If you follow the courts, you will certainly have come across Olympus Spa v. Armstrong. On March 12, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc in this case, which began in 2020 when a transgender woman in Washington State alleged that a traditional Korean spa, which requires patrons to be entirely naked, refused her (or is it him?) entry because she (he?) had not yet undergone so-called gender-affirming surgery.
The latest “trans violence” was committed by a heterosexual man who went to a hockey game in Rhode Island and shot his family, then himself. His daughter described him as sick and mentally ill. Robert Dorgan, who preferred the name Roberta, is just the latest in a long line of violent people claiming to be transgender. Last week, a 6ft 18-year-old boy, who wanted to be a “petite” woman, was identified as the main suspect in the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history. Last summer, a male called Robert Westman killed two children and injured many more at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. The 2023 Nashville school shooter was a girl called Audrey, who identified as a man called Aiden.
Weeks into his second term, it’s clear President Trump intends to be the most transformative force our politics has seen in a century. He seems equally determined to change the course of the world — and perhaps its map, too. Trump’s enemies can blame themselves for making this possible. They showed him that impeachment is nothing to fear: securing conviction in the Senate is nigh impossible and whatever damage impeachment might do to a president’s reputation has already been inflicted on Trump. Two impeachments and a welter of post-presidential criminal prosecutions and even convictions failed to stain Trump in voters’ eyes. On the contrary, they left him more popular than ever and discredited the institutions his opponents employed as weapons of their “lawfare.
It’s been a less than stellar year for trans activists. Shortly after taking office last January, President Trump signed an executive order withholding federal funds from any school that permits biological men and boys from playing on women’s sports teams. Then in June the US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning the use of puberty blockers and hormones for the treatment of young patients suffering from so-called gender dysphoria and seeking to change their gender identity. And on Tuesday the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases brought by transgender athletes seeking to overturn laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring biological boys and men from playing on female sports teams at the state and local level.
I hope this is the year people fighting the gender hydra, with its proliferation of harms across society, finally recognize that this is not a culture war. It is a war against a rapidly expanding industry built on the deconstruction of sex and, like any profitable industry, it will continue growing until it is stopped. Calling it a medical scandal, misogyny, or social contagion will not create a sustainable resistance unless people understand it as an industry. At the heart of the matter is the fact that industries in capitalist systems must expand to survive. And once they do, once a market forms, they’re near-impossible to erase. They begin to multiply, as others see opportunity. Consider pornography: despite widespread harm, eliminating it has proven impossible, so far.
President Trump offered Republican members of Congress a stand-up routine involving an imitation of transgender athletes lifting weights at the House GOP Member retreat earlier today. The President said that his wife “hates” when he does this and considers it “unpresidential.” "She said, 'darling please, the weightlifting is terrible'," the President recounts, before launching into his impersonation, replete with sound effects. The impression has been a regular feature of Trump's rally speeches over the last year or so. Melania, he claimed, also said that his audiences didn't like his dancing, pointing out that FDR would never dance as a counter-example.
So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offense? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room. Ms. Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered a man who identifies as a woman in the changing area of the gym she uses in LA. She was shaken. "I was naked in the locker room," she said. "I turn around and there’s a man there in boy clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me. I’m butt naked.
Even now, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans just assume that there is a vast and vulnerable cohort of kids who are born “trans” and need so-called “gender-affirming care.” They look at the protests and listen to progressive politicians and assume that there must be at least some evidence that pediatric medical transition helps children in distress. It would be unthinkable to have put children through all this for nothing, and for American medics to have gone along with it all. But the awful truth is that there is no evidence that allowing children to transition actually works in any meaningful sense. An analysis recently published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy has finally cut through the noise with a simple but devastating tool: a calculator.
What's the best novel you've read all summer? For Cockburn it's the more than 200-page complaint that Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte filed in federal court today against Candace Owens, regarding several episodes that Owens has broadcast claiming that the First Lady of France was, in fact, born a man. Cockburn understands that Owens offered the Macrons the right of reply before airing the speculation, but the French President and his wife declined. This has led to a source close to Owens to claim to Cockburn that the suit is nothing more than “a foreign government trying to silence an independent American journalist.” And they’re not the only ones, pace Candace.
On Saturday at the California Interscholastic Federation State Track and Field Championships, the biological male athlete AB Hernandez won gold in both the girls’ high jump and triple jump. The medals came at the expense of female athletes, sparking outrage from parents, local leaders and former collegiate athletes. As Sophia Lorey put it: “Girls deserve fair and safe sports. It’s time for adults to stand up and do something.” This is just the latest injustice created by the extreme Democrat ideology that has forced itself on California, the state that will be hosting the 2028 Olympics. It’s a cruel irony that a state set to showcase the world’s commitment to fair competition on the global stage allows policies that rob its own female athletes of fairness and opportunity.
The future is technological, and this includes human reproduction. In Silicon Valley, a very particular sort of technological pro-natalism is emerging – not a movement to try to persuade ordinary people to have families so much as a push to create genetically superior children. The way they see it, the future of human reproduction is – and should be – increasingly technological. There’s a vast amount of money moving into the reproduction industry. Interestingly, the big players here are often the same people who have been ruthlessly pushing gender ideology – the insane idea that you can change your sex at will. Why would this be? What is the connection between the fad of transgenderism and tech-fatalism?
The Democrats are hellbent on handing President Trump win after win when it comes to the issue of biological men competing against women in sports. Their desire to die on this hill is baffling especially considering Trump’s November mandate. Generous souls that they are, now progressives are ensuring their arch nemesis can make the most of his winning message during his presidency. During his joint address to Congress last night, Trump introduced Payton McNabb, a former volleyball player who, in 2022, suffered a traumatic brain injury after a man was allowed to compete against her in a match. She received a standing ovation from Republicans as Trump vowed to protect female athletes. He didn’t stop there.
Of the many inevitables of Oscar season, one certainty is that the film or filmmakers perceived to be the front-runner will find themselves in a spot of difficulty before the awards ceremony. There is a legion of highly paid, aggressive publicists whose job is not only to promote their clients’ interests, but also to rubbish the competition. Granted, an Oscar is no longer the path to box-office success it once was — I’m not sure that anyone was rushing out to see CODA or Nomadland after their awards, not least because there was so little competition in the pandemic era — but it will add millions to an asking rate, instill lasting gravitas and ensure a movie’s lasting reputation. Many people really, really want to win an Oscar.
Nancy Mace has embarked on her newfound crusade against the trans employees of the Hill — a group of people so uncomfortable in their own skin that many undergo plastic surgery in order to feel more like their true selves. Mace’s campaign to ban biological men from the women’s restrooms of Congress marks a change in tack for the congresswoman — not the first one, obviously. “I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” the South Carolina congresswoman told the Washington Examiner back in 2021. “No one should be discriminated against.
I’ll be upfront: I’m skeptical of the trans movement. Not the individuals within it, but the broader cultural shift that prioritizes feelings over facts and subjectivity over objective reality. Yet, despite my reservations, I have deep empathy for those grappling with identity confusion — an experience that must be profoundly disorienting. My concern is that we’re accelerating this confusion by feeding a culture obsessed with validation. So, when I sat down to watch Will & Harper, I hoped, perhaps naively, that this film might grapple with these, my own very real questions, in a meaningful way. It doesn’t. What I found instead was a film that falls short as cinema and even shorter as a piece of prop art.
On issue after issue, conservatives — and Republicans — have lost the “culture wars.” Not just lost but lost decisively and permanently. The victories are so secure on most issues that conservatives have abandoned the fight. At times, the result has been a more tolerant public consensus, for example regarding gay rights and marriage. There are two notable exceptions, however, where the cultural battles remain white-hot: abortion and transgender rights. Both issues motivated voters in 2024. On abortion, voters have been mobilized by controversial Supreme Court decisions. The fight began in earnest in 1973, when Roe v. Wade effectively legalized abortion throughout the country and throughout the nine months of pregnancy.
In the minds of many progressive Democrats, Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Dem, just committed an unpardonable sin. He told the New York Times that his two girls should not have to compete in sports against men who have become women: Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that. Moulton’s statement is really about two issues, not one. It is important to distinguish them. The first, obviously, is about women and athletics.
After staking her entire career on her claim that French first lady Brigitte Macron was born a man, former Daily Wire host Candace Owens was suddenly ousted from the company. While her criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza is ostensibly what got her the boot, Cockburn is sure claiming perverts run the French government didn’t help her case. Owens, who has always reveled in controversy, does not seemed phased however. “I am finally free,” she rejoiced, including to renew her attacks on Brigitte. https://twitter.com/realcandaceo/status/1806055079570764216 "France is being run by perverts," she declared, in a sentence that could be considered objectively true in any of the last few centuries.
We live now in an age of reverse gaslighting. Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity. Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal. Imagine: practically the entire population quarantines itself because a couple of government bureaucrats tell them to. Everyone starts wearing little paper masks as patents of their capitulation and, secondarily, as badges of their virtue.
Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Seraphina Rose, appeared to come out as transgender last weekend. The chosen venue for this announcement? Her grandfather’s funeral. The young lady recently got a buzz cut and wore a black suit to the memorial service, at which she introduced herself to the audience with her new name before reading a Bible verse. “Hello my name is Fin Affleck,” she told the grieving audience. The intent is not to beat up on Miss Affleck here — she is a minor and is clearly going through a lot. She is the middle child of parents who went through a very public and messy divorce with allegations of infidelity and alcoholism. Her father has since gotten remarried to an old flame.
