Sonia Sodha on the triumph of the karenphobes:

Last week, it was announced that [Kate Clanchy] and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, had parted company “by mutual consent” and that it will “revert the rights” and cease distribution of all her work.

The book that prompted this is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her memoir of a 30-year teaching career. Rave reviews and an Orwell prize gave way to mixed reactions from readers: some adored it, others thought she used racial and ableist stereotypes to describe her diverse students. Among the readers of colour I know, reactions were just as mixed: some found her descriptors offensive, others thought they were OK, especially in the

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Anna Slatz on the Cork outrage:

Susan Stryker, a transgender Professor of gender studies at the University of Arizona, is the first of three keynote presenters at the 25th Lesbian Lives conference, which is being held in March at the University of Cork in Ireland. Its 2022 theme is “solidarity.”

Stryker was one of the first academics who sought to apply critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” to males who insisted they could become women. In 2020, Stryker wrote an article for Time Magazine drawing and relying on the history of racial segregation to claim that women were merely a social construct. Such comparisons have been extensively decried by Black feminists.

Thus performatively underlining … Read the rest

A conference. University College Cork. In March.

The 25th Lesbian Lives Conference will take place in University College Cork, Ireland from 4th-5th March 2022. The LGBT+ Staff Network of University College Cork, in conjunction with the community organisation LINC and scholars from University College Dublin, Cambridge University, and University of Brighton Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender Research, are delighted to host the conference.  

Cool.

The theme for the 2022 Lesbian Lives Conference is Solidarity.  

Uh oh. We’ve learned that that can have some oddly limited applications – that it can, weirdly enough, mean not solidarity with lesbians but solidarity with men, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a Lesbian Lives Conference … Read the rest

More on the Huxley issue:

Imperial College must not “disown” one of its founding fathers, Thomas Huxley, eminent scientists have warned as they urged the university not to remove his bust or rename a building named after him.

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In a letter to The Telegraph, a group of 39 leading scientists – including 17 from Imperial College – are imploring Imperial College not to turn their back on him.

“Huxley was an ardent abolitionist who fought the virulent pro-slavery scientific racism of his day and publicly welcomed the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865,” they say.

“From childhood poverty, Huxley rose on merit to become President of the Royal Society and Privy Counsellor. ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, he fought for the

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Starts well, and then messes it up.

When Sapna Palep was younger, she was mortified by conversations about menstruation. “It was like, ‘Let’s not talk about this, I need to leave the room,’” said the 43-year-old mother of two. The mere mention of periods evoked “pure embarrassment and fear.”

Ms. Palep’s 9-year-old daughter, Aviana Campello-Palep, in contrast, approaches the topic with zero self-consciousness or hesitation. “When my friends talk about getting their period, they just talk about it,” Aviana said. “It’s just normal in a girl’s life.”

These frank conversations have led Ms. Palep and her daughters, Aviana and Anaya, who is 8, to create Girls With Big Dreams, a line of undergarments for tweens, which includes reusable period

… Read the rest

Libs of Tik Tok is probably not a potential comrade from my point of view, but this is…piquant.

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1484347783020646400

It’s about “ways to support your LGBTQ students” – which rather assumes “you” will have lots of them, which in fact is unlikely.

Step one, she says, is to “normalize pronouns in your classroom.”

You what? Nobody needs pronouns “normalized” in a classroom or anywhere else – they’re a core part of our language, which we start learning by osmosis in infancy. Children aren’t stumped for how to express “you” or “I” or “them” or any other pronoun, they’re dab hands at it by the time they’re in school.

A great way to do this, she goes on, is to use … Read the rest

Scientists write a letter to Nature:

Once again a group of us—this time a different group—got together not to protest an article in Sci. Am. or Nature, but to make a public statement in Nature about the impending defenestration of a great scientist: Thomas Henry Huxley. As the Guardian and other sites have reported, Imperial College in London is pondering—and almost certainly will execute—the relocation of a statue of Huxley, and is also considering renaming one of its structures, the Huxley Building.

That’s annoying. Huxley was a progressive guy, more so than Darwin.

The Guardian wrote:

An investigation into Imperial College London’s historical links to the British empire has recommended the university remove a statue and

… Read the rest

Jupiter from the James Webb telescope September 12, 2019.

See comments for correction.… Read the rest

No racism here folks, move along.

Hours before a failed effort by Democrats to pass a voting rights bill in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was asked in a news conference on Wednesday for his message to voters worried about access to the polls during the midterm elections.

Mr. McConnell described those worries as a ginned-up controversy, and misleadingly cited data on voter turnout.

“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he responded.

Note that he thinks African Americans are not Americans.

Leaving that aside however – come on. The issue is future elections, not past … Read the rest

Today I learned there’s a thing called Pop ‘n’ Olly, which bills itself as “LGBT+ and Equality ‘Edutainment’ for children and young people”…without of course saying anything about what qualifies it to educate children and young people (or for that matter to edutain them).

It showed us…this.

🥳 NEW VIDEO 🥳 Gender Explained for Kids – Part 1 💜 Designed specially to use alongside our brand new book “What Does LGBT+ Mean” this video is perfect to help introduce the idea of gender to kids 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

To access the resources, head to https://t.co/xPzoQB55Q2 pic.twitter.com/KMnbDjSx8k

— Pop'n'Olly (@PopnOlly) January 19, 2022

It is – surprise surprise – absolutely dire. It starts by “explaining” how infants are “assigned” a sex and … Read the rest

The police can’t cope.

Scotland’s national police force has warned that it cannot comply fully with the demands of new hate crime laws until next year, as officers struggle to cope with a surge in reported offences caused by Twitter rows.

In its quarterly report Police Scotland said there were “hurdles to overcome” if officers were to carry out their duties within the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, passed nine months ago, with training and guidance still to be addressed, along with a requirement for new IT systems.

They want to postpone because they’re having trouble keeping up with people who call the police because they’re OfFended by something on Twitter.

A 76 per cent rise in

… Read the rest

Parody or serious effort to delete the word “women” from the language? It can be hard to tell.

According to two former competitors, players with vaginas received extra underwear on the latest season of “Survivor,” which aired in 2021. 

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Wallace said it “makes sense” to give players with vaginas more than one pair of underwear because “we got stuff going on own there” and they have different needs than those with penises. 

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Insider has reported that wearing the same underwear and clothes for an extended period of time can have potentially life-threatening consequences, with the health risks, such as severe urinary tract infections, being higher for people with vaginas. 

According to Wallace, shortly after she and her

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This would be just one more example of a man who identifies as a woman verbally abusing feminist women, but this one is “Lead therapist for” GenderGP.

The key here is, ‘Human’ rights. Trans people are human, we are not aliens from another planet, though some animals called GCs would like to believe we are.

— Marianne Oakes (@OakesMarianne) January 19, 2022

Trans people are human, but feminist women are animals. Hm.… Read the rest

Oh gee what do you know it turns out all those Christmas lights use a lot of electricity. I thought there had to be a special dispensation from someone that made them magically not part of our brisk destruction of our own ecosystem, but no.

With the world moving towards cleaner energy and looking to reduce emissions, there are questions to be asked about the heavy usage of Christmas lights.

Yes like why the fuck don’t people just stop doing it, seeing as how we’re racing toward disaster as it is.

I bet a lot of people think it’s “for the kids,” but if so that’s sad because guess who is going to be dealing with much worse … Read the rest

To the surprise of absolutely no one:

Former Pope Benedict XVI failed to act over four child abuse cases when he was archbishop of Munich, a German probe into the Catholic Church has alleged.

Of course he did. That’s what the church did for generations until it finally got caught. What matters to the Catholic church is the Catholic church. Not people, just the church (and its clergy – those people matter).

[A] new report into historical abuse allegations carried out by a German law firm incriminated the former pontiff. Abuse continued under his tenure, it is alleged, and the accused priests remained active in church roles.

Because that’s what always happened. The church always put the church first.… Read the rest

Oh isn’t that sweet – Princess Ivanka handing out apples to The Poor.

Thanks to our incredible partners + volunteers who helped feed families across Idaho & NY fresh, locally-sourced produce & dairy this holiday season.

✔️1.1 M pounds of dairy🥛+ produce 🍎 delivered
✔️1.3 M meals served
✔️52,000+ food boxes distributed
✔️100% privately funded pic.twitter.com/mt6RI8JhHm

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) January 18, 2022

For sure. She’s not the crook child of a crook father, she’s not the corrupt daughter who gave herself a nepotistic job in the White House when her corrupt daddy was pretend-president, she’s not the object of an investigation by the New York DA, she’s a sweet dainty young girl who carries big boxes around in a … Read the rest

The National Women’s Law Center is no longer about women’s law. Chalk up another win for institutional capture!

It tells us:

On January 19, 2022, the National Women’s Law Center, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., and 20 additional organizations committed to gender justice and LGBTQ rights submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Brandt v. Rutledge. We filed our brief in support of Dylan Brandt, Brooke Dennis, Sabrina Jennen, and Parker Saxton, transgender young people with gender dysphoria who the state of Arkansas has tried to bar from receiving gender-affirming health care, as well as their parents and two doctors.

What does that have to do with women’s … Read the rest

This is…so American.

https://twitter.com/NinaStrohminger/status/1483992827482804224

Ask them what they think the federal minimum wage is.

https://twitter.com/NinaStrohminger/status/1484155207579799552

And that’s why we have the terrible, ludicrous politics we have, including the massive gap between rich and poor.

Even NPR reporters are bad at it.

You need to call me to tell me who this was! Lol

— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) January 20, 2022

https://twitter.com/Currying_Favor/status/1484083374604099584 … Read the rest

Institutional capture:

Canadian Bar Association Demands “No Exception” To Male Transfers to Women’s prisons

Well, that’s women decisively thrown under the wheels of the runaway locomotive.

The Canadian Bar Association had issued a series of recommendations and directives to the Correctional Service of Canada demanding violent male criminals be accommodated in women’s prisons, and to ensure their biological sex is never recorded.

In a letter dated December 4, 2020 the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) denounced a draft proposal by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) that they claim was not lax enough in its treatment and transfer of trans-identified prisoners. The CSC Commissioner’s Directive currently takes into consideration operative status and any overriding safety concerns for staff and other inmates

… Read the rest

Pakistan is such a hellhole.

A court in Pakistan has sentenced a woman to death over allegedly blasphemous messages sent over WhatsApp and Facebook.

Aneeqa Ateeq, 26, was found guilty and given a death sentence by a court in Rawalpindi on Wednesday after a complaint was registered against her under Pakistan’s draconian cybercrime and blasphemy laws

Why not just let Allah deal with the problem? Why not concentrate on being good people themselves instead of handing out death sentences for private chats?

Pakistan is an Islamic state and has some of the harshest blasphemy laws in the world, regularly handing down death sentences. In practice executions are not carried out and the accused spend their lives in jail.

Pakistan … Read the rest