Rafia Zakaria apparently deleted the stupidest of her tweets from yesterday attacking Joan Smith for her review of Zakaria’s book on “white feminism.” Or most of them, but not quite all.

I don’t really care what the rest of the review says…but it’s true Against White Feminism does go for the jugular and I’m terribly proud of it :-) @thetimes pic.twitter.com/0hy09FC8Uy

— Rafia Zakaria (@rafiazakaria) September 12, 2021

She doesn’t really care what the review says, which is why she composed all those childish “nyah nyah Karen na na Boomer” about them.

I’ll grant her one point: she didn’t care enough to find out who Joan Smith is.

Haha the reviewer is a real angry Karen! They’re so terribly passed

… Read the rest

Zakaria’s book sounds only slightly less contemptuous and hostile than her social media persona. Joan Smith reviewed it in the Times (so Zakaria thought it would be clever to lob stupid insults at her on Twitter in response, which is very adult and sensible).

“White feminism” as a derogatory term, caricaturing it as a movement that imposes its preoccupations on women who are not white or middle class, has been around for a while. People claim it is reflective more of a state of mind than skin colour; even Pragna Patel, a founding member of Southall Black Sisters, has been accused of being a “white feminist”.

In other words it works pretty much the way “terf” does – as an … Read the rest

Many people clearly pride themselves on being unpleasant.

https://twitter.com/rafiazakaria/status/1437145213420589060

No she doesn’t. That’s Joan Smith, and no she doesn’t. “pol” is short for political, and in any case “pol” doesn’t mean pale in the first place. But being told that wasn’t going to stop the snide pissy Zakaria.

I see the army of white feminist trolls have entered the chat!

— Rafia Zakaria (@rafiazakaria) September 12, 2021

How dare the white feminists point out a dishonest smear of the feminist author of Misogynies?

https://twitter.com/rafiazakaria/status/1437157419034025989

Ok boomer :-)

— Rafia Zakaria (@rafiazakaria) September 12, 2021

What a crude vulgar childish brat. I won’t be following her work.… Read the rest

Psychologist Ellyn Kaschak on the trans dogma:

… there is a deafening silence on the part of most individual psychologists and an enthusiastic, unquestioning and unresearched explosion of support for transgender motives, actions and people by others. I too want to offer support for human rights, but uninformed and unquestioning support may actually involve harm, so instead, I am asking for psychology to step up and take on its responsibilities in this regard.

Not only the conferences, but the classroom and the laboratory are appropriate places to be asking important questions. Yet the inhabitants of these venues are being silenced in the name of human rights and a purported bias named “transphobia.” Academics have been censored and in some

… Read the rest

The usual complete indifference to the needs of women. Me first me me me me me me me me me.

https://twitter.com/PhilosophyTube/status/1436379858007904259

By “women like me” he means men. He’s calling Labour MP Rosie Duffield “awful” (calling her thread awful, but you know we’re meant to think she’s awful for tweeting it) for saying that abused women need women-only services. It’s all about him and zero about the thousands of women who need such services.

You can’t build a progressive movement on this kind of blind relentless egotism and selfishness.… Read the rest

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist:

Legal Feminist tweeted a short thread starting like this the other day:  

How to offer your gender critical employees an employment tribunal claim on a plate: don't wait for them to say or do anything – just gratuitously insult and bully them. https://t.co/kWzf7BPaSZ

— Legal Feminist (@legalfeminist) September 8, 2021

Cunningham first notes that the tweet hasn’t been verified, she doesn’t know who Mother Cecily is, she doesn’t know the story is true. But as a hypothetical, it’s what not to do.

It’s an extraordinarily bad idea. Any HR director tempted to organise training with this kind of content needs to catch up with the implications of the judgment of the Employment Appeal Tribunal

… Read the rest

Meanwhile, if we get tired of banal formulaic denunciations of “white feminism” by white women who write columns for the Independent, we can turn to Ex-Muslims of North America for some real oppression.

https://twitter.com/ExmuslimsOrg/status/1437046193419390991

The Islamist organization is Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the theocrat who answers the question says: “The ruling of apostasy of Islam is clear, again that’s one of the things the west doesn’t like and seeks to change the ruling of apostasy. As such in Islam it is clear that apostates do attract capital punishment and we don’t shy away from that.”

It’s telling that he shifts the agency onto the victim – it’s the “apostate” who “attracts” murder for leaving the religion. Islam is not to blame, … Read the rest

Katie Edwards in the Independent:

Over 30 years ago now, Judith Butler wrote the gender studies classic Gender Trouble. Today, Butler expounded on those ideas in an interview with The Guardian.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her progressive approach over the decades, Butler suggested that we should rethink the category of “woman”. 

Progressive? What’s progressive about her “approach”? What’s progressive about suggesting that we should rethink the category of “woman”? Especially when what she means by that is “to include men”?

Butler advocates for trans women and their inclusion in the sisterhood.

Which is ridiculous at best, because trans women are men.

Although the “sisterhood” seems to have become something of an exclusive members’ club. Feminism, or more accurately,

… Read the rest

Another woman bullied out of attending:

Elected in April 2020, Starmer will be hoping his initial year and a half leading his party will be enough to ensure a standing ovation.

One person who won’t be in that audience however is the MP for Canterbury Rosie Duffield. A poster girl for Labour’s surprise successes in the 2017 election, Duffield has attracted both praise and opprobrium for her views on transgender issues. Back in August last year, LGBT+ Labour demanded Starmer ‘take action’ against Duffield after she wrote on Twitter that ‘only women have a cervix.’

How does one go about “taking action” against an MP who states an anatomical fact? And why does one attempt such a thing? Why … Read the rest

Craig McLean promoted the open access copy of his paper on July 27, apparently to universal indifference; the turphs found it on September 4. They all say what we all say – the paper is remarkably bad for a working academic and it’s mystifying that it was accepted.

Senior lecturer?

Wow

FYI
UK Equality Act defines woman as females of any age

We are not 'cis-female (non-trans)'

What a collection of bias nonsense

— Marjorie Hutchins (@leakylike) September 4, 2021

https://twitter.com/NeurolawGuy/status/1434185027018010625 https://twitter.com/PhoenixRedRum/status/1434105993881964547 … Read the rest

From the abstract of an academic article by a sociologist…

This article examines the development of anti-transgender debates within the United Kingdom, which have gained traction due to proposed amendments to the country’s Gender Recognition Act (GRA). A group of determined lobby groups, taking their lead from like-minded organizations in the United States, has protested vigorously against the proposed changes to the GRA, especially with respect to “single-sex spaces”. As a result of this furor, the lives of transgender people have become the subject of open debate.

“The lives of transgender people have become the subject of open debate”? Is that academic language? Is it the language of sociology? Surely “the lives of” various categories of people is a … Read the rest

Aw yeah, coupla men who beat up women.

https://twitter.com/FallonFox/status/1436541344713957377… Read the rest

Bina Shah tweeted on September 8:

I just really need to know how Judith Butler’s definition of women applies to Afghan women who are being beaten on the streets by the Taliban. Have you ever considered that your academics really don’t fit the lives of women in the global South?

And if they don’t fit in the lives of those women (which they don’t), how well do they fit women anywhere?

She expanded on her thoughts the next day:

But it was Judith Butler’s statement that “we need to rethink the category of women” that got me going. It coalesced from quite a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about gender identity theory as it is being adopted in

… Read the rest

Another exciting first – a man beats a woman in mixed martial arts.

Transgender mixed martial arts fighter Alana McLaughlin made a successful start to her career by choking out her opponent in the second round last night.

McLaughlin, who was born a man, was the first openly-transgender MMA athlete to compete in the US since 2014.

And having been rocked by opponent Celine Provost in the first of three scheduled rounds, McLaughlin fought back the second session to submit Provost by rear-naked choke.

In stepping into the cage, McLaughlin, 38, became just the second transgender woman to compete in the sport, following in the footsteps of Fallon Fox who was cageside in Miami.

Ah yes the footsteps of Fallon … Read the rest

Are books just clutter you should get rid of or an essential or something in between? Julian Baggini leans toward the first.

Having recently put everything into boxes for the less terminal adventure of a house move, we decided to strictly limit how much came out of them at the other end. However, we knew that there is one kind of object that defiantly resists the cardboard coffin: books. Like so many, we would happily decimate our wardrobes, clear out our cupboards and gut our garages, but would struggle to liberate our libraries. Why is it so hard?

For a lot of reasons. We want to read a lot more books than we get around to reading. Some books … Read the rest

Freedom! Private enterprise! The boss is always right! Innovation!

Except when…

Texas has made it illegal for social media platforms to ban users “based on their political viewpoints”.

Prominent Republican politicians have accused Facebook, Twitter and others of censoring conservative views. Former US president Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after a group of his supporters attacked the Capitol in January.

The social networks have all denied stifling conservative views. However, they do enforce terms of service which prohibit content such as incitement to violence and co-ordinated disinformation.

Well no wonder Greg Abbott doesn’t like that.

(What about jurisdiction though? Can states pass laws that restrict global communications? I wouldn’t have thought Texas has the power to … Read the rest

When Republicans take credit for the civil rights movement…

Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who previously served as Donald Trump’s press secretary, has released her first television ad, which is entitled “Who We Are”.

“I’ll never forget being a student at Little Rock Central High and watching my dad – a Republican governor – and Bill Clinton – a Democrat[IC] president – hold open the doors for the Little Rock Nine, doors that forty years earlier had been closed to them because they’re Black,” Sanders says in the ad.

…

“Good triumphed over evil,” Sanders says of the Little Rock Nine in her ad. “That is who we are. The radical left wants to teach our kids America

… Read the rest

I have a feeling that’s not what Labour said.

This is not a joke, but deadly serious.

The Labour Party have officially placed @YoungLabour chair @JessicaLBarnard under investigation – for opposing transphobia.

Here is her letter sent to NEC members – passed to me – and here are the tweets she’s being investigated for. pic.twitter.com/qnzcC0fLWm

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) September 10, 2021

Barnard says in her letter to NEC members that the letter gave her notice that she’s “under investigation for challenging transphobia online.” Again, it seems unlikely that that’s what the letter said.

The trouble is that activists of the Owen Jones/Jess Barnard type treat the word “transphobia” as self-evident and universally understood, when in fact it’s a recently … Read the rest

It isn’t my womb that makes me a woman, Natasha Devon writes

Because it’s the large non-motile gametes?

Hahaha no don’t be silly.

Trans people have always been present in human society. Famously Marsha P Johnson, an American activist and trans woman, threw the first brick during the Stonewall riots in June 1969.

“Famously” inaccurate. Johnson was a drag queen.

Binary notions of gender – the idea that there are only men and women and everyone fits neatly into one of those two categories – are also a Christian invention, which spread across the globe as Christian countries colonised it.

Huh. So how were there humans before Christianity? If they had no idea which was which how did they reproduce?… Read the rest

Katie makes a good point.

Anyone who does even cursory research on the “trans murder epidemic” quickly realizes that the vast majority of these are not hate crimes. Trans people usually get murdered for the same reasons as anyone else—DV, drugs, random bad luck etc. HRC won’t say this but it’s true.

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) September 9, 2021

One of the more fucked up aspects of activists/journalists/etc who spread the false narrative of the “trans murder epidemic” is that they are terrifying the exact population they claim to want to protect. It’s not helpful to tell people they’re at risk when they aren’t. Stop it!

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) September 9, 2021

Well it’s not helpful to trans people … Read the rest