No, Waterstones. That’s not correct.

Please add to the twitter storm that is spontaneously occurring and think about what this form of activism is teaching us. pic.twitter.com/0nA2wLhgmv

— M (@sisterpegj) March 12, 2022

Not period. Not end of story. Not true. Being a woman isn’t subjective – note that “identifying as” something is entirely subjective and self-reported and thus not something that anyone else can confirm or deny. Being a woman isn’t like that. Vladimir Putin could identify as a woman; it wouldn’t make him one.

And that arrogant bullying claim not only has nothing to do with feminism, it’s an insult to feminism – so what’s it doing on a table with a “Feminism” sign at Waterstones Norwich? Besides … Read the rest

A judge has put a hold on Texas’s “investigate the parents” bill.

A Texas judge on Friday issued an injunction against enforcement of the governor’s order to investigate gender-affirming care as child abuse, handing opponents of the policy a temporary victory.

I don’t know what I think about the Texas bill, but I do know that that first paragraph is already on one side as opposed to neutral. It’s a new and questionable idea that there even is such a thing as “gender-affirming care.” If children started saying they were snakes would it be species-confirming care to cut off all four limbs?

The state Legislature last year failed to pass a bill that would have made it a

New sexist pig exactly like old sexist pig.

Yeah you might be getting a bit of a skewed sample there babe

— Caspar Salmon (@CasparSalmon) March 12, 2022

Don’t you “babe” us you patronizing git.… Read the rest

Does the law actually say trans women are women?

No.

This is a relief to me, because really, who gave the law authority to determine ontology? That would just be weird. The law can define categories for the purpose of a law, but it can’t just bang a gavel and say strawberries are luxury automobiles.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist spelled it out a couple of years ago:

The Gender Recognition Act 2004 does change some people’s legal sex. Obviously the law can’t change anyone’s biological sex. The fact that the law can’t mess with material reality is the point Canute was making when he forbade the tide to come in. But section 9 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 

Keir Starmer throws women overboard.

Asked to define a woman, Starmer replied: “A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law. It has been the law through the combined effects of the 2004 [Gender Recognition] Act and the 2010 [Equality] Act. So that’s my view. It also happens to be the law in the United Kingdom.”

It doesn’t “happen to be” the law, it’s a law because people have lost their fucking minds.

You can’t turn men into women by passing laws. You can change definitions under law, but you can’t change the underlying reality. If you want to pass … Read the rest

Rowling is more involved by the day.

I don’t think our politicians have the slightest idea how much anger is building among women from all walks of life at the attempts to threaten and intimidate them out of speaking publicly about their own rights, their own bodies and their own lives. 1/3 https://t.co/NtwFcTVgif

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) March 12, 2022

Now @Keir_Starmer publicly misrepresents equalities law, in yet another indication that the Labour Party can no longer be counted on to defend women’s rights. But I repeat: women are organising across party lines, and their resolve and their anger are growing. 3/3

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) March 12, 2022

We. are. organizing.

Always glad to hear from some of

Sarah Ditum on Labour’s inability to say what the word “woman” means:

Clearly, asking a Labour MP to define “woman” is a reliable way to get them to look silly. And so interviewers are going to keep on doing it. Which means that Labour should, at some point in the past two years, have come up with a one-line answer, if only to get them through media appearances.

…

Because, despite Cooper’s dismissive attitude, the definition of “woman” does matter. It matters for single-sex spaces. It matters for sport. It matters for the language we use to talk about female health. It matters for measuring the income gap, and for monitoring who’s doing more than their fair share of

Carol Tavris wrote a few weeks ago about the fad for transing and the failure of much of journalism to report on it fully.

An August 6, 2021 episode of WNYC’s “On the Media” illustrates the problem: the hosts focused on efforts “to block access to medical care for trans kids,” the “politics and propaganda behind the recent wave of anti-trans legislation,” and “what the science tells us about gender affirming care in adolescence.” But “On the Media” did not tell the full story. The usually thorough reporters did not invite a cultural historian to wonder why “gender affirming” clinics have proliferated, from only one in 2010 to more than 400 today, offering puberty blockers and hormones to facilitate

Julie Burchill holds Laurie Penny’s whiny self-indulgence up for laughter:

Penny also squeals about Western sexism while giving Islamism a hall pass. They once wore a hijab and gushed about how great it felt, while Their opinion on the 2015 Paris massacre was, ‘Racist trolling is not heroism. Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie.’

You’d think the war in Ukraine might have given such alleged empaths a moment’s pause in their navel-gazing and belly-aching, but it’s business as usual. I’ve been suspended from Twitter after saying that unarmed Ukrainians facing down Russian tanks are braver than men who dress up as women. However, I will scatter my pearls before the whiny non-binary and warn Them that the reviews

James Kirkup at the Spectator says it’s a difficult time to be a girl:

In 2019, the Lancet published research showing girls’ rates of self-harm had tripled since 2000. Other studies show girls are much more likely to be depressed or anxious than boys.

I would hate to be a girl in this climate. Porn, “sex work,” giant testosterone-filled “girls” taking all the good parts – no thank you.

On the surface things look pretty encouraging.

They’re more likely than boys to go to university. They have better economic prospects than any generation of females that went before them. Empowered female role models are more visible than ever before, in culture, sport, media, science, business, even politics.

Yet at

#Raifestlibre Après 10 ans de détention #Raifestlibre ! #Raifisfree After 10 years in prison #Raifisfree !
بعد 10 سنوات من السجن #رائف_حرّاً pic.twitter.com/1VA0XjSofs

— Ensaf Haidar (@miss9afi) March 11, 2022

After 10 years my father is free! pic.twitter.com/ZF2GePvHGu

— Raif Badawi (@raif_badawi) March 11, 2022

… Read the rest

Oh my god Raif is out of prison.

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi – jailed and sentenced to 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam online” – has been freed, his wife says.

“Raif called me. He is free,” Ensaf Haidar told AFP news agency from Canada, where she fled with the couple’s three children.

The blogger’s first 50 lashes caused a global outcry and he became an emblem of rights abuses in the country.

There has been no official Saudi comment on his release.

Mr Badawi’s son Terad also tweeted: “My father is free.”

But he’s still under a travel ban.

The NGO Reporters Without Borders said it would work to ensure he can join his family in Canada despite the

W. H. Auden wrote a poem titled August 1968 in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring.

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Cody Walker wrote at Kenyon Review in September 2016:

We depend on poets for this kind of expression, of course. A totalitarian regime communicates through jargon and claptrap; a poet (or a poet like Auden, anyway) fires back with rhyme and tetrameter. At the time, the fight doesn’t feel fair—but history

Anna asked in a comment:

Have you seen the pro-Nazi Azov battalion?

I hope this doesn’t turn out like when we helped the Afghanistans against the Russians in the 1980s and then some of them turned out to be terrorists.

Snopes on the Azov Battalion:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing military violence and instability have mobilized far-right extremists, playing into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about “neo-Nazis” running the country as justification for invading Ukraine.

In a speech given just before Russia launched its ongoing attack on Ukraine, Putin justified what he described as a “special military operation.” He stated:

Its goal is to protect people who have been abused by the genocide of the Kyiv

I saw this –

In the category "trending", meaning one of their more popular items. It is fashionable these days to threaten to kill women who assert our boundaries and demand our rights.

I have contacted their customer support.
You can reach them here: teamsptee at gmail dot com pic.twitter.com/FamjKV6z8E

— Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen) March 9, 2022

– so I stared a bit, trying to recall ever seeing any ads for “kill the racist” or “kill the homophobe” shirts, and then I Googled “official kill the terf shirt” and found, depressingly, that it’s not just the one company.

Then I Googled “official kill the racist shirt” and found…no match.… Read the rest

Masha Gessen tells us that Russians don’t know what’s happening, because they don’t have access to truthful reporting.

A majority of Russians get their news from broadcast television, which is fully controlled by the state. “This is largely a country of older people and poor people,” Lev Gudkov told me. Gudkov is the director of the Levada Center, which was once Russia’s leading public-opinion-research organization and which the state has now branded a “foreign agent.” There are more Russians over the age of forty-five than there are between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Even those who get their news online are still unlikely to encounter a narrative that differs from what broadcast television offers. The state continues to ratchet

Another ACLU ad on Facebook.

An anonymous donor has pledged to match all donations up to $200,000. Every dollar you donate right now will be doubled and immediately put towards our legal, advocacy, and organizing work that supports trans kids and their families.

“Supports” how though? What do they mean by support?

They’re “supporting” what they call “trans kids” by working to make sure they can get drastic, irreversible surgery or drugs or both. It’s not as clear-cut as they think that that equals “support.” It could be that the reality is that some or all such “kids” are caught up in a trend, and will regret this medical tampering with their path to physical adulthood. In addition to everything … Read the rest

Culture war:

Culture has long been a proxy in the assertion of power by one people over another. Recent egregious examples include the Chinese government’s attempt to suppress Uyghur religion, literature, music, even food, and Islamic State’s destruction of ancient monuments. In war, culture is a second front. At their most extreme, wars are about eradicating a people’s cultural memory altogether, wiping them from the slate as if they had never been.

…

In some ways, intentions are less important than effects, amid war’s messy reality. A missile strike in Kyiv that reportedly killed five people was seemingly directed at the television tower, but it lies close to Babyn Yar, the site of the massacre of 150,000 people

One good thing:

A virtual gallery to showcase Mali’s cultural history has been launched, featuring tens of thousands of Timbuktu’s ancient manuscripts.

The manuscripts were smuggled to safety from Timbuktu after Islamist militant groups took control of the city in northern Mali in 2012.

They contain centuries of African knowledge and scholarship on topics ranging from maths to astrological charts.

“Central to the heritage of Mali, they represent the long legacy of written knowledge and academic excellence in Africa,” said Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian known for smuggling the manuscripts out of Timbuktu, who was also involved in the project.

The site is called Mali Magic and from a quick look it is pretty damn magic. It’s music … Read the rest

Chip chip chip chip away.

Hey you! Got a minute? That’s all it takes to contact your elected officials and urge them to #EndPeriodPoverty in the US! ➡️ https://t.co/yWSv2XHBUz pic.twitter.com/DHqO4vmAyr

— Always (@Always) February 16, 2022

It’s not young people. Boys don’t miss school because of period poverty.

Do you think it's going to help that *you're* so ashamed to use the word "woman" that you'd rather create a completely nonsencial stat, @Always? pic.twitter.com/GjRqfrnp0I

— Eva Kurilova (@eva_kurilova) March 9, 2022

Say the word. The word is “girls.” It’s not blasphemy or porn; we can say it. Girls.

To be fair, they do know how to say it.

Without encouragement and support to keep playing from her dad, Jennifer