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 I am pleased to say that, today, our elite female swimmers will not be conned out of medals by cheats.

But, shockingly, some athletes still are. And I believe cowardice and misogyny lies behind this. – Sharron Davies

 In 1980, I missed out on a gold medal in Moscow, coming second behind an East German swimmer whose victory was drug-enhanced.

Although I was on top form for the 400m medley final, I knew it wouldn’t be enough to win. Everyone did. It was evident from the masculine shape of the female competitors from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that they were on illegal drugs.

So I lost out on the ultimate sporting accolade because the GDR had institutionalised doping. It was cheating on an industrial scale to create the most successful medal factory in Olympic history. – Sharron Davies

So the GDR administered the male hormone testosterone routinely to female athletes, some as young as 11. These girls were pawns in a criminal game. They were given no choice but to take the banned little blue pills and, although they conferred explosive strength and stamina – making them virtually invincible – long-term they wrecked their physical and often mental health.

So when I swam against Petra Schneider – for whom I have only immense sympathy – it was, one commentator has said, as if a nuclear torpedo was racing a dolphin. The improbably fast German national record she set has yet to be beaten, 44 years on. – Sharron Davies

You might think an outrage of this magnitude would be enough to insure against another. You’d be wrong. Because, as I outline in my book Unfair Play: The Battle For Women’s Sport, a similarly gross injustice is taking place in female sport today.

I have been viciously vilified and endured death threats against me and my family. I’ve lost work and valuable sponsorship, while charities I’ve supported for years have dropped me as their ambassador – all for pointing this out.

But the inequality is too important to ignore: the growing prevalence of transgender women (males who identify as women) competing in female sport today, from grassroots to elite level, is an outrageous affront to an already disadvantaged minority – which sounds odd when females are 51 per cent of the population but we have nowhere near parity in sport with men.

I have no compunction about referring to transwomen as biological males because this is what they are. There are only two gametes, two sexes: male and female.

That said, I have absolutely no personal animus against anyone being their authentic self. I want everyone to participate in sport, just in a category that aligns with their biological sex.

What I fiercely object to is unfairness. – Sharron Davies

What is mind-blowing is the complete absence of any kind of scientific rigour underpinning the IOC’s totally false assertion that transwomen have no inherent physical advantage over biological females. If that were true, why bother to have separate categories for men and women at all? – Sharron Davies

I believe it is an abomination that we do not protect our female athletes who are already beleaguered by inequality.

Only 1,000 women in the UK earn their living from sport compared to 11,000 men. Women are paid a fraction of what men earn, too. And now women are supposed to move over to accommodate males who identify as women. Why is it always women who are forced into giving up their hard-won opportunities? –

Just seven out of 19 key Olympic sports protect females from unfair male advantage because the IOC essentially allows each sport to set its own rules. –

There are still more injustices: if a trans athlete is tested with higher than permitted testosterone levels they are banned for a year. A female would get a four year ban. It is unfair and it’s madness. – Sharron Davies

Interestingly, a transman – a biological female – from the Philippines will be competing, fighting other females. If they didn’t they wouldn’t make the men’s team. That’s fine. No female I know has an issue with this, providing no banned substances are being taken.

But if males, no matter how they identify, are allowed to fight females, the combat sports federations would, in my view, be guilty of gross negligence, given the vastly superior strength and power of male-born fighters.

The IOC, in its bland pronouncements about inclusion and non-discrimination, still discriminates against females and stubbornly fails to take note of scientific fact. – Sharron Davies

The subjugation of women in sport happens not just at elite level but at grassroots, too. Imagine how swiftly it would stop if females could take a magic pill that allowed them to beat men!

In January 2024, Fair Play For Women showed, through personal testimonies across 35 sports, how women have lost their privacy, dignity, safety and performance rankings after men who claimed to be women joined sports.

Most significantly, the research highlighted how women and girls are put off sport when forced to compete with males. Participation numbers are falling as a result. – Sharron Davies

I have some common sense solutions: taxpayer-funded sports organisations should lose their money if they allow trans-identifying males to compete with females, because they are guilty of deliberate sex discrimination. – Sharron Davies

Facts should take precedence over feelings. – Sharron Davies

Girls stick with sport when they grow up in a healthy, safe and fair environment, and we won’t have the elite female athletes of the future without fairness from the earliest ages. – Sharron Davies

Policy problems should be dealt with by the level and part of government best placed to deal with them.

Good public policy should recognise subsidiarity. Local problems should be dealt with locally. But not all problems are local. A council issuing its own currency to address perceived failures in national-level monetary policy would not be a great idea.

Council-level policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions are about as sensible as councils trying to take on monetary policy or building up their own armed forces. It isn’t that monetary policy and national defence aren’t critically important. It’s rather that those concerns are best handled by central government. – Eric Crampton

Hitting the net zero target at a national level will be hard enough to do cost-effectively. Trying to do it within each region misses out on opportunities where abatement is cheaper in some places than in others. The only sensible way of bridging those differences would be allowing emissions trading between regions – and that’s what the existing Emissions Trading Scheme already does.

And the existence of the ETS really matters here. The scheme is reasonably comprehensive for emissions in sectors other than agriculture. It is not just the best way of getting to net zero, it also makes it hard for other policies to reduce net emissions. – Eric Crampton

It’s a type of blood shaming and that term mau mau to toto Māori, it means blood traitor and the fact that’s now part of the Māori political lexicon is a deep indictment on the Maori Party. It’s almost as if they’re trying to run some sort of blood classification scheme out of Harry Potter.

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer is from Taranaki. This region faces distressing economic circumstances.

Sadly she opposes economic development, hates mining but has no remedy for job creation. 

Between her hate speech and the Matatini rappers, trash talk has replaced political intelligence.

She smiles like Tinker Bell but rhetoric is from blinking hell.

Her obsession with blood shaming is alien. It shows political fragility at a time when the Māori community needs inclusive and positive role models. – Shane Jones

I would like to acknowledge the 2,400 survivors. Thank you for your strength, your bravery and your honesty,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says.

I know there is nothing I can do to take away your pain, but I want you to know you are heard and you are believed. – Christophers Luxon

This is a dark and sorrowful day in New Zealand’s history. As a society and as the State we should have done better. I am determined that we will do better. – Christophers Luxon

To the survivors, I know we can never replace what has been lost. What I can commit to you is we will engage with the Royal Commission’s report and recommendations in good faith, with careful consideration and we will never lose sight of what you have endured to bring the truth to light. Christophers Luxon

Either we live in a society that allows women to have sociopolitical opinions, or we don’t. Either we live in a society where women can peacefully associate together without harassment, abuse and violence, or we don’t. There is no nuance here. And if we don’t live in that society, then please point me in the direction of the legislation that states that; I’ll get a railing to chain myself to. – Tania Sturt

But I think most have come to the conclusion that, although they want to be as inclusive as possible, biology does matter when it comes to sport, and that it’s impossible to balance the requirement of fairness without ensuring that they take biology into account.

I think that’s broadly sensible. – Lisa Nandy

You can call it a Karakia to make it sound cool and fashionable and culturally aware, but it’s a prayer. And a prayer is a religious act. And I say that as someone who identifies broadly as Christian, not cool.

This is fundamentally one of the biggest problems with the public service. Across many departments, they have allowed themselves to get distracted by stuff like this, which is not their core job.

They need to act more like the private sector and just do the work – and forget everything else
And then, maybe they’ll actually be good at their job. You never know. – Heather du Plessis-Allan

Our education system has been infiltrated by radical extremist idealogical lecturers who have succeeded in distorting the curriculum to the extent that the graduates are carbon copies of themselves. That can only mean the new recruits in the modern economy (if they choose to seek a job) are focused too much on satisfying their own needs or idealogical pursuits rather than the people they are being paid to serve.

While not quite to the same extent, our welfare system has become a conscious supporter of those who are knowingly ripping off the State with excuses for not working that lack any sense of credibility.

So, our hope for a less dependant future will depend on a concerted effort from all of us demanding a return to a time when it was considered a privilege to live in Godzone – not a right.
Let’s do it. – Clive Bibby

While it is true that trans men i.e. biological females may feel slighted that New World doesn’t stock male tampons most of the current fuss is being made by chaps who by dint of self-identification feel entitled to use female only spaces- literal and figurative.

Of course, while the number of identifying males who commit crimes serious enough for prison and who then identify as a woman at sentencing are small, the fact that the judiciary then incarcerates them in women’s prisons is both stupid and dangerous. And while this situation is statistically rare the safety of women’s only spaces is now eroded by the very institutions that enshrined them in the first place, the courts and Parliament. – Penn Raine

Data shows that between 60 and 70% of lawyers support progressive policies which suggests that most of our country’s practising lawyers, almost half of which are women, will support the direction of the ‘discussion paper’. The area of family law is the fifth most practised area out of twenty-four and we must suppose that the problem of family violence figures largely in this area. Would it be surprising if the safety of women in shelters became threatened if laws allowed female-identifying men freer access to these places because to refuse them would be a crime?

Back in the dark old days women who were labelled ‘nags’ or ‘shrews’ could be ordered by the magistrate (male) to wear the Scold’s Bridle, an iron mask that prevented non-compliant speech. It is ironical that members of our own sex would collaborate with those men who would like to see us submissive, polite and smiling as they pretend to be us. – Penn Raine

When the compilers of dictionaries are telling you that words no longer mean what you think they mean, it’s a method of control. It has the effect of forcing members of the public to continually doubt their own senses, a form of gaslighting on a global scale. Those responsible for these online dictionaries should understand that their role is to record common usage, not manipulate the public into changing the way they speak. We should keep in mind the warning of science-fiction author Philip K. Dick: “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words”. –  Andrew Doyle

The blocking of puberty in healthy children is the lobotomy of the 21st century. Where docs once interfered with the brains of the mentally unwell, with little regard for the horrendous side effects, now docs meddle with the bodies of the mentally unwell, again with seemingly little concern for the lifelong harms that can arise. Future generations will surely look with as much horror upon our era’s pumping of gender-confused kids with biology-altering drugs as we do upon yesteryear’s violent intrusion into the grey matter of people who were only ill.  – Brendan O’Neill 

It’s hard to think of anything more unethical, or indeed outright wicked, than the cynical dangling of the spectre of suicide to try to cajole people into conforming to an ideological worldview; than this marshalling of a fantasy army of dead children in an effort to shame and silence one’s critics. Not content with experimenting on kids, trans activists and their allies also darkly promise piles of dead kids unless everyone in society, from government ministers to everyday mums and dads, goes along with their lunacy. So, good on Musk for speaking out. For exposing these sinister methods of trans ideologues. For discussing the grief felt by parents of ‘trans kids’. For being honest. Let’s now normalise every parent of a ‘trans kid’ having the right to express their distress, without persecution, and certainly without prosecution. – Brendan O’Neill 

Sex is a matter of biology. Gender is a matter of cultural stereotypes that express sex. You can identify w/the traditional stereotypes for your sex or you can be gender nonconforming. But the idea that the latter makes you different from your sex is a quasi-religious view.

— Prof. Gary Francione (@garylfrancione) July 24, 2024

Electoral politics, particularly in Western Europe, is a toxic amalgam of power-madness, low cunning, and moral grandiosity. Of these, as St. Paul said of charity, moral grandiosity is the greatest: that is to say, not the best or most important in this particular context, but the most harmful.– Theodore Dalrymple

 To use farmland in a very overcrowded country to erect thousands of unsightly windmills bespeaks a kind of Marxist hatred of the countryside, and of the rural idiocy to which Marx referred. Unsightliness is of no concern to environmentalists, who perceive notional emissions of carbon dioxide more vividly than what they see with their eyes. Miliband’s father was a Marxist professor who lived at a time when smokestacks were still a symbol of progress in Soviet iconography; they have been replaced by windmills in current “progressive” ideological iconography.

Mr. Miliband, a British minister, has, I surmise, his mind firmly focused on the whole world and its ecosphere, which he wants to save, rather than on the small corner of it for which he carries important responsibilities. It is too boring for him, not sufficiently interesting, merely to ensure that old ladies can afford to heat their homes in the dead of winter. Who needs old ladies anyway? They have had their time, in which they probably kept themselves warm for years by burning coal. It is payback time: Let them shiver, so long as moral perfection is achieved and the planet is saved. But the idea that China is going to alter its conduct because of the magnificently self-sacrificing policies of Britain could occur only to a man in the grip of self-importance rising to the level of megalomania, the occupational disease of professional politicians.

But of course, Mr. Miliband is not the only one of his type. Preening petty politicians are by no means uncommon. They have only to hear of a bad idea to alight on it like a fly on ordure. Moral grandiosity is to them what honey is to bears. – Theodore Dalrymple

All my friends were out buying their fancy cars and whatnot: I just kept saving my money, saving, saving. – Charlie Simmons

I thought, well, all my friends are going to uni and spending four years doing the degree. I just decided I’d pop into a full-time job, save my money and build up my assets. – Charlie Simmons

Europe’s self-loathing classes have produced a continent that, decades ago, gave up fighting for civilisation. You can bet that the Parisian drag queens would never make such fun of Islam. – Tom Hunter 

The woke: “Wow, look at me and my edgy ridiculing of Christianity. How stunning and brave I am, now that everyone’s at it! How inclusive I am, to exclude these Christian scum!”

Okay, now do Islam.

The woke: “What are you, some sort of racist?!” – Alice Smith

Is anyone else bored of ‘queering’? Everything’s getting ‘queered’ these days. We’ve had ‘Queering the Curriculum’. ‘Queering the Arts’. And my personal favourite: ‘Queering Palestine.’ This entails academics ‘unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle’. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. ‘Queering the Pavement’ is the only thing they’re interested in.

Now, with soul-zapping inevitability, we’ve had the ‘queering’ of the Olympic Games. Yesterday’s rain-sodden opening ceremony in Paris was super LGBTQIAzzz.
There were drag acts everywhere. A bearded bloke twerked for the world. A bollock-naked man in blue paint was served on a platter of fruit to a gaggle of diet-dodging drag queens. Look, if I wanted to be exposed to the camp debauchery of drag culture, I’d go to a kindergarten. – Brendan O’Neill

Just as you can’t switch on the BBC, visit a library or have a quiet pray these days without encountering a drag queen, so you can’t watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics without seeing portly men in moob-hugging outfits voguing and gloating. It was more Eurovision than Olympian. More Ru Paul than Ancient Greece. More ‘Sashay away’ than ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’. That’s the original Olympic motto. It means ‘Faster, higher, stronger’. Because, believe it or not, we were once a species that celebrated the moral beauty of sporting heroism rather than the ability of a middle-aged man to lard himself into a sequined gown.

The part of the ceremony that caused the biggest stink was the camp Last Supper. A bunch of drag acts gathered around a buxom woman adorned in an aureole halo crown in an unmistakable mimicking of da Vinci’s painting of Christ and the apostles at their final meal. Wearing the smug look of all glib performance artists who love nothing more than to piss off ‘normies’ – because they lack the talent for anything else – the drag queens giddily got into their disciple positions and heaped holy adoration on the lady Jesus. You could almost hear their thoughts: ‘Ooh boy, this is going to piss off old farts – yes!’

Christians are angry. As well they might be. This was ‘extremely disrespectful to Christians’, said Elon Musk. Now, naturally, there’s a backlash against the backlash. Calm down, the woke are saying. Stop being such prudes and snowflakes, they’re chortling. It’s just a little light mockery, they’re insisting. Which is big talk from a section of society that would be weeping into its keffiyehs and demanding heads on spikes if the ceremony had featured a drag-act Muhammad being served a smurf on a plate of fruit with his cock out.

For me – a non-prude and non-snowflake who fully supports the liberty of blasphemy – the question is not ‘How could you disparage Christ like this?!’, but ‘Why would you disparage Christ like this?’. At an Olympics opening ceremony. In front of a billion viewers (well, until we switched off). I have no problem with drag acts in Soho, or Le Marais, of course. But at the opening ceremony to an international celebration of human brotherhood? I’m fine with mockery of religious idols and beliefs, if that’s what you want to do. But at the Olympic Games? Why? Why sully this ancient competition with the infantile Christ-bashing of the conformist godless drones of the modern culture industry?

The shallowness of these provocateurs is summed up in the fact that they would never ridicule Islam.  – Brendan O’Neill

The knowing profanity of the ceremony was not ‘stunning and brave’ – it was dumb and cowardly. Christianity is a safe target in 21st-century Europe. If you really want to stir shit up, give us a drag Muhammad next time. Give us queens cosying up to the Prophet wearing a boob tube and lipstick. You won’t, of course, because you know the potential consequences. There is something sick about well-paid performance artists taking cheap shots at Christianity in a country where people have been shot to death and literally beheaded for raising questions about Islam. They’re the brave ones, not you. And yet rather than show solidarity with them, you look the other way, and throw shade on far easier targets. What moral weaklings.

It would be a mistake, though, to see yesterday’s wet, lame spectacle as irreligious. For in truth, it represented the ascendancy of a new religion: woke. It’s actually fitting that, before the eyes of the world, France replaced Christ and his disciples with ‘queers’ and drag queens. It was a dramatic rendering of a real trend: the usurping of old moral values by the dispiriting belief system of the new elite. Indeed, if you want to be cancelled today, forget mocking Christ – try referring to a ‘transwoman’ as ‘he’. They’ll have your head like Marie Antoinette’s. Yes, if it’s blasphemy they want, let’s give it to them. Transwomen are men, drag queens should stay out of schools, Islam has loads of mad beliefs – what else should we add?  – Brendan O’Neill

I’m starting to think the transgender movement isn’t about gender at all, and never was.

It’s about forcing entire populations to confess things in public they know are false in private.

It’s an exercise in mass mind control by the State and its elites. – Alice Smith 

The IRD needs a systematic process to chase unpaid taxes to ensure that those directors who do pay their debts are not compelled to compete against those who do not.

The IRD used to claim it was its job to be fair. That was never true; it is its job to enforce the tax laws. Well. Perhaps it should do that. – Damien Grant