Via Maryam on Twitter:

Maryam Namazie ‏@MaryamNamazie Nov 7
Mothers against execution in Iran
Long Live.

An editorial from the Daily Times in Pakistan:

Pakistani society’s deep rooted acceptance of despicable misogynistic behaviour once again came to light recently when a mixed gender group of students at Karachi University (KU) who were playing a casual game of cricket together within the bounds of the university were assaulted for doing so by the activists of the notoriously thuggish fundamentalist Islami Jamiat-e-Talba (IJT), the student wing of the Jamat-e-Islami. The IJT and its members are a menace across the universities of the country, and they have defaced and perverted these supposed places of learning and critical reflection into fearful places of demagoguery and reactionary backwardness.

Imagine if Mormons or Baptists were doing that on university campuses in the US – assaulting people for playing cricket (or baseball) without segregating by sex.

Interaction between grown adults of the opposite gender is a particular target of their crusading violence and they are emboldened to carry out their disgraceful actions due to the authorities and police in particular turning a blind eye to their actions. For decades this student organisation has carried out its hooliganism with impunity, terrorising students who are legal adults and not beholden to have their behaviour policed according to the precepts of some moralising band of roving fanatical vigilantes.

Imagine living in a place where you were always subject to being policed by some moralising band of roving fanatical violent vigilantes.

In the KU case, eyewitnesses report that the students were merely passing the time while waiting for their conveyances after classes were over, when the bunch of IJT goons took issue with men playing with women and demanded they stop, which resulted in an acrimonious exchange and the aforementioned attack. The attack resulted in injuries to five students, including the female students.

Police arrived and stopped the attack, but the IJT goons were promptly released.

In all likelihood, the police will not prosecute these thugs and as per its past record, deem such an issue a trivial annoyance and sweep it under the carpet. The IJT will continue to operate freely, while rival student organisations have long since been banned, ostensibly to prevent rival student groups’ violence. This state of affairs is shameful and cannot be condemned enough. The police and the university are making a statement by their inaction that they do not see this brand of violent evangelicalism to be problematic and do not consider the participation of women in public life, let alone their right to enjoy regular activities without trauma, a matter of any significance.

Because they’re just women. They don’t matter.

John Knight, LGBT Project Director at the Illinois ACLU, posts about a suburban Chicago school district that refuses to let a trans girl use the girls’ locker room, instead making her use a separate room.

My clients started meeting with the District more than two years ago to explain why their daughter should be treated as a girl at school in all ways, including when using the locker room. As the District has no policy guiding the treatment of transgender students, the parents had to initiate the discussion regarding how the school would treat their daughter in accordance with her gender. They provided medical information regarding her diagnosis with gender dysphoria and her transition to living fully as a girl, including legally changing her name and changing the gender on her passport.

In response to claims by the school that they had not had to deal with transgender students before, the parents brought in representatives from the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance to educate the school administration and staff. The parents made clear to the District that their daughter’s gender and her medical condition is not a choice and that it is essential to her health and her ability to succeed at school that she be treated as a girl, and that means being treated like a girl in all respects including locker room access.

What the District offered was a separate restroom, down a long hallway, where my client has been forced to dress for gym and the athletics she is involved in. The separation serves as a daily reminder that the school does not regard her as a girl or even a human being but as some undifferentiated “other.”

Does it? Does the separation really say (or “serve as a reminder”) that the school does not regard the student as a human being?

I don’t think it does. I think that’s rhetorical inflation.

What our client wants is pretty basic – to be accepted for who she is and treated just like other students. Other students accept her. The school board and administration apparently do not. These adults should remember that many students are unhappy with their bodies – body image issues can be serious in a world filled with unrealistic and often oppressive images of physical beauty particularly for young women and girls. But no other students – no matter how uncomfortable they are with their bodies – are required to hide them. Imagine how it feels for a girl to be told that her body is so unacceptable that she must dress apart from everyone else – even if she might otherwise choose to do so. The message is loud and clear – transgender students should be ashamed of how they look and who they are.

But if these adults should remember that many students are unhappy with their bodies, then that applies to the girls in the locker room in general, not just to the trans girl.

It is upsetting to see the superintendent say that the District is “sensitive” to the needs of transgender students and supportive of them. The District’s actions are the farthest thing from being supportive. You can’t defend discrimination by claiming you’re nice about it. Most damaging, the superintendent asserts that a girl who is transgender has a “male body” and that transgender students are “of the opposite sex” when defending the District’s position. Such assertions are wrong as a matter of science and offensive because they serve to challenge and undermine the very core of a person’s identity.

In what sense are such assertions wrong as a matter of science? What science is it that says a transgender girl has a female body?

And then this business of the very core of a person’s identity…what exactly about that is immune from challenge? What are the criteria? Are there any limits? If people say their identity is something that doesn’t comport with the apparent facts, does the world have to agree in all circumstances no matter what? Or does this new rule apply only to trans gender people? If so, why?

A transgender girl is female. She is a girl through and through – not something in between as the District suggests.

“Through and through” – what does that mean? How does John Knight know?

I don’t think this kind of magical thinking is going to help anyone in the long run.

The Guardian reports on A New Study that finds that children from godbothering families are less altruistic than children from non-godbothering families.

Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.

They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.

“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.

I can’t say that that surprises me. I don’t think religion necessarily makes people less altruistic, or that atheism necessarily does the opposite. But I do think there are aspects of religion that pull in that direction, in particular, the focus on a god as opposed to humans (and other animals). Obedience to a god just is not the same thing as concern for humans.

The findings “robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households”.

Older children, usually those with a longer exposure to religion, “exhibit[ed] the greatest negative relations”.

The study also found that “religiosity affects children’s punitive tendencies”. Children from religious households “frequently appear to be more judgmental of others’ actions”, it said.

Sure. That’s the obedience to god thing. The god is by its nature a tyrant – a being vastly more powerful than we are, demanding that we obey it – so it’s going to encourage a tyrant-based morality. Obey the tyrant, and judge harshly anyone who doesn’t.

The report was “a welcome antidote to the presumption that religion is a prerequisite of morality”, said Keith Porteus Wood of the UK National Secular Society.

“It would be interesting to see further research in this area, but we hope this goes some way to undoing the idea that religious ethics are innately superior to the secular outlook. We suspect that people of all faiths and none share similar ethical principles in their day to day lives, albeit may express them differently depending on their worldview.”

Well said; not triumphalist. It’s always a mistake to be triumphalist about one New Study.

There was a big rally in Madrid today to protest violence against women.

The rally, organised by feminist groups, was attended by representatives of all the main political parties.

Activists dressed in black [lay] on the ground to remember hundreds of women murdered over the years in what they described as “macho terrorism”.

They said laws against domestic abuse should be extended to include all violence against women.

Isn’t violence against women kind of last century? Kind of second wave? Kind of over?

A survey carried out by the European Union last year estimated that 13 million woman in Europe experienced physical violence in 2013.

But statistics and surveys suggest the problem is less prevalent in Spain than other European countries, our correspondent says.

But he adds that violence against women is high in the public’s conscience in Spain, and the rally has succeeded in reasserting the issue on the political agenda – only six week’s before an unpredictable general election.

Has anyone figured out how many of the women had it coming?

The NSS reports that Turkey is working on treating violence against women more gently, kindly, compassionately – to the perps, that is, not to the women.

Proposals by the Turkish Ministry of Justice to treat sexual harassment and violence against women less severely have drawn widespread condemnation from campaigners.

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) is “deeply concerned” by the draft proposal and has warned that if passed the plans will allow perpetrators of crimes normally punishable by five years’ imprisonment “to engage in negotiations with prosecutors to reduce their sentence to one year, postpone their sentence, do community service or pay money to avoid jail time.”

They note that the proposal “covers a number of crimes that predominantly affect women and girls including molestation, sexual abuse, threats and sex with minors. Victims and survivors will not even be consulted in the negotiations” and they stress a background of hundreds of murders of women in Turkey this year alone.

That will happen when you teach people that this other set of people are inferior. It becomes open season.

The BBC reported earlier this year that there has been a “dramatic rise in violence against women in Turkey”, linked by many to the ideology of the Islamist AKP.

President Erdogan and senior members of his party have made repeated statements about women’s ‘traditional’ role in society. In November 2014 he denied that men and women should be on an “equal footing” and said it was “against nature”.

In July the Turkish deputy prime minister told a female parliamentarian, “Madam be quiet! You as a woman, be quiet!”

And if she won’t – punch her.

In their statement the IKWRO note that “since only January 2015, 285 women have been murdered. Perpetrators of violence against women and girls already face minimal charges and often walk free under the outrageous ‘provocation’ rule, which allows perpetrators to argue that they were provoked by their victims.

And that makes it no big deal to murder them?

God people are terrible.

H/t Bernard Hurley

I’m going through the past three years of Jesus and Mo, so I thought you’d enjoy this one:

Ontological bomb-shelter – that’s so exactly right. You can’t see it or talk to it, you can’t get messages from it, you can’t register complaints with it – it’s beyond your reach. Permanently…Except after you’re dead, they say, but then that’s very easy to say, isn’t it – you’re not going to be able to show them wrong. It’s the perfect con, and most people fall for it.

The Patreon is here.

So this is where we are.

Morgan M Page ‏@morganmpage Nov 4

TERFs are commiting acts of genocide against trans women under the UN’s definition of genocide. http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_analysis_framework.pdf …

Shivoa Birch ‏@Shivoa Nov 4
Imagine writing a piece telling queer/trans* youth to remember elders & saying “yes, call me a Terf or a Swerf” #ToneDeaf #TransGenocide

Morgan M Page ‏@morganmpage Nov 4
The entire anti-trans radical feminist agenda has always been upfront that their purpose is genocide. We need to start calling it that.

Genocide.

And they accuse other people of inciting hatred.

Reason (the libertarian website) agrees with the libertarian feminists, of course. Elizabeth Nolan Brown says the usual things:

In a recent interview with Time magazine, feminist icon Gloria Steinem—currently promoting a new travel memoir—says that the biggest threat to reproductive rights today is “patriarchy… the very definition (of which) is that men control women’s bodies in order to control reproduction.”

The way johns do, for instance. But Brown isn’t having any of that, thanks.

It’s a nice sentiment—but alas, Steinem’s concept of human rights and bodily integrity only applies to certain people. Steinem has been an outspoken proponent against sex workers’ right to bodily integrity.

Over the summer, Steinem was one of a group of Hollywood celebrities and high-profile feminists condemning the human-rights group Amnesty International for its support of completely decriminalizalizing prostitution.

Or rather, decriminalizing pimps, brothel owners and johns. They favor the decriminalization of prostitutes aka sex workers. So Steinem isn’t in fact “an outspoken proponent against” (i.e. an opponent of) sex workers’ right to bodily integrity.

In 2014, Steinem said it was wrong to use the term “sex work,” a preferred term of many women who willingly work in the sex trade, because prostitution is merely “commercial rape”—a “body invasion” that is “not like any other work.” Never mind that a lot of grown women choose to be sex workers and do not experience prostitution as commercialized rape; that’s how Steinem sees it, and so pity the poor sex worker who thinks she gets to define her own experience.

But by the same token a lot of grown women and underage girls do not choose to be sex workers; they are forced into it and/or trapped in it. Which group is more likely to have various kinds of privilege that should be checked? I say it’s the group that doesn’t choose. The more options you have (and privilege amounts to more options), the less likely you are to “choose” to be a chicken-processor or a coal miner or a prostitute. The more desperate you are, the more likely you are to do jobs that you wouldn’t touch if you could survive any other way. The fact that some women think prostitution is a fabulous way to get both sex and money is not all that relevant to the desperate ones.

In Pakistan too.

A gunman on a motorbike shot dead a Pakistani journalist in the country’s restive northwest on Tuesday and hours later the Taliban claimed the killing, bringing to 71 the number of journalists and media workers killed in Pakistan since 2002.

Zaman Mehsud, 38, was a journalist working for the Pakistani Urdu newspaper Daily Umet and SANA news agency, and also worked for the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

A journalist and a human rights worker. Of course they killed him.

Taliban commander Qari Saif Ullah Saif told Reuters: “We killed him because he was writing against us … we have some other journalists on our hit list in the region, soon we will target them.”

The journalist’s brother Muhammed Aslam wept as he collected the body. “He left five children and a widow,” he said.

…

At least 67 journalists and media workers were killed between January 2002 and 2014, according to press freedom group Reporters Without Borders. Including Mehsud, another four have been killed this year.

All but one were Pakistanis. The killers have been convicted in only two cases — that of American Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and that of Geo reporter Wali Babar.

Shoot the messenger.

Katha Pollitt on Germaine Greer and the fatuous attempt to no-platform her and the absurd demand that a feminist be 100% perfect (in the sense of: agrees with me in all particulars) or be banished.

She starts with the fact that Greer has always been all over the place. There’s always plenty to disagree with in what she writes and says. Nobody could agree with everything she says.

Still, when I was invited to interview her a few years ago about Shakespeare’s Wife, her biography of Anne Hathaway, I was delighted. I did not start a petition to have her invitation canceled on the grounds that anyone who approves of cutting off little girls’ clitorises has no place on a podium talking about any subject, even Elizabethan England. I thought: Here’s a woman who has lived a big life and, at 70, has written a book that tries to rescue one of history’s most famous wives from oblivion and misogyny. That’s feminism.

Also, it’s interesting. Being interesting is a virtue. Greer is interesting. Few of her detractors are.

(Do I mean none of them are? Yes, probably. But I haven’t examined them all, so I can’t be sure. On the other hand I can be pretty sure that the kind of person who thinks Greer should be shunned is not interesting. People who are interesting don’t think that way. It’s a crude way to think, and that’s not compatible with interesting thought.)

Then Katha quotes from Rachael Melhuish’s petition.

Where to begin? Violence against trans women is the fault of feminists? I doubt the brutal men who assault and murder trans women have even heard of Greer­­—or are likely to attend her proposed lecture on feminism in the 20th century (which, she says, will not touch on the subject of trans women at all). And if you believe that inviting someone to lecture on campus is an endorsement of their views—even on subjects they’re not lecturing about—it doesn’t sound as if you’re really all that keen on debate. It sounds more like you want the university to invite only people who think like yourself.

Which would be a disaster, because they would all be so unlikely to be interesting.

It’s both unfortunate and bizarre that at a moment when feminism is showing renewed signs of life, the first impulse is to narrow the conversation and throw rotten vegetables at everyone who isn’t singing 100 percent in unison. And did I mention ageism? That prejudice seems to be completely acceptable. A typical tweet: “Germaine Greer is an insane old woman. Just watched the interview, she should be in an old peoples home.”

Feminism doesn’t apply to women over 40. Once you’re past 40 you’re in the wrong wave, and you should be locked up.

In the UK, the National Union of Students has “no-platformed” (attempted to prevent from speaking anywhere) the lesbian feminist writer and activist Julie Bindel for “transphobia” stemming from a 2004 article in The Guardian in which she mocked the notion that having a sex change made someone a woman. (Although she’s apologized for the tone of that piece, it doesn’t matter: She questions the use of sex-reassignment surgery, especially for children, and that’s enough.) Transgender-rights activists argue that trans women are real women, irrespective of their physical attributes, and have always been so. But even if that view prevails, the movement has taken a wrong turn somewhere if Bindel—a decades-long campaigner for lesbian rights and against male violence toward women—is the misogynist, and the feminists include male “allies” screaming at her to shut up.

Tell me about it. All those male “allies” screaming at feminist women to shut up – screaming it in full, throbbing confidence that they’re on the Right Correct Pure side, the social justice side, the intersectional side, the fight privilege side, the listen to marginalized people side. I could compile a list of those fuckers.

Even abortion isn’t as divisive a subject as transgender rights: No one pickets a campus talk by Sister Helen Prejean because she belongs to a church that demands that raped 10-year-olds give birth. You don’t see anyone no-platforming conservatives who support cuts in government programs that devastate poor women and families, or foreign officials representing governments that deny women basic human rights. There’s a virtual standing army of prominent people—people with actual real-world power—who are more intimately connected with the subjection of women than Germaine Greer or Julie Bindel; to say nothing of the numerous people, like the classics scholar Mary Beard and the gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who have supported their campus appearances and found themselves in the same crosshairs.

Strange, isn’t it. Counter-productive. Embarrassing. Narcissism of small differences.

Guest post by Josh Spokes. An email from Consumers Union to members, and his reply.

Policy and Action from Consumer Reports

Journalism again treating violent unreasonable reactions to other people’s reasonable actions as “provoked” or “sparked” or “ignited” by the people who did nothing wrong. Charlie Hebdo “sparked” the violence that left nine of them dead; Lars Vilks “set off” outrage; Raif Badawi “triggered” his own ferocious punishment.

This one is the New York Times:

An actress from Iran has gone on the run after igniting a backlash by posting photos of herself on social media showing her not wearing a hijab…

Seriously: journalists need to be more careful with the way they write these stories. She didn’t “ignite” anything.

Sadaf Taherian began posting the controversial photos on Facebook and Instagram over the last two weeks and the response from Iranians was as swift as it was extreme. In an interview with Masih Alinejad, a journalist who runs a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” which features photos and videos of Iranian women walking in public with their heads uncovered, Taherian reportedly said she was initially “nervous” about the reaction the images might trigger. Indeed, many Iranians lashed out at Taherian with insults and called her “immoral.”

That’s the way to say it. They lashed out at her; she didn’t do anything to them.

Then, the Iranian government piled on, officially denouncing Taherian as an “offender.” When another popular actress came to Taherian’s defense on social media, a spokesman for Iran’s ministry of culture and lslamic guidance said the two actresses would be barred from acting. “As far as this ministry is concerned, these two individuals are no longer considered to be artists any more and do not have any right to act,” said Hossein Noushabadi. The popular TV show starring Taherian was abruptly pulled from the state television network schedule.

Well, that’s “Islamic guidance” for you.

Suzanne Moore says remember who brung ya.

Everyone now is bisexual, pansexual, agender (without a gender). It’s all so wild. Miley, Cara, various models. Young people are coming out of the closet into a hall of mirrors. For this “coming out” often says my insides feel different to my outsides. Hear me roar. Welcome to the world, friends, for who does not feel like that?

Exactly. This isn’t some hot new thing, it’s just how people are. Granted it is more talked about now, but that doesn’t mean it’s a new invention.

Now that there is a new set of identities for people to pick’n’mix, it would be gracious not to erase those who lived and died with more fixed identities. This is not melodrama, this is history as power. Laurie Penny recently came out as a genderqueer feminist but she differs from many of her genderqueer friends: “I still identify politically as a woman. My identity is more complex than female or male.” This I take for granted. So why does it need to be said? Penny is extremely smart and if she wants to present as a sexual outlaw that’s fine. Try being a “butch dyke” or is that not quite radical enough?

Nah. *yawn* That’s so last year.

The current preoccupation with being on the sexual edge and yes, call me a Terf or a Swerf or my own term Smurf (Some Made-Up Radical Feminist) if you like, but I don’t just check my privilege, I check our history. Because if sex is just something you do rather than something you are, then it is way easier to play with gender. Yet it has become so muddled that every identity must be proclaimed in a hierarchy of grievance. This fragmentation, which is not intersectionality, but rather an increasingly insular discussion about cis-ness, microaggressions and trigger warnings, runs in horrific parallel to images of women being raped and killed all over the world.

Once, queer meant that one could get outside of one’s own identity. My male gay friends came on abortion marches with me. I went to Aids vigils with them. Even now I see that the fight about reproductive rights for women continues and while places such as Ireland can accept gay marriage and the decriminalisation of drugs, they still won’t decriminalise women’s bodies.

But hey, we’re just cis women, we don’t own feminism.

I saw a very bizarre remark – by a woman – on Twitter today.

Sick and tired of cis & white feminists thinking they own feminism.

Leaving aside the “white” part, the remaining claim is pretty staggering. “How dare women think feminism is about women?!”

What other oppressed class is subject to this kind of bullshit? What other oppressed class gets shouted at for thinking its own liberation movement is not “owned” by someone else?

It’s only women who are willing – in fact eager – to erase themselves this way.

Maybe that’s enough to tell me I’m not a woman after all. I’m not a fucking political masochist.

Another woman stoned to death in Afghanistan.

The men surround the woman as she stands in a hole dug into the stony ground, only her head pokes above the surface. Then they begin to pick up rocks and hurl them at her again and again from close range.

Her agonized cries grow louder as the barrage of stones intensifies.

They like that. They like her agonized screams.

The 19-year-old woman, identified as Rokhshana, had been forced to marry against her will and recently fled with another man, said Seema Joyenda, the governor of Ghor province. The couple were caught after two days, and the Taliban leader of the village ordered that Rokhshana be stoned to death for adultery, Joyenda said.

Because men own women, and women don’t own themselves, and women who rebel in any way must be killed by torture.

Attacks on women and disregard for their rights have been widely documented by international organizations in Afghanistan.

“The prevalence of violence against women and harmful practices continues to be of serious concern,” said a report in April by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

A report in the same month by Amnesty Internationalraised concerns about the persecution of women’s rights activists in the country, not only by the Taliban and tribal warlords, but also by government officials.

Women aren’t supposed to have rights. Women are property; property can’t have rights.

The Economist tells me something I didn’t know: Jeremy Corbyn is an advocate of justice for Dalits.

Specifically, Mr Corbyn wants British law to prohibit discrimination on grounds of caste, a step which the government seems reluctant to take, and one which some prominent British Hindus adamantly oppose. These opponents insist that the existence of caste discrimination in Britain is unproven, and that outlawing it would be an insult to the Indian community.

Except of course for the Dalit portion of “the Indian community.”

All this matters more than ever because a political battle over the Dalit question may soon come to a head in Britain after simmering for a long time.  Arguments over whether Britain should explicitly outlaw maltreatment on grounds of caste have been in progress since at least 2010 when an Equality Act made it illegal to discriminate (in the treatment of employees and customers, or the provision of state services) on a familiar list of criteria, including race, ethnicity, religion and gender.

In its initial version, the Act said that the government “may” add caste to the catalogue of protected characteristics if the need were to become obvious. Then in April 2013, after some lively debate in both Houses of Parliament, the government reluctantly agreed to a new forms of words, spelling out that it “must” add caste to the list.

But they’re still talking about it, and dragging out the process. Mustn’t rush into these things.

Meena Varma of the Dalit Solidarity Network says she believes that Hindu lobbyists are pressing the government “at the highest level” to drop the idea of legislating against caste discrimination. On the other other hand, the list of people and bodies who still think that Britain should outlaw caste discrimination is also quite impressive; not only Mr Corbyn but Anglican bishops, some respected Liberal Democratic and Conservative peers, the National Secular Society, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Navi Pillay, who till recently was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

So the Labour leader is not alone in his concern for the Dalits, whether in India or Britain. But as he may soon discover, people who speak out for the wretched of the earth can get themselves called all manner of unpleasant things, from neo-colonialist to Orientalist.

Because only a neo-colonialist Orientalist would insult the Indian community by advocating the outlawing of caste discrimination. So Dalits are neo-colonialist Orientalists, so they can safely be forgotten.