"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
Checking Starmer by voting Tory is the strongest card the Tories have, and very logical.
Having 200+ very left-wing MPs on Labour's backbenches encouraging him to do psychopathic left-wing things - with no parliamentary opposition- is in no-ones interests, save the fanatics.
The only way that logic works is if Labour goes into coalition with the Lib Dems. Coalition helped avoid the crazies taking over from 2010-15, but a minority government hardly kept the right wing quiet under May’s government. Quite the opposite, it gave the backbench factions (both left and right) real power.
The logic works now.
Labour are on course for a majority well over 250 seats with the Tories virtually wiped out.
That isn't logical. Once the Tories are safely out of office, with Labour having a solid majority, anything extra isn't in the interests of good governance.
I disagree, with a really humungous majority, Labour might do the things necessary to fix Britain's problems like tax land/wealth/property more, rather than do the things to try and be popular.
Weak. You can do any of that with a majority of 50.
We will see all sorts of defences to this thrown up in the next 6 months by those who'd gleefully (and partisanly) love to see the Conservatives wiped out for their own amusement.
It would lead to some terrible laws being made. Not in the interests of the country.
Did you feel similarly when Boris was clearly heading for a landslide? Assume you backed Labour in 2019 to check his progress in the interests of the country?
I don't think it was really accepted - especially by those on the right - that Boris was heading for a landslide. I remember on election night 2019 being as worried as I'd ever been by world events up to that point in my life that Corbyn might be about to have access to the levers of power. (The only way I could bear to watch the news was by looking at the GBP:USD exchange rate - when it ticked up slightly at 10pm I knew we were safe.) Whereas I don't think anyone's really in any doubt that Starmer will win.
Back in 2017, however, I do think there was quite a lot of expectation that TMay would win easily, and that probably drove up the Lab vote and down the Con vote.
Let me clarify that last para: I don't mean people who might have voted Con decided to vote Lab instead in order to keep the Con majority down (a few might, but I don't think a significant number). The belief that the Cons would win allowed unenthusiastic Con voters to stay home, and persuaded Lab voters with severe doubts about a Corbyn-led government that they could and should vote for him anyway to keep the Con majority down. (Indeed, I daresay many of the latter were as satisfied as they could have been by the outcome.)
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
Yeah - the Tavistock clinic wasn't great; but if you talk to patients there they would say that's due to unnecessary gate keeping and waiting, not that they were put on a fast track to medical interventions they didn't want. Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated - I could get testosterone blockers if I didn't want to see the effects of my male pattern baldness, and a woman going through the menopause could get HRT easily meeting with just the GP (or even over the counter). The pill has huge hormonal impacts on people - and many children (under 18s) take it all the time. For some reason it must be different for trans people, and that's because in the UK the ideological conclusion of most structures is to try to prevent as many people from transitioning as possible - even if those people want to and would benefit from it.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it well.
The Conservatives are going to do atrociously. However, what I'm arguing for is that a narrative may develop that mitigates against a complete wipeout.
It's interesting to see how many people on here feel threatened by that.
I've had the carrot of a monumental Tory wipeout dangled in front of me for a while now. I *will* be disappointed to have that taken away from me.
I don't have a problem admitting that. I've found the period of Conservative government from 2010 increasingly difficult and so the greater their defeat the greater the cathartic benefit for me.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
Let's analogise the Cass review to a different demographic.
Imagine that a review of women's reproductive healthcare took place (with a focus on abortion), and the response from most women was one of shock and horror at the reviews methodology, findings and conclusions. Imagine that the review overwhelmingly cited anti-abortion activists, and ignored or downgraded the significance of multiple studies that talked about the medical reality of abortions. Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions. Imagine that women's advocacy groups, doctors and charities made multiple public statements about how this review is clearly biased and not in line with the scientific evidence. And imagine that despite all this, the politics surrounding the review have been lead by political parties and activists and a media climate that has stoked anti-abortion narratives for years and years.
That is what this review is. It is a political hatchet job. Politicians and journalists in the UK are happy with the outcomes, but doctors who specialise in this area and the people it will effect are not.
I find your attempt to undermine Cass's conclusions rather sad.
It is a simple fact that the NHS embarked on giving puberty blockers without its own research study being completed, at far younger ages than the 12 yr limit in the Netherlands where the treatment was devised, to to people who wouldn't have been eligible under the Dutch scheme. When research study was completed, it didn't find that the use of puberty blockers had eased kids distress. So it's pretty rich for you to cite 'scientific evidence' in your attack on the Cass review - there was never any scientific evidence for this treatment in the first place.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
They did talk to a few - see the "York Study" in the appendixes. While limited in the numbers of individuals interviewed, it's one of the better parts of the report.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it very well. That was a horrible day at work. Some of my colleagues could not disguise their glee. The only very small positive is that the constituency where I worked and many of my colleagues voted (not where I voted) was so close that they suspended the recount over night and it wasn't anounced until late Friday afternoon.
Historically, the Reform vote share was almost always zero. So we can't always rely on history. A big per cent of right-wing voters begin from a place of rejecting the government.
Nobody can be sure of how to extrapolate from the history of increasing but still small proportions of the electorate voting UKIP in elections that weren't perceived as mattering much - in order to send the government a "stop 'em coming 'ere" message - then the EURef where you had the 52%, and then the weird 2019 EU election which didn't matter a damn but which had a higher turnout than the EU elections of 2014 and 2009, and in which the Brexit party knocked the Tories into 5th place.
The question is what will the racist section of the WWC do with their votes.
No psephological professor or "data scientist" wielding a pair of calipers is equipped to give a reliable answer to that question. Science won't yield the answer. Personally I think they will give their votes to a Tory party under a white Union-Jack waving leader. Look at the fundamentals, not the technical characteristics of one's favourite charts. Reform probably won't stand in many places where they might hurt the Tories.
What's so special this time that a minor party could have a big effect? Nothing. The only caveat being that this assessment could be wrong if a major newspaper supports Reform - e.g. the Express - but that's highly unlikely.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
Checking Starmer by voting Tory is the strongest card the Tories have, and very logical.
Having 200+ very left-wing MPs on Labour's backbenches encouraging him to do psychopathic left-wing things - with no parliamentary opposition- is in no-ones interests, save the fanatics.
The only way that logic works is if Labour goes into coalition with the Lib Dems. Coalition helped avoid the crazies taking over from 2010-15, but a minority government hardly kept the right wing quiet under May’s government. Quite the opposite, it gave the backbench factions (both left and right) real power.
The logic works now.
Labour are on course for a majority well over 250 seats with the Tories virtually wiped out.
That isn't logical. Once the Tories are safely out of office, with Labour having a solid majority, anything extra isn't in the interests of good governance.
The problem with that sort of thinking, like with tactical voting, is that it relies on being able to predict how other voters will vote.
If every 2019 Tory voter follows that reasoning then the Tories will end up with an unlikely majority, not what the hypothetical voter wants to happen. It's extremely risky but to vote for the most important thing you want.
If the most important thing you want is to throw the Tories out of government then voters ought to vote for that
No, I don't fathom that. It's self- policing.
If the polls show a humongous Labour majority on the way, and the Tories being wiped out, then that will drive the narrative of the campaign and voting behaviour of core Tories, to an extent.
If it shows it as getting close or vaguely close then there will be a counter-reaction to ensure the Tories are definitely out.
That works as long as there is no systematic bias in the polls and everyone makes their mind up weeks in advance. Good luck with those assumptions. I know they haven't been the ones you've bet with because, SNP 2015 aside, doing so would have lost you money.
I think you think I'm arguing for something I'm not here.
I'm not arguing the Conservatives won't be heavily defeated; I'm arguing about how the campaign may develop at the fringes regarding the scale.
I see that.
I think I'm arguing a fairly philosophical point of whether it is right to advocate a course of action where you hope that only a minority will follow your recommendation. It seems a bit dishonest.
Logically, if a course of action is something that would bring disaster if everyone agreed with you, then it follows you shouldn't advocate it (even if you're confident only a small number will).
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
Which other nations have openly said “this is a bad review and we have no interest in following it”?
Canadian doctors have said they disagree with the findings and have no plans on changing their care because of it.
(I noticed this because I was in Canada at the time it was published).
"There actually is a lot of evidence, just not in the form of randomized clinical trials," said Dr. Jake Donaldson, a family physician in Calgary who treats transgender patients, including prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapy in some cases.
So a doctor who is involved in the space and presumably has views that disagree with Cass. That was the first in the article - there were a couple of others (Dr Wong) quoted who also disagree but nothing like how you presented it
Mr. Gezou, I always forget if it was the 50s or 60s, but the US had a programme of sterilising those with low IQs. Naturally, that's viewed with horror today.
I did wonder (and mentioned) whether the reckless encouragement aimed at children to get them to make life-changing decisions (including sterilisation) would be seen horrendously in the future. Just at first glance, it seems nuts to try and divorce authority from the parents and invest it in children too young to vote, drink, drive, or have sex, while certain groups of people cheerlead from the sidelines and dogpile anyone who has any disagreements or questions as bigots.
You assume that parents oppose transitioning. It's clear from the Cass report that that is very often not the case. Children would not be referred or attend if their parent(s) did not bring them, particularly as the Tavistock was a national service requiring long journeys. Additionally, there was a wait of up to 4 years to be seen, once again requiring persistent parental motivation, and the majority of children had socially transitioned before they ever reached the Tavistock.
You may not approve of such parents, but it does seem that the majority were supportive of the treatments given, indeed desperate for treatment for distressed young people.
True, parents were desperate and many supportive and trusting of clinicians (as we all tend to be).
Also true that certain charities and pressure-groups tried to divorce authority from the parents.
Both things can be true.
Parents don't own their children - children are individual and separate human beings. Parents don't and should not have the right to dictate everything about their children's life. As a teen I had significant depression in part exacerbated by my relationship with my dad - I got antidepressants and treatment without his knowledge at 14 and that was a good thing. Many queer people know that their parents, unfortunately, do not always have positive reactions when their children come out - whether that's due to their sexuality or gender identity.
I think parents do 'own' their children, at least until they achieve majority. If we accept that children are not yet mature enough to make long-term decisions in their own interests - which I think we do e.g. we don't let children vote - then who, ultimately, makes the decisions? The parents. (I accept that there are edge cases where the state steps in e.g. in children of addicts incapable of caring for their children, but we are obviously not talking about that in the majority of cases). I grant that the relationship between child and parent may not always be perfect, but it is significantly more likely to be in the child's interests than transferring that responsibility to the state.
Parents have a duty of care for their children, and all adults who engage with young people have safeguarding responsibilities. But parents do not have carte blanche to dictate their children's life - they can't abuse or neglect them, they can't use them for free labour, they can't demand that their children believe the same things they do. If a gay kid comes out, a parent can't say "no" and aim to torture it out of them.
And kids do, indeed, do lots of "life changing" things without parental consent - abortions and medication for example. Gillick competence is good (and the Cass review is a threat to it, I fear).
The idea of parental supremacy over children should be very concerning to people, especially in the face of evidence that most abuse of children happens in the home or by close relatives. Parents obviously will have a unique relationship with their children, nobody doubts or wants to prevent that. But children are not property of their parents, nor are they an extension of them. They have their own needs and, sometimes, they clash with the wants of their parents.
I think we're talking about 'parental responsibility' for children rather than 'parental supermacy', which seems a weirdly loaded phrase. If we accept that there should be responsibility, then who is best placed to determine what is in the best interests of a child who thinks they should be the opposite sex, the parents, or an agency of the state run by people who really really like doing medical interventions to change the sex of children?
That's definitely not our family's experience of interactions with NHS gender services.
Hope you don't mind me asking, but are you related to Woody662 who stopped posting here some years back? He was a very good poster, and astute punter - one of the many that I miss.
I'd be rather surprised if that were the case. Woody662 was decidely of the right, whereas The Woodpecker is notably not of that hue.
Thanks John. That makes sense.
W662 was I think a professional gambler back then. Good poker player, I believe.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
It was extremely important that Dr. Cass came from outside the field of 'expertise in gender issues in children' - how on earth would she have delivered a report of any worth or credibility otherwise? She would have been effectively marking her own homework.
Historically, the Reform vote share was almost always zero. So we can't always rely on history. A big per cent of right-wing voters begin from a place of rejecting the government.
Nobody can be sure of how to extrapolate from the history of increasing but still small proportions of the electorate voting UKIP in elections that weren't perceived as mattering much - in order to send the government a "stop 'em coming 'ere" message - then the EURef where you had the 52%, and then the weird 2019 EU election which didn't matter a damn but which had a higher turnout than the EU elections of 2014 and 2009, and in which the Brexit party knocked the Tories into 5th place.
The question is what will the racist section of the WWC do with their votes.
No psephological professor or "data scientist" wielding a pair of calipers is equipped to give a reliable answer to that question. Science won't yield the answer. Personally I think they will give their votes to a Tory party under a white Union-Jack waving leader. Look at the fundamentals, not the technical characteristics of one's favourite charts. Reform probably won't stand in many places where they might hurt the Tories.
What's so special this time that a minor party could have a big effect? Nothing. The only caveat being that this assessment could be wrong if a major newspaper supports Reform - e.g. the Express - but that's highly unlikely.
The difference this time.
1) The extent to which the Conservatives are not considered a serious party of government by huge numbers of its usual adherents
combined with
2) The extent to which the reason for this is threefold: For most is is simply incompetent. For about half it is too centrist and not populist enough. And for the other half it is too populist and insufficiently One Nation.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
God you sound like one of those old bigots who thought they were no gay people in the 1970s .
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
Nonsense, St Rowling of Barnton has her finger on the pulse of Scottish voters.
1996 Donald Trump Jnr graduated from high school Trump didn't attend. 2000, Ivanka Trump graduated from Choate. Trump didn't attend. 2002, Eric Trump graduated Hill School. Trump didn't attend. 2012, Tiffany Trump graduated from Viewpoint School. Trump didn't attend. 2024 #BarronTrump graduates Trump claims he would have attended if he wasn't in court.
You decide if that is a truth or lie!
Barron is 6'7, DJTrump doesn't like to be in the same photo.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Mr. Gezou, I always forget if it was the 50s or 60s, but the US had a programme of sterilising those with low IQs. Naturally, that's viewed with horror today.
I did wonder (and mentioned) whether the reckless encouragement aimed at children to get them to make life-changing decisions (including sterilisation) would be seen horrendously in the future. Just at first glance, it seems nuts to try and divorce authority from the parents and invest it in children too young to vote, drink, drive, or have sex, while certain groups of people cheerlead from the sidelines and dogpile anyone who has any disagreements or questions as bigots.
You assume that parents oppose transitioning. It's clear from the Cass report that that is very often not the case. Children would not be referred or attend if their parent(s) did not bring them, particularly as the Tavistock was a national service requiring long journeys. Additionally, there was a wait of up to 4 years to be seen, once again requiring persistent parental motivation, and the majority of children had socially transitioned before they ever reached the Tavistock.
You may not approve of such parents, but it does seem that the majority were supportive of the treatments given, indeed desperate for treatment for distressed young people.
True, parents were desperate and many supportive and trusting of clinicians (as we all tend to be).
Also true that certain charities and pressure-groups tried to divorce authority from the parents.
Both things can be true.
Parents don't own their children - children are individual and separate human beings. Parents don't and should not have the right to dictate everything about their children's life. As a teen I had significant depression in part exacerbated by my relationship with my dad - I got antidepressants and treatment without his knowledge at 14 and that was a good thing. Many queer people know that their parents, unfortunately, do not always have positive reactions when their children come out - whether that's due to their sexuality or gender identity.
I think parents do 'own' their children, at least until they achieve majority. If we accept that children are not yet mature enough to make long-term decisions in their own interests - which I think we do e.g. we don't let children vote - then who, ultimately, makes the decisions? The parents. (I accept that there are edge cases where the state steps in e.g. in children of addicts incapable of caring for their children, but we are obviously not talking about that in the majority of cases). I grant that the relationship between child and parent may not always be perfect, but it is significantly more likely to be in the child's interests than transferring that responsibility to the state.
Parents have a duty of care for their children, and all adults who engage with young people have safeguarding responsibilities. But parents do not have carte blanche to dictate their children's life - they can't abuse or neglect them, they can't use them for free labour, they can't demand that their children believe the same things they do. If a gay kid comes out, a parent can't say "no" and aim to torture it out of them.
And kids do, indeed, do lots of "life changing" things without parental consent - abortions and medication for example. Gillick competence is good (and the Cass review is a threat to it, I fear).
The idea of parental supremacy over children should be very concerning to people, especially in the face of evidence that most abuse of children happens in the home or by close relatives. Parents obviously will have a unique relationship with their children, nobody doubts or wants to prevent that. But children are not property of their parents, nor are they an extension of them. They have their own needs and, sometimes, they clash with the wants of their parents.
I think we're talking about 'parental responsibility' for children rather than 'parental supermacy', which seems a weirdly loaded phrase. If we accept that there should be responsibility, then who is best placed to determine what is in the best interests of a child who thinks they should be the opposite sex, the parents, or an agency of the state run by people who really really like doing medical interventions to change the sex of children?
That's definitely not our family's experience of interactions with NHS gender services.
Nor is it even close to the conclusions of the Cass report.
Point 1 (Quackometer Myth 3). The evidence pyramid Cass got that evidence pyramid from OpenMD[1]. That's fine, and I've seen it before. But it's a bit naive and outdated. From memory, penicillin wouldn't have been passed by it. Variations on it have been proposed[2], and the Oxford CEBM[3] modified (right word?) it twice, first in 2009, then in 2011. The result[4] is a bit of a mess[5] and the simple pyramid still works as a pedagogical tool, but it's not that simple.
Point 2 (Quackometer Myth 4) The number of detransitioners Quackometer makes several points here, some of which are good but not relevant: for example i) if the number came from GIDS, then the fact that other clinics did not cooperate is not relevant, and ii) you can't draw conclusions from censored data (loss to follow-up), so they all may have detransitioned or they all may have persisted (right word?).
Incidentally it does make one good point: detransition and desistance are rates over time, not single events. X transition, Y detransition, Z retransition, and so on. Think of it as a Markov chain.
So. Confusion in pro- and anti-Cass analyses are
Clinic vs Clinics
Rejected for review vs rejected after analysis
As before, if anybody wants to lob me about 40Kpa so I can do a DPhil in 2025 so I can do this properly, then that would help.
Let's analogise the Cass review to a different demographic.
Imagine that a review of women's reproductive healthcare took place (with a focus on abortion), and the response from most women was one of shock and horror at the reviews methodology, findings and conclusions. Imagine that the review overwhelmingly cited anti-abortion activists, and ignored or downgraded the significance of multiple studies that talked about the medical reality of abortions. Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions. Imagine that women's advocacy groups, doctors and charities made multiple public statements about how this review is clearly biased and not in line with the scientific evidence. And imagine that despite all this, the politics surrounding the review have been lead by political parties and activists and a media climate that has stoked anti-abortion narratives for years and years.
That is what this review is. It is a political hatchet job. Politicians and journalists in the UK are happy with the outcomes, but doctors who specialise in this area and the people it will effect are not.
Your analogy is in no way relevant - it is designed to be political and inflammatory.
FWIW my cousin is one of the top gender reassignment surgeons in the country. She was deeply concerned by Tavistock / Mermaids etc. Surgery is sometimes the appropriate course to take but it is very serious and should only be taken after mature reflection and much counselling. Her concern was that activists were guiding troubled/confused children down a path from which there was no return inappropriately early
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
Checking Starmer by voting Tory is the strongest card the Tories have, and very logical.
Having 200+ very left-wing MPs on Labour's backbenches encouraging him to do psychopathic left-wing things - with no parliamentary opposition- is in no-ones interests, save the fanatics.
The only way that logic works is if Labour goes into coalition with the Lib Dems. Coalition helped avoid the crazies taking over from 2010-15, but a minority government hardly kept the right wing quiet under May’s government. Quite the opposite, it gave the backbench factions (both left and right) real power.
The logic works now.
Labour are on course for a majority well over 250 seats with the Tories virtually wiped out.
That isn't logical. Once the Tories are safely out of office, with Labour having a solid majority, anything extra isn't in the interests of good governance.
The problem with that sort of thinking, like with tactical voting, is that it relies on being able to predict how other voters will vote.
If every 2019 Tory voter follows that reasoning then the Tories will end up with an unlikely majority, not what the hypothetical voter wants to happen. It's extremely risky but to vote for the most important thing you want.
If the most important thing you want is to throw the Tories out of government then voters ought to vote for that
Yes. One of the reasons I like the Swiss referenda system is that it gives voters the chance to do more than one thing with their vote. With our system you are able once every 4-5 years either express your opinion about who's best for government, or try to defeat someone you don't like.
Tactical voting also has a problem, in that you may not much like the alternative either. Labour voters voting LD may be disconcerted to find that they've elected someone who spends the next 5 years attacking the (potential) Labour government. LD voters voting Labour may be disconcerted to find that they've elected someone slavishly loyal to Starmer. Green voters may well be rapidly fed up with either.
On the 200+ idea, though, it's actually the other way round. The leadership has rightly or wrongly ensured that the overwhelming majority of candidates are centrist, so if most of them get in, the existing left-wing MPs will find themselves in a small minority. They will be much more influential if the majority is only, say, 30-40.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
How long were people beaten up, killed, fired and generally persecuted for being openly queer? Most of Christendom?
Who knows what the "baseline" queerness of humans is? Maybe the "natural" state of humans is that more people are queer than 1/4 - maybe it's as high as 1/2. Maybe, even, a majority of people are some flavour of queer. We don't know, because the societies that dominated most of the globe were hugely patriarchal and actively persecuted queerness. We know that societies don't necessarily evolve to benefit the majority of people - in fact we can see the opposite where many societies are built in ways to entrench inequality (aristocratic land norms, capitalism, slavery relations, racial relations, gender relations and more). We know, for example, that many colonised cultures had ideas of third or non binary genders - and when colonial settlers engaged with them they purposefully campaigned to enforce rigid gender norms based on their social understanding, not those practiced by the native people. Why should we assume that straightness or cisness should be typical?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
2019 (December) to summer 2020 - Labour could be finished, forever. At best, it will take them at least two parliaments to get near to power. 2020-21 - Starmer is a dud, and has no chance. 2022 - Well, the Tories are making a bit of a mess of things, aren't they? Could be a hung parliament. 2023 - Bloody hell, Tories have made such a mess Labour could actually win! 2024 - a Labour majority of under 100 would be somewhat surprising (though Starmer is still a dud).
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
It looks at whether in 5 years time debt is falling based on a wide set of parameters which you can change.
Change tax allowances, rate of CGT, spending on health, GDP growth rates etc.
It shows how difficult it is to keep to this rule.
That's interesting.
But it didn't let me apply full CGT to main dwellings, abolish the Brown Bodge £100k Tax Rate by reversing the withdrawal of tax allowance (which should be balanced out and more by adjustments to tax rates), or bring Fuel Duty into line with inflation since it was frozen in cash terms in ~2010.
NICs on Private Pension Income only not State Pensions is one I had not considered before.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
The numbers of people affected are tiny. I do have children, indeed I have a teenage son who is gay and has one or two trans friends and acquaintances.
The fact that "people have rammed it down everyone's throats", on both sides, is exactly my point. There are pressure groups who have pushed trans rights as a cause celebre because and a vocal group of celebrities and politicians who have been extremely noisy on the other side. And the rest of us are expected to have strong views. But about something that affects a tiny tiny number of very vulnerable people.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
Point 1 (Quackometer Myth 3). The evidence pyramid Cass got that evidence pyramid from OpenMD[1]. That's fine, and I've seen it before. But it's a bit naive and outdated. From memory, penicillin wouldn't have been passed by it. Variations on it have been proposed[2], and the Oxford CEBM[3] modified (right word?) it twice, first in 2009, then in 2011. The result[4] is a bit of a mess[5] and the simple pyramid still works as a pedagogical tool, but it's not that simple.
Point 2 (Quackometer Myth 4) The number of detransitioners Quackometer makes several points here, some of which are good but not relevant: for example i) if the number came from GIDS, then the fact that other clinics did not cooperate is not relevant, and ii) you can't draw conclusions from censored data (loss to follow-up), so they all may have detransitioned or they all may have persisted (right word?).
Incidentally it does make one good point: detransition and desistance are rates over time, not single events. X transition, Y detransition, Z retransition, and so on. Think of it as a Markov chain.
So. Confusion in pro- and anti-Cass analyses are
Clinic vs Clinics
Rejected for review vs rejected after analysis
As before, if anybody wants to lob me about 40Kpa so I can do a DPhil in 2025 so I can do this properly, then that would help.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
I don't think we can blame the Americans for this one. It seems largely home grown. The rest of the online world must think the Brits are absolutely obsessed with the topic. It's one area where the UK is agriculturally self-sufficient. Americans have been trying to export the abortion debate but fortunately, like gun rights and chlorinated chicken, we've so far said no thanks.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Lol - yes, I am the one that wants to enforce gender stereotyping and the anti-trans position (held by the right, the Catholic church, anti queer activists and generally a load of weirdos) are the people who are happy with doing away with gender stereotyping. Saying a woman can have a penis and a man can have a womb is what these people find threatening - even if it is clearly true.
I don't encourage people to "surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express" - I know loads of cis masc lesbians and cis femme gay men; trans people may want surgery because of the dysphoria they experience and I believe in their bodily autonomy to do so.
To give you an idea of how disengaged I became, the most startling quote I think I picked up by LT was "I don't know how I wee.". At which point I thought: "What ?!"
That may be a misapprehension of a slight conversational adjustment by LT going: "I don't know how I ... we ... (something something something)."
Farage is a far more polished and non-loony sounding media performer than Truss or a number of her other Tory friends. Of course that's part of why he's been a fixture of our politics for so long.
It looks at whether in 5 years time debt is falling based on a wide set of parameters which you can change.
Change tax allowances, rate of CGT, spending on health, GDP growth rates etc.
It shows how difficult it is to keep to this rule.
That's interesting.
But it didn't let me apply full CGT to main dwellings, abolish the Brown Bodge £100k Tax Rate by reversing the withdrawal of tax allowance (which should be balanced out and more by adjustments to tax rates), or bring Fuel Duty into line with inflation since it was frozen in cash terms in ~2010.
NICs on Private Pension Income only not State Pensions is one I had not considered before.
NIC on private pensions doesn't make much sense. If we want it to be similar to income tax, and we should, just merge it.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
I don't think we can blame the Americans for this one. It seems largely home grown. The rest of the online world must think the Brits are absolutely obsessed with the topic. It's one area where the UK is agriculturally self-sufficient. Americans have been trying to export the abortion debate but fortunately, like gun rights and chlorinated chicken, we've so far said no thanks.
Yes, we are known world wide as TERF island - and our trans brain worms are not a US import; it is just where Brit brain worms seem focus on what is the same overall battle.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Lol - yes, I am the one that wants to enforce gender stereotyping and the anti-trans position (held by the right, the Catholic church, anti queer activists and generally a load of weirdos) are the people who are happy with doing away with gender stereotyping. Saying a woman can have a penis and a man can have a womb is what these people find threatening - even if it is clearly true.
I don't encourage people to "surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express" - I know loads of cis masc lesbians and cis femme gay men; trans people may want surgery because of the dysphoria they experience and I believe in their bodily autonomy to do so.
It's the trans ideology which tells young people struggling with puberty who do not conform to the gender stereotype for their body that the problem is that their body is wrong, and not that gender stereotypes are too restrictive.
And, yawn, of course the Catholic church, etc, are wrong. What a lazy form of argument.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
Just to show that things haven't really changed; a sarcastic look into a very particular piece of corruption, from 1975. It's all downhill from here, lads!
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Lol - yes, I am the one that wants to enforce gender stereotyping and the anti-trans position (held by the right, the Catholic church, anti queer activists and generally a load of weirdos) are the people who are happy with doing away with gender stereotyping. Saying a woman can have a penis and a man can have a womb is what these people find threatening - even if it is clearly true.
I don't encourage people to "surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express" - I know loads of cis masc lesbians and cis femme gay men; trans people may want surgery because of the dysphoria they experience and I believe in their bodily autonomy to do so.
It's the trans ideology which tells young people struggling with puberty who do not conform to the gender stereotype for their body that the problem is that their body is wrong, and not that gender stereotypes are too restrictive.
And, yawn, of course the Catholic church, etc, are wrong. What a lazy form of argument.
No - nobody is telling children that the problem is with their bodies. The most gender fuckery I have seen is in queer circles - trans people and cis queers love playing with gender presentation. What we aren't doing is telling people who are saying they feel that their body is an issue that their understanding of their own body is inherently wrong and that being trans is something to be avoided at all costs. I say gender fuckery for anyone who wants it.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
The systematic reviews commissioned to support the Cass Review did not limit on study type - there was no RCT restriction.
If there's something in the Cass review that excludes non-RCT evidence, please point to it.
Also, you can do a randomised trial without blinding - sometimes, where it's obvious who has received treatment, it's the only way. Double blind is gold standard, but it's tricky for e.g. the benefits of limb amputation.
(I'm not defending the Cass Review, which I haven't read in full and I do have some reservations about the Review. But I have knowledge of the systematic reviews commissioned to support the Review and it's simply false to say they excluded non-RCT evidence, if that is what you are claiming - e.g. the x-sex hormone review inclusion criteria states as included study types: "Clinical trials, cohort studies, case–control studies, cross-sectional studies, pre–post single-group design studies or service evaluations that provided treatment outcome data. Case studies and case series were excluded.")
This is the report's summation: Overall, the systematic review authors concluded that: “There is a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormone interventions in adolescents with gender dysphoria/incongruence, and few studies that undertake long-term follow up. No conclusions can be drawn about the effect on gender dysphoria, body satisfaction, psychosocial health, cognitive development, or fertility. Uncertainty remains about the outcomes for height/growth, cardiometabolic and bone health. There is suggestive evidence from mainly pre-post studies that hormone treatment may improve psychological health although robust research with long-term follow-up is needed”. This is in line with other systematic reviews published previously..
The point is rather that the stance the review takes (rightly or wrongly) is that without definitive evidence, a strong brake should be applied to the provision of treatment.
Yes - and that's where I have misgivings. Most of the people involved in the Review and the supporting studies are from other areas of medicine/healthcare research and that's not a bad thing - it would be near impossible to find someone in gender healthcare without a pre-existing very strong settled view on the right approach! - but then you do end up with a possible bias towards the 'we mustn't apply treatments without strong evidence' viewpoint.
The affirmative group hate the Cass Review because it undermines (or exposes the existing evidence void beneath) existing practices.
The gender critical group loves the Cass Review because they extrapolate from absence of (good) evidence for benefits to assuming there is therefore (there is not!) evidence for absence of benefits - with some encouragement from the framing of the review, or the parts I have read, at least.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
The systematic reviews commissioned to support the Cass Review did not limit on study type - there was no RCT restriction.
If there's something in the Cass review that excludes non-RCT evidence, please point to it.
Also, you can do a randomised trial without blinding - sometimes, where it's obvious who has received treatment, it's the only way. Double blind is gold standard, but it's tricky for e.g. the benefits of limb amputation.
(I'm not defending the Cass Review, which I haven't read in full and I do have some reservations about the Review. But I have knowledge of the systematic reviews commissioned to support the Review and it's simply false to say they excluded non-RCT evidence, if that is what you are claiming - e.g. the x-sex hormone review inclusion criteria states as included study types: "Clinical trials, cohort studies, case–control studies, cross-sectional studies, pre–post single-group design studies or service evaluations that provided treatment outcome data. Case studies and case series were excluded.")
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
The numbers of people affected are tiny. I do have children, indeed I have a teenage son who is gay and has one or two trans friends and acquaintances.
The fact that "people have rammed it down everyone's throats", on both sides, is exactly my point. There are pressure groups who have pushed trans rights as a cause celebre because and a vocal group of celebrities and politicians who have been extremely noisy on the other side. And the rest of us are expected to have strong views. But about something that affects a tiny tiny number of very vulnerable people.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Truss endorsing Trump says it all. It's not like there's that much ideological common ground between them. No, what they share in common is narcissistic grievance. They both blame their failure on a Deep State.
Is there any chance of her losing her seat? I can't believe she ever spends any time there the amount of glad-handing alt-right whackos she undertakes.
There's a bit of history because the association tried to deselect her because she was having an affair...the turnip taliban. But she seems safe now unless they get fed up with all the nut job stuff .
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
The systematic reviews commissioned to support the Cass Review did not limit on study type - there was no RCT restriction.
If there's something in the Cass review that excludes non-RCT evidence, please point to it.
Also, you can do a randomised trial without blinding - sometimes, where it's obvious who has received treatment, it's the only way. Double blind is gold standard, but it's tricky for e.g. the benefits of limb amputation...
Is there confusion here between the studies that were included for review. and the studies that were reviewed and dismissed? The former speaks to how studies were selected, the former to how studies were analysed.
I don't believe any of the reviews did a meta-analysis, so I'm not sure that they will have excluded based on quality. In a meta-analysis you'd weight or possibly exclude, but the syntheses are mostly narrative or at most visual. I think.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it very well. That was a horrible day at work. Some of my colleagues could not disguise their glee. The only very small positive is that the constituency where I worked and many of my colleagues voted (not where I voted) was so close that they suspended the recount over night and it wasn't anounced until late Friday afternoon.
Awful, yes. And 2015 rivalled it for me. Bent over backwards to not scare the good folk of Middle England and the reward? - Tory majority. Those utter utter bastard voters.
"Right, fuck it then. If that's how we get treated when we try and fit in we may as well go off and do our own thing."
It looks at whether in 5 years time debt is falling based on a wide set of parameters which you can change.
Change tax allowances, rate of CGT, spending on health, GDP growth rates etc.
It shows how difficult it is to keep to this rule.
That's interesting.
But it didn't let me apply full CGT to main dwellings, abolish the Brown Bodge £100k Tax Rate by reversing the withdrawal of tax allowance (which should be balanced out and more by adjustments to tax rates), or bring Fuel Duty into line with inflation since it was frozen in cash terms in ~2010.
NICs on Private Pension Income only not State Pensions is one I had not considered before.
Cutting health spending in real terms gives a tremendous amount of room for funding elsewhere.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
Which other nations have openly said “this is a bad review and we have no interest in following it”?
Canadian doctors have said they disagree with the findings and have no plans on changing their care because of it.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
The systematic reviews commissioned to support the Cass Review did not limit on study type - there was no RCT restriction.
If there's something in the Cass review that excludes non-RCT evidence, please point to it.
Also, you can do a randomised trial without blinding - sometimes, where it's obvious who has received treatment, it's the only way. Double blind is gold standard, but it's tricky for e.g. the benefits of limb amputation...
Is there confusion here between the studies that were included for review. and the studies that were reviewed and dismissed? The former speaks to how studies were selected, the former to how studies were analysed.
I don't believe any of the reviews did a meta-analysis, so I'm not sure that they will have excluded based on quality. In a meta-analysis you'd weight or possibly exclude, but the syntheses are mostly narrative or at most visual. I think.
Thank you. Although I was referring to when the exclusion took place, not why.
I'm going to have to draw a flow chart, aren't I? One of the links you gave had one (and I assume the others did too) but only up to inclusion.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
It looks at whether in 5 years time debt is falling based on a wide set of parameters which you can change.
Change tax allowances, rate of CGT, spending on health, GDP growth rates etc.
It shows how difficult it is to keep to this rule.
That's interesting.
But it didn't let me apply full CGT to main dwellings, abolish the Brown Bodge £100k Tax Rate by reversing the withdrawal of tax allowance (which should be balanced out and more by adjustments to tax rates), or bring Fuel Duty into line with inflation since it was frozen in cash terms in ~2010.
NICs on Private Pension Income only not State Pensions is one I had not considered before.
NIC on private pensions doesn't make much sense. If we want it to be similar to income tax, and we should, just merge it.
I might be inclined to that, but it would be a big enough change so as to be difficult in one jump. We all saw how expensive the fairly moderate changes to NICs in this spring and last authum have been.
I think I would argue for NICs on Private Pension Income being used directly to increase the State Pension by ~8%. To me that is an appropriate rebalancing.
I had an interesting conversation with a pensioner who lives alone (divorced many years ago), and gets nothing beyond the basic state pension to live on which is £169.50 per weekm with certain Benefits.
She described her living expenses per month as "one week's pension on the car, one week's pension on energy, one week's pension on the difference between Housing Benefit and Rent, and what's left over on the rest." She is in receipt of local housing allowance on a 1 bedroom house, and has her council tax paid. It's been slightly rebalanced by Local Housing Allowance catching up with 3/4 years of cash freeze this month, but is a good illustration.
There are a lot of people like that. Positive changes by the present Government in addition to modest increases in the state pension are minimum wage increases and the default workplace pension scheme. These have been good moves.
Despite my bitter contempt for Rishi & friends, I will give them that,
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
The numbers of people affected are tiny. I do have children, indeed I have a teenage son who is gay and has one or two trans friends and acquaintances.
The fact that "people have rammed it down everyone's throats", on both sides, is exactly my point. There are pressure groups who have pushed trans rights as a cause celebre because and a vocal group of celebrities and politicians who have been extremely noisy on the other side. And the rest of us are expected to have strong views. But about something that affects a tiny tiny number of very vulnerable people.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, say penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
The systematic reviews commissioned to support the Cass Review did not limit on study type - there was no RCT restriction.
If there's something in the Cass review that excludes non-RCT evidence, please point to it.
Also, you can do a randomised trial without blinding - sometimes, where it's obvious who has received treatment, it's the only way. Double blind is gold standard, but it's tricky for e.g. the benefits of limb amputation...
Is there confusion here between the studies that were included for review. and the studies that were reviewed and dismissed? The former speaks to how studies were selected, the former to how studies were analysed.
I don't believe any of the reviews did a meta-analysis, so I'm not sure that they will have excluded based on quality. In a meta-analysis you'd weight or possibly exclude, but the syntheses are mostly narrative or at most visual. I think.
Thank you. Although I was referring to when the exclusion took place, not why.
I'm going to have to draw a flow chart, aren't I? One of the links you gave had one (and I assume the others did too) but only up to inclusion.
If 'included' and then not included in synthesis (due to quality) that should be very clearly flagged up in the paper. I'd be interested in any examples of that (as my understanding of what was done is therefore wrong, for some papers at least).
The couple of reviews that I saw pre-publication had no such exclusions - and they were, as far as I'm aware, the ones that attempted a bit more than a narrative synthesis.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
Salience. One of the things that haunts me for election prediction. How salient is this for voter behavior?
The armourer who handed a live gun to Alec Baldwin (and for no reason I can easily see brought live bullets on set) gets 18 months.
But Baldwin is on trial for involuntary manslaughter, facing (based on a quick Google- 12 years).
Seems a bit harsh to this non lawyer. You shouldn't mess around with guns of course, but I feel like more blame ought to attach to the person whose job it was to provide safe guns and who completely failed at her task.
It looks at whether in 5 years time debt is falling based on a wide set of parameters which you can change.
Change tax allowances, rate of CGT, spending on health, GDP growth rates etc.
It shows how difficult it is to keep to this rule.
That's interesting.
But it didn't let me apply full CGT to main dwellings, abolish the Brown Bodge £100k Tax Rate by reversing the withdrawal of tax allowance (which should be balanced out and more by adjustments to tax rates), or bring Fuel Duty into line with inflation since it was frozen in cash terms in ~2010.
NICs on Private Pension Income only not State Pensions is one I had not considered before.
NIC on private pensions doesn't make much sense. If we want it to be similar to income tax, and we should, just merge it.
I might be inclined to that, but it would be a big enough change so as to be difficult in one jump. We all saw how expensive the fairly moderate changes to NICs in this spring and last authum have been.
I think I would argue for NICs on Private Pension Income being used directly to increase the State Pension by ~8%. To me that is an appropriate rebalancing.
I had an interesting conversation with a pensioner who lives alone (divorced many years ago), and gets nothing beyond the basic state pension to live on which is £169.50 per weekm with certain Benefits.
She described her living expenses per month as "one week's pension on the car, one week's pension on energy, one week's pension on the difference between Housing Benefit and Rent, and what's left over on the rest." She is in receipt of local housing allowance on a 1 bedroom house, and has her council tax paid.
There are a lot of people like that. Positive changes by the present Government in addition to modest increases in the state pension are minimum wage increases and the default workplace pension scheme.
Despite my bitter contempt for Rishi & friends, I will give them that,
I get the political difficulties but the process of endless minor tweaks that we have used for the last couple of decades for taxation doesn't really work.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
It follows that the trans movement is inherently reactionary because it reinstates the normative gender roles that had previously been 'queered'.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
The main controversies are
Kids being given drugs to alter their bodies
Men, who haven’t had any surgery (ie men) , being allowed in female only spaces, sexually assaulting women then being referred to by judges as men, then put in female prisons
If adults want to pay for private surgery to sod about with their bodies, then let them do it. But not on the NHS, and not if they’re still at school. And self ID is complete nonsense
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
All part of the culture wars. Which, given we - as in the main parties - have largely stopped debating economic policy except for tinkering around the edges, is all we have.
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
What is this "female gender sterotype" of which you speak.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
It looks at whether in 5 years time debt is falling based on a wide set of parameters which you can change.
Change tax allowances, rate of CGT, spending on health, GDP growth rates etc.
It shows how difficult it is to keep to this rule.
That's interesting.
But it didn't let me apply full CGT to main dwellings, abolish the Brown Bodge £100k Tax Rate by reversing the withdrawal of tax allowance (which should be balanced out and more by adjustments to tax rates), or bring Fuel Duty into line with inflation since it was frozen in cash terms in ~2010.
NICs on Private Pension Income only not State Pensions is one I had not considered before.
NIC on private pensions doesn't make much sense. If we want it to be similar to income tax, and we should, just merge it.
I might be inclined to that, but it would be a big enough change so as to be difficult in one jump. We all saw how expensive the fairly moderate changes to NICs in this spring and last authum have been.
I think I would argue for NICs on Private Pension Income being used directly to increase the State Pension by ~8%. To me that is an appropriate rebalancing.
I had an interesting conversation with a pensioner who lives alone (divorced many years ago), and gets nothing beyond the basic state pension to live on which is £169.50 per weekm with certain Benefits.
She described her living expenses per month as "one week's pension on the car, one week's pension on energy, one week's pension on the difference between Housing Benefit and Rent, and what's left over on the rest." She is in receipt of local housing allowance on a 1 bedroom house, and has her council tax paid. It's been slightly rebalanced by Local Housing Allowance catching up with 3/4 years of cash freeze this month, but is a good illustration.
There are a lot of people like that. Positive changes by the present Government in addition to modest increases in the state pension are minimum wage increases and the default workplace pension scheme. These have been good moves.
Despite my bitter contempt for Rishi & friends, I will give them that,
Re the pensioner, she should get pension credit if her income is less than £218.15 per week (she probably does already given council tax being paid) so confused as to why it would be £169.50.
It looks at whether in 5 years time debt is falling based on a wide set of parameters which you can change.
Change tax allowances, rate of CGT, spending on health, GDP growth rates etc.
It shows how difficult it is to keep to this rule.
That's interesting.
But it didn't let me apply full CGT to main dwellings, abolish the Brown Bodge £100k Tax Rate by reversing the withdrawal of tax allowance (which should be balanced out and more by adjustments to tax rates), or bring Fuel Duty into line with inflation since it was frozen in cash terms in ~2010.
NICs on Private Pension Income only not State Pensions is one I had not considered before.
NIC on private pensions doesn't make much sense. If we want it to be similar to income tax, and we should, just merge it.
I might be inclined to that, but it would be a big enough change so as to be difficult in one jump. We all saw how expensive the fairly moderate changes to NICs in this spring and last authum have been.
I think I would argue for NICs on Private Pension Income being used directly to increase the State Pension by ~8%. To me that is an appropriate rebalancing.
I had an interesting conversation with a pensioner who lives alone (divorced many years ago), and gets nothing beyond the basic state pension to live on which is £169.50 per weekm with certain Benefits.
She described her living expenses per month as "one week's pension on the car, one week's pension on energy, one week's pension on the difference between Housing Benefit and Rent, and what's left over on the rest." She is in receipt of local housing allowance on a 1 bedroom house, and has her council tax paid.
There are a lot of people like that. Positive changes by the present Government in addition to modest increases in the state pension are minimum wage increases and the default workplace pension scheme.
Despite my bitter contempt for Rishi & friends, I will give them that,
I get the political difficulties but the process of endless minor tweaks that we have used for the last couple of decades for taxation doesn't really work.
Yes - an unwillingness to grasp nettles for fear of being stung.
I live in hope that Mr Starmer will have some strategic rabbits in his hat, even if some of them may prove expensive and difficult for me personally.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
Shouldn't a truly emancipatory movement want to free people from the need to become dependent on a lifetime of medication?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
What is this "female gender sterotype" of which you speak.
Pink dresses and ankle socks?
Whatever society decrees to be such on a given day. I do not dictate fashion. Or anything, tbh
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
All part of the culture wars. Which, given we - as in the main parties - have largely stopped debating economic policy except for tinkering around the edges, is all we have.
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
Here's some hard polling as a distraction. Isn't Street supposed to be vaguely popular & successful (however that's defined in Toryworld)?
Edit: LDs called Siobhan with approximately latin surnames seems to be a thing.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
The main controversies are
Kids being given drugs to alter their bodies
Men, who haven’t had any surgery (ie men) , being allowed in female only spaces, sexually assaulting women then being referred to by judges as men, then put in female prisons
If adults want to pay for private surgery to sod about with their bodies, then let them do it. But not on the NHS, and not if they’re still at school. And self ID is complete nonsense
Oh, agreed. But I was addressing @LostPassword's different point
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
Salience. One of the things that haunts me for election prediction. How salient is this for voter behavior?
It never comes up in the lists of issues ranked by voters in polls. They quote the economy, inflation, net zero, immigration, the NHS, education, national security, standards in public life. It's not even at ULEZ levels of salience.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
It follows that the trans movement is inherently reactionary because it reinstates the normative gender roles that had previously been 'queered'.
Given the backlash, I'll bet you that this ends with the imposition of normative gender roles, at least upon men.
Liz Truss devotees should head over to YouTube which has several hour-long videos of various media interviews given by the great lady in the past day or two.
Apparently the whole thing is the Bank of England's fault.
I think Liz Truss's delusions are at the point where medical intervention may be necessary.
Hugo Rikfind's column today illustrates exactly how batshit crazy her thinking is
This starts long before she is even in Downing Street. It’s 2020, and the Covid pandemic has just kicked off. Boris Johnson is already sick, as is Dominic Cummings, as is Matt Hancock, as is the chief medical officer. “I still find it hard to comprehend,” writes Truss, “how the official state allowed this to happen.” Think about that phrase, “the official state”. Who, actually, does she mean? By then, she’d had an unbroken run in government since 2012. Could she not think of a name?
I think "the official state" is her term for what the Americans call "the deep state",which is believed to prevent the Government from doing what they wish. How they expected it to avoid COVID is beyond me, it being a really weeny virus that spread around the globe.
She is a nutter.
I think Cummings has spoken on this issue.
Yes. He said: “about as close to properly crackers as anybody I've met in parliament”.
The question is how the Conservative Party system for choosing leader managed to pick her.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
Shouldn't a truly emancipatory movement want to free people from the need to become dependent on a lifetime of medication?
What? I have depression which, given the family history of depression and suicide, is almost certainly somewhat biological. Is it a bad thing that I have to take antidepressants to help me not want to harm myself or end my life? A lot of people who are medicalised or disabled are done so by society at large - I agree with the social model of disability. But some people do need medical intervention all their life to participate in society or, you know, survive.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Yep I think that in that area the Cass report is simply wrong. I assume that George Kirrin would fall foul of that particular prohibition.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
All part of the culture wars. Which, given we - as in the main parties - have largely stopped debating economic policy except for tinkering around the edges, is all we have.
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
Ah yes Corbyn, I remember him, but then it was daft debates about policies that couldn't possibly be implemented, like a windfall tax on energy firms, making non-doms pay tax, an energy price cap and renationalising Northern Rail. What is the point of discussing such unicorns that are simply never going to happen?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
All part of the culture wars. Which, given we - as in the main parties - have largely stopped debating economic policy except for tinkering around the edges, is all we have.
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
Here's some hard polling as a distraction. Isn't Street supposed to be vaguely popular & successful (however that's defined in Toryworld)?
Edit: LDs called Siobhan with approximately latin surnames seems to be a thing.
A welcome distraction - although has the LD Siobhan changed gender to become Sunny? Or am I just seeing everything through a transgender lens? (Alternative hypothesis, Siobhan has changed party to Green or was indeed Green to start with )
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
Which other nations have openly said “this is a bad review and we have no interest in following it”?
Canadian doctors have said they disagree with the findings and have no plans on changing their care because of it.
(I noticed this because I was in Canada at the time it was published).
That article appears to say that some Canadian doctors have said that. The article says, "While experts in the field say more studies should be done, Canadian doctors who spoke to CBC News disagree with the finding that there isn't enough evidence puberty blockers can help." That's not a formal national response! That's not an example of a medical org distancing themselves.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
I think that one of the merits of civilization and philosophy is that they give us the ability to escape from Darwinian pressure, should we choose to do so.
And, for the record, I chose my wife for her sparkling wit, her appreciation for fog, and her bright blue eyes - not her breast size.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Liz Truss devotees should head over to YouTube which has several hour-long videos of various media interviews given by the great lady in the past day or two.
Apparently the whole thing is the Bank of England's fault.
I think Liz Truss's delusions are at the point where medical intervention may be necessary.
Hugo Rikfind's column today illustrates exactly how batshit crazy her thinking is
This starts long before she is even in Downing Street. It’s 2020, and the Covid pandemic has just kicked off. Boris Johnson is already sick, as is Dominic Cummings, as is Matt Hancock, as is the chief medical officer. “I still find it hard to comprehend,” writes Truss, “how the official state allowed this to happen.” Think about that phrase, “the official state”. Who, actually, does she mean? By then, she’d had an unbroken run in government since 2012. Could she not think of a name?
I think "the official state" is her term for what the Americans call "the deep state",which is believed to prevent the Government from doing what they wish. How they expected it to avoid COVID is beyond me, it being a really weeny virus that spread around the globe.
She is a nutter.
I think Cummings has spoken on this issue.
Yes. He said: “about as close to properly crackers as anybody I've met in parliament”.
The question is how the Conservative Party system for choosing leader managed to pick her.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
Shouldn't a truly emancipatory movement want to free people from the need to become dependent on a lifetime of medication?
What? I have depression which, given the family history of depression and suicide, is almost certainly somewhat biological. Is it a bad thing that I have to take antidepressants to help me not want to harm myself or end my life? A lot of people who are medicalised or disabled are done so by society at large - I agree with the social model of disability. But some people do need medical intervention all their life to participate in society or, you know, survive.
Of course it's a bad thing that you have to take antidepressants. Wouldn't you rather not need them?
Isn't the point of 'queering' geneder roles to allow people to express themselves freely regardless of their biological sex?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
Salience. One of the things that haunts me for election prediction. How salient is this for voter behavior?
It never comes up in the lists of issues ranked by voters in polls. They quote the economy, inflation, net zero, immigration, the NHS, education, national security, standards in public life. It's not even at ULEZ levels of salience.
One hopes that Susan Hall will soon be at ULEZ levels of salience !
Incidentally quite an interesting little 5-6 minute video from the Gabby Cabby channel, about why he will not be buying an Electric Cab.
I don't quite agree with him on the limited life of electric vehicle batteries, or the price differentials when taken as a business asset, but worth a listen.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I was given morphine when I was wheeled into A&E after an accident. I didn't see it for sale in Amazon Fresh (actually just a Morrisons) when I went in to buy a sandwich yesterday.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
All part of the culture wars. Which, given we - as in the main parties - have largely stopped debating economic policy except for tinkering around the edges, is all we have.
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
Here's some hard polling as a distraction. Isn't Street supposed to be vaguely popular & successful (however that's defined in Toryworld)?
Edit: LDs called Siobhan with approximately latin surnames seems to be a thing.
A welcome distraction - although has the LD Siobhan changed gender to become Sunny? Or am I just seeing everything through a transgender lens? (Alternative hypothesis, Siobhan has changed party to Green or was indeed Green to start with )
Sorry, you're right! Though Siobhan Benita is now backing Sadiq so LDness can be fluid..
Comments
I don't have a problem admitting that. I've found the period of Conservative government from 2010 increasingly difficult and so the greater their defeat the greater the cathartic benefit for me.
It is a simple fact that the NHS embarked on giving puberty blockers without its own research study being completed, at far younger ages than the 12 yr limit in the Netherlands where the treatment was devised, to to people who wouldn't have been eligible under the Dutch scheme. When research study was completed, it didn't find that the use of puberty blockers had eased kids distress. So it's pretty rich for you to cite 'scientific evidence' in your attack on the Cass review - there was never any scientific evidence for this treatment in the first place.
While limited in the numbers of individuals interviewed, it's one of the better parts of the report.
The question is what will the racist section of the WWC do with their votes.
No psephological professor or "data scientist" wielding a pair of calipers is equipped to give a reliable answer to that question. Science won't yield the answer. Personally I think they will give their votes to a Tory party under a white Union-Jack waving leader. Look at the fundamentals, not the technical characteristics of one's favourite charts. Reform probably won't stand in many places where they might hurt the Tories.
What's so special this time that a minor party could have a big effect? Nothing. The only caveat being that this assessment could be wrong if a major newspaper supports Reform - e.g. the Express - but that's highly unlikely.
I think I'm arguing a fairly philosophical point of whether it is right to advocate a course of action where you hope that only a minority will follow your recommendation. It seems a bit dishonest.
Logically, if a course of action is something that would bring disaster if everyone agreed with you, then it follows you shouldn't advocate it (even if you're confident only a small number will).
"There actually is a lot of evidence, just not in the form of randomized clinical trials," said Dr. Jake Donaldson, a family physician in Calgary who treats transgender patients, including prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapy in some cases.
So a doctor who is involved in the space and presumably has views that disagree with Cass. That was the first in the article - there were a couple of others (Dr Wong) quoted who also disagree but nothing like how you presented it
W662 was I think a professional gambler back then. Good poker player, I believe.
Clearly not the same person.
https://ifs.org.uk/election-2024/be-chancellor
It looks at whether in 5 years time debt is falling based on a wide set of parameters which you can change.
Change tax allowances, rate of CGT, spending on health, GDP growth rates etc.
It shows how difficult it is to keep to this rule.
If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I just tried to listen to the Iain Dale interview of Liz Truss as wallpaper, and I'm afraid I only lasted about 10 minutes.
She rather lost me before it started by bluntly endorsing Mr Chump as the next US President.
1) The extent to which the Conservatives are not considered a serious party of government by huge numbers of its usual adherents
combined with
2) The extent to which the reason for this is threefold: For most is is simply incompetent. For about half it is too centrist and not populist enough. And for the other half it is too populist and insufficiently One Nation.
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Point 1 (Quackometer Myth 3). The evidence pyramid
Cass got that evidence pyramid from OpenMD[1]. That's fine, and I've seen it before. But it's a bit naive and outdated. From memory, penicillin wouldn't have been passed by it. Variations on it have been proposed[2], and the Oxford CEBM[3] modified (right word?) it twice, first in 2009, then in 2011. The result[4] is a bit of a mess[5] and the simple pyramid still works as a pedagogical tool, but it's not that simple.
Point 2 (Quackometer Myth 4) The number of detransitioners
Quackometer makes several points here, some of which are good but not relevant: for example i) if the number came from GIDS, then the fact that other clinics did not cooperate is not relevant, and ii) you can't draw conclusions from censored data (loss to follow-up), so they all may have detransitioned or they all may have persisted (right word?).
Incidentally it does make one good point: detransition and desistance are rates over time, not single events. X transition, Y detransition, Z retransition, and so on. Think of it as a Markov chain.
So. Confusion in pro- and anti-Cass analyses are
- Clinic vs Clinics
- Rejected for review vs rejected after analysis
As before, if anybody wants to lob me about 40Kpa so I can do a DPhil in 2025 so I can do this properly, then that would help.Notes
[1] https://openmd.com//guide/levels-of-evidence.php
[2] https://ebm.bmj.com/content/21/4/125
[3] https://www.cebm.ox.ac.uk/resources
[4] https://www.cebm.ox.ac.uk/resources/levels-of-evidence/ocebm-levels-of-evidence
[5] It doesn't take account of modelling which is very popular these days, and it's a bitch to automate. Surgeons tend to use impact to assess quality
FWIW my cousin is one of the top gender reassignment surgeons in the country. She was deeply concerned by Tavistock / Mermaids etc. Surgery is sometimes the appropriate course to take but it is very serious and should only be taken after mature reflection and much counselling. Her concern was that activists were guiding troubled/confused children down a path from which there was no return inappropriately early
Tactical voting also has a problem, in that you may not much like the alternative either. Labour voters voting LD may be disconcerted to find that they've elected someone who spends the next 5 years attacking the (potential) Labour government. LD voters voting Labour may be disconcerted to find that they've elected someone slavishly loyal to Starmer. Green voters may well be rapidly fed up with either.
On the 200+ idea, though, it's actually the other way round. The leadership has rightly or wrongly ensured that the overwhelming majority of candidates are centrist, so if most of them get in, the existing left-wing MPs will find themselves in a small minority. They will be much more influential if the majority is only, say, 30-40.
Who knows what the "baseline" queerness of humans is? Maybe the "natural" state of humans is that more people are queer than 1/4 - maybe it's as high as 1/2. Maybe, even, a majority of people are some flavour of queer. We don't know, because the societies that dominated most of the globe were hugely patriarchal and actively persecuted queerness. We know that societies don't necessarily evolve to benefit the majority of people - in fact we can see the opposite where many societies are built in ways to entrench inequality (aristocratic land norms, capitalism, slavery relations, racial relations, gender relations and more). We know, for example, that many colonised cultures had ideas of third or non binary genders - and when colonial settlers engaged with them they purposefully campaigned to enforce rigid gender norms based on their social understanding, not those practiced by the native people. Why should we assume that straightness or cisness should be typical?
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
2019 (December) to summer 2020 - Labour could be finished, forever. At best, it will take them at least two parliaments to get near to power.
2020-21 - Starmer is a dud, and has no chance.
2022 - Well, the Tories are making a bit of a mess of things, aren't they? Could be a hung parliament.
2023 - Bloody hell, Tories have made such a mess Labour could actually win!
2024 - a Labour majority of under 100 would be somewhat surprising (though Starmer is still a dud).
But it didn't let me apply full CGT to main dwellings, abolish the Brown Bodge £100k Tax Rate by reversing the withdrawal of tax allowance (which should be balanced out and more by adjustments to tax rates), or bring Fuel Duty into line with inflation since it was frozen in cash terms in ~2010.
NICs on Private Pension Income only not State Pensions is one I had not considered before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWQOsI7m-Sk
The fact that "people have rammed it down everyone's throats", on both sides, is exactly my point. There are pressure groups who have pushed trans rights as a cause celebre because and a vocal group of celebrities and politicians who have been extremely noisy on the other side. And the rest of us are expected to have strong views. But about something that affects a tiny tiny number of very vulnerable people.
It's bafflingly reactionary.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
https://youtu.be/9GpWA8WgBnw?si=HtIbvVsZBPRVgN_N
I don't encourage people to "surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express" - I know loads of cis masc lesbians and cis femme gay men; trans people may want surgery because of the dysphoria they experience and I believe in their bodily autonomy to do so.
That may be a misapprehension of a slight conversational adjustment by LT going: "I don't know how I ... we ... (something something something)."
And, yawn, of course the Catholic church, etc, are wrong. What a lazy form of argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt_C0AAGPts
The affirmative group hate the Cass Review because it undermines (or exposes the existing evidence void beneath) existing practices.
The gender critical group loves the Cass Review because they extrapolate from absence of (good) evidence for benefits to assuming there is therefore (there is not!) evidence for absence of benefits - with some encouragement from the framing of the review, or the parts I have read, at least.
NHS Leeds gender identity services, for example, have a waiting list of over four thousand.
https://www.leedsandyorkpft.nhs.uk/news/articles/leeds-gender-identity-service-response-newsnight-investigation/
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
- Prevent him?
- Allow him but do not facilitate him?
- Encourage him?
Followed byQuestion 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
"Right, fuck it then. If that's how we get treated when we try and fit in we may as well go off and do our own thing."
That was the mood of the party. Hence Corbyn.
I was just on @BBCr4today discussing Liz Truss's book.
@MrHarryCole suggested she could come back as a Keith Joseph to Thatcher.
I said she isn't even Keith Allen to Orville. This was a mistake.
I should of course have said Keith Harris. I would like to apologise and I will make a donation to a green bird sanctuary.
https://twitter.com/MattChorley/status/1780148184964067790
I'm going to have to draw a flow chart, aren't I? One of the links you gave had one (and I assume the others did too) but only up to inclusion.
I think I would argue for NICs on Private Pension Income being used directly to increase the State Pension by ~8%. To me that is an appropriate rebalancing.
I had an interesting conversation with a pensioner who lives alone (divorced many years ago), and gets nothing beyond the basic state pension to live on which is £169.50 per weekm with certain Benefits.
She described her living expenses per month as "one week's pension on the car, one week's pension on energy, one week's pension on the difference between Housing Benefit and Rent, and what's left over on the rest." She is in receipt of local housing allowance on a 1 bedroom house, and has her council tax paid. It's been slightly rebalanced by Local Housing Allowance catching up with 3/4 years of cash freeze this month, but is a good illustration.
There are a lot of people like that. Positive changes by the present Government in addition to modest increases in the state pension are minimum wage increases and the default workplace pension scheme. These have been good moves.
Despite my bitter contempt for Rishi & friends, I will give them that,
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, say penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
The couple of reviews that I saw pre-publication had no such exclusions - and they were, as far as I'm aware, the ones that attempted a bit more than a narrative synthesis.
But Baldwin is on trial for involuntary manslaughter, facing (based on a quick Google- 12 years).
Seems a bit harsh to this non lawyer. You shouldn't mess around with guns of course, but I feel like more blame ought to attach to the person whose job it was to provide safe guns and who completely failed at her task.
Kids being given drugs to alter their bodies
Men, who haven’t had any surgery (ie men) , being allowed in female only spaces, sexually assaulting women then being referred to by judges as men, then put in female prisons
If adults want to pay for private surgery to sod about with their bodies, then let them do it. But not on the NHS, and not if they’re still at school. And self ID is complete nonsense
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
Pink dresses and ankle socks?
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/04/07/transhumanism/
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
I live in hope that Mr Starmer will have some strategic rabbits in his hat, even if some of them may prove expensive and difficult for me personally.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Edit: LDs called Siobhan with approximately latin surnames seems to be a thing.
And, for the record, I chose my wife for her sparkling wit, her appreciation for fog, and her bright blue eyes - not her breast size.
Isn't the point of 'queering' geneder roles to allow people to express themselves freely regardless of their biological sex?
Incidentally quite an interesting little 5-6 minute video from the Gabby Cabby channel, about why he will not be buying an Electric Cab.
I don't quite agree with him on the limited life of electric vehicle batteries, or the price differentials when taken as a business asset, but worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5QcGgK5KyE
As I said, your position is very telling.