.

[WRN Derbyshire & Staffordshire @WRNDerbyshire]

Sexual violence isn't caused by British reserve about sex.

@SamanthaNiblet4 claims that if we just "drag sex out from the shadows" and stop being embarrassed, we'll somehow reduce the "frightening" use of sex as a weapon against women and girls.

That's pure deflection. Rapists and abusers don't offend because society is too prudish. They offend because they are predators who seek power and control. Britain already has wall-to-wall sex education, consent campaigns and open discussion of sexuality. The problem is not silence; it's failed enforcement, soft justice and denial about who is committing these crimes.

And the proposed solution? An MP bringing sex toys into the House of Commons for a "summer of sex."

That is not serious politics. It is performative, infantile and an insult to every woman who has been raped, assaulted or terrorised. Parliament is not a sex-shop showroom. If this is the level of gravity Labour applies to violence against women, no wonder we are in the state we're in.

The residents of her constituency in South Derbyshire deserver better.

[. @didosdaughter]

@RichardHanania Holy mackerel - that interview has been ‘edited for clarity’ and it *still* reads like the fevered brain dump of a Foucault-addled first year student

[Queen Bee @KingBobIIV]

Fifteen years ago, as a die-hard Corbynite, Labour voter, lefty and Remainer, I'd probably have scoffed at the death of Ann Widdecombe, if I'm honest. I loved Andy Hamilton's Old Harry's Game on BBC Radio 4, and she was the punchline in what felt like every episode.

Looking back, I'm quite ashamed of that version of myself. It wasn't real morality, it was performative virtue.

The last decade has been quite a journey for me, both spiritually and politically, and I don't think the two are unrelated. Watching people rush to celebrate her death, only to frantically delete their posts when it emerged she had been brutally murdered, made me realise how grateful I am not to be that person anymore.

I'm meeting more and more people who've travelled a similar path and arrived at much the same place.

Whatever your politics, don't let hatred become part of your character. Try to pull people up to your level, rather than allowing yourself to be dragged down to theirs.

RIP Ann. You were quite some human being.

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

An open letter to Baroness Cass ref the case of this child, whose situation needs to investigated by social services. This indeed is not a political matter but one of child protection.
https://t.co/XOTCtPq8tZ

Dear Baroness Cass,
I am writing in response to the case you described of the eleven year old boy socially transitioned by his parents at two and a half, now living stealth, afraid to attend school as either sex, and increasingly withdrawn and physically deconditioned as a result. I wanted to set out why I think this case illustrates something more specific than the question you posed about whether politicians or doctors should decide what happens to children like him.

The case is, on its own terms, a clear demonstration of premature identity foreclosure. A child of two and a half has no capacity for the kind of abstract, exploratory self reflection that genuine identity formation requires, on any developmental account from Piaget through Marcia. What happened to this child at that age was necessarily a decision made on his behalf and then sustained around him, not a discovery he himself reached. Bronfenbrenner's ecological model describes exactly the mechanism by which that early decision then becomes self perpetuating: once a social transition is established in the home, it is carried into school, peer relationships, and eventually clinical contact, each system reinforcing what the previous one had already settled, with no point at which the original premise is revisited. By the time this child reaches adolescence, an identity adopted before he could speak in full sentences has become something he now actively conceals and fears having questioned, which is a strange and telling outcome for an identity supposedly discovered rather than constructed.

The detail you raise of weakened bones from inactivity rather than from medical intervention is, I think, the most important part of the case, because it shows the harm operating through an entirely social pathway. A child too afraid of being outed to attend school is a child whose ordinary developmental environment, peer contact, physical activity, the everyday testing of self against the world that Erikson and Marcia both treat as necessary to identity formation, has been closed off by the position he has been placed in. This is not a side effect of any drug. It is the direct consequence of a foreclosed identity that has left him with nowhere safe to be a child.

I would push back on framing the central question as one of medical versus political authority over decisions like puberty blockers. The decision that produced the harm you describe was not a medical one at all. It was a parental and social decision taken years before any clinical pathway became relevant, and the clinical system he now exists within is managing the consequences of that earlier decision rather than the cause of his distress.

Given that he is now isolated, school avoidant, and showing physical signs of neglect of his basic developmental needs, I think it is also worth asking plainly whether this is a case that ought to have come to the attention of children's social services on ordinary safeguarding grounds, independent of any question about gender identity at all. I would suggest the more pressing question your case actually raises is what support and recourse exists for a child in his position now, given how early and how thoroughly the foreclosure already occurred, and what should change about how social transition in early childhood is approached so that fewer children arrive at eleven in a position this difficult to unwind.

Yours sincerely,

[Ellen Highwater KPSS WRN @HighwaterEllen]

I was a footsoldier for that report which was so brilliantly researched and written up by @ClaireLoneragan. Some of us were thrown out of our local libraries for politely raising concerns that books featuring pegging, glory holes, coprophilia, golden showers and dangerous sexual practices were in the children's section, alongside endless books promoting gender ideology as fact (some aimed specifically at autistic children), books about menstruation that never once mentioned girls - just people who bleed. What a time to be alive.

[James Esses @JamesEsses]

If you want to summarise just how messed up the United Kingdom is in a single sentence:

The UK government believes that 11 year olds are too young to watch YouTube but old enough to block their puberty and render themselves infertile.

[Sunday Sport @thesundaysport]

There's confusion, so here's that EHRC guidance in plain Sunday Sport language:
'Lads, if you want to play dress up and have a wank, crack on. Just not in the ladies' shithouse, eh?'

[. @didosdaughter]

Nicola Sturgeon is exactly the sort of of person who would say “if I have a fault, it’s that I’m just too trusting” or some such self-serving guff

[. @didosdaughter]

@kinsman_a @akuareindorf @novaramedia Bloody hell, no spring chicken! But then, stirring up fear in the younger generation is the long-standing tactic of older TRAs - create a new batch of paranoid gender gremlins

[Sarah Phillimore @SVPhillimore]

It is interesting and I have noted carefully that Maugham has - as far as I know - never threatened any gender critical male barrister with a regulatory complaint. I am sure his targeting of female barristers is just a happy accident, what with biological sex being so difficult to discern and all.

[. @didosdaughter]

Embarrassed for you, mate. Seriously, what a clown show.

[www.TransLucent.Org.UK @TransLucent_Org]

STATEMENT.

Please share widely.

[Akua Reindorf KC @akuareindorf]

@PompeySteph @UKLabour @EHRC @bphillipsonMP As long as you and other men stay out of the ladies' we're all good, Steph. It's the law.

[. @didosdaughter]

@heatherthefair @ZoeNope I don’t want to be ordinary if it looks like this

[. @didosdaughter]

@besslilburne Women are not human Kleenex to soak up the tears of sad men alienated from their birth sex.. Can you not see how women are being asked to perform femininity to make a man feel safe? Does this not strike you as patriarchy in sheep’s clothing?

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.

Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.

Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.

Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.

Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.

Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.

C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.

Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.

Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.

Alors pardon. Et au travail.

[Steph Hardy @StephHardy10]

@WingsScotland A woman is any personality in a female body, not a female personality in any body.

It's that simple. 💃🏽

[. @didosdaughter]

@WRNWales @as_penarth If he was really ‘expecting this question’ why was his answer so ignorant and rambling? He can barely complete a sentence!

[. @didosdaughter]

@NadiaWhittomeMP So, men can have anything they want (by default) but women can have nothing of their own? Nice feministing, Nadia!

[. @didosdaughter]

@SkyNews @LucyJMcDaid How many times - RAPE IS NOT SEX, and teaching people how to wank will do nothing to counter violence against women. Rape is about power and control, not getting your rocks off. Don’t use it as a figleaf for your headline-grabbing antics; it’s grubby and venal