Oh good, YET ANOTHER man explaining what a woman is and how wrong we’ve all been to think we knew.

What is a woman? It’s a question that’s suddenly everywhere, and it turns out the answer is complicated. Jon breaks down the gender binary and gender spectrum in this week’s episode. Stream the free episode now on Apple TV+. pic.twitter.com/n9RfjAhu7p

— The Problem With Jon Stewart (@TheProblem) October 8, 2022

… Read the rest

Sally Hines as FGEN issued a “statement” (aka a blog post) last March:

FGEN is an international network of feminist academics and others whose aims are wholly political in that we seek to oppose transphobia wherever it becomes apparent – whether in a university in Central London or on the prairies of the midwestern United States. 

So, the F shouldn’t be there at all. It’s not a feminist network, it’s an anti-“transphobia” network, i.e. a network dedicated to insisting that men are women if they say they are and no one is allowed to disagree. No feminism in sight.

We aim to promote the human rights of trans and gender diverse people worldwide to end the exclusion of trans

Sally Hines founded a thing called the Feminist Gender Equality Network, aka FGEN.

Tell us more:

The Feminist Gender Equality Network (FGEN) is a cross-sector, interdisciplinary international organisation that adopts an intersectional feminist framework in order to:

1. advance the understanding of gender and sex as fluid categories

What’s feminist about that though? If gender and sex are fluid categories, how can feminism exist? What does it mean? What is it for?

2. protect the rights and needs of people of all (or no) gender

Then why call it feminism? Why not call it peopleism? If it’s for people of all or no gender (what that means is a question for another paragraph, or another day) then why … Read the rest

Reduxx has further detail on the Jacob Breslow question – Jacob Breslow Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, that is.

The academic who recently resigned from a charity that promotes the medical transitioning of children had for years been writing blog entries related to pro-pedophilia activism and “minor attraction.”

Activism around sex with children, that is.

“Activism” forsooth – as if the common understanding that it’s extremely wrong to force sex on children were just another outdated unexamined prejudice like the one that says women are stupid and inferior or the one that says non-white people are stupid and inferior.

It’s not. Sex is not good for children. Adults forcing or coaxing or tricking them into sex … Read the rest

Oops there goes the Kerch bridge:

Ukraine is exploding with excitement this morning.

Videos of the damaged Crimean bridge have spread like wildfire on social media; this is already being compared to the sinking of the Russian warship Moskva in April.

“The guided missile cruiser Moskva and the Kerch bridge – two notorious symbols of Russian power in Ukrainian Crimea – have gone down,” tweeted Ukraine’s ministry of defence.

“What’s next in line, Russkies?” it went on.

Ukraine has a brilliant sense of humor.

Ukraine’s inventive social media activists are gleefully pumping out memes to celebrate the occasion.

And Ukraine’s second largest bank, Monobank, says it has already issued a new debit card design featuring the collapsed

There’s a petition we can sign in support of the University of Southern Maine professor under attack for saying there are only two sexes. I just signed it.

There’s a conversation about the effort to get her fired at Why Evolution is True.… Read the rest

It hasn’t sunk in yet, has it.

Trans youth charity #Mermaids forced to close its vital helpline because of “intolerable abuse”. Even if you disagree with ⁦@Mermaids_Gender⁩ (which I don’t), this harassment is so wrong & prevents trans youth & parents accessing life-saving help https://t.co/AZjUL60P33

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) October 7, 2022

WHAT “vital helpline”???

Mermaids isn’t helping, it’s harming. Puberty blockers are harmful. Cutting off breasts or penises is harmful. Telling children they’re in the wrong body and can change that with drugs and surgeries is harmful. Mermaids doesn’t help; instead of helping Mermaids gives children terrible, dangerous advice.

The brutal recklessness of these ideologues is a sight to behold.… Read the rest

Meet “Critical Childhood Studies”:

Critical Childhood Studies (CCS) is an emerging academic field that has developed over the past two decades. The field belongs in the same ballpark as Critical Race Theory or former Women’s Studies (now Gender or Queer Studies). Established to examine the histories and provide cultural context for people oppressed on the basis of race and sex, these fields have morphed.

Rather than helping oppressed communities, critical scholars often promote ideological views on race and “gender” that ultimately do the exact opposite: further fuel racism and sexism. Critical Childhood Studies (CCS) has fallen into the same trap — deconstructing childhood to a degree that, if applied outside of an academic setting, would put children in danger.

Too bad girls in Iran can’t identify their way out of being killed by the security police.

Reports are emerging of the death of another teenage girl at the hands of security forces in Iran, as protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini looked set to enter their third week.

Sarina Esmailzadeh, a 16-year-old who posted popular vlogs on YouTube, was killed when the security forces beat her with batons at a protest in Gohardasht in Alborz province on 23 September, according to Amnesty International.

This isn’t random or chance. A harsh punitive control of women is the core of Islamist theocracy. Islam sees women as nothing but walking temptations to men, who have to be bagged up and … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Feminism is for everyone except women.

I fully understand why many feminists say that men can’t be feminists, and I understand why they are suspicious of men who claim to be. It’s because we have a tendency to take over when we get involved, and when it comes to transactivists, they are living up to those expectations. What I don’t understand is how people can make declarations such as “MY feminism will be intersectional” as if people could buy a feminism and paint it any color that works best for them.

I think that moving Women’s studies over to Gender Studies has had an obvious and negative effect on people’s understanding of … Read the rest

Last year Michael Biggs wrote a piece for The Critic about…it’s simpler to quote.

Threats of violence against “trans exclusionary” or “gender critical” feminists — who do not believe that people can change sex merely by announcing preferred pronouns or wearing different clothes — have become ubiquitous on social media. It is nevertheless surprising to discover that such threats can now be submitted as academic work for a master’s degree.

The London School of Economics held a conference in April 2021 for students taking the MSc in Gender (Sexuality). One session was entitled “No Time, No TERFs, No Norms”; the disparaging acronym stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. A paper in the session concluded:

“If TERFs think trans* is

From an interview with Maggie Haberman about Trump and her book about Trump and reporting on Trump:

He fixated on the paper and attacked me because of it. There were times when he attacked me over coverage — it was always over a story or something he saw me say on TV. One thing he got very upset about seeing me say on TV was that he watches a lot of TV, and then that became a fixation. He’s incredibly hostile to anyone suggesting he watches a lot of TV because he thinks it’s some knock on his intelligence.

Of course it’s a knock on his intelligence. It’s also a knock on his intellectual energy, his discipline, his abilities, his … Read the rest

An online course at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is titled Who is Feminism For? The instructor is Sophie Lewis.

The seemingly uncontroversial idea that feminism is synonymous with “the women’s movement”—i.e., that feminism is “for women”—has in fact never been widely accepted, least of all among feminists. From the beginning, comradely holes have been poked in feminism’s myriad attempts to define itself, not to mention the word “woman.” For centuries, feminists have debated: what does feminism encompass? Who is feminism for?

No they haven’t. Not for centuries – the word hasn’t been current for that long, let alone the movement.

In this course, we’ll enter that debate, unpacking questions of feminism’s purpose, scope, and possible limits. Along the

The BBC tells us:

Relatives of a girl who died during protests in Iran have been forced into making false statements, a source close to the family has told BBC Persian.

Nika Shakarami, 16, went missing in Tehran on 20 September after telling a friend she was being chased by police. On Wednesday night, a state TV report showed her aunt, Atash, saying: “Nika was killed falling from a building.” Her uncle was also seen on TV speaking against the unrest, as someone seems to whisper to him: “Say it, you scumbag!”

They apparently smashed every bone in her body.

Tehran judiciary official Mohammad Shahriari was cited by state media as saying on Wednesday that a post-mortem showed Nika

Shambolic Neutral on The Divine Trans/The Trans Divine:

“Transpeople are sacred. We are the divine”. If that’s not cult-speak then I do not know what is. Some of us have been saying gender ideology is the new religion for over a decade. Finally, it clearly feels secure enough to make it blatant.

Or at least the branch of it that hangs out at the Globe does.

In a way of course that makes sense – it’s what drama and acting are all about. You could get up on a stage and say “drama is the divine” and I would see it quite differently. It would be a metaphor as opposed to a lunatic boast. There is something magical (metaphorically … Read the rest

Scotland goes full magic gender:

A Holyrood committee tasked with scrutinising the Scottish government’s gender recognition reform bill has given its support to the key principles for simplifying how transgender people can update their birth certificates – including the introduction of self-declaration.

Great. Let’s introduce self-declaration for everything. I’m Bill Gates, so give me the contents of his bank account.

Thursday’s report by Holyrood’s equalities, human rights and civil justice committee recommends, by a majority of five to two, the move to statutory self-declaration before the registrar general for legal gender recognition, thus removing the need for a psychiatric diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

It also supports reducing the age at which people can apply for a gender recognition certificate

The Telegraph reports The Globe’s mad dash to pretend it never did call women bitches:

Shakespeare’s Globe has been criticised for sharing a “derogatory” poem challenging “transphobic Terfs”, as the theatre promoted a play about a non-binary Joan of Arc.

A play about one of history’s rare Famous Women that pretends she wasn’t a woman after all.

Verses that begin by using the word “bitch” to descibe feminists who are critical of gender ideology were shared on the Globe’s website and the venue’s Twitter feed to promote I, Joan, a play about the French heroine.

Well that’s what the good people do now – call feminists bitches and cunts. It’s The Monstrous Regiment of Women updated.

It also

Throwing down.

India, I swear to God, if you want to start a petition for Mermaids to take me on in court, the first signature will be mine. https://t.co/1HZ6BbCX55

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 5, 2022

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Originally a comment by Freemage on A small but important right.

It always blows my mind how swiftly virtually the entire Left forgot about the phrase “Schroedinger’s Rapist”. It was the go-to for the explanation why women couldn’t just trust a random guy, even though he might seem all right – because rapists don’t wear neon signs on their heads, and thus you only know a guy is a threat when he actually reveals himself to BE a threat.

And of course, this was true even though the vast, vast majority of men not only aren’t rapists, but are repulsed and revolted by the idea of rape. The harm that can be committed by the small minority of men … Read the rest

And Glosswitch shares another narcissistic display from the Globe:

Just seen the poem tweeted – later deleted – by @The_Globe and wow, that's a lot of words to say "fuck off Mummy, I hate you, please will you give me a cuddle" pic.twitter.com/1KZIlKQGWR

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) October 5, 2022

Blah blah blah my right to proudly self-identify blah blah blah my beauty astounds them –

This is not social justice or anything like it. This is just an unholy blend of aggression and conceit. I can’t wait for it to fall over and end.… Read the rest