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As was widely anticipated, World Rugby have now made their new transgender policy official: it is not recommended that transwomen play women's rugby.

World Rugby has approved updated transgender participation guidelines following a comprehensive, collaborative and inclusive review of its existing guidance.

The new guidelines [which can be accessed here] cover the participation of transgender athletes in men’s and women’s contact rugby where it is possible to do so safely and fairly.

As with many other sports, the physiological differences between males and females necessitate dedicated men’s and women’s contact rugby categories for safety and performance reasons. Given the best available evidence for the effects of testosterone reduction on these physical attributes for transgender women, it was concluded that safety and fairness cannot presently be assured for women competing against transwomen in contact rugby.  

As a result, the new guidelines do not recommend that transwomen play women’s contact rugby on safety grounds at the elite and international level of the game where size, strength, power and speed are crucial for both risk and performance, but do not preclude national unions from flexibility in their application of the guidelines at the community level of the game. Transmen are permitted to participate in men’s contact rugby.

As I've noted before, there somehow isn't much demand from transmen to participate in men’s contact rugby. Funny, that.

StonewallUK are deeply disappointed.

aph-module__paragraph–block ContentPageBodyParagraph-module__paragraph–size-medium–spacing-normal” style=”padding-left: 40px”>Keira's case is not, as some claim, about ‘the healthcare of trans children’ but rather about girls so distressed by the levels of hatred and misogyny they encounter they look for an escape from their female bodies. I felt like Keira did when I was her age, as did many of my lesbian friends.

Putting kids on drugs and a possible path to unnecessary surgery because they are experiencing psychological distress caused by external factors is a human rights violation. It is high time that we see it for what it is. Let’s hope the court does, and this practice of medicating and carving up healthy young bodies will be replaced by appropriate care and support for these vulnerable young women. That I write this as a happy lesbian as opposed to a regretful transman is only because when I felt as Keira did, the GIDs clinic did not exist.

No doubt there are multiple reasons why young girls are so easily persuaded that they need to transition. The online culture on forums like Reddit, as outlined by Scott Newgent, must play a considerable part. But yes, it does seem that girls who would if left alone become lesbian, as with Bindel here, are particularly vulnerable. The new trans ideology, it seems, would prefer that they undergo medical intervention as soon as possible rather than break the gender stereotypes or, god forbid, enter into same-sex relationships.

al rebirth, was quite literally about being able to see clearly now. He wrote it, allegedly, while recovering from an operation for cataracts. 

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbX87g7wzJI&w=550&h=309]

That's according to the Times obituary, at any rate – which also details Nash's role in the rise of Bob Marley:

One night in early 1967, Johnny Nash was invited to a Rastafarian yard party in Kingston, Jamaica. As the ganja was passed around the blazing fire, a young singer named Bob Marley played guitar and sang.

Struck by the power of his songs, Nash took him to meet his American business partner Danny Sims. They concluded that at the time the 22-year-old Marley’s skills as a songwriter outstripped his ability to perform them himself and signed him to a publishing contract with the primary purpose of providing songs for Nash to record. “Them seh me voice nuh good enough but me songs are,” Marley later recalled in his distinctive Jamaican patois.

Over the next two years Marley practically lived at the uptown villa which Nash and Sims were renting while they groomed his burgeoning talents. The arrangement proved beneficial to both parties. “Johnny taught Bob how to sing on the mic, and Bob taught Johnny how to play the reggae rhythm,” Sims noted.

By the time Nash moved to Jamaica and discovered Marley, he already had several showbusiness lives behind him as a child star on American television, a teenage tenor in the style of Johnny Mathis, and as a movie actor taking the lead in Take a Giant Step (1959), regarded as a landmark in African-American cinema.

Nash took Marley with him to London and to Sweden, where they stayed for the best part of a year while Nash was making a film. In return, he wrote several hits for Nash, including Guava Jelly and Stir It Up which introduced reggae to the pop mainstream and exposed Marley’s songs to a wider audience for the first time.

Yet despite the brilliance of his songwriting protégé, Nash’s biggest and most memorable hit ironically came with one of his own compositions. Allegedly written while lying in a hospital bed recovering from an operation for cataracts, the irresistible pop-reggae groove of I Can See Clearly Now and its promise of a “bright, bright sunshiny day”, took Nash to the top of the American charts in 1972 and made the top five in Britain.

I'll admit it does have the sound of an urban myth, that cataract story. Someone perhaps said it as a joke, and it kind of stuck.

What an incredible voice, though. The way he holds and moves that note starting at about 1:30….

l Assembly audit on Wednesday that South Korea could have sent an SOS to North Korea through an international communication network of commercial vessels to rescue the official. But Suh added that there were "risks" to asking North Korea to rescue the official as it would reveal how it gathers intelligence and expose security assets.

Suh also admitted that he was briefed in the initial phase of the incident that there was "no possibility of a defection to North Korea." That suggests the government suspected that the official had fallen overboard accidentally but invented the defection story to cover its back.

The man was picked up in North Korean waters on the morning of Sept. 22 and apparently kept in the freezing water by his captors for another six hours before they shot him dead, doused the body in fuel and incinerated it.

President Moon Jae-in then sat on the story for two days until he had safely delivered a pre-recoded speech to a virtual session of the UN General Assembly in which he proposed a peace treaty with North Korea.

When I first reported the story I mentioned that the man was defecting because he was recently divorced, and because of huge debts he'd run up. I've seen no further mention of this, which suggests that perhaps these were claims that the South Korean authorities made up to try and explain the deeply unlikely idea that a man would willingly defect to the North – never mind defect by jumping into the freezing sea to try and swim across into North Korean waters.

His family, meanwhile, are fighting back.

Those brave literary organisations. Scan from the latest Private Eye:

e traffic and became a bit of a backwater – underused and in decline. I remember it well – we used it a lot at the time, driving up to Sheffield where my parents lived. It made a welcome change from the boredom and monotony of the M1, even if the journey took longer. So this is only too familiar:

[Photos © Paul Graham]

astic surgery and hormones. My sex never changed, though. Only my appearance changed.

Anyone going through this is in store for a brutal process. Yet we now have thousands of naïve parents walking their children into gender-treatment centers, often based on Internet-peddled narratives that present the transition experience through a gauzy rainbow lens. Many transition therapies are still in an experimental phase—as you will learn if you become sick during or after these treatments.

During my own transition, I had seven surgeries. I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra. All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year. Between me and my insurance company, medical expenses exceeded $900,000.

Jesus.

Well, whatever, it's a salutary and level-headed read. His conclusion:

As someone who has experienced medical transition first-hand, I am convinced that it’s better to err on the side on discretion, and leave life-altering decisions to adults who have the benefit of a fully developed brain. The next time my daughter’s friend, or any child, comes to me for advice on their gender dysphoria, here’s what I’d tell them: “There are people who need to medically transition to walk peacefully through their lives, and you, kiddo, might be that person. But, right now, you are a child, and your body is developing everything you need to be a healthy, happy, strong adult. When you grow up, you get to decide about your life.”

For parents, I would say this: It is simply not your right or duty to decide to medically transition your child. Remove that burden from your mind. Medical transition is for adults. The negatives associated with medical transition are vast, and you won’t be the one who lives with the consequences. It will be your child. If your child tells you they will kill themselves if you do not allow them to medically transition (perhaps following a script he or she is provided on Reddit or Tumblr), take them to the hospital so they can be treated for suicidal ideation. Suicidal ideation and seeking transition are separate issues, so separate them.

://mickhartley.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451ebab69e20263e96c16d8200b-pi” style=”display: inline”>

Let's be grateful that street artists – unlike "proper" artists – don't embellish their work with explanatory guff as to what really mean. 

ain of trans politics, but Stonewall now claims that everyone has a gender identity, and therefore everyone identifies, in some way, with gender stereotypes. While Stonewall continues to make this claim it will continue to be on the wrong side of the government’s new schools guidance.

Having adopted such radical, far-reaching new policies, rather than seek to persuade wider society of their value, Stonewall has sought to silence opposition and enforce submission by labelling heretics — such as women who want to retain the sex-based rights secured by the 2010 Equality Act, and lesbians who reject the concept of the ‘female penis’ — as ‘transphobic’, placing them on the same moral level as racists.

A substantial, and increasing, number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people have had enough of Stonewall’s dogmatism. The founding in 2019 of the LGB Alliance, a grassroots, lesbian-led lobbying group which rejects gender identity, is responding to the demand for alternative thinking.

Stonewall’s brand is powerful — but brands are illusory, and Stonewall’s masks the socially divisive and damaging effects of its current policies. Politicians, schools, NGOs and major corporations routinely subcontract their judgment on LGBT issues to Stonewall, persuaded that whatever Stonewall says is ‘best practice’ must be right. But they should learn to be more cautious, because the new Stonewall is a vastly different organisation from the one which gradually earned their trust.

I suppose this could be seen as an object lesson in what happens to a campaigning group when they succeed in their original aims. To survive, they adopt new aims….

p style=”padding-left: 40px”>Moon and his government sat on the news of the killing for two days until a pre-recorded speech in which the president proposed a peace treaty with North Korea had safely been beamed out to a virtual session of the UN General Assembly.

Both the president and the military have been accused of cowardice and dereliction of duty. In their defense they have since perpetuated the claim that the official had chosen this route to defect.

Today we hear that the man's family are demanding a UN investigation:

Government apologists have claimed that the man wanted to defect to North Korea, but the official's family denies this.

His elder brother Lee Rae-jin on Tuesday visited the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul and requested an independent probe of the killing.

The request is poignant since Moon hushed up the killing for two days until after he had delivered a speech calling for peace with North Korea to a virtual session of the UN General Assembly.

At a press conference, Lee raised the possibility of joining hands with the parents of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was imprisoned in North Korea in 2016 on a charge of subversion and died after he was released in a coma in 2017. He vowed to "tell the world about the brutality of North Korea."  […]

The official, who worked as a fisheries inspector, went missing from a patrol boat on Sept. 21 and was spotted by a North Korean Navy ship the following morning. Accounts differ what happened next. The South Korean military says the man's captors kept him in the water for six hours while they interrogated him, before "an order from above" came to kill him. They then fired a dozen rounds into him before setting him ablaze.

But North Korean leader Kim Jon-un, in a letter of apology to Moon, claimed the official was killed immediately and only his life vest was set on fire while the body had disappeared.

The military, which looked on while the official was being first kept in the freezing water and then murdered, later claimed that the man must have wanted to defect because he left his shoes behind on board and wore a life vest. But life vests are mandatory on patrol boats, and no evidence of the shoe story has been presented so far.

Neighbors and family of the official say it would have been madness to choose that route to defect to North Korea even if he had wanted to.

Murkier and murkier.