Terry Gross talked to Masha Gessen about Putin’s war on Ukraine last Thursday.

My guest, Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist who reported in late January and February from Ukraine, then went to Moscow after the invasion. On the night Putin shut down the last remaining independent source of TV news, Gessen was at that studio. Gessen’s dispatches are being published in The New Yorker, where Gessen is a staff writer. Gessen left Moscow on Thursday and is speaking to us from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.

For 20 years, Gessen was a journalist in Moscow and had been the chief correspondent for Russia’s leading news magazine until it became impossible to report the real news. After that, Gessen

Another they does an interview.

Kae Tempest is perched at a table outside a station-side cafe, playing with a cigarette. Murphy, Tempest’s alaskan malamute, stirs as I approach, and on clocking me, Tempest returns the cigarette – still unlit – to their chest pocket. For years, Tempest’s long curly barnet was a trademark look. Today, though, wearing white trainers, upturned jeans and a turquoise jacket, their hair is short, a neat fade that, Tempest says, they still occasionally catch themselves admiring.

Got it? Tempest is special. Tempest is a they, Tempest perches and plays and has a malamute, Tempest has short hair.

In August 2020, in an Instagram post, Tempest came out as non-binary. They announced their

Arbeit macht frei, prostitution is empowering.

A clinic which receives NHS funding has been promoting prostitution as a way for transgender people to pay for their transition treatment, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Being a sex worker ‘can be useful and sometimes empowering’, according to a guide produced by CliniQ, a sexual counselling service for transgender people at King’s College Hospital in London. It adds: ‘It can help us pay for parts of our transition.’

Well of course it can; money is money. It can help pay for, or just pay for, anything; that’s how money works. Robbing banks can help pay for stuff too, unless you get caught.

Entitled Cruising: A Trans Guy’s Guide To The Gay

Not helping what?

First, to repeat myself, I hate this use of “hit” and “hit out at” and “attack” for argument and disagreement. It frames dissent as physical violence, and that’s not a useful or intelligent way to frame it. Nobody hit anybody, Rowling was not hit, she was not hit out at, she didn’t attack the Scottish government. There’s way too much talk of violence in this discussion already, and newspapers shouldn’t be adding to it via stupid metaphors.

Second, nonsense. Women have rights too and we are allowed to remind everyone of that, and insist on keeping them, and resist efforts to take them away.

Third, yes she is “helping.” Who put Slater and Harvie in charge of … Read the rest

Yeeeaaahhhhh not his call.

Anyone who has spent more than an hour in the company of gay men knows "babe" is our most overused word, not least to describe each other.

It's used as much as other people use "mate".

Anyone who thinks that's misogyny needs to find themselves some more gay friends! https://t.co/13ppVtqnWn

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) March 12, 2022

What gay men do amongst each other is wholly irrelevant to whether or not they get to call women they’re trying to bully on Twitter “babe”. If the woman you’re trying to bully says no, you don’t get to push back because gay men call each other it. Sexism is sexism even when gay men do it.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Incomplete picture.

There are many awareness days related to trans issues, but today’s is very important. Detransition Awareness Day is vital because there are so many people in positions of power being led to believe that something so life-changing as gender identity is a fixed awareness that one is “born in a body that doesn’t match their identity.”

I was at the Seattle Public Library Event sponsored by WoLF in February 2020. After exiting, thanks to police guard we were safe from the frothing crowd who were chanting “No hate, no fear, all genders welcome here” with what I perceived as hatred for the women who spoke and attended.

I met up … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Actually the law.

“The process that people have to go through does need to be looked at,” he told The Times. “If you talk to anybody who’s been through the process there’s a real issue about respect and dignity.”

So I wonder if he’s read the Cass report? How long before the continuing scandal and disaster will force him (and others) to moderate and walk back their unqualified support for genderist demands?

He called for a “more considered, respectful, tolerant debate about these issues”. Starmer added: “I don’t think it furthers the interests of anybody to continue the debate in the way that it’s been going on now for some

Another MP saying no. (Usual apologies for linking to Mail but if Guardian won’t report…)

For a woman who, only this week, was reprimanded for wading into the increasingly febrile transgender debate, you’ve got to applaud Tory police and crime commissioner Lisa Townsend for her sheer chutzpah.

…

‘It is not a “niche” issue, it is not “hysterical” for women to be taking to the street about it,’ Lisa wrote. ‘We will not accept this gaslighting from men who keep telling us they are women or from those who enable them,’ she added to her retweet and posted it without a second thought.

Three men, including local Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, complained. The Surrey police and crime panel’s complaints

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