All entries by this author
May 27th, 2024 7:02 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Sigh.
50 seconds in, Jardine: “We are not talking about people who call themselves women, we are looking at people who have transitioned and who are legally women, now that’s a different situation.”
No it isn’t. Legally it is, yes, but in this case it’s because the law is deeply fucked up. For a woman facing a naked man in her changing room it is not… Read the rest
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4 comments
May 26th, 2024 9:00 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Heads men win, tails women lose.
NHS chiefs are facing landmark legal action after 26 female hospital nurses protested about being forced to share a women’s changing room with a transgender colleague who is biologically male.
The women complained that the transgender nurse – who has not had gender reassignment surgery – had taken a ‘keen interest’ in female staff when they were getting undressed. They say they have found the situation ‘intimidating and upsetting’.
In a formal complaint, the nurses say they were stunned after the ‘sexually active’ trans nurse admitted to trying for a baby with a female partner and [that he] had stopped taking female hormones. But a human resources manager at the hospital trust allegedly
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7 comments
May 26th, 2024 8:20 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Libbatarians don’t love him.
Donald Trump, the former US president, has suffered the rare humiliation of getting booed and heckled during a raucous speech to the Libertarian National Convention.
Trump’s rocky ride at a Washington hotel on Saturday night, including cries of “Bullshit!” and “Fuck you!”, underlined the challenge that the Republican presidential nominee faces to broaden his appeal both left and right on the political spectrum.
The clips are fun to watch. He doesn’t enjoy being booed and yelled at.
“The fact is we should not be fighting each other,” Trump pleaded. “If Joe Biden gets back in, there will be no more liberty for anyone in our country. Combine with us in a partnership – we’re
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4 comments
May 26th, 2024 5:30 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Hadley Freeman lets rip:
On Wednesday, at a US Senate judiciary hearing, [Ted] Cruz questioned Judge Sarah Netburn, whom President Biden has nominated to the US District Court. Netburn has a long record of dealing with complex cases but Cruz focused on one in particular: her recommendation in 2022 that the serial rapist William McClain be transferred to a women’s prison.
In 2015, when McClain was 51, after he was released from jail for raping two children and before being reincarcerated for sharing violent child pornography, he chose to identify as a woman. And off he went to a women’s prison, with Netburn’s blessing. When the Bureau of Prisons suggested this could be traumatising and dangerous to the female
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3 comments
May 25th, 2024 5:12 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Ya uh huh.
Shakespeare’s plays were written by a woman and the clues are there in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, according to US author Jodi Picoult.
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She believes there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare did not write the works – most damningly, she says, a man who did not secure education for his daughters could not possibly have written “proto-feminist” characters.
Secure education for his daughters how? Send them to Oxford?
Moreover, Picoult says Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew that he was not the real author.
On the contrary, they knew that he was. Ben Jonson had always felt rivalrous toward him, and scornful of his lack of erudition or classical education…until he read the Folio and … Read the rest
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20 comments
May 25th, 2024 10:26 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Daily Mail takes a cold hard look at the career of Mridul Wadhwa…while still, very unfortunately, using the deceptive pronouns. I realize that use is compelled in some way, but it needs to stop. It weakens any reporting on the subject that does it.
It was a post which was expressly advertised as being for women only but, three years ago this month, a biological male was installed in it. It required a compassionate figure to lead a charity providing a ‘safe space’ to help rape victims get through the worst experience of their lives.
The successful candidate was bullish and strident. Mridul Wadhwa labelled rape victims bigots and transphobes if they doubted whether a man identifying as
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6 comments
May 25th, 2024 9:58 am |
By Ophelia Benson
An exceptionally shameless lie:
Federal prosecutors on Friday asked the judge in Florida overseeing the classified documents case against Donald Trump to bar the former president from public statements that “pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents” participating in the prosecution.
The request was made to the federal district judge in the case, Aileen Cannon. It follows a distorted claim by Trump earlier this week that the FBI agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in August 2022 were “authorized to shoot me” and were “locked and loaded ready to take me out and put my family in danger”.
Not distorted so much as flagrantly untrue.
Trump was referring to the disclosure
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May 25th, 2024 3:39 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Times on that thing Literary Alliance Scotland had on its website for weeks but now says is “inappropriate” and they don’t know how it got there:
A briefing document on providing safety for trans people published by the Literary Alliance Scotland (LAS) said that “Terfs” — trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for women considered hostile to trans people — were joining forces with “fascists”.
It said this was a “societal issue” and urged bookshop owners not to “stay out of it”. It added: “This rise in transphobia signals a danger to all LGBTQ+ people, to reproductive rights, etc.”
Good old “etc” yeah? That can mean anything you like. Very professional, very literary.
The alliance, formed in 2015, is
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5 comments
May 24th, 2024 11:48 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Magi Gibson on Literary Alliance of Scotland and the blacklisting of feminist women:
Let’s start with this piece, which seems not so much guidance or advice, but an uncompromising imperative. (Screenshot from the guidance document)
This is extremely worrying. How can an organisation purportedly committed to inclusion and diversity endorse a call which not only uses a derogatory term about women, and is essentially a call to blacklist certain books from bookshops, and to no-platform certain authors?
By imitating all the other organizations and institutions that do so.
The truth is that this guidance sanctions the blacklisting of books of any woman who has written or expressed a view on the reality of biological sex.
This is not a
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2 comments
May 24th, 2024 10:40 am |
By Ophelia Benson
We just want to square the circle, that’s all.
I want to see it easier and more humane for how trans people can access a gender recognition certificate, but I also want to make sure we’re protecting single sex spaces based on biological sex
Well you CAN’T, because those two items cancel each other. The whole nonsensical idea of a “gender recognition certificate” renders women’s rights an absurdity. If men can get “certificates” that say they … Read the rest
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6 comments
May 24th, 2024 7:28 am |
By Ophelia Benson
A rape crisis centre that gleefully taunts women:
Rape Crisis Grampian is their name. They mock women.
Ha. ha. ha. Geddit? They offer women only spaces that include men two days a week and the rest of the week they offer spaces that include men. Take that, cis bitches!
… Read the rest
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1 Comment »
May 24th, 2024 7:02 am |
By Ophelia Benson
From Woman’s Place UK a couple of years ago:
For the International Women’s Day episode of BBC Woman’s Hour, Emma Barnett interviewed Anneliese Dodds, the Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, and asked her for a clear definition of ‘what a woman is’.
And didn’t get one. Of course.
Anneliese Dodds: Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things. I mean, obviously, that’s then you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition…
Emma
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May 23rd, 2024 5:30 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The BBC solemnly informs us that a teenager is going to “become a saint.”
Carlo Acutis died in 2006, at the age of 15, meaning he would be the first millennial – a person born in the early 1980s to late 1990s – to be canonised. It follows Pope Francis attributing a second miracle to him. It involved the healing of [a] university student in Florence who had bleeding on the brain after suffering head trauma.
So why did Carlo Acutis die? If he can heal a university student in Florence why can’t he cure himself?
Carlo Acutis had been beatified – the first step towards sainthood – in 2020, after he was attributed with his first miracle – healing
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21 comments
May 23rd, 2024 3:04 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The ACLU three weeks ago:
Anti-abortion politicians brought this case all the way up to the Supreme Court to deny pregnant people access to emergency abortion care that is necessary to prevent severe and potentially life-altering health consequences, and even death.
The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, which will determine whether politicians can put doctors in jail for treating pregnant patients experiencing medical emergencies. The ultimate decision in the case — which is expected by the summer — could have severe consequences on the health and lives of people across the country facing emergency pregnancy complications.
Etc etc etc. The ACLU doesn’t say “women” or “woman” even … Read the rest
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7 comments
May 23rd, 2024 10:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Perfect. The Supreme Court says yay racial gerrymandering; let the fun begin.
The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision along party lines on Thursday, which represented its fullest endorsement of partisan gerrymandering to date.
In the past, legal restrictions on racial gerrymandering — maps drawn to minimize the voting power of a particular racial group, rather than the power of a political party — had the side effect of also limiting attempts to draw maps that benefitted one party or another. While the Court largely tolerated gerrymanders that were designed to lock one party into power, those maps sometimes failed because they also targeted racial minorities.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference
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15 comments
May 23rd, 2024 9:26 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh come ON.
An error???
Meaning what, their foot slipped and they typed “gender critical” instead of “transphobic”?
Come on. It wasn’t a fumble or a blunder or a pratfall or a “genuine mistake.” It was an iteration of the trans dogma that the two are the same thing, and equally evil and deserving of punishment and exile. It was yet another instance of the hatred of women … Read the rest
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5 comments