But with late-in-life cross-dressing.

Make it stop 🤣 pic.twitter.com/3gTboejRnf

— Binky (@TheOnlyGuru) November 11, 2025

No, don’t go. Put down those car keys.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Or, Assume The Position.

A point made in the comments and possibly worth repeating:

From what I’ve seen over the years, the word ally is typically used, by the people who rush to use it, to mean something like advocate, or mouthpiece, or supplicant, or puppet. There’s no discernible interest in, or expectation of, reciprocation; no obvious shared goal or mutual benefit. Indeed, the role, once assumed, appears to entail saying dumb and vividly untrue things, thereby becoming unreliable and absurd.

Say, by insisting that odd, cross-dressing men are somehow, magically, women. Or that a reluctance to mouth fabulist pronouns, to affirm a person’s imaginary themness, is some life-threatening moral oversight.

And then there are the not infrequent detours into outright struggle sessions – as seen, for instance, here, where a disobedient woman finds herself being scolded by a man in an unconvincing wig for not doing the “work” expected of an ally – essentially cowed deference and dishonesty on demand.

Specifically,

This, then, is a world in which allyship – “listening to the community” – requires prostration, a suspension of cognitive faculties, and a surrendering of basic probity.

In the case above, regarding race, the duty of the ally would presumably be to announce, as Mr Zellie does, that preferring the civilised to the thuggish is “a white supremacist construct,” to regurgitate his assertions about the character and motives of “straight white men,” to demand the “defunding” of the police, as Mr Zellie does, and jumping through whatever rhetorical hoops, and taking whatever “action,” Mr Zellie deems appropriate or amusing.

The only benefit I can see for those willing to debase themselves in this way would be the hope that Mr Zellie won’t assert or imply that you’re a racist, or that you’re insufficiently “anti-racist.” And therefore racist.

Not, it has to be said, the most tempting offer.

As someone notes in reply to the post quoted above,

Not an unfair summary.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Lifted from the comments, Mr Burkett ponders crime and its apologists:

A thread ensues.

Regarding the consequent conflictedness and anxiety, all that progressive wrongness, these three posts include some fairly vivid illustrations of the phenomenon.

Among which, a claim that more theatre for schoolchildren would somehow deter the kinds of creatures who repeatedly and gleefully sucker-punch elderly ladies for being the wrong race, and a chap who insists that women should allow themselves to be mugged at bus stops lest their mugger, out on probation, come to harm.

Oh, and the belief, expressed tearfully and at length by a Guardian columnist, that when you find your home being burgled in the middle of the night, the real victims, the people deserving of sympathy and indulgence, are the ones breaking into your home while brandishing carving knives and then driving off with your valuables in your car.

In the examples featured in the posts above, the perpetrator is typically black and the apologist white. This recurring racial hang-up is often made explicit – as when the activist and lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, mentioned here, dismissed objections to being burgled as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes,” while telling Guardian readers that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”

Mr Stafford Smith went on to chide and insult the victims of burglary, and the law-abiding generally, while offering implausible excuses for those who break into strangers’ homes and steal their belongings, and who do this over and over again with ever greater boldness. And none of these claims were challenged, at all, in the Guardian‘s fawning interview. Apparently, among many progressives, such contrivance is not only congenial, but terribly high-status.

Perversity as piety.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Or, Return of the Honesty Box.

With domain renewal looming, along with umpteen other behind-the-scenes expenses, now seems a good time to remind patrons that where you are right now is made possible by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to ensure this place exists a while longer, and remains ad-free, there are three buttons below the fold with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted.

If what happens here is of value, this is a chance to show it.

If one-click haste is called for, there’s a QR code in the sidebar, at which you point your phone camera, and my PayPal.Me page can be found here. As requested, there are SubscribeStar and Ko-Fi accounts, via which love may also be monetised, whether as one-off donations or monthly subscriptions. Should you be gripped by an urge to express encouragement via currency, by all means succumb.

Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link, or via the button in the sidebar, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

It’s what keeps this place here.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for close to nineteen years, in over 3,500 posts and hundreds of thousands of comments, the Reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.

Do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company.

Oh, and consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

From the comments, scenes from Smith College, Massachusetts:

A woman reacted to a banner stating “Women are adult human females” by calling the group holding it “fascists.”pic.twitter.com/8w8oikJX76

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) October 6, 2025

It turns out that when you try to pretend away fundamental realities, as if wishing made it so, any reminder of those realities has to be repressed or erased, or at least shouted at quite loudly.

I believe this was the scene that prompted the meltdown.

Update, via the comments:

Mike D adds,

Well, it does seem to be an illustration of the fact that if you require continual, universal affirmation – i.e., deference – if you need everyone else to pretend something vividly untrue – then you’re unlikely to be happy. The best you could hope for is to surround yourself with people who are willing to lie to you.

It’s worth mentioning, I think, that the trans-identified people I’ve spoken with or seen who seem most content are the ones who can concede the reality of the situation, and who can juggle that reality with their preference to live as if they were the opposite sex, while knowing that they aren’t.

They don’t seem prone to the bedlamite outbursts seen above.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.