A small news item from Williamsburg, Kentucky.

A homeless shelter in Williamsburg will no longer accept women as a way to stop people from having sex.

Allow me to do an editorial tweak of that sentence: In an effort to prevent people from having sex on the premises, a homeless shelter in Williamsburg will now turn away homeless women.

The director at Emergency Christian Ministries said people are having sex at the shelter and they cannot accept that.

“It seems like these last days it’s getting worse … the ungodly type,” Director Billy Woodward said.

About 10 to 12 women were asked to leave the shelter over the past two weeks.

Of course. Using a similar line of reasoning, Tim Hunt told a group of women scientists that women should be in separate labs. Using a similar line of reasoning, some states force women to wear concealing tents whenever they go outside. Using a similar line of reasoning, some Islamist student groups try to impose gender segregated seating at their events. The reasoning is that men are the people, and women are the devilish distraction, so of course it’s women who have to be shut out, including shut out of actual shelter when they’re homeless.

Woodward said in some cases, they will not accept children either.

“Right now, no because of the female factor,” Woodward said.

However, Woodward added he would accept a male child if his father and he were homeless.

Because men and boys are people, who have needs. Women and girls are not people, and don’t have needs.

Also if somebody has to be turned away from the only homeless shelter in town, it totally makes sense that it should be men, since men are so much more vulnerable to rape and violence than women are.

Woodward said he made his decision based on the Bible. He said what was happening at the shelter was sinful.

He told us he is not saying women are the cause of the “sex problem.”

“It takes two to do that,” he said. “We are not biased or prejudice whatsoever.”

He says he’s not saying women are the cause of the sinful shelter-sex, but he’s turning them away from shelter anyway. So all he’s saying is that women don’t matter.

I’ll refrain from muttering about mangers and inns.

How they do it in Canada.

Trudeau and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne greeted Syrian refugees at the airport in Toronto.

The family— the father is a blacksmith and the mother a sales clerk — was the first through processing in the wee hours of Friday morning after the government aircraft landed following a long flight from Beirut.

The family fled Syria, spent eight months in Lebanon and now they came to Canada because here, Madeleine will have many opportunities, the family said.

“We suffered a lot,” Jamkossian said. “Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise.”

Trudeau and Wynne were on hand to welcome the first two families from the plane that brought 163 Syrian refugees to Canada. They were joined by the ministers of immigration, health and defence, as well as local mayors and opposition immigration critics.

Some cities in Israel have cut Jennifer Lawrence out of posters advertising the movie she stars in, because, you know, women are hoooooors unless they’re hidden away like dirty laundry.

Most Israeli cities have been treated to the standard poster of the final “Hunger Games” installment, featuring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen posing with her bow and arrow. But in the ultra-Orthodox suburb of Bnei Brak, as well as in Israel’s capital city Jerusalem – where several neighborhoods are heavily religious – residents instead received a censored version of the poster, featuring only an image of the fiery crown.

Extremely religious versions of Judaism consider the female image to be licentious, and ultra-Orthodox newspapers, catalogues and advertisements routinely edit out photographs of females entirely. City posters in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem featuring images of women have been often been vandalized, and Bnei Brak specifically, the city municipality bans public images that could be deemed offensive to its religious population.

Because women are hoors. You can look at men all you want, but women – no no no, because they’re hoors. We hates’em, precious.

H/t Seth

Meghan Murphy explains some things about feminism.

When I started blogging, back in 2010, I was, admittedly, naive about the deep divides that exist between liberal and radical feminists. I still struggle with how to name those divides properly. I refer to those who refuse to make obvious connections between various forms of violence against women and who work to decontexualize our collective subordination as “liberal feminists,” “sex-positive feminists,” or “third-wave feminists,” never wholly sure of the most accurate label.

I realize this is because what I actually believe is that, if you can’t (or won’t) connect the dots between prostitution, pornography, rape culture, sexual harassment, objectification, femicide, colonization, domestic abuse and, more generally, female subordination, you are not a part of this movement — the feminist one. In other words, it’s not that you’re doing it wrong, it’s that you’re not doing it at all.

Feminism is a real thing. It means something. It is a particular analysis. It is not whatever any individual says it is or wants it to be. It is not “inclusive.” It is not everything nor should it be — if feminism is everything then it is nothing. It is not about framing misogyny as empowerment because it makes us feel better. It is a movement. It is political. It is what we call the woman-led fight to end patriarchy and male violence against women.

I was talking about that yesterday, in disagreeing with Aaron Kappel’s piece. Feminism isn’t so “inclusive” that it’s about men, not even “nonbinary” or “genderqueer” men. It’s about women, just as anti-racism movements are not (and should not be) about white people.

Murphy found herself shut out of journalism when she started, because she’s not the right kind of feminist.

The sites that were dominating the conversation around feminism and the women who worked for these sites were not, in fact, “helping other women” — they were helping their friends, friends who held the same political ideology, who thought prostitution was fun and cool, who didn’t dare question the party line, who could afford to hang about in New York City on their parent’s dime, shmoozing with those who held the reigns to the tightly-knit New York media cabal. They were heavily invested in attacks on the second wave and in promoting a marketable version of “feminism” that supported capitalism, boobs, and boners.

If that’s the feminism of the future, y’all are screwed.

At first I thought it was all in my head, but it wasn’t. I’d been blackballed. My words had broken the unspoken rule all young female journalists and writers were to follow: keep it light, keep it sexy, don’t dare to move beyond the Twitter mantras that passed for “feminism” these days. If you want to write about “whorephobia” and “slut-shaming,”great. Even better if you can write about how radical Slutwalk is and point to all the “agency” of your white, rich “sex worker” friends. But to say anything else was to bite the hands that feed you. Liberal feminists and sex industry advocates had become one in the same and the media reflected that.

It makes sense, I suppose. Sex industry advocacy is obviously more likely to be profitable than its opposite is. Journalism doesn’t pay for itself you know.

There are millions more who are far less privileged than I and so it amuses me (in a rather ragey way) to see young, middle class, American women blathering on about “privilege” and “marginalized voices” on Twitter within the safety and comfort of their family money, Ivy League educations, fancy internships, and gifted property. It’s no mere coincidence that these women and men are the same ones who write articles for Playboy and Jezebel about how empowering “sex work” is and call anyone who disagrees a variety of names that all amount to anti-feminist cliches about “prudes” and “man-haters.” (We hear you — you love dick. That’s not a politic. That’s something insecure 19-year-olds say because they want to be cool.)

So we have an in-crowd that consists mostly of privileged, American, liberal women, based in New York, who have turned cronyism into “feminism,” rejected women who question the patriarchal and capitalist status quo, and have turned words like “diversity,” “inclusivity,” and “privilege” into media careers.

If that’s true, it explains a lot.

It’s no accident that the actual feminist movement (not the Playboy Feminism, as I coined it recently in New Statesman, increasingly shoved down our throats) is under attack, erased and misrepresented by the liberal and even leftist media. It’s no accident that our work — women’s work, the work of the movement — is carefully removed from discourse by women already on the inside or women who are desperately trying to get in. It’s no coincidence that women who speak out against male violence are no-platformed, attacked, vilified, slandered, and have their employment threatened.

The new erasure is the same as the old, but this time they’re calling it “feminism.” A kind of “feminism” that is not only detached from the global feminist movement, but that actively works against it. That supports “diversity” but not a diversity of ideas. A kind of feminism that attacks radical women, only to turn around and sell books that regurgitate the arguments we were making all along (but minus the credit). A genius Con if there ever was one.

I really don’t like the kind of feminism that attacks radical women. Radical women are what’s needed.

The British Humanist Association announces its new president:

Writer, broadcaster, and comedian Shappi Khorsandi will succeed physicist Jim Al-Khalili as the President of the British Humanist Association (BHA), it has been announced. The twelfth President in the BHA’s history, and the fourth woman to take the role, Shappi will begin her three-year term as President in January 2016.

Born to non-religious parents in Iran, Shappi and her family fled to Britain in her youth after her father, the poet Hadi Khorsandi, was targeted for assassination by Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime after writing a satirical piece about the Islamic Revolution. Growing up in England, Shappi’s childhood was marked by recurrent fears of her father being assassinated, and the family spent time under police protection. Sharing her father’s talent for humour, she began a successful career in stand-up comedy after graduating from Winchester with a degree in drama, and has made numerous appearances on TV and radio comedy shows, including Live at the Apollo, Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Have I Got News for You and QI.

A humanist all her adult life, Shappi was most recently one of several contributors to Michael Rosen and Annemarie Young’s new children’s book What is Humanism?, a project that is in keeping with her personal priority of having humanism better understood by young people in particular.

Announcing Shappi’s appointment, BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson said, ‘It’s a great pleasure to welcome Shappi to the Presidency of the British Humanist Association. Our President must be able not just to communicate humanism clearly but to connect on an emotional level with those many people in Britain who have humanist beliefs but don’t know the word exists to describe them. As such a warm and accomplished broadcaster, not to mention an intimate commentator on the human experience in her standup and elsewhere, Shappi certainly has that ability in spades.’

Brilliant. I hadn’t heard of her before, and she sounds terrific. I think humor is a massively important part of humanism.

H/t Maureen

From Feminist Quotes:

Men often react to women’s words – speaking and writing – as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper, Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men – control, violence, insult, contempt – that no threat seems empty.

Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

There’s this guy Taki Theodoracopulos who passes for a journalist of some sort, or at least a commentator. He’s very rightwing and very rude, but he also seems to consider himself an adult. He once had a column at the Spectator.

He has a website he calls Taki’s Magazine, and there he has a pile of childish abuse.

TIME magazine has selected German Chancellor and part-time nude model Angela Merkel as its “Person of the Year,” because to call her “Man of the Year” would be sexist, even though she looks like a man.

…

The magazine’s glowing profile of the dumpy, toadstool-like alleged woman with the Moe Howard haircut…

So because she’s opened her legs spread-eagle to at least a million Middle Eastern “migrants” by the end of this year, TIME has designated her a hero rather than a traitor.

And in Chicago, tiny-fingered part-time Jewish ballerina Mayor Rahm Emanuel…

It should be obvious why British feminist Julie Bindel is a lesbian—because she looks like a sullen warthog and no self-respecting heterosexual man would touch her with a ten-foot dildo.

Any time you feel a bit fed-up or futile, just pause to remember that you’re not Taki Theodoracopulos.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown went to an LGBT summit the other day and wrote it up for Reason.

During a lunch break at The Atlantic LGBT summit Thursday, attendees were invited to watch an informal panel discussion on transgender civil rights. Panelists included several transgender activists, as well as several non-trans panelists included for their expertise on legal issues (such as Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner Chai Feldblum) or proximity to the conversation (such as an Atlantic staff writer who covers social justice). This, it turns out, was problematic.

Erasing marginalized people from discourse about their own communities has long been a problem, of course. But the fact remains that, at the moment, there are no trans EEOC commissioners. There is no trans executive of the American Civil Liberties Union D.C., or on the White House outreach team. Considering that this was not a panel on the trans experience per se but a dialogue on legal barriers to equality, the inclusion of cisgender people who work directly on these issues hardly seems a mystery or a microaggression.

Commissioner Feldblum and moderator Steve Clemons pushed back slightly, defending the inclusion of non-trans panelists on these grounds. No good. Before long, those who thought having cis people on the panel was OK were branded complicit in the fact that trans people are often the targets of physical violence. Once again, nods and murmurs of approval from the audience.

Were they told they have blood on their hands?

here’s some other conventional wisdom gleaned from the summit:

• Being “safe” means not just freedom from actual or threatened physical violence but also avoiding offensive or hurtful language.
• Gender identity is established in early childhood (“between three and six years old,” according to Hattaway Communications research associate Nicholle Manners); for parents, helping children transition to their preferred gender identity at a young age is the only humane position.
• Laws that are redundant or practically unenforceable are still worthwhile for their “symbolic” power. (Says Scott Shackford: “I remember when people defended anti-sodomy laws as symbolic.”)
• Anything short of unconditional affirmation of minority-activist goals is a form of “erasure.” The correct response when talking about politics and policy is to assess who has the most potent victim-profile and then defer to them. By assessing people on things like race, gender expression, and sexuality rather than the content of their ideas, we are showing them proper respect.

The urge to police people’s language at the summit was also strong—comically so, at times. During one Q&A session, an aggrieved audience member suggested panelists watch their use of the word “states” when referring to American land, as it was exclusionary to those who live in U.S. territories.

And it was impossible not to notice a contradictory impulse in so many of those gathered. At the same time as people praised the non-binary “gender spectrum,” they reinforced old tropes about masculinity and femininity, and the centrality of biology to both. One speaker said he knew his daughter was trans from a young age because Nicole—assigned male at birth, like her twin brother—liked to dress in pink and avoided boy toys. Another speaker described a man as being “in touch with his feminine side” because “he cries a lot.” (Nothing regressive and gender-stereotypical to see here!)

That’s one I still haven’t seen any sensible explanation or reconciliation of. I don’t think I’ve even seen any acknowledgement that it is contradictory. I still want to know – why is non-binary seen as on a continuum with trans when in fact it’s the opposite?

For years, feminists have fought against the idea that there’s something inherent in girlhood or womanhood that explains most of the gendered preferences and traits foisted on us. Now this viewpoint gets a pass, as long as it’s espoused by the LGBTIQ community rather than the usual old patriarchy.

Not from me it doesn’t.

I’ve just learned that all the museums have made paintings and books of paintings available to all of us to download for $0.00. The Rijksmuseum for instance.

So have that street in Delft.

Robert Jensen on sex, gender and patriarchy, from June 2014.

Today’s existing sex-role differentiation is the product of a patriarchal society based on male dominance. In that system, males are socialized into patriarchal masculinity to become men, and females are socialized into patriarchal femininity to become women.

In patriarchy, sex-role differentiation supports male power and helps make the system’s domination/subordination dynamic seem natural and normal. Moral, intellectual, and emotional traits are assigned differentially to each sex, creating what we today typically call gender roles. This patriarchal system of control—which is complex, adapting to changing conditions and to resistance—is designed to justify and perpetuate male dominance.

I’m not sure “designed” is the right word there, since it’s not really designed at all in the ordinary understanding of the word. “Functions to” maybe?

The gender roles in patriarchy are rigid, repressive, and reactionary. These roles constrain the healthy flourishing of both males and females, but females experience by far the most significant psychological and physical injuries from the system.

In patriarchy, gender is a category that functions to establish and reinforce inequality.

Ah look, he said “functions to” himself. Better.

Anyway – yes, and that’s why the claims that gender is a precious essence or an inner feeling or an identity are so dubious.

In contemporary culture, “radical” is often used dismissively as a synonym for “crazy” or “extreme.” In this context, it describes an analysis that seeks to understand, address, and eventually eliminate the root causes of inequality.

Radical feminism opposes patriarchy and male dominance. Radical feminism, which challenges the naturalizing of the process by which patriarchal societies turn male/female into man/woman, rejects patriarchy’s rigid, repressive, and reactionary gender roles.

And now that whole project is being relentlessly and steadily demonized by people who want to embrace gender roles instead of rejecting them.

It’s sad.

The latest Jesus and Mo:

How do people of the book think they know the book is actually “God’s word”? How do they manage to be so confident about it? That’s one of the things I can never figure out about that kind of religious belief. It’s so trivially easy to pretend something is “God’s word”…so why do people so readily believe it of just one book out of the millions of books there are? Why do they think the goddy authorship is established and doubt-proof?

I don’t know. That’s one of the infinite number of things I don’t know.

The latest collection of Jesus and Mo strips, with a foreword by ME.

The Patreon.

The Alberta government has had the audacity to pass farm safety legislation. We can’t have that.

Alberta’s premier and some NDP MLAs have been targeted with violent threats over their controversial new farm safety legislation.

Rachel Notley’s government saw Bill 6 pass in the legislature on Thursday; it will become law on Jan. 1, 2016.

Someone on Twitter took screenshots of the threats.

Someone’s gotta man up and kill her…

…put a pitchfork through notley’s neck?

We honestly need to start killing off politicians.

Maybe we need to go back to the old west and just shoot her already.

Because farming should be dangerous, right?

It’s not just Oklahoma cops, it’s not just US cops. Via teslalivia in a comment: Tammy Mills at the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Police officers with histories of sexually exploiting vulnerable victims of crime were given responsibility for family violence and sexual offences investigations, a damning anti-corruption report has found.

The Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission inquiry into predatory behaviour by Victoria Police found officers preyed on vulnerable victims of crime, particularly victims of family violence, and misused the power and trust placed in them.

The small minority of officers, the report stated, misused their authority to “devastating effect” by commencing or attempting to commence an intimate personal or sexual relationship with victims of crime.

Priests and cops. They get their victims handed to them on a platter.

The report, released on Wednesday, found family violence victims were the most common victims of predatory police officers in its examination of 142 allegations of predatory behaviour by Victoria Police over the past decade.

It examined complaints ranging from sexually inappropriate comments or relationships, through to stalking and assault.

…

Another case IBAC examined concerned a male officer who allegedly sexually assaulted a female victim of family violence whom he had met on-duty.

A number of female police officers came forward during the internal investigation to state they too had been subjected to sexual harassment and assault by the officer.

Some had reported the conduct to their superiors, but no action was taken.

The investigation identified the officer also frequently misused the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) database to access personal details of women he met on-duty to pursue for sexual relationships.

Some were vulnerable women with mental health issues or family violence victims.

The more vulnerable the better, right?

A new cartoon from Assigned Male:

Sophie Labelle

I’m not transitioning because”I want to become a girl” ; I’m transitioning because I AM a girl.

Same for boys and non-binary folks. heart emoticon

Then what does “I’m transitioning” mean?

The birth of another theocracy.

The Gambia has been declared an Islamic republic by President Yahya Jammeh who said he wanted to further distance the west African state from its colonial past.

The tiny, formerly secular country – named after the river from which British ships are said to have fired cannonballs to fix its borders – joins the ranks of other officially Islamic republics such as Iran and Afghanistan.

And Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – such lovely, rights-respecting states, all of them.

“In line with the country’s religious identity and values I proclaim Gambia as an Islamic state,” said Jammeh on state television. “As Muslims are the majority in the country, Gambia cannot afford to continue the colonial legacy.”

Nonsense. Gambia could perfectly well continue to be secular; there’s nothing inherently colonialist about secularism.

Also…Islam? Very colonialist. How does Jammeh think it got to Gambia, exactly? On the breeze, like pollen?

Despite strong commercial ties with Britain and other European countries whose citizens are regular visitors to the Gambia’s white-sand beaches, relations with the west have deteriorated in recent years.

The European Union temporarily withheld aid money in 2014 over Gambia’s poor human rights record. The Gambia, whose main industries are agriculture and tourism, ranks 165 out of 187 countries on the UN development index.

The blogger Sidi Sanneh, a former foreign minister who has become a US-based dissident, said: “Starved of development funds because of his deplorable human rights record and economic mismanagement, Jammeh is looking towards the Arab world as substitute for and source of development aid.”

So the guff about colonialism is just cant; Jammeh wants money.

He could always try a GoFundMe.

Meanwhile, it’s perfectly all right to make little kids feel excluded and weird because they’re not from godbothering families.

Valentine Doyle (6) sits at the back of her class for 30 minutes every day and “draws”, while her classmates are taught religion.

“She feels left out, different, excluded,” says her father, Devin. “She says she wants to ‘do the God thing’ now because the other kids are doing it. They were doing the sign of the cross and some of them told her she should do it too. So she wants to.”

The parents had been living in France, where the state schools don’t teach religion.

“Vallie went to school in France. There you just go to the local school. It’s completely secular. If parents want their children to do religious education, they go to Sunday school or private schools. We knew there would be an issue here, so we put Vallie’s name down for a lot of Educate Together schools, but she didn’t get in. They were all full.”

They found her a place in a National school, one with the charming and inclusive name Christ the King National School.

They were nice to her there, they tried to make her feel included, but the fact remains…

…opting out of religious instruction means sitting at the back of the class for 30 minutes each day. “She draws. She sits on her own and she doesn’t like it. She feels excluded and different.

“She’s a curious kid and asks about religion. We’d like her to be able to opt in and learn about all religions. We have told her religion is a thing people use to explain about love with stories, but that we think there are better stories to understand love.”

But the teaching of religion there isn’t comparative, as the name probably suggests. It’s brand-name religion. It is, in short, Catholic.

So Vallie sits in the back and feels like a weirdo.

Here’s a shining example of the kind of thing that is sundering so many friendships and alliances: Aaron Kappel on why women and feminists are so horrible.

The piece starts with an unpleasant fantasy about peeling off a strip of skin, unpleasant enough that I skipped over most of it.

The fluidity of gender is complicated; it is messy and it is beautiful. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I cannot say with any real sense of authenticity or certainty that I know who or what I am–not fully. I lived as a cis heterosexual man for the first 22 years of my life. I then lived as a cis homosexual man for another decade. Today I am something much closer to myself.

I identify as non-binary because at this point in my life–as I deconstruct obstructions that have confined my existence thus far–I understand that there is a deeper truth found within that I have yet to unearth.

The important thing is, Kappel is a special snowflake.

Now that I have a deeper understanding of who I am, now that I know I am not male, the rejection of my humanity is visible all around me. Just as my mother did, there are those who insist that because of my body, I cannot be who I am.

And sometimes, those doing the insisting, the hurting, are self-described feminists.

Of course. It’s always the feminists. It’s never the big looming drunk guys in bars, it’s always the feminists. Let’s all sit down and get cozy and have yet another session of Bash the Feminists.

One Friday night earlier this fall, my partner and I were having drinks at a dark, dank dive bar in center city Philadelphia with his brother’s fiancée (let’s call her Kelly) and her best friend. I was ambivalent going into the planned happy hour–something we do together every few months–in part because it would be the first time I’ve seen them since I’ve been living as non-binary. Happy hour quickly turned into many hours.

Several pitchers in, I returned from the restroom to find that pronouns were being discussed. My partner had just finished telling Kelly that because I am non-binary, I use gender-neutral pronouns, they/them.

Notice something missing? There’s nothing about Kelly’s feminism. There’s nothing to suggest that she is a feminist, apart from the fact that this story follows Kappel’s mention of feminists.

As I sat down, Kelly decided to bombard me with questions about, and alternatives to, how I identify. At one point she, in all seriousness, suggested using “it” as a pronoun instead.

“No,” I stated sternly.

“I’m only asking to understand,” she replied.

“I am not an it!”

Maybe that is why my body shook and my breath lost its rhythm; my eyes flooded, then evaporated, and my skin lost all its moisture.

It’s sad about Kappel’s eyes evaporating. The part about the skin though – couldn’t that be from the many hours in the dark dank dive bar and the several pitchers of beer? Alcohol is dehydrating.

Maybe that is why I had to use one hand to help lift the other hand, and why I fumbled erratically, wrapping my ankles around the legs of the chair so as not to fall off and into the void below–for the entire room fell away. The floor disappeared and there was nothing but an eternal darkness.

All because of feminism! Or, you know, because of being drunk.

Where does feminism fit into my experience? Specifically, where do I fit into feminism? I know that for feminism to be successful and beneficial, it must be intersectional–yet even in alleged intersectional feminism, there is exclusion, erasure, or outright dismissal of people like myself.

Bullshit. Feminism is about women’s rights, so no, it should not “center” people who lived as men for 32 years. Feminism should not be so “intersectional” that it stops being about women’s rights.

I told Kelly that I was not her encyclopedia, that her using me to gain understanding was a problem. She continued to question my humanity, even after I became visibly and audibly upset, while her friend said nothing and permitted the abuse to continue.

I muttered, “This isn’t about you,” and Kelly began crying. In a matter of seconds, she centered herself as the victim.

As I sat between the two women, I clung to my chair, grasping for the support an inanimate object is incapable of providing. Then I rose and walked out into the night, sobbing, panting, shaking my way home.

In other words Kappel had a massive tantrum, and now uses the tantrum as evidence of the harm that Kelly did. That too is bullshit. Kelly may have been very obnoxious or may not have, but Kappel’s panting and shaking – not to mention the evaporated eyes – does not count as evidence that she was.

This is merely one example of what happens when feminists reject intersectionality. That rejection is violence, and people like myself are the recipients of that violence.

When feminists speak about feminism and address their audience by saying he or she as a means to be inclusive, I am excluded. When they speak to or about other feminists and use only female-specific pronouns and descriptors, I am excluded. When women call for equity and inclusion but exclude those who reject the gender binary, we feel the same oppression these women are purportedly contesting. If intersectional feminism does not include trans people of all stripes, then it is not intersectional.

Blah blah blah blah – feminism has to be about me me me me or it is not intersectional. Feminists have to stop talking about women, dammit!

The narcissism and self-absorption and spite are obvious and disgusting. Kappel goes on for many more paragraphs explaining why feminism should be all about Kappel and how very special Kappel is. It’s as painful to read as tearing off a strip of skin would be.

In Oklahoma City:

A former Oklahoma City police officer was convicted Thursday of 18 of the 36 counts he faced, including four counts of first-degree rape, related to accusations that he victimized 13 women on his police beat in a minority, low-income neighborhood.

Daniel Holtzclaw, 29, sobbed as the verdict was read aloud. He could spend the rest of his life in prison based on the jury’s recommendations, which include a 30-year sentence on each of the first-degree rape counts. Among the other charges he was convicted of were forcible oral sodomy, sexual battery and second-degree rape.

…

The allegations against Holtzclaw brought new attention to the problem of sexual misconduct committed by law enforcement officers, something police chiefs have studied for years.

During a monthlong trial, jurors heard from 13 women who said Holtzclaw sexually victimized them. Most of them said Holtzclaw stopped them while out on patrol, searched them for outstanding warrants or checked to see if they were carrying drug paraphernalia, then forced himself on them.

It’s one of those jobs, like being a priest, that give you access to victims and a veneer of authority.

Surprisingly, for once, the jury believed the victims.

[D]espite the number of victims, the case presented prosecutors with several challenges.

Many of the women had arrest records or histories of drug abuse. Most hailed from the same neighborhoods in the shadow of the state Capitol. Two women took the stand wearing handcuffs and orange scrubs because they had recently been jailed on drug charges. Another woman admitted on the stand to slipping out of her motel room the night before and procuring marijuana and the hallucinogen PCP.

Holtzclaw’s attorney, Scott Adams, made those issues a cornerstone of his defense strategy. Adams questioned several women at length about whether they were high when they allegedly encountered Holtzclaw. He also pointed out that most did not come forward until police identified them as possible victims after launching their investigation.

Ultimately, that approach did not sway the jury to dismiss the women’s stories.

All of the women are black. Holtzclaw is half-white, half-Japanese. The jury appeared to all be white, though Oklahoma court officials said they did not have race information for jurors. Some supporters of the women questioned whether the jury would fairly judge their allegations.

And yet he was convicted.

Hooray for tolerance and acceptance and general friendliness, right? Including for parents who don’t vaccinate their children, including when you are a parent with children in the same school, right?

It’s right according to the principal of Brunswick North West Primary in Melbourne, Trevor Bowen. Slate quotes from his message to parents:

We expect all community members to act respectfully and with tolerance when interacting with other parents and carers who may have a differing opinion to their own. This includes an opposing understanding about child immunisation.

People from both sides of the discussion have expressed their thoughts in terms of the wellbeing and ongoing health of the children they care so much for. This is most admirable. I ask all community members to interact respectfully at all times and with a sense of tolerance and acceptance of diversity.

The Independent has a heartwarming story about a little girl in Toronto.

A Canadian transgender father left behind a wife and seven children to begin a new life as a six-year-old girl.

Stefonknee (pronounced ‘Stephanie’) Wolschtt, 46, had been married for 23 years when she realised she was transgender.

She’s now living with an adoptive family, and says she does not “want to be an adult right now”.

She realized she was transgender and six years old? How? How does an adult age 46 realize she is six years old? What’s that like? What does it mean? How does it work? Six year old girls, for instance, don’t have seven children, so doesn’t having seven children interfere with realizing one is six years old?

“I can’t deny I was married. I can’t deny I have children. But I’ve moved forward now and I’ve gone back to being a child,” she said in a video series by The Transgender Project, published by Daily Xtra.

She’s moved forward. So where have her children moved to?

Feeling rejected by her family, Ms Wolschtt left and now lives with her adoptive family, who she says are “totally comfortable with me being a little girl”.

She explains how her new parents’ youngest granddaughter wanted a little sister and decided Ms Wolschtt should be younger than her.

“We have a great time. We colour, we do kid’s stuff,” she says.

“It’s called play therapy. No medication, no suicide thoughts. And I just get to play.”

Maybe the granddaughter will realize she’s a 46-year-old man.

In an earlier part of the series, Ms Wolschtt spoke of how she became suicidal and was hospitalised a month after taking part in the first Toronto transgender march in 2009.

After she was discharged, her wife accused her of harassment and assault, and pressed charges against her to achieve a restraining order.

But she’s not at all a danger to that granddaughter she plays with because…reasons.

The Independent left some stuff out of this story.