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, (b) stunningly ignorant of Jewish history, or, dare I say it, (c) both. 

Both. It has to be both.

Well, yes.

Any attempt to “modify” Greenland’s territorial or constitutional status would not only violate international law, but could also “undermine” regional stability, the experts, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, said in a statement Wednesday.

“Assertions suggesting that a territory can be taken, controlled or ‘owned’ by another state in pursuit of perceived national security or economic interests evoke a logic of colonial domination that the international community has long rejected,” the UN experts said on Wednesday.

Of course it does. There’s no other way to describe it. “I want this country, you have to give it to me or else” is colonial domination on stilts.

We’re going backward in time.

Again with the forced-team-labeling.

There are no LGBTQ+ rights. There are universal human rights, and then there are lesbian and gay rights. I don’t know of any specific to trans people rights that don’t negate the rights of other people, mostly lesbians. The specific to trans people purported rights are not rights, they’re grabs and intrusions and sulks.

Freedom of the press on the way out?

The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter early Wednesday in what the newspaper called a “highly unusual and aggressive” move by law enforcement, and press freedom groups condemned as a “tremendous intrusion” by the Trump administration.

Agents descended on the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. The Post is “reviewing and monitoring the situation”, a source at the newspaper said.

In other words the Post is not preventing the situation.

The reporter’s home and devices were searched, and her Garmin watch, phone, and two laptop computers, one belonging to her employer, were seized, the newspaper said. It added that agents told Natanson she was not the focus of the probe, and was not accused of any wrongdoing.

…

In a first-person account published last month, Natanson described herself as the Post’s “federal government whisperer”, and said she would receive calls day and night from “federal workers who wanted to tell me how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues or transforming their agency’s missions”.

Pure coincidence. Right?

Press freedom groups were united in their condemnation of the raid on Wednesday.

“Physical searches of reporters’ devices, homes and belongings are some of the most invasive investigative steps law enforcement can take,” Bruce D Brown, president of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement.

“There are specific federal laws and policies at the Department of Justice that are meant to limit searches to the most extreme cases because they endanger confidential sources far beyond just one investigation and impair public interest reporting in general.

“While we won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles until the affidavit is made public, this is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”

That’s what Trump does: he escalates.

Saying “I need ___” is not automatically a valid claim to have a right to that ___.

Trump thinks it is, at least when he says it. If anybody says “I need” about something of his, of course that’s not a valid claim to have a right to it.

 Trump insisted that the United States “needs Greenland” on Wednesday, hours before the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, met with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House.

It doesn’t matter whether or not the US “needs” Greenland. It can’t have it. Trump can’t have it. Nobody can have it. Countries aren’t party favors or ice cream cones or bunches of flowers. They’re not inanimate objects of slight value that people can bestow on each other.

When you’re even losing the prosecutors…

At least six career prosecutors in the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s office — including Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson — have resigned as the office continues to face pressure to treat the investigation of the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE officer as an assault on a federal officer case.

Thompson also previously served as the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota; he was appointed by President Trump in June and served in the position until October. He resigned from the attorney’s office along with Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, Ruth Schneider and Tom Hollenhurst.

Two sources familiar with the matter tell CBS News the resignations stemmed from concern over a request to probe Good’s widow — who was with her when they encountered the ICE agents — as well as the way that the case is being treated as an assault on a federal officer as opposed to a civil rights case. 

Missing from photo: any sign of an assault on a federal officer.

Doug Kelley, a former assistant U.S. attorney for Minnesota, says the move is a major blow to the credibility of the office moving forward.

“I’ve been practicing federal criminal law in this state for 51 years and this is the darkest day in 51 years as far as I can see for the rule of law in Minnesota,” Kelley said. “If they feel the need to resign because of orders they have gotten that will violate their consciences, to me it’s a great statement on their part that this is not tolerable by them.”

In other words, when you start to lose the prosecutors people are going to ask why.

Trump says anything short of grabbing Greenland by force is unacceptable.

The Trump administration is poised for crunch talks with Greenlandic and Danish officials on Wednesday, amid the U.S. president’s ongoing push to take control of Greenland.

Greenland Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt and her Danish counterpart, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, are expected to convene at the White House for talks with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump doubled down on his aggressive rhetoric shortly before the high-stakes meeting. In a social media post on Wednesday, the U.S. president said anything less than Greenland becoming a part of the United States would be “unacceptable.”

So this is the new rule now, yes? We say it’s unacceptable for X to hang onto X’s Whatever because we want it so X has to give it to us?

Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, said he does not expect the U.S., Greenland, and Denmark to be able to find a diplomatic solution on Wednesday, describing the situation as “a profound crisis.”

“I think there was a significant change, I think it was yesterday, when it was announced in Washington that JD Vance, the vice president, was going to take over the meeting,” Bildt told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Wednesday. “It was scheduled to be with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has indicated a slightly milder approach, but JD Vance has, of course, been directly insulting towards Denmark and demanding very strange things,” Bildt said.

It’s all very Sudetenland.

NPR does the same thing.

SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:

This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments from two separate cases weighing the rights of transgender athletes. Little v. Hecox challenges Idaho’s ban on trans athletes playing on women’s and girls’ sports teams. West Virginia v. B.P.J. challenges a similar ban in West Virginia. 

Male athletes you fool. The issue is that they’re male so they don’t belong on women’s and girls’ sports teams.

MCCAMMON: So, in essence, what are these two cases about?

SOSIN: So conservatives have increasingly argued that transgender women and girls have an unfair advantage in sports, that their hormone levels make them stronger and faster, and for that reason, they say, trans women should be banned from competition. 

Not just conservatives, and not just “hormone levels”. Males are stronger and faster, in multiple ways. Humans are dimorphic, and male humans get the bigger and stronger morph.

You know, the rest of the country will remain as it is, but I think the bigger implication that we would see is that having your Supreme Court come back and tell you again and again and again that your rights matter less than everybody else’s is a really damaging thing for a lot of transgender individuals. We’re seeing a slow chipping away of transgender dignity, equality and also the law, very, very slowly.

What a lie. Nobody is telling trans people their rights matter less than other people’s. Courts and feminists are telling them there is no such thing as a right to pretend to be a woman in order to take jobs and prizes and services and sports trophies intended for women.

I’m not the only one who is annoyed by this dreck.

The rest of Jon’s rebuke:

Sosin simply *lies* about the research, notably the paper by @FondOfBeetles in SM (2021). But the whole framing is wrong, and the spin that you put on this – on words like ‘ban’ and ‘advantage’ – is deeply dishonest. On this evidence, you simply have no regard for the truth at all. It’s *astonishingly* poor journalism. Your reputation should be in the ditch for this, including among liberals.

Among many of us it is.

The ludicrous things Trump says. His total lack of awareness of other minds. Normal people know it’s not clever to say idiotic things out loud in public, let alone to the New York Times.

Whether he’s trying to make the country Whiter

TRUMP: No, I just want people that love our country. It’s very simple. I want people that love our country. I want people that respect our country, respect the laws of our country, and I want people that can embrace our country.

(The reporters pointed out that the only refugees currently allowed to enter the country are White South Africans.)

TRUMP: Well, I haven’t seen that. I mean, I certainly haven’t seen that. But over the years, it’s been very much the opposite of that. Very, very much the opposite of that. People are coming into our country. Nobody’s doing it based on race.

He hasn’t seen that – it’s his doing. He did that.

(The reporters said the pollsters warn Trump isn’t doing enough to convince the young voters he is addressing the economy.)

TRUMP: I don’t know. I think, I think I can tell you I’m very popular. This just came out, from TikTok. It came out just recently that Donald Trump was No. 1 on TikTok and the most popular person. You can have these. I don’t think you’ll use it.

Reader: they used it.

Whether he is interested in retribution on his political foes

TRUMP: No, well, it’s not retribution. But it should be retribution.

Sharp as a tack.

On $2,000 tariff rebate checks he promised to most Americans

TRUMP: I did do that? When did I do that?

Oops.

Prosecutors say no.

Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.

Right. When a cop kills a random bystander the thing to do is investigate the bystander’s spouse rather than the cop.

Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.

Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.

Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.

It’s so trumpy, pressing for a criminal investigation of the victim.

The fraud cases, which involve schemes to defraud safety net programs managed by state agencies, were the chief reason the Trump administration launched an immigration crackdown in the state. The vast majority of defendants charged in the cases are of Somali origin.

…

After Ms. Good was shot, the Justice Department decided to forgo a civil rights investigation that would establish whether the ICE officer’s use of deadly force was justified. That decision led several career prosecutors at the department’s civil rights division in Washington to resign in protest, MS Now reported on Monday.

…

Mr. Thompson strenuously objected to the decision not to investigate the shooting as a civil rights matter, and was outraged by the demand to launch a criminal investigation into Becca Good, according to the people familiar with the developments, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Mr. Thompson had originally set out to investigate the shooting in partnership with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that reviews police shootings. Senior Justice Department officials overruled the decision to cooperate with the state agency.

A filthy business.

The thumb always on the scale.

Right before Becky Pepper-Jackson sets up to shot put, she always taps her left foot on a board at the edge of the throwing circle.

The ritual helps her focus on her form amid the pressure of the track and field competition — not to mention the additional pressure of spectators wearing T-shirts that say things like “Protect Women’s Sports,” which Pepper-Jackson says are worn specifically for her.

The 15-year-old is the sole transgender student-athlete in West Virginia, according to her attorneys, and her bid to continue playing competitive sports is in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Three words in, there’s the thumb – Becky. Followed by she, her, her, her, her, transgender, her, her.

It’s the Washington Post and it picks a side in the first clause of the first sentence. It’s the Washington Post and it picks the side that tells blatant lies. It’s the Washington Post and it reports this story as if women and girls have no rights at all and simply don’t matter.

The justices are scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday about whether Pepper-Jackson should continue competing, considering that a state law bans transgender women and girls from playing on women’s sports teams.

In other words he’s a boy and he shouldn’t be playing on a girls’ sports team. It doesn’t matter that he’s a “transgender girl” any more than it would matter if he were a pretend girl or a masquerade girl. He’s a boy.

Pepper-Jackson’s lawyers argue that the ban discriminates against her for being transgender and violates her constitutional equal-protection rights.

The state counters that the ban is necessary to preserve fairness in women’s sports and that Pepper-Jackson should receive no exceptions. Trans women have an unfair physical advantage, no matter their age, because the athletes were designated male at birth, the state argues, adding in its brief that “biological males are, on average, bigger, stronger, and faster than biological females.”

Oh come on. They can’t expect us to believe that men have an unfair physical advantage because they were designated male at birth. They can’t even expect us to believe they believe that. Men have that unfair physical advantage because they are male. They would be male even if nobody had ever “designated” them anything. The reality precedes the label, and is independent of it, and is emphatically not created by it.

Although the Supreme Court in 2020 found that trans workers were covered by federal antidiscrimination laws, it has recently handed defeats to advocates for transgender rights.

But the purported rights in question are not rights. There are no special transgender rights just as there are no special forgers’ rights or imposters’ rights. Trans people have human rights; human rights don’t include rights to force others to join our personal fantasies.

Polls show that two-thirds of Americans agree with bans on trans women playing on women’s sports teams. The science concerning the biological advantages of trans female athletes remains hotly debated.

The debate is political, not scientific or in any other way factual. Everybody knows males have physical advantages.

Pepper-Jackson was designated male at birth. Heather Jackson, Pepper-Jackson’s mother, has testified that she noticed early that there was a difference between her youngest child and two older sons.

Pepper-Jackson had typically feminine preferences, gravitating toward dresses and asking her mother why their bodies were not alike.

Oh well then. Gravitating toward dresses trumps the physical body every time, yeah?

It’s sometimes hard to believe, the way respected news outlets make fools of themselves over this subject.

The DoJ is not investigating.

Trump’s Department of Justice is seeing its latest mass resignation over its handling of the case of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent last week in Minneapolis.

Days after Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced that the agency’s Civil Rights Division would not be investigating the shooting—despite the fact that the office’s criminal unit would ordinarily probe any abuse or improper use of force by law enforcement—four top officials in the section have resigned.

As MS NOW reported Monday night, the chief of the criminal unit—listed on the DOJ website as Jim Felte—has resigned, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief, and acting deputy chief. The outlet reported that other decisions by administration officials also contributed to their decision to leave.

The FBI announced late last week that it would be probing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross’ shooting of Good, who was killed while sitting in her car on a street in Minneapolis where ICE was operating—part of a surge of federal immigration agents who have been sent to the area in recent weeks, with the Trump administration largely targeting Somali people.

Despite video evidence showing that Good’s wheels were turned away from Ross, who was one of a number of officers who had approached her car and reportedly given her conflicting orders, the Trump administration is continuing to claim that she purposely tried to drive into the ICE agent and that Ross fired “defensive shots”—something law enforcement agents including ICE officers are trained not to do in situations involving a moving vehicle.

And they weren’t defensive anyway. Even if you think she intentionally bumped him with her car, it still seems clear that she was turning away from him, because that’s the direction her car went after he shot her in the face three times. Her car didn’t roll across the street, much less into Ross or in the direction of Ross, it rolled down the street, away from Ross. The word is not “defensive” but “rage-fueled”.

As administration officials have aggressively pushed a narrative painting Good as a “domestic terrorist”—a designation that ordinarily would never be used by the government until a full investigation had been carried out—the FBI has blocked Minnesota authorities from conducting a probe, leading the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to file a lawsuit Monday.

As the Washington Post reported Monday, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division would typically work alongside the FBI “to guide investigatory strategy” on a case like Good’s. Prosecutors with the division were involved in trying the officers who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis and Tyre Nichols in Memphis.

“It is highly unusual for the Civil Rights Division not to be involved from the outset with the FBI and US attorney’s office,” Vanita Gupta, who led the division during the Obama administration, told the Post. “I cannot think of another high-profile federal agent shooting case like this when the Civil Rights Division was not involved—its prosecutors have the long-standing expertise in such cases.”

Well Trump and his slaves don’t want expertise, especially not long-standing expertise. They want pliability, and automatic loyalty to Trump, and obedience.

Hundreds of attorneys in the Civil Rights Division have resigned since President Donald Trump began his second term a year ago. Stacey Young, a former division attorney who left the DOJ soon after Trump was inaugurated, told NPR that the division is “not an arm of the White House.”

“The Civil Rights Division exists to enforce civil rights laws that protect all Americans,” Young said. “It doesn’t exist to enact the president’s own agenda. That’s a perversion of the separation of powers and the role of an independent Justice Department.”

Yes but Trump is the big boss and that’s all that counts.