All entries by this author
Mar 11th, 2023 6:04 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Would risk a backlash.
Certainly, one might examine certain propositions more carefully because of their provenance, but I hardly think it true or sensible to say that ‘nobody has any reason to believe anything you have to say’ on a particular issue on the grounds that ‘you’ are sadly wrong on other issues.
Yeah, I get that on an intellectual level, but I’m looking at this from the point of view of someone who wants the Green Party (when it actually is green and not pink and baby blue) to do better and have a greater influence on the policy positions of more mainstream parties. In going all in on … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Mar 10th, 2023 11:28 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Don’t mention the war climate disaster.
The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of David Sir Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press, the Guardian has been told.
The BBC says not true, not true, they never planned to broadcast that episode. But…
Senior sources at the BBC told the Guardian that the decision not to show the sixth episode was made to fend off potential critique from the political right. This week the Telegraph newspaper attacked the BBC for creating the series and for taking funding from “two charities previously criticised for their political lobbying”
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10 comments
Mar 10th, 2023 10:54 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Mike Haubrich on being a Democrat and a gender skeptic:
I am the local party unit secretary in Minnesota for the DFL, which is an anachronistic reference to a 1940’s merger of the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor parties. Very few farmers in Minnesota belong to the DFL anymore as Minnesota is as reflective as the rest of the country in the rural-urban divide between Democrats and Republicans. Most labor unions work with the DFL, but I think that fewer members of the rank and file follow along with it. There are conflicts between environmentalists and labor, especially up on the Iron Range, as many people depend on iron ore extraction and refining for their livelihood.
Nothing is absolute, of
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10 comments
Mar 10th, 2023 10:05 am |
By Ophelia Benson
News from the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine:
The UKOM report asserts that future guidelines must rely on a systematic review of evidence rather than cherry-picking studies, and that all hormonal and surgical interventions must be restricted to research settings to ensure clear protocols, safeguarding & adequate follow-up./2
The existing Norwegian treatment guidelines for gender-dysphoric youth, based on a 2015 report ”The Right to the Right Sex,” closely mirror WPATH SOC7 “gender-affirming” model. Medical gender affirmation is widely available to youth,
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
5 comments
Mar 10th, 2023 8:09 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The net might be tightening around Trump. Then again they might all chicken out again.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office recently signaled to Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that he could face criminal charges for his role in the payment of hush money to a porn star, the strongest indication yet that prosecutors are nearing an indictment of the former president, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
The prosecutors offered Mr. Trump the chance to testify next week before the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the potential case, the people said. Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close; it would be unusual for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, to notify a
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2 comments
Mar 10th, 2023 5:22 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Gaby Hinsliff reviews Time to Think for the Guardian, very very cautiously and queasily, and laced with questionable assumptions.
BBC journalist Hannah Barnes’s densely reported account of events inside the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) in London, the country’s only specialist clinic for transgender children…
The book traces Gids’s evolution from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity…
The first two paragraphs and already we can see the assumptions doing their work – there definitely is such a thing as “transgender children” and there also definitely is such a thing as “gender identity” and we all know what they are and that they are definitely real. It’s called reification, and … Read the rest
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3 comments
Mar 9th, 2023 5:34 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Karen Ingala Smith on reading the names and not getting distracted:
Today, for the eighth year running, in the Parliamentary International Women’s Day debate, MP Jess Phillips read out the names of women in the UK who have been killed since the previous years IWD debate and where a man or men are principal suspects. This year the list contained the names of 107 women, the youngest, Holly Newton was just 15 years old, the oldest, Anne Woodbridge was 92.
I have been collating and commemorating UK women killed by men for 11 years, since the murder of 20-year-old Kirsty Treloar on the 2nd January 2012.
I am grateful to Jess Phillips for amplifying my work and for
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Mar 9th, 2023 12:01 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Telegraph on The Lesbian Project:
“I could never have imagined,” says [Kathleen] Stock, who today is launching – along with [Martina] Navratilova (who[m] she has never met in person) and writer Julie Bindel – the Lesbian Project, a group that intends to champion UK women who are same-sex attracted.
…
[I]ts existence will infuriate those who see her and Bindel, along with their ally – and heterosexual – JK Rowling, as a trio of arch-Terfs (trans exclusionary revolutionary feminists), largely because of the animosity between some trans activists who object to lesbians refusing to have sex with transgender women who have male genitalia.
The reporter must have been writing in haste. It’s a quartet, not a trio, … Read the rest
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2 comments
Mar 9th, 2023 11:37 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Waterstones says it’s not true it’s not it’s not it’s NOT.
Waterstones has refuted [rejected] accusations made on social media this week that it is failing to stock certain titles about gender, saying the claims are “of course… untrue”.
Twitter users had claimed that Waterstones branches were refusing to stock Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (Swift Press), with similar suggestions made about Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith (Fleet).
Not so much refusing to as failing to. I saw no claims that Watersones staff were stupid enough to say “We refuse to stock it!” when asked. The claims are that it’s extremely difficult … Read the rest
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5 comments
Mar 9th, 2023 10:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Washington Post shares more of Tucker Carlson’s texts that reveal what whoppers he tells on Fox News every night.
Like:
It’s so interesting that Carlson knows that about Trump and that it’s never stopped him helping Trump and harming Trump critics and opponents. What Trump is good at is destroying things so here we are helping him destroy the US, democracy, the climate, the rest of the world…
He knows but does it anyway. What a guy.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Mar 9th, 2023 7:31 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Family values:
Anti-abortion Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert has said that her 17-year-old son will make her a grandmother in April.
Isn’t that sweet. She had a baby when she was a teenager and now her son is following her lead.
“There’s something special about rural conservative communities,” Boebert continued. “They value life. If you look at teen pregnancy rates throughout the nation, well, they’re the same, [in] rural and urban areas. However, abortion rates are higher in urban areas. Teen moms’ rates are higher in rural conservative areas, because they understand the preciousness of a life that it’s about to be born.”
Or they’re lower in urban areas because people with better access to schools and libraries and higher … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
6 comments
Mar 8th, 2023 4:18 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trudeau pretends to express solidarity on International Women’s Day and then promptly says haha fooled you, I don’t mean a word of it.
Hooray for women’s day and also you women sit down and shut up while the men talk for you.
Piss off Justin.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
11 comments
Mar 8th, 2023 3:49 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Eva Kurilova on The Man Who Speaks for Canadian Women, Even on International Women’s Day.
Marni Panas, born Marcel Panas, is an Alberta man who claims to be a woman and likes to talk about how authentic he is. Recently, he was also invited to speak on a panel at an International Women’s Day event called “She Is” organized by Discovery House, a Calgary-based women’s charity.
A women’s charity that doesn’t know what a woman is. I remember the days when everyone learned this in very early childhood.
Two real women were invited to join Panas on the panel of “women leaders and change-makers across a variety of sectors”: Mandy Stobo, an “artist, entrepreneur, actor and mother,”
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Mar 8th, 2023 10:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
About this idea that women are attention-hogs while men modestly stand aside and let us blather – Deborah Tannen has written about this misperception:
I do say, in my just-published book about women’s friendships, that women friends, as compared to men, tend to talk more — more often, at greater length and about more personal topics. But that’s private speaking — conversations that negotiate and strengthen personal relationships. Research, my own and others’, has also shown that men tend to talk far more than women in what might be called public speaking — formal business-focused contexts, like meetings. In a now-classic study, Barbara and Gene Eakins recorded seven university faculty meetings.
They found that, with one exception,
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3 comments
Mar 8th, 2023 10:11 am |
By Ophelia Benson
I wonder if Tucker Carlson drew a line under his own career with that stunt.
(It won’t signify much to him – he’s been paid a lotta dollas over the past x years.)
Anyway I love the way Anderson Cooper says this.
… Read the rest
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