transgender conversion therapy ban

The Government consultation on its proposal to "ban conversion therapy" ends on 4 Feb 2022. While it may sound like good sense to ban “conversion therapy", in this case the danger is that the ban will criminalise parents, teachers and therapists who may wish to tell children that they are not “born in the wrong body”. Consider this thought experiment by Naomi Cunningham from her speech, Conversion therapy: the path to good law, on 17 Nov 2021:

Say you’re a therapist. You see an unhappy 10-year-old girl. She wears baggy clothes, and has short hair. She says she’s sure she’s a boy really. She hates her developing breasts, and dreads the onset of periods. She despises all things “girly.”

Sex by deception - Gayle Newland

Gayle Newland was convicted in 2017 for sexual assault using a prosthetic penis without her victim's consent. The case is referred to on page 256 of Material Girls. The BBC report states that she tricked her blindfolded friend into sex. See also Guardian report: the strange case of Gayle Newland.

The Vaccine Moment by Paul Kingsnorth

The Vaccine Moment by Paul Kingsnorth, published January 2022, is a great essay on the narratives and stories about Covid-19 over the last two years. He expresses concern about the Austrian lockdown of the ‘unvaxxed’ and the Australian quarantine camps. He writes about conspiracy theory and  The Great Reset. Here are two extracts.

All men are rapists

“All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.” So says Val, a militant radical feminist character in The Women's Room (1977) by Marilyn French. I had to put up with this discourse in the 1980s while living in the Camdens and Islingtons of right-on johns and trendy wendys. It was, after all, the decade of the so-called New Man: where did he go?

the price of oil

A barrel of Brent crude oil is about 159 litres and costs about $86.50, or £62.85. It sells for about £227. Roughly, then, it costs 39p a litre and sells for 143p a litre, 3.6 times (that is, nearly quadruple) the cost.