All entries by this author
Jun 4th, 2022 8:18 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh look, another one.
It was only 50 years ago this month that the first female rabbi was ordained
For many American Jews, seeing a female rabbi is a pretty regular part of life. But it’s a fairly recent development. Sally Priesand – the first American female rabbi – was ordained just 50 years ago, on June 3, 1972.
This groundbreaking ordination changed women’s roles, and the course of Judaism itself.
Although Priesand had strong support from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where she was enrolled in seminary, a lot of people still didn’t want to see her in the role.
“There would always come a time where some person would come up to me and tell me why
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Jun 4th, 2022 8:11 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Hey, sometimes NPR does manage to use the word “women” – for instance in a story that talks about the “gender imbalance” in China. They must have worked out, after a lot of hard thinking, that you can’t have a “gender imbalance” if gender (aka sex) can be swapped for its opposite at a moment’s notice.
Just as in the United States, people born after the 1980s in China are facing the prospect of worse outcomes than their parents. Property prices rise beyond their reach; college graduates have to compete over limited jobs; and a gender imbalance favoring males — made worse by decades of the one-child policy — puts marriage out of reach for poorer men. Hard work
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Jun 4th, 2022 7:48 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Mike B commented:
Yesterday, my partner and I listened to a long segment on NPR on abortion. Not once was the word “woman” used. In its place, “somebody,” “a person/people,” “patient.” The verbal gymnastics was astonishing, like watching horses run an obstacle course.
So I went looking. I found a segment from today, so not the one Mike listened to (unless they tweaked the date), but it fits the description – the only use of “woman” is in the name of a women’s center, which NPR is not at liberty to “correct.” Other than that, zilch. What we get instead is:
Following the leaked Supreme Court decision that suggests Roe v. Wade will be overturned, many Americans of
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Jun 4th, 2022 6:11 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Janice Turner informs us that civil servants (in the UK) are being told appalling drivel as official “training” – by people who are secretive about it.
Here are some facts I learnt by watching an “inclusion workshop” for civil servants. A brain in a jar “knows” if it is male or female and, if transplanted into the “wrong” body, would exhibit distress. This country has no legal sex-based rights. It is impossible to define what “woman” or even “female” means. There is zero conflict between women’s rights and trans rights, so beware colleagues asking too many questions; they’re probably bigots.
So by “inclusion” the people who send civil servants to these workshops mean exclusion of women. Interesting.
A:gender, “a network
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Jun 3rd, 2022 12:39 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Some tipping points:
The second is the loss of the Amazonian rain forest. Deforestation is drying it out, and when it reaches a tipping point, there will be no going back. (We’re in the lucky generation that gets to watch Bolsonaro making it happen. On purpose.)
…with a significant loss of trees, less water will enter the atmosphere so areas of the Amazon will become drier and drier as the water cycle breaks down. This is already happening in the southern and eastern Amazon, where dry seasons have become longer for at least the past 2 decades.
Global warming will intensify this damage. Along with deforestation, it will lead to increased forest fires, regional droughts and
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Jun 3rd, 2022 11:30 am |
By Ophelia Benson
More on the drought:
The megadrought currently choking the western United States is the worst drought in the region in more than 1,000 years. It’s having an enormous impact across many states and on several major reservoirs including Lake Mead, a water source for millions of people in the West.
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This week, local officials in Southern California started restricting water use, including watering of lawns to once or twice a week, for about six million residents. It’s also having a major impact on Lake Mead, which is a major source of water for agriculture and for millions of people in the American West.
Ok hang on – why not just ban watering lawns entirely? Lawns make no difference … Read the rest
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Jun 3rd, 2022 11:05 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Meanwhile, drought.
A once-in-a-lifetime drought in the western part of the US is turning up dead bodies – but that’s the least of people’s worries.
It’s not once-in-a-lifetime any more. Lifetimes are going to be radically different in the future (the future meaning now and tomorrow and so on – not some distant prospect beyond the horizon).
Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead – formed by the creation of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River – is the largest reservoir in the United States and provides water to 25 million people across three states and Mexico. Here, the stunning scale of a drought in the American west has been laid plain for all to
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Jun 3rd, 2022 10:35 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Now there’s a surprise.
When Hillary Clinton ran for the US presidency in 2016, she received sexist comments “on a constant basis” and her team had “no idea” how to deal with them, her former aide Huma Abedin has said.
Abedin, who worked closely with Clinton on her campaign, recalled that the former secretary of state was deluged with openly sexist remarks as well as unhelpful advice, or instructions to emulate male politicians.
Really? Women get abuse? I thought it was only trans people – especially male trans people. We’ve been told for years that women are the evil domineering phobic cruel sex, but now it seems that a woman running for high office has to expect nonstop sexist … Read the rest
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Jun 2nd, 2022 5:21 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Girls to the Front has a thread on “Sophie” Cook.
We were not “quite happily” using “Mx” a few years ago. I’ve never used it and never been the slightest bit happy about it. It’s just one more intrusion on and theft of what’s ours.
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Jun 2nd, 2022 5:06 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Times on “Sophie” Cook:
Senior prosecutors are facing criticism over the recruitment of a transgender activist to a key diversity role despite evidence that she has posted derogatory tweets about women.
And is a man.
Sophie Cook, who has supported the replacement of the word woman with “womxn” and used the acronym “terf” — trans-exclusionary radical feminist — has been appointed the Crown Prosecution Service’s “speak-out champion”, a new role.
You know, the CPS could have appointed a woman. It wouldn’t be a bad idea – women have all kinds of issues with the CPS, conspicuous among them the staggeringly low rate of prosecution of rape cases. What does a man who calls himself a woman have to … Read the rest
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Jun 2nd, 2022 11:56 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on One’s estates.
The third* most common argument I hear from pro-monarchy Norwegians is something along the lines of “Would you rather have something like the American model and get someone like Trump as the Head of State?”. This seems to presuppose that the monarchy does indeed serve a real function that must be served somehow, so if the monarchy is abolished we need to put something else in its place. My answer is the same as the one I give when religious apologists ask what atheists want to put in religion’s place: Neither the monarchy nor religion serves any function that needs to be served at at all, so we can … Read the rest
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Jun 2nd, 2022 11:52 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Enzyme on One’s estates.
Campaigners have said much of this land lies on peat bogs, which should be allowed to grow wild to sequester carbon instead of being used for grouse shooting.
OK, but this is important, and it perhaps does undermine some of the point about tree-cover. I’ve no love for grouse-moors, and many grouse moors are close to peat areas: anyone who’s been to the Peak District can attest that there’ll be grouse-butts in one place, and a couple of hundred metres away you’re up to your thighs in peat.
BUT… Peat-bogs are not forest. They are AMAZING carbon sinks. According to the Beeb,
Peatlands cover around 12% of the land in
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Jun 2nd, 2022 11:39 am |
By Ophelia Benson
It can be so difficult to be sure you’re not reading a parody. Surely the BBC wouldn’t publish a parody news item…
When Alexa Hermosillo, 25, came out as non-binary about a year ago, while living in San Diego, California, he found many of the people he dated still boxed him into a gender binary.
He was expecting to find something else? “Dating” (i.e. sex) tends to work that way.
Hermosillo had short hair and presented as more masculine, but was using she/he pronouns at the time. People he dated, however, “would assign that more normatively masculine role to me”, he says (Hermosillo now identifies as trans masculine). “If we drove somewhere, I would be the person to drive.
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Jun 2nd, 2022 10:26 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Guardian decides today would be a good day to treat “JK Rowling” as just another political issue people disagree on, and by the way she’s the wrong side to pick.
It seems they have a series called Dining across the divide: two people eat something and talk about how they disagree. Catchy subhead for this one:
One voted Labour, the other Tory, and they disagreed about Brexit. Can they find common ground over JK Rowling?
Can they? Can they? Can they agree that she’s a bitch and a Karen who has no right to say that men are not women?
Of course they can.
John The subject where I felt I was educated is the storm that has engulfed
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Jun 2nd, 2022 9:16 am |
By Ophelia Benson
To think I used to admire Peter Tatchell.
So, who cares, right? So 80 “cis lesbians” do get pressured to have sex with men pretending to be women, so what? Bitches. Karens.
A lot of people make the point that Simon makes:
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Jun 1st, 2022 4:03 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
A crudely written vituperative piece on the Allison Bailey tribunal by one Moya Lothian-McLean:
Barrister Allison Bailey – a co-founder of the LGB Alliance, a transgender-exclusionary organisation – is suing, in one fell swoop, Garden Court, her legal chambers, and Stonewall, the largest LGBTQ+ organisation in Europe.
It’s just stupid and ludicrous to call the LGB Alliance “transgender-exclusionary.” There is no law or rule or unwritten agreement that lesbians and gay men must “include” trans people in everything they do. It’s not particularly obvious why they’re expected to “include” them at all ever. Stonewall, meanwhile, could be said to have become a mostly trans-focused organization, and it can certainly be called one that treats some lesbians and gay men … Read the rest
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Jun 1st, 2022 11:48 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh, gee, I thought Priss Choss was such a keen environmentalist.
The duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, two of the royal family’s largest portfolios of land, have snubbed tree campaigners who are calling for the royals to rewild their estates.
Well. You know. There’s The Environment, and then there’s One’s portfolio of land.
Rewilding advocates at the campaign group Wild Card have been meeting for months with the crown estate, which manages most of the royal land and pays the revenue into the Treasury. They say relations have been “really positive”.
However, the duchies are separate to the crown estate, and not subject to the same level of accountability. The two organisations – described by the land campaigner Guy
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