Via Captain Nemo in the comments, a tale of woe and trauma from party person Mr Jordan Bennett: 

Okay so I had the most DISGUSTING INVALIDATING experience at Heaven nightclub last night,

Hey, I visited Heaven one evening in the early 90s. I’ve seen what can happen.

a place where I am meant to feel free and accepted.

A big gay club for today’s downtrodden homosexual. There is, though, the small matter of security checks. For weapons and such.

Queuing to enter the club it splits into 2 lines- MAN and WOMAN – to be checked by seperate [sic] people.

Sharp-eyed readers may have an inkling of what’s coming.

I am non-binary so OF COURSE I’m gonna queue in the women’s line in sheer protest of where I know they would expect me to queue based on my appearance.

But of course. Let’s call it intersectional decision-making. Or a contrived, rather needy, excuse for drama. 

I wait to be checked nervously and then one of the security staff rudely gestures me to the other line for men. I then kindly tell them that I am non-binary whilst highlighting the pronouns on my earrings which clearly say ‘They/Them’

Sadly, however, said earrings had lost their talismanic powers:

They carried on refusing me access, repeatedly saying this side was for ‘women only’. I shamefully walk to the other side. The two distinctly separate box-like detectors for each queue added to the prison-like atmosphere. I felt invalidated and embarrassed.

Habitual self-involvement can do that, I suppose.

A left-leaning management consultant recently asked his left-leaning Twitter followers for their thoughts on the insufficiently left-leaning working class. The replies – from self-declared socialists, Guardian readers, “woke remainers,” and assorted “social justice advocates” – are, shall we say, of a type, but may nonetheless be of interest. 

Via Damian Counsell, who adds, “If you want to know why the Conservatives have an 80-seat majority…”

Also, open thread. 

I’m not sure there’s a name for this kind of thing. (h/t, Noah Carl) || Odd doggo. || Get you. || Good to know. || Access denied. || Hi, Toilet is an (almost) contactless public convenience. || The thrill of public transport, part 2,044. || Athletic ladies, 1940. || Squirrel feeder of note. || The thrill of pencil sharpening. || Possible pet. (h/t, Darleen) || Tiny monsters. || “Get with the times.” || A brief guide to medieval tennis. || “The root of all discrimination that we see in the world.” || The thrill of hair drying. || The thrill of Thames Television. || Today’s words are learning environment. || Scenes. || Bio-absorbable screws. || Hot bee sex. || This does this. || And finally, he’s taking it rather well, all things considered.

She’s tired of catering to your feelings. 

You see, when you appear to be female, and sound female, and are objectively female, and you visit a restaurant with a group of women, and the stranger taking your order fails to pre-emptively ask, as one does, whether anyone present has serious mental health issues, and instead simply says, “Hi, ladies”… Well, clearly, this is an outrage. 

Update, via the comments: 

Nikw211 adds,

I am not responsible for the state of someone else’s mental health. This is not because I lack compassion, but because anyone who makes the state of their confidence and sanity dependent on random strangers is going to be forever disappointed. It would be like bursting into tears every time you buy a lottery ticket and find your numbers didn’t come up.

It does seem an unpromising path to contentment. As noted here recently, 

This, I think, is what makes trans activism different from that of other groups with which transgender people are often equated. Someone being gay, for instance, doesn’t generally entail a demand that everyone else either hallucinate or pretend to hallucinate. Which is to say, trans activism often includes a belief that the rest of us should pretend that the physical reality we can see is somehow not the case. And unsurprisingly, people may object to being told that they should lie on demand.

A concession that would leave those so inclined at the mercy of any poseur, or prankster, or unpleasable neurotic.

Some will likewise not welcome being told to indulge, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of neurological anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to. 

Update 2:

You know what to do. I’ll set the ball rolling with some agreeable downwardsness; a state-of-the-art driving simulator circa 1967; hairs hitherto undetected; assorted slime mould; and the thrill of competitive miniature dry stone walling.

Oh, and I think these may be teabags.