Pink News introduces us to a gender-fluid father who identifies as a straight lesbian.

Perhaps Pink News has merged with The Onion? No, they say the father wants to raise awareness.

A young father has opened up about his gender fluidity, in a bid to raise more awareness regarding the subject.

Jas Sutherland always knew he felt like both a male and a female, but said that until recently, he never though he could be open about it.

However, now, he says he can transition between his two personas regularly and is determined to generate a better public understanding about what it is to be gender fluid.

It must be so exciting to reinvent the wheel.

Why do we have to conceptualize it that way? Instead let’s conceptualize it the opposite way: “feeling like” a female or a male is just a formula we paste onto our sense of self (which is another such formula, it’s formulas all the way down), and we could use a different formula. It’s possible that nobody really “feels like” a female or a male at all; it’s possible that we all just feel like ourselves – our selves – and the categories are external and imposed.

Maybe we all just feel like people…or maybe not even that, maybe we all just feel like a set of senses and thoughts and actions.

I, at least, don’t feel like either a female or a male, nor do I feel “gender fluid” in the sense of alternating between the two. I feel like someone who is seen as a female by the rest of the world. In here? I couldn’t really tell you. A secret agent, a dissenter, a taker of notes.

He made the decision to come out four months ago after consulting a life coach who he says helped him come to terms with his identity, as did seeing more gender fluid stars – such as Ruby Rose – in the spotlight.

“I have had theses feelings for many years but just suppressed it,” he says.

“Knowing I didn’t want to change sex or be a cross dresser it was hard to find myself with that.

“It was not until the term came out that I felt comfortable coming out myself. Stars like Ruby Rose have certainly made life easier for the rest of us.”

So he’s a straight lesbian. Whatevs.

Another particularly surprising bit of dialogue from a thread on the AUSA Womensfest page. I’m calling the characters A, B and C even though all this is public, in case they don’t want their names bandied about on some blog.

A: like straight up if you’re worried enough about two cis women in a position of power being called cunts very implicitly for, you know, actively enacting transmisogyny that you’re bothered with that immensely more than with the transmisogyny (which, you know, at its absolute tamest involves being called much, much worse), as someone who kind of has a cunt depending how you define that: you’re a cunt.

…

it’s often cis women who are the most violent to trans women because it’s one of the few ways in which cis women benefit from the policing of womanhood, that they’re “more authentic” than trans women.

…

B: Okay. I don’t want to make this nitpicky, but I am genuinely surprised – you’re saying MOST of the violence committed against transwomen comes from ciswomen?

Yes, I’m aware of the policing of gender, and the way oppressed groups benefit from oppressing others. But literally, literal physical violence? Transwomen are most often murdered, not by cismen, but by ciswomen???

C: As a trans woman I can absolutely confirm that cis women – feminists in particular – have been the most violently and insidiously transmisogynist towards me + ppl I know.

B: what [C] said. also: the group of people most fervently dedicated to getting poor trans women fired (and — it is near impossible to get hired as a trans woman, a lot of the time, so this is a death sentence), evicted, and otherwise deprived of the basic essentials of life are a large group of cis women.

like, virtually none of them are cis men.

hundreds. of cis women.

A: Oh, yes, of course – even as a ciswoman (maybe? we could go with queer but I want to avoid labels here), I can confirm the kinds of insidious, horrifying, nonphysical (and occasionally physical) violence I have experienced at the hands of women of all kinds.

That is horrendous, and in no way to be dismissed. But I was talking about the kinds of physical violence that goes with – and that I have experienced with – being called a cunt.

B: lmao ok so basically what you’re saying is “i don’t believe these frail female-bodied cis women could beat up a trans woman”, is that right? if not, please clarify why you’re so disbelieving of this

it has happened to my friends. it happens most often when groups of cis women jump one trans girl. i’m not going into this further out of respect for the trans women on this thread who don’t deserve to be traumatized for the sake of proving something to you.

So there it is: the claim is that women are the source of violence against trans women. Not men, but women. Especially feminists.

Brandon Griggs at CNN tells us about the photographer who took those photos of Aylan Kurdi.

Nilufer Demir was crossing a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, on Wednesday when she saw him: a small boy in a red T-shirt, blue pants and black shoes, lying face-down in the sand.

Waves lapped at his lifeless face.

She froze.

“There was nothing left to do for him. There was nothing left to bring him back to life,” she told CNN Turk, a CNN sister network based in Turkey.

So Demir, a correspondent and photographer with Turkey’s Dogan News Agency, did the only thing she could: She raised her camera and began shooting.

She thought it was the only way to express the silent scream of his body.

Demir, 29, has worked for Dogan News Agency, also known as DHA, since she was a teenager. Based in Bodrum, she responded to reports of activity at the beach and discovered that several bodies had washed up on shore.

She and her colleagues found Aylan’s brother Galip nearby, and then another boy. None of them had life jackets.

The boys’ father was the only Kurdi family member to survive the ill-fated boat trip.

“I don’t want anything else from this world,” Abdullah Kurdi told CNN on Thursday. “Everything I was dreaming of is gone. I want to bury my children and sit beside them until I die.”

Demir has been covering the refugee crisis for months and has photographed many dead migrants. But none has had the impact of her images of Aylan.

“I didn’t think it would bring this much attention when I was taking the photograph,” she told CNN Turk. “However, with the pain I felt when I saw Aylan, the only thing on my mind was to pass along this to the public. I didn’t think anything else. I just wanted to show their tragedy.”

That happens – one photo strikes a nerve. The little girl running down the road with napalm burns; the little boy in the huge cap in the Warsaw ghetto; the woman with the faraway stare in the dust bowl.

Nick Ut

More from the AUSA Womensfest page.

(I know some of y’all don’t do Facebook, but this is a public page and you can read it without being signed up to Facebook.)

A post explaining some things:

Newsflash, AUSA:

trans women are women.
trans women are biologically female.
trans women are womyn-born-womyn.
trans women are female-bodied.
trans women have female chromosomes.
trans women have female reproductive systems.
trans women’s genitals are female.
trans women’s secondary sex characteristics are female.
trans women have female voices.
trans women are female-socialized.

(source: queerkittenprincess on Tumblr)

Unpack yourselves.
Stop excluding trans women.
Trans women are dying and you are aiding and abetting in that.
You are complicit in that.
YOU ARE KILLING TRANS WOMEN WITH YOUR BELIEFS.

The Auckland University Students Association is putting on a Womensfest September 21-25.

It’s time for another Womensfest! The AUSA Womens’ Rights Officers have been working around the clock to bring you a great week filled with events on womens’ rights, issues, culture and intersectionality! Don’t miss it – come along and get empowered!

Good stuff, right? But there’s a problem.

One planned item is the Vagina Cupcake event.

Uh oh.

One response:

Hiya WROs! I was one of the WROs in 2011 and I’ve learned a lot since then. For example, we did things for fun (luckily not during our Womensfest, but unfortunately during our KATE) like vulva origami and vulva cupcakes, for exactly the same reasons as you are now – we thought we were breaking boundaries and taboos around women’s bodies, and doing something new and exciting.

What I didn’t think about then was that we weren’t representing all women’s bodies, and in fact what we were doing was a pretty cruel slap to those women who were already the most excluded. It wasn’t new and exciting, but an old exercise in cis privilege. It was reminiscent of the ways a lot of old-school feminists try to exclude trans people from women’s spaces by emphasising specific shared traits or experiences of “womanhood”, e.g. having a vagina. Which if you think about it is not a great thing to base a sisterhood on!

I’m actually really embarrassed about a lot of the things I did out of ignorance when I was WRO, but history doesn’t have to repeat. Luckily there are lots of fun ways to celebrate Womensfest without resorting to a reductive feminism rooted in the vagina, aka Cunt Feminism. If you want to learn how not to be a cunt feminist I suggest you listen closely to the constructive criticism that you are being given by your peers.

More in the unofficial series on slavery around the world – slave labor on Thai fishing boats.

Akaradetch Seri had a fight with his girl friend one day and found himself homeless. He spent the night on a park bench where ever such a nice man approached him and offered him a place to stay.

The man mentioned he could stay at a friend’s house, what turned out to be a stark room inhabited by several others. The front door remained bolted, and Seri became worried when asked not to leave under any circumstances.

After several days, the men were taken to a port and loaded into a ship’s barren hull, then ferried to Indonesia and forced to board another vessel to work. Afraid, Seri asked to go back. He was told his passage had been paid for and only his backbreaking labor could buy his freedom.

For the next three years, Seri caught and sorted fish on a Thai-run deep-sea fishing vessel in Indonesian waters, earning a fraction of Thailand’s minimum wage.

And that’s how it’s done.

Thailand has overfished its own waters so it goes into other countries, which means the slaves are stuck on the boats for months or even years.

The conditions are horrific and not compensated for by decent pay, so nobody wants these jobs.

Increasingly, boat owners have turned to human traffickers to meet their staffing needs.

Over one third of polled fishing industry workers in Samut Sakhon province, a fishery hub, said they were trafficked into the industry, with 57 percent reporting conditions of forced labor, according to a 2012 study by the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP).

Long-haul fishing boats, which rarely return to shore, are especially prone to abusive conditions, with one in six surveyed workers on such vessels reporting they did not sign up for the job, according to a 2013 study by the International Labor Organization.

One former slave places the figure much higher. “Ask 100 men on a boat and 80 of them have been tricked into working there,” said Chairat Ratchapaksri, a 37-year-old Thai man who worked as a mechanic on a deep-sea vessel before his rescue in April from the remote Indonesian island of Benjina, following the publication of an Associated Press investigation into a massive Thai-run criminal syndicate operating in those waters.

Read the rest.

Sara Hucal wrote the piece.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted a cartoon a couple of days ago:

Someone they haven’t shut up yet:

Ahmad Al-shathry ‏@Abunass3r Sep 2
@KenRoth That’s a Saudi Arabian political cartoon, by the way. Drawn by @jabertoon his work appears regularly in our news papers

Natasha Fatah and Nahayat Tizhoosh produced a story for the CBC on the failure of the Gulf states to accept any refugees at all.

https://youtu.be/WYQwdF6SBXE

Pure, virtuous Saudi Arabia.

The Ministry of Social Affairs has banned Saudi families from adopting Syrian or other foreign children.

“The ministry does not sponsor Arab children who lost their parents in conflicts, such as in Syria and Iraq. There are global humanitarian organizations that deal with these cases,” said Latifah Al-Tamimi, director of social supervision at the ministry in the Eastern Province.

So their god hates children, too. No surprise there.

Bloomberg reports that refugees from Syria feel more welcome in Europe than in the Gulf states.

Searching for a new home, Yassir Batal says Germany and its unfamiliar voices and customs are more enticing for his wife and five children than the wealthy Arab states whose culture, religion and language they share.

Like so many other Syrians who have escaped civil war, the 36-year-old has ruled out heading south through Jordan to Saudi Arabia or beyond. They wouldn’t be welcomed the same way, he said.

“In Europe, I can get treatment for my polio, educate my children, have shelter and live an honorable life,” said Batal, as he left a United Nations office in Beirut, the city that’s been the crossroads for more than a million refugees since the violence started in March 2011. “Gulf countries have closed their doors in the face of Syrians.”

What happened to the ummah?

“I’m most indignant over the Arab countries who are rolling in money and who only take very few refugees,” Danish Finance Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen said in an interview this week at his office in Copenhagen. “Countries like Saudi Arabia. It’s completely scandalous.”

Well all those beheadings aren’t free, you know.

Tariq Al Shammari, a Saudi who heads the Council of Gulf International Relations lobby group, dismissed the criticism as “nonsense” and unfair.

“The Europeans turned a blind eye to what was happening in Syria until the crisis reached their shores,” Al Shammari said by telephone from Manama, Bahrain’s capital. “They just want to lay the blame on someone else.”

Because it’s the Europeans’ responsibility but not the Saudis’? Why? Who made that rule?

Outside the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Mahmoud Abbas, the artist, said he was driven to draw the cartoon by news of Syrians who were found decomposing in a truck abandoned on the highway connecting Budapest and Vienna last week.

Mahmoud Abbas

“If our Arab heritage hasn’t moved us toward the people closest to us, then it’s a disaster,” he said.

God hates people.

Whatever problem it is you want to address…just blame it on women. It makes everything so much simpler. The Malay Mail Online reports on an example of that simplification process:

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 4 — A Friday sermon by Federal Territories’ Islamic authorities today blamed women who do not cover their “aurat,” or intimate body parts, for causing social ills that would affect even those who do.

In its sermon distributed to mosques under its jurisdiction, the Federal Territories Islamic Department (Jawi) also compared uncovered women to uncovered dishes, which it said are bound to frequented by flies, making them unappetising.

Women’s filthy intimate body parts cause all the problems, plus, they draw flies and are just plain disgusting.

“Let us think, what will happen if a dish is not covered? Surely flies will go to the dish, subsequently making those who love the dish lose their appetite,” Jawi said.

“Looking at today’s social ills, it is worrying. When women fail to cover their aurat perfectly, it will open the door to vices,” the sermon added.

“The exploitation of women will prosper. Illicit sex will invite calamities. Life will no longer be peaceful. Safety will be worthless. Even those who take care of their aurat will be victims. Those who reveal their aurat, sins await them.”

It’s women, I tell you, women women women.

According to contemporary Muslim teachings, Muslim women’s “aurat” towards unrelated men is their whole body except their faces and both palms.

Elbows? Biceps? The middle of the back? Shins? Everything but the face and palms? That’s some powerful magic.

Except it’s not, it’s just a way to batter and smash women down into even more submission, which is still never enough. It’s just not possible to hate and stifle women so thoroughly that they become no longer an issue and the sermons can talk about something else. God damn women! What is wrong with them?! Why do they have to be so bad?

There was no mention in the sermon about the obligation of men to also cover their aurat, although Friday prayers are attended almost exclusively by Muslim men in Malaysia.

Of course not. It’s the women who are so disgusting and fly-blown, not the men.

I wonder how many women got beaten up in Kuala Lumpur today.

Kate Smurthwaite has some thoughts on the pope’s “pardon” for abortions.

As I am the official representative of womb-operators (as well as being a comedian I’m also the Media Spokesperson for Abortion Rights UK – you’d be amazed how much overlap the roles have) every journalist and radio presenter has been tripping over themselves to ask me if I’m PLEASED. One even went so far as to ask whether I couldn’t manage a ‘small hooray’.

But any transitory modicum of elation I might have felt at the news that his Holiness has taken one tiny step away from the misogynist medieval attitude that my uterus is any of his damn business is more than swamped by the fury I’m feeling that anyone is still listening to the guy.

Right? The news media treat him with such tender care, such affection, such solemnity – but why? He’s not the boss of all of us. He’d like to be, but he’s not. He’s not, strictly speaking, the boss of anyone except the church hierarchy. He’s just a guy in fancy robes who’s at the top a particular church ladder, that’s all. There are a lot of Catholics, but they’re all free to ignore him if they decide to. He has no power over them.

He has as no democratic mandate. The Pope is ‘elected’ by a bunch of cardinals who in turn are appointed by the Pope. They’re not exactly a diverse bunch.

He doesn’t represent Catholics, thousands of whom have abortions every year and carry on calling themselves Catholics afterwards. Some have even organized to form a campaign group called Catholics For Choice.

He certainly doesn’t represent women. Everyone is entitled to a view on any subject they want, but seriously. Has he, or any of his cardinals, ever woken up and thought ‘still no period… oh shit, I really hope this isn’t… come on… start you stupid thing…’?

No, because for them it’s always someone else who does the baby-having. They make the rules, those inferior other people carry them out.

The only mandate he has is that, as several enthusiastic journalists couldn’t wait to advise me, ‘He’s God’s representative on earth.’

Draconian laws, the vast majority of them initially catapulted into force by the political influence of his predecessors, mean that every year over 20 million women have unsafe illegal abortions and thousands of them die. I’m sorry, but in 2015 I need a better justification for that than ‘He’s God’s representative on earth’.

Journalists told her that? Oy. No he’s not “God’s representative on earth” – because we don’t have any reliable knowledge that there is such a god, because even if we did we wouldn’t know how to contact it, because we have no reason at all to think any pope or any other human is that unavailable god’s “representative.” There’s no link between those four words and any kind of evidence or line of transmission.

And if there were we could still disobey it.

Mona Eltahawy tweeted an interesting graphic:

Terry Glavin in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday:

“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.”

There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare – the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples – among Syrian Canadians there is also an unquenchable sorrow.

…

But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the western countries, the civil society groups – it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.”

Drowning in the sea: a little boy in a red t-shirt and shorts, found face-down in the surf. The boy was among 11 corpses that washed up on a Turkish beach Tuesday. Last Friday, as many as 200 refugees drowned when the fishing boat they were being smuggled in capsized off the Libyan coast. At least 2,500 people, most of them Syrians, have drowned in this way in the Mediterranean already this year.

Nobody is innocent.

…what we are all doing – Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, Americans, Canadians, and all the dominant elites of the United Nations and the NATO countries that cleave to that sophisticated indifference known in polite company as anti-interventionism – is a very straightforward thing. We are watching Syria die. We are allowing it to happen. And if you can comprehend that, you will know something of the sorrow that afflicts Faisal Alazem and all those other Syrian-Canadians these days.

 

Seen on Twitter:

History of Astronomy ‏@hist_astro 5 hours ago
Lunar eclipse (khusuf) in Turkish version of “Wonders of Creation” by al-Qazwini, 1717 copy @walters_museum.

Lori Watson, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies at the University of San Diego, asks: What is a “woman” anyway?

Radical feminism has theorized “woman.” One of its more salient contributions for this context is showing that what it means to be a woman is not an absolute; it’s relative.

The category “woman” and the category “man,” the groups “women” and “men,” are relational. One does not socially exist without the other.   For all the vexing about nature, social categorization is what is being dealt with here.   Men without women don’t exist as socially defined. Women without men don’t exist as such either.   The categories are equal in their relational existence. Unfortunately, such equality doesn’t extend to their social substance, although we are working on it.

The categories are relational.

No doubt women who have been socialized to femininity since birth on the basis of their sex organs do have a relationship to womanness that is in some important sense particular. But so, too, do white women, Black women, Latina women, Asian women, lesbian women, poor and working class women, differently abled women, even if it is not based exclusively on their sex organs. In other words, even if one commonality among all these groups is socialization to and subjection to femininity on the basis of sex organs at birth, that does not exhaust their relation to the category woman. Femininity varies along other hierarchies. Sojourner Truth reminds of this in her “Ain’t I a woman?”[5]

Moreover, gender nonconforming persons, whether trans identified or not, are typically confronted with the hierarchy of gender in often violent and torturous ways. Socialization to masculinity is itself about socially demonstrating one’s ability to dominate. Fail at it, and what are you? A pussy. A fag. In short, a girl, a woman, someone who allows “them”selves to be penetrated, dominated.

And you get called that. You can see and hear men doing that without even going outside; you can just watch all those macho reality shows on the Discover channel.

Now return to our observation that gender is a relational category. Where do trans women stand in relation to men? (For that is the question, not how do trans woman stand solely in relation to women, as is often treated as the only question.) The radical feminist analysis revealed that femininity under conditions of male domination entails widespread forms of discrimination including sexual access for men to women on men’s terms, often with impunity, including often with force. How do trans women stand in relation to these forms of male power? Trans women are often socially marginalized, locked out of employment opportunities for gendered reasons, excluded from housing opportunities, lack basic protections for physical safety and bodily integrity, aggressed against for their perceived gender transgression, raped in order to be taught the meaning of womanhood and for who knows what other “reasons,” forced to sell their bodies for sex for sustenance, and murdered for asserting their right to exist.   That starts to sound a lot like being a woman in this world to me.

In other words it’s being someone’s “bitch.”

Because people talked about this on the Oliver Sacks – Temple Grandin thread: a website about CAFOs.

In the United States and other parts of the world, livestock production is becoming increasingly dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In a CAFO, animals are crammed by the thousands or tens of thousands, often unable to breathe fresh air, see the light of day, walk outside, peck at a plants or insects, scratch the earth, or eat a blade of grass.

Over 50 billion food animals are raised and slaughtered every year (not including massive quantities of farmed fish). Grazing and growing feed for livestock now occupy 70 percent of all agricultural land and 30 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet. If present trends continue, meat production is predicted to double between the turn of the 21st century and 2050. Yet already, the Earth is being overwhelmed by food animals that consume massive quantities of energy and resources, whose wastes foul waterways and farmlands, and when eaten excessively, degrade our health.

Nature as Industry: The Merciless World of the CAFO

The CAFO is the ultimate expression of the industrialization of nature. If all of us knew more about the realities of modern industrial animal food production, however, one would hope that we would apply the collective brakes on this dietary, environmental, and ethical madness.

“The principle of confinement in so-called animal science is derived from the industrial version of efficiency. The designers of animal factories appear to have had in mind the example of concentration camps or prisons, the aim of which is to house and feed the greatest numbers in the smallest space at the least expense of money, labor, and attention. To subject innocent creatures to such treatment has long been recognized as heartless. Animal factories make an economic virtue of heartlessness toward domestic animals, to which we humans owe instead a large debt of respect and gratitude.”

—Wendell Berry, Stupidity in Concentration

I didn’t know that Grandin supports or defends CAFOs, though I did know she has no issue with raising animals for slaughter. I suppose in current conditions you can’t do the second without doing the first.

Oh but, Christie Wilcox at Discover reports that the dolphin-assisted birth didn’t happen.

According to the documentary, Dorina did not go through with her watery plans. She went into labor at night, and thus had a natural birth on land. But, she did say she could feel the dolphins ‘sending positive energy’.

Below is my original commentary on the practice of dolphin-assisted births, from 2013. But the tl;dr version: Dolphins are wild animals. Wild animals do not make good midwives.

Because wild animals can get bitey and tossy and killy.

But there’s another quite compelling reason, which is that they’re not trained. Midwifery isn’t just hanging around sympathetically you know – midwives have to do things. Swimming isn’t enough.

Because of their friendly disposition and common occurance in aquariums, we tend to think of dolphins as trustworthy, loving creatures. But let’s get real for a minute here. Dolphins don’t eat sunshine and fart roses. They’re wild animals, and they are known to do some pretty terrible things.

Look at how their treat their women. Male dolphins are aggressive, horny devils. Males will kidnap and gang-rape females with their prehensile penises, using alliances of several males to keep females isolated from the rest of the group. As Miriam Goldstein once explained to Slate, “To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails. And if she tries to swim away, they chase her down.” Male dolphins don’t just rape their females — they’ve also been known to assert authority by forcibly mounting other males.

They also get a kick out of beating on and killing other animals. Dolphins will toss, beat, and kill small porpoises or baby sharks for no apparent reason other than they enjoy it, though some have suggested the poor porpoises serve as practice for killing the infants of rival males. That’s right, not only do dolphins kill other animals, they kill baby dolphins using the same brutal tactics. No matter how cute they might appear, dolphins are not cuddly companions; they are real, large, ocean predators with a track record for violence — even when it comes to humans.

See? I told you they get tossy. Imagine the fun they would have with a newborn infant.

Apparently this is not something from the Onion.

Dorina Rosin, a “spiritual healer,” plans to give birth in the sea with the aid of dolphins. Among other benefits, Rosin and partner Maika Suneagle believe that their baby will speak dolphin.

Really? They believe that how? If they had a Chinese midwife, would they believe their baby would therefore speak Chinese?

Also, what kind of aid do they think the dolphins will give?

Do they pause to recollect that dolphins are carnivores? Do they know what a carnivore is? Would they consider giving birth on the savanna with the aid of lions?

“In 2011 and 2014 I had the privilege to learn from and with wild and free dolphins and Humpback whales in Hawaii who transformed and healed me in a very profound way,” Rosin wrote. “I felt deeply called to spend two times three months in nature – mostly by myself – and to deeply connect to this magical place of beauty and transformation inside and outside which called me home.”

That sounds fun. The giving birth part, not so much.

CBS Atlanta offers more details.

Spiritual healer Dorina Rosin and her partner Maika Suneagle are appearing in the documentary Extraordinary Births to chronicle the woman’s journey of giving birth in the sea with a dolphin as a midwife, as reported by The Daily Mail. Experts say the plan poses the risk of other local marine life, like a great white shark, showing up in the water.

Ya think? Surely sharks wouldn’t be attracted by all that blood and stuff, would they?

Child experts warn that dolphins in the wild are unpredictable and dangerous and should not be trusted around a pregnant woman or newborns.

See, even child experts know that, and I bet adult experts know it even harder.

Aylan Kurdi’s father says what happened – the tiny boat flipped in five-foot waves, and his two little boys and their mother drowned over the course of three hours.

The father of Galip and Aylan Kurdi, the young refugee boys from Syria whose drowning off a Turkish beach has touched a global nerve, said Thursday that his family had paid smugglers more than $2,000 for a voyage to a Greek island in a 15-foot boat that was quickly upended by five-foot waves. His wife also drowned.

“The waves were high, the boat started swaying and shaking. We were terrified,” said the father, Abdullah Kurdi, 40, a Syrian Kurd from the town of Kobani near the Turkish border. “I rushed to my kids and wife while the boat was flipping upside down. And in a second we were all drowning in the water.”

…

Choking back emotion as he spoke, Mr. Kurdi described how he had flailed about while trying to find his children as his wife held onto the capsized boat.

“I started pushing them up to the surface so they could breathe,” he said. “I had to shift from one to another. I think we were in the water for three hours trying to survive.”

He watched helplessly as one exhausted child drowned, he said, then he pushed the other toward the mother, “so he could at least keep his head up.”

Mr. Kurdi then apologized, saying he could no longer speak, ending the conversation.

He has a sister in Vancouver; she’s been trying to get them safely out for months.

The sister, Teema Kurdi, who moved to Canada about 20 years ago, told The Ottawa Citizen that she had applied for a visa that would have allowed the children and their parents to come as sponsored refugees.

“I was trying to sponsor them, and I have my friends and my neighbors who helped me with the bank deposits, but we couldn’t get them out, and that is why they went in the boat,” Ms. Kurdi, a hairdresser who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, told the newspaper. “I was even paying rent for them in Turkey, but it is horrible the way they treat Syrians there.”

Nothing was working, so the family tried the tiny boat.

Activists are sharing the photos of Aylan.

Photographs and video of Aylan’s lifeless body quickly spread across social networks in Turkey and then the rest of the world, posted by outraged observers, rights activists and reporters who suggested that the distressing images needed to be seen and could act as a catalyst for the international community to finally halt the war in Syria.

Among those who shared the images and expressed their dismay were Liz Sly, a Washington Post correspondent covering the war in Syria; Nadim Houry and Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch; David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee; and activists in the Syrian city of Raqqa and living under the rule of Islamic State militants.

Then there were arguments about the ethics of sharing the photo.

There were also disagreements inside newsrooms about whether to publish or even share the images. A number of reporters argued forcefully that it was necessary to confront the public with the human toll of the war in Syria, and the impact of policies that make it difficult for refugees to find asylum in Europe. But many editors were concerned about shocking their readers and wanted to avoid the appearance of trafficking in sensational images for profit.

It’s not a sensational image though. Emotive, but not sensational. There’s a difference.

By the end of the day, there was unusual agreement among the editors of newspapers across the political spectrum in Britain who decided to feature the images on their front pages, along with calls for action from Prime Minister David Cameron.

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Kim Murphy, the assistant managing editor of The Los Angeles Times for foreign and national news, said there had been a consensus among the paper’s senior editors to show the boy as he was discovered, face down on the beach.

“The image is not offensive, it is not gory, it is not tasteless — it is merely heartbreaking, and stark testimony of an unfolding human tragedy that is playing out in Syria, Turkey and Europe, often unwitnessed,” she said. “We have written stories about hundreds of migrants dead in capsized boats, sweltering trucks, lonely rail lines, but it took a tiny boy on a beach to really bring it home to those readers who may not yet have grasped the magnitude of the migrant crisis.”