How dare Italy refuse to treat women like machines for the gestation of other people’s babies???

Italian authorities are bringing in new measures targeting LGBT families and making it harder for them to have children. Many same-sex parents feel that a new law, which would make it illegal to have surrogacy abroad, is a personal attack against them.

“We have two options: to stay in Italy and face prison, or to run away.”

Husbands Claudio and Davide (not their real names) have a baby on the way through surrogacy – a woman in another country is carrying their son for them.

They don’t “have” a baby on the way. What they have is an arrangement by which they pay a nameless woman in “another country” – I’m guessing one poorer than Italy, where women are more desperate to survive – to spend nine months carrying an ever bigger and heavier baby for two guys far away who are paying her (not nearly enough). It’s not a neutral business arrangement with no moral issues attached. It’s not mere “carrying,” like carrying a suitcase or a bag of groceries.

The practice is illegal in Italy and most of Europe, so couples travel to countries where it is legal – such as the US and Canada – and bring their babies back home.

Now why might it be illegal? Is it homophobia or mere squick? Or could it be at all to do with exploitation and/or the inherent risks to the manufactured child? The BBC doesn’t say.

But the Italian senate is set to approve a bill that would make surrogacy a “universal crime” – one so serious that it would be prosecuted even if committed abroad, like human trafficking or paedophilia.

Again, why might that be? Could it possibly be because it is like human trafficking? The BBC doesn’t say.

“I don’t want to leave my country. I am proud to be Italian,” Davide says.

“I’m trying my best to be a good citizen, and now I’m being treated like a criminal – just because I want to have a family.”

No, that’s not true. The issue is not his wanting to have a family. The issue is the rent-a-womb method of “having a family” he’s resorting to.

The surrogacy bill is part of the socially conservative agenda of Giorgia Meloni – Italy’s first female prime minister, whose Brothers of Italy party is a direct political descendant of a movement formed by members of Mussolini’s Fascist Party after the war.

But social conservatives are not the only ones who think surrogacy is at least morally questionable.

Angelo Schillaci, Professor of Comparative Public Law at Rome’s Sapienza University, calls the proposed law “irrational” and says it does not make sense to place surrogacy in the same legal category as paedophilia and crimes against humanity.

“This bill is seeking to punish things that are perfectly legal in countries that are our allies, such as the US and Canada,” Prof Schillaci says. “It would be like prosecuting someone for smoking weed in Amsterdam after they’ve come back home.”

No it would not. What a callous frivolous brutal comparison. A woman is not a joint.

And what about the child? What about the child’s learning that she or he never had what we understand as a mother, but only a “gestational carrier”? What if the child feels like a piece of toast, produced by a machine?

Carolina Varchi, the Brothers of Italy MP who drafted the bill, vehemently rejects [the claim that the law is an attack on LGBTXYZ rights]. “Most people who use surrogacy are heterosexual,” she says.

Experts have told the BBC that 90% of the couples who use surrogacy in Italy are straight, and many of them hide the fact that they have gone abroad to have a baby.

You mean gone abroad to hire a machine-woman to produce a baby for them.

Ms Varchi strongly believes the new law will “protect women and their dignity”.

“It’s intolerable. Women’s bodies are reduced to objects that are rented for nine months to bring a child into the world, who is then ripped away to be delivered to the clients.”

Via Amazon no doubt.

In countries where surrogacy is legal, regulations vary – including whether or not a surrogate can be paid more than expenses, and what steps must be taken to ensure surrogates give free and informed consent.

Aha – so they admit “surrogates” can be exploited and coerced. Why doesn’t that cause them to think a little more carefully?

Billy Bragg tells a woman how to feminism.

Originally a comment by maddog1129 on TRANSlation.

I can’t dress in the “approved for women” way, either. With me, it starts with the shoes. I simply can’t wear the foot-binding torture devices that are assigned to women. I haven’t always had bilateral plantar fasciitis, but I’ve had the condition for several decades. In my 20’s, I could wear soft-soled oxfords; now I need all-black cushioned athletic shoes. Starting from that foundation, pants suit or pants and blazer are as close as I can get to appropriate business wear. Luckily, I didn’t have to actually go to court very often.

If I were somehow forced to put on the woman-appropriate glad rags it would feel profoundly uncomfortable…which is quite irrational.

But it’s not irrational at all. First, there is actual, physical discomfort. Women’s clothes are designed for looks (in the male gaze kind of way) rather than for the comfort of the wearer. They put scratchy lace in undergarments. It’s torture. The designs are often restrictive of movement. I’ve worn puffy sleeves and cuffs that literally prevented me from moving my arms freely. Pencil skirts hobble the stride. There aren’t any damn pockets. The clothes are objectively un-comfortable. It’s not a bit irrational to feel uncomfortable in them.

There are other ways in which women’s clothes are uncomfortable, and that’s not irrational either. I’ve known since I was old enough to talk that the clothes assigned to women and girls are ooky. Girls’ skirts exist for boys to look under or flip up. Girls are sitting duck targets for male sexualized aggression. When girls hit puberty, the footwear for girls changes to articles designed to prevent girls from running away, even if their life depended on it. Girls are trapped. Of course it feels ooky. Clothing for women and girls is designed to keep females vulnerable, subordinate, compliant — and fearful. The clothing carries an inherent, and perhaps not-so-subtle, rape threat. No wonder many girls and women hate female clothing. No wonder many suffer something very like gender dysphoria. It really does something to your psyche to be under siege and in danger 100% of the time, because of your sex. And the danger is itself sexual. Women and girls are vulnerable to a particular risk of male violence that males just simply aren’t. Yes, male bodies can be sexually violated, but they never suffer the added risk of parasitic takeover.

So, yeah, I (and many other women) know all about gender dysphoria. It sucks to be the subordinate sex, the unfree sex.

Just an additional thought about Maoist communist workers’ uniforms: were the uniforms identical? Did they, for example, all button up the same way, or did they keep the clothing industry standard of buttoning men’s shirts and jackets one way, and buttoning the women’s shirts and jackets the other way?

Such womany behavior:

A trans-identified male led a gang of activists to ransack the concession [stand] of a culturally significant cinematheque in Mexico last week in protest of his removal from the women’s washroom.

Sounds like fun. I think I’ll identify as Queen Elizabeth I and flip over all the library wastebaskets when they fail to believe me.

On September 12, a man calling himself “Laura Glover” took to social media to complain that he had been physically removed from the women’s washroom at the National Cinematheque in Mexico City, the nation’s most culturally significant film archive and theatre.

…

Glover was then recorded by his friend confronting security outside of the cinema, screaming at a male guard for the behavior of the female officer who had initially asked him to leave the women’s facilities.

“This is an act of discrimination by the National Cinematheque of Mexico,” Glover exclaimed in the video. “We women are tired. This bitch beat at my door and she hit it very hard and this happened at the National Cinematheque of Mexico.”

We pretend-women are tired, so we get to call women “this bitch” when they don’t do whatever we say all the time.

Within hours of the clip going viral on social media, the Cinematheque issued a statement apologizing to Glover and reaffirming its commitment to “non-discrimination.”

Glover owes them an apology; they owe him nada.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Thomas the fundraising draw.

Like you, I don’t think there’s any quid pro quo going on here. Thomas is an ideologue and a true believer.

I think there’s three things going on here:

1) Conservatives want to keep justices like Thomas “in the fold.” There has long been a belief in the conservative legal and political world that Republican appointees like Stevens, O’Connor, Souter, and even Kennedy have gone “soft” and turned into moderates because they were co-opted into the Washington cocktail party circuit, or trying to curry favor with the liberal intelligentsia or whatever. (This used to be called the “Greenhouse Effect,” named for then-NYT legal reporter Linda Greenhouse — the idea being that Republican justices would shy away from conservative rulings so that Greenhouse would say nice things about them.) This is probably nonsense, but many conservatives believe it. So I think a large factor here is wanting to keep the Thomases and Alitos surrounded by a social network of hard-core conservatives, and using luxury vacations and stuff to facilitate that.

2) The opportunity for backchannel legal strategizing. I’m sure these gatherings include late-night conversations over cigars and bourbon in which Thomas comments on which conservative legal goals would probably get five votes on the Court, and which ones aren’t there yet, and what kinds of test cases might win over the swing votes. They may not be explicitly mapping out strategy (“if you bring this kind of challenge, I can get five votes for it, so tee that up this year”) — though I don’t rule it out — but if Thomas/Alito are leaking enough gossip about the justices’ views, it’ll amount to the same thing. Of course, this kind of thing would still go on even if no justices ever attended such events, because there’s an extensive network of SCOTUS clerks who serve two-year posts and then move on to positions at private law firms or conservative legal groups or whatever. The only difference is that instead of Recent Former Thomas Clerk gossiping about what the boss said the other justices think, it’s Thomas directly.

3) The opportunity to fundraise based on access to the justices.

Should this stuff be prohibited, and subject to criminal punishment and/or impeachment? I don’t know. I lean towards no. Just disclose it, and the public know the slimy stuff that’s going on. The justices really do tend to care about their reputations and legacies — there’s a reason Thomas, who generally doesn’t care about drawing criticism, keeps concealing this stuff — so that isn’t nothing. Enough to deter it from continuing? Probably not in the cases of Alito and Thomas. But I can imagine other justices looking at this stuff and thinking that a weekend in Palm Springs isn’t worth the damage.

Oh so that’s how they get there – simple – just claim that “transvestite”=”transgender” and breeze right past all the differences.

New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People

The author is Laurie Marhoefer, a historian at the University of Washington.

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case.

It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted by the Nazis, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians, including myself, before finding that the historical evidence shows that trans people were, indeed, persecuted by the Nazi regime.

This is an important case. It was the first time a court recognized the persecution of trans people in Nazi Germany. It was followed a few months later by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, formally releasing a statement recognizing trans and cisgender queer people as victims of fascism.

Wtf are “cisgender queer people”? What’s the German for that?

In 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler took power, the police in Essen, Germany, revoked [Toni] Simon’s permit to dress as a woman in public. Simon, who was in her mid-40s, had been living as a woman for many years.

The Weimar Republic, the more tolerant democratic government that existed before Hitler, recognized the rights of trans people, though in a begrudging, limited way. Under the republic, police granted trans people permits like the one Simon had.

In the 1930s, transgender people were called “transvestites,” which is rarely a preferred term for trans people today, but at the time approximated what’s now meant by “transgender.” 

Ahhhhh there it is. It’s a simple trick. Just pretend that what was meant by “transvestite” then is exactly what is meant by “transgender” now and go on your way rejoicing.

But it isn’t the same. It isn’t remotely the same. Transvestites, however deeply they felt “like” the other sex internally, didn’t run all over the landscape trying to force the rest of the world to agree that they were indeed the sex that matched their clothes.

Hey I have an idea, why don’t we all just go the Maoist route and make everyone wear drab uniforms with no sex/gender differentiation. Problem solved.

The police permits were called “transvestite certificates,” and they exempted a person from the laws against cross-dressing. 

Clothes clothes clothes, it’s all about the clothes.

I was thinking about this today, nudged by that nonsense from Neil Tyson about How We Know What Sex People Are and the fact that I said “not me” to every single one of his cues for Who Is Woman. I don’t generally have to think about it much because I don’t generally have to get dressed up or put on Appropriate Business Attire or anything like that…but if I did have to it would be awkward. I worried about that a little back when I was invited to speak at conferences now and then. Did I look too casual or sloppy in my non-feminine “presentation”? The thing is, and was, I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t dress in the approved-for-women way. In that sense I maybe understand what is meant by gender dysphoria. If I were somehow forced to put on the woman-appropriate glad rags it would feel profoundly uncomfortable…which is quite irrational. It should be no big deal, but it isn’t. And the only reason it would feel so creepy is the This Is Not Me feeling, which is such a narcissistic thing to worry about in the first place. Who cares? No one. But it would feel ooky anyway. So in that sense…I don’t know, maybe I can grok what people are so worked up about.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

Originally a comment by Mostly Cloudy at Miscellany Room.

The extremist trans activist Alejandra Caraballo is promoting an article in the Smithsonian Magazine that claims the Nazis persecuted transgender people:

The Nazis came for trans people, burned the first trans clinic, and murdered the first trans woman who ever got bottom surgery.

To deny this is to engage in holocaust denial.

I keep hearing this claim put about by many trans activists. The obvious purpose of this claim is to smear anyone who disagrees with puberty blockers, men in women’s prisons, men competing in women’s sports, etc. as being a similar type of murderous bigot that the Nazis were.

Has anyone researched this? I know Malcolm Clark has looked into the issue.

The Nazis persecuted and murdered tens of thousands of homosexual men. A number of these homosexual men were what used to be called “transvestites”, who wore women’s clothing for most or all of the time. One of them was “Liddy” Bacroff, who has been described as a homosexual and a transvestite.

So it seems the “trans” people that Caraballo is talking about were actually homosexuals who liked to cross-dress.

Their suffering was tragic and deserves to be commemorated, but such people were not the main target of the Nazis, like Jews and Roma were. Nor is there any ideological connection with disagreement with “gender ideology” and Nazism.

Pro Publica has more on the ever-expanding “Clarence Thomas has multiple conflicts of interest” scandal.

On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Libertarian meaning extremely conservative and pro-rich people & anti-poor people.

One passenger on one private jet was Clarence Thomas.

During the summit, the justice went to a private dinner for the network’s donors. Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice was brought in to speak, staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.

That puts Thomas in the extraordinary position of having served as a fundraising draw for a network that has brought cases before the Supreme Court, including one of the most closely watched of the upcoming term.

That’s in addition to the extraordinary position of taking all these bribes in the first place and going to all these highly political events and conferences and retreats in the first place.

Thomas’ involvement in the events is part of a yearslong, personal relationship with the Koch brothers that has remained almost entirely out of public view. It developed over years of trips to the Bohemian Grove, a secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California. Thomas has been a regular at the Grove for two decades, where he stayed in a small camp with real estate billionaire Harlan Crow and the Kochs, according to records and people who’ve spent time with him there.

Shorter: Thomas is dirty. Very, very dirty.

The code of conduct for the federal judiciary lays out rules designed to preserve judges’ impartiality and independence, which it calls “indispensable to justice in our society.” The code specifically prohibits both political activity and participation in fundraising. Judges are advised, for instance, not to “associate themselves” with any group “publicly identified with controversial legal, social, or political positions.”

But the code of conduct only applies to the lower courts. At the Supreme Court, justices decide what’s appropriate for themselves.

“I can’t imagine — it takes my breath away, frankly — that he would go to a Koch network event for donors,” said John E. Jones III, a retired federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush. Jones said that if he had gone to a Koch summit as a district court judge, “I’d have gotten a letter that would’ve commenced a disciplinary proceeding.”

“What you’re seeing is a slow creep toward unethical behavior. Do it if you can get away with it,” Jones said.

Hey, I thought. Judge Jones? THE Judge Jones? So I googled. Yes, THE Judge Jones – the intelligent design ruling Judge Jones.

The Koch network is among the largest and most influential political organizations of the last half century, and it’s underwritten a far-reaching campaign to influence the course of American law. In a case the Supreme Court will hear this coming term, the justices could give the network a historic victory: limiting federal agencies’ power to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. After shepherding the case to the court, Koch network staff attorneys are now asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent. (Thomas used to support the precedent but flipped his position in recent years.)

In short, Thomas is strikingly corrupt.

Mind you, I’m confident he would rule for Koch-thought anyway, even if they’d never given him so much as a sandwich, but all this partying and holidaying and festivity with the billionaires who want everyone else to have less of everything is kaka anyway.

Start at 50 minutes on this to see and hear Neil deGrasse Tyson being sillier than you or I would have thought possible.

He tells his hosts he can tell women and men apart by looking at them, and that women are more expressive with their jewelry, and that women don’t have short hair, and a whole list of things of that kind. (Every single one of them, by the way, failed to be true of me, and I’m very far from the most strikingly butch woman on the planet, so…) He tells them that with much passion and emphasis, as if he’s saying something novel or surprising or clever. The point seems to be (I got too irritated and bored to watch to the end of his “argument”) that we know which sex is which because of a lot of visible cues, which are not inherent to femaleness or maleness but chosen and a matter of custom and fungible (i.e. they can be swapped)). Well no shit Sherlock, we know that. Now explain why that means we have to let men take everything we’ve won for ourselves over the past half-century.

What naïve credulous babble.

Oh it’s real is it? How do you know? Why am I not aware of having one? How do you know you have one?

Also what is it? What does that mean? Please explain without tautology – without using the word or its cognates.

And what is a “valid” identity? How do you know trans ones are “equally as valid”? Please explain, again without tautology or circularity.

A few more turns of the screw in Scotland:

Police Scotland is setting up a dedicated hate crime unit ahead of Humza Yousaf‘s hugely controversial new laws coming into force early next year, it can be revealed.

The unit is expected to go live in November and training of the force’s 16,400 officers gets underway in December in preparation for the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act being implemented in early 2024. The legislation consolidates existing law and extends protection for vulnerable groups with a new offence of “stirring up hatred”.

So we can expect even more of the kind of opinion-sniffing and women-punishing that prompted Women Won’t Wheesht. What a brilliant plan!

Under the Act, offences are considered “aggravated” – which could influence sentencing – if they involve prejudice on the basis of age, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or variations in sex characteristics.

But not, of course, sex. Never sex. Women never matter; women must never be allowed to matter. Prejudice against women doesn’t count, because women are so awful that prejudice is completely reasonable and fair.

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy with human rights group Sex Matters, said: “The establishment of a new, dedicated hate crime unit at Police Scotland sends a sinister message to those who advocate for women’s and children’s rights.

“People need to be able to speak the truth about sex to stand up for their own rights and to carry out safeguarding. Women can’t explain why so-called ‘trans women’ shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports without saying that, as a matter of material reality, ‘trans women’ are men.

“Are we going to see teachers who say that boys who identify as girls can’t go into the girls’ changing rooms pursued by this new police unit? If ‘misgendering’ counts as a hate crime, then people who simply speak the truth risk a criminal record, and it is chilling to think that a dedicated police unit will be now pursuing people who are acting in the best interests of women and children.”

Chilling and sickening and enraging.

The Act became law in April 2021 and, despite the legislation receiving Royal Assent, it has not come into force as Police Scotland had said it would require time for “training, guidance and communications planning”. As that exercise nears completion, police chiefs are refusing to confirm how many officers will be attached to the new hate crime unit, or how much has been spent in preparation for the new laws to come into effect.

They say their new Core Operational Solutions (COS) – a suite of new national systems which have been rolled out to replace 44 legacy systems and processes with five national applications – is also going to be deployed to “bring to justice those perpetrators of hate against protected people and groups”.

And those protected people and groups do not include women. Transgender identity is on the list but being a woman is not – so men in dresses will have a field day calling the cops on women who refuse to pretend to believe in their magic idenniny.

Police Scotland recorded 64,807 incidents of domestic abuse in 2021-22 but women were excluded by the Scottish Government from the new hate crime laws.

Women just don’t count. Women are The Servants. Women are in the background, mopping the floor and making dinner; they just don’t matter enough to merit any protections.

Former Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill said: “Police Scotland are in danger of taking their eye off the ball. All new legislation requires training for officers. But the establishment of a unit when it should be part of the day job gets things out of kilter. The main hate crime has always been and remains misogyny and domestic violence.

Yes but that’s such old news, so much part of the landscape. It’s like wallpaper. It’s not new and exciting like twanzphobeeya.

The contortions they indulge in, in order to avoid saying the word “women.” Columnist Monica Hesse in the Washington Post:

‘Abortion tourism’: A tidy phrase for punching down at desperate people

Subhead:

Republicans made it harder to get abortions in red states. Now they have a punchline for trivializing the journeys people undertake to get the procedure.

But it’s not “people” who undertake the journeys. If it were, Republicans wouldn’t oppose abortion rights. It’s not “people”; it’s those harlots known as “women.” It’s those weak, stupid, yet eternally plotting and rebelling people with no penis and too much freedom. Women must be forced to carry and push out babies they don’t want to carry and push out, because they are inferior people who refuse to recognize their inferiority.

Nevertheless Monica Hesse carefully avoids saying the word.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) has used it. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) has used it. Focus on the Family uses it; so does the Christian Coalition of America. All of them use it to describe the same broad concept: A patient who needs an abortion travels to a location where they can get an abortion.

Where they can get an abortion – that, unlike “people” and “individuals” and the like, spells out the ridiculous underlying doctrine that men too get abortions.

The phrase itself isn’t new; its use dates back at least 40 years ago, mostly in European countries, to neutrally describe the act of individuals crossing national borders to end pregnancies. But in the past 15 months, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the phrase has bloomed in the United States, used almost exclusively by antiabortion Republicans and with obvious intent: to make pregnant people, whom the party has forced into desperate straits by pushing draconian state laws, seem like harlots on holiday.

Oops. Slipped up a little there. “Harlots” doesn’t usually mean men.

Maybe she lost the plot after “harlots,” because suddenly women appear.

Are women who live in abortion-restrictive places traveling across state lines in order to access abortion? Yeah, almost definitely…

Are women crossing state lines in order to take in a Broadway show, finally eat at Momofuku and grab a relaxing abortion before ice skating at Rockefeller Center? Please.

So she does know it’s women, and that Republicans are insulting them because they are women…yet, in the next paragraph…

“Abortion tourism” is a dismissive, frivolous phrase that implies abortion is a dismissive, frivolous thing — something that bored pregnant people do when they’ve suddenly run out of “Abbott Elementary” episodes. “Abortion tourism” implies that reproductive care is a luxury, not a necessity, and that pregnant people…

Dismissive? Frivolous? How about the frivolous dismissal of the fact that all this bullying and bossing and punishing is aimed at women, specifically and exclusively women? Punishments for not wearing the hijab are aimed at women and forced pregnancy laws are aimed at women. It matters that they’re aimed at women. We can’t name the power imbalance, the injustice, the persecution, the tyranny if we can’t name the people it’s aimed at. Wake the fuck up.

We’re deep in a battle of terminology. Not only in the obvious way of “fetus” vs. “unborn child” or “intact dilation and extraction” vs. “partial birth,” but in the more innocuous-sounding terminology that needs to be unpacked in order to fully grasp how insidious it actually is.

Insidious is it? Take a look in the mirror. Your deliberate erasure of women is insidious. Your innocuous-sounding terminology needs to be unpacked.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard antiabortion activists decry the concept of “abortion on demand,” a phrase clearly meant to imply that people seeking abortion are treating medical clinics like the customer service line of Comcast. That they are impatient, impulsive and self-centered. That they want what they want, and what they want is three free months of HBO and unlimited mifepristone.

In other words how misogynists usually do think of and talk about women. Not people, but women. Women specifically. It makes zero sense to talk about misogyny and pretend that it’s “people” who need abortion rights in the same damn column.

What is the protocol that these activists would prefer? Abortion upon polite request? Upon begging? Abortion upon getting permission from your husband, your father, your priest and a slim majority of your state’s legislative body?

Husband. You’re talking about women here. Quit pretending not to.

And, of course, there is the newest turn of phrase I’ve seen cropping up in recent weeks: “Abortion trafficking,” which implies that pregnant people are being kidnapped and thrown into vans, dragged unwillingly to unwanted abortion appointments. What does it actually describe? Friends or romantic partners giving pregnant people lifts…

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has an entire guide related to insidious abortion terminology. It is almost entirely composed of the terms that antiabortion activists use to make abortions sound scarier than they are, and to make the people seeking them sound less trustworthy…

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has an entire guide related to insidious abortion terminology. It is almost entirely composed of the terms that antiabortion activists use to make abortions sound scarier than they are, and to make the people seeking them sound less trustworthy.

“Mostly” women. Imbecile.

H/t What a Maroon

Attitudes.

That drop in support for faking birth certificates is a good thing. It’s good that more people think blatant absurd lies should not be “legally recognized.”

Which twin has the moral panic here? I’d say the moral panic was all the hang-wringing over the poor fragile persecuted men who only wanted to grab everything that belongs to women.

And the trans ideology is not part of that long post-war liberalisation. It’s a parody of it. Men claiming persecution on the basis that they are women inside despite having male bodies is a parody of feminism, not a branch of it.

As for feeling unsafe and unwelcome, has Nancy Kelley been paying any attention at all to how feminist women are treated by trans ideologues and enforcers?

How sweet: just as Birmingham offers a new statue of The Hijabi Woman, Iran beefs up its punishments for women who try to escape the damn thing.

Iran’s parliament has passed a controversial bill that would increase prison terms and fines for women and girls who break its strict dress code.

Those dressed “inappropriately” face up to 10 years in jail under the bill, for which a three-year “trial” was agreed.

And by “inappropriately” they mean for instance a stark naked head and neck. Funny how men are allowed to have stark naked heads but women are not.

Under Iranian law, which is based on the country’s interpretation of Sharia, women and girls above the age of puberty must cover their hair with a hijab and wear long, loose-fitting clothing to disguise their figures.

While men don’t have to do any such thing.

On Wednesday, members of parliament voted by 152 to 34 to pass the “Hijab and Chastity Bill”, which says people who are caught dressed “inappropriately” in public places will be subject to a “fourth degree” punishment.

“People”? Does it say that? Not “women”? But men don’t wear hijab at all, so a hijab bill wouldn’t be talking about “people” as opposed to “women” would it? I don’t trust the BBC not to be sneaky and dishonest on this subject.

The bill also proposes fines for those “promoting nudity” or “making fun of the hijab” in the media and on social networks, and for owners of vehicles in which a female driver or passenger is not wearing the hijab or appropriate clothing, according to AFP news agency.

Any person who promotes violating the dress code “in an organised manner” or “in co-operation with foreign or hostile governments, media, groups or organisations” could also be imprisoned for between five and 10 years, it says.

Women must be terrorized and punished and blotted out. Women are the source of all evil. Women are a temptation to innocent men, and they must not be allowed to get away with it.

Earlier this month, eight independent UN human rights experts warned the bill “could be described as a form of gender apartheid, as authorities appear to be governing through systemic discrimination with the intention of suppressing women and girls into total submission”.

Ya think?

They hate women. Really really bone-deep hate them.

The bullies win another round.

But it’s not “very clear.” It’s very unclear. Define “transphobia.” Define “biphobia.” Explain why you burble about transphobia but not misogyny. Explain why you seem not to give the tiniest shit about women’s rights.

The CBC reports:

Two people have been arrested in Ottawa for “inciting hatred” by “displaying hateful material” during a protest against school policies on gender identity curriculum, according to Ottawa Police.

The CBC doesn’t say what kind of “hateful material” of course. Is it the “men are not women” kind? Is it hateful to say that?

Two people have been arrested in Ottawa for “inciting hatred” by “displaying hateful material” during a protest against school policies on gender identity curriculum, according to Ottawa Police.

Like what? Material that says women have rights?

The march in nation’s capital is part of a number of protests and counter-protests across Canada where heated exchanges are taking place. Some parents and socially conservative groups are protesting LGBTQ-inclusive education policies in the classroom and in extracurricular settings under the banner of parental rights. 

Liars liars liars. It’s not only “socially conservative groups” who object to campaigns that try to force us to agree that men can be women. Far from it.

Policies emerging across the country, including in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, that require young people to get parental consent before teachers can use their preferred first names and pronouns are at the heart of these protests.

Gee, silly parents, not wanting their kids to mutilate themselves and mess up their lives for the sake of a grotesque social contagion.

It’s psychological cult capture, that’s what it is.

Would you say that Scientologists who believe that “body thetans cling to their body because they have lost their free will as a result of events in their past lives” have a psychological condition? Or would you say that they have been subject to cult indoctrination? Buying into the thinking that leads you to believe you are the opposite sex is a psychological condition only to the degree that it is psychological cult capture. It is social engineering, programming, and propaganda that is being aggressively pushed into every level of culture on a global scale. Like the Church of Scientology, there is MONEY to be made from selling people the idea that they need to medically alter their body in order to cure their “gender dysphoria.” Gender dysphoria is an implanted belief, it is as imaginary as a body thetan.

Emphasis mine. This is what I keep saying. It’s not some pure psychic state that just happens, it’s social contagion at best and deliberate social engineering at worst. I think Amy’s dead right about this.

How utterly revolting.

A new sculpture believed to be the first of its kind in the world will be unveiled next month to celebrate women who wear hijabs.

The Strength of the Hijab was designed by renowned sculptor Luke Perry and will be installed in the Smethwick area of Birmingham in October. It is believed to be the first sculpture in the world of a woman wearing the head covering, worn by many Muslim women.

The sculpture is five metres tall and weighs around a tonne.

It’s not a “head covering” that is “worn by many Muslim women.” It’s a bandage that wraps the hair and neck leaving only the middle of the face exposed, and it is imposed on many Muslim women, often by violence. Some women wear it “voluntarily” but only if you consider a religious obligation “voluntary.” Many are very much forced to wear it, and many are beaten or killed for refusing. It’s beyond revolting for a man in a semi-secular country to create a statue celebrating the damn thing. Will he next do a statue celebrating female genital mutilation? Just imagine what that will look like.

Mr Perry said: “The Strength of the Hijab is a piece which represents women who wear hijabs of the Islamic faith, and it’s really there because it’s such an underrepresented part of our community, but such an important one…“It’s something which people feel very strongly about, identify with, [and] they feel happy about and comfortable with.”

Some probably do, but it’s ridiculous to assume they all do when it’s well known that the hijab is forced on many women and girls whether they want it or not. It’s ridiculous to assume they all do when it’s a heavy, hot, smothery garment, which may be comfortable outside in winter but isn’t the rest of the time. It’s ridiculous to assume they all do when it’s notoriously re-imposed on women any time hardliners replace reformists in countries where Islam is mandatory.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on More to a woman.

Anna Funder’s book is a brilliantly written and forensic analysis (she is a trained lawyer, and acutely sensitive to words and what they don’t say, but nevertheless express) of Orwell’s bullying & abuse – sexual & otherwise – of women, including his wife, and his moral cowardice where those women closest to him were concerned. As I read, I found myself almost trembling with rage at times, racked with guilt at my own deficiencies toward others, but, above all, appalled throughout at the manipulativeness, cruelty & furtive hypocrisy of Orwell.

I am not, as it happens, a great admirer of Orwell, apart from ‘Animal Farm’, the idea for which came from Eileen Orwell, who also, as Funder makes clear, made a great contribution to the wit of its writing. I have always felt that there is a kind of dead puritanism at Orwell’s heart, something ‘cabin’d, cribbed, confined’, a hatred of exuberance and joy, which has a lot to do with his prurience, his furtive & unpleasant sexual adventures, his wheedling advances to various women, whether in person or by letter, & his rapes (yes!) or attempts at them. Not to mention his fundamental dislike of working-class people, even as he seeks to appear to be on their side.

I recommend Funder’s book to everyone. It is excellent, and as devastating for the reader as it is to the gilded memory of George Orwell.

Now there’s a headline.

Doctors say transgender women should be allowed to compete in female sports because it boosts ‘their mental health and self-esteem’

Yes and adults should be allowed to compete in children’s sports because it boosts their mental health and self-esteem.

I’ll be boring and spell it out. Why does the mental health and self-esteem of men who pretend to be women matter more than women’s mental health and self-esteem? Why does the former in fact simply cancel the latter? Why should men be allowed to trample women into bleeding fragments to boost their own mental health and self-esteem? Why do men count while women are so much garbage?

Researchers at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, said participating in sports had many benefits, including boosting mental health, self-esteem and lowering the risk of obesity and chronic diseases.

No shit, so how about not driving women out of sports?

They advocated for trans people to be allowed to compete in their desired gender category at elementary, middle, high school and college. But they admitted competitive sports were a different matter because participants had invested their whole careers in the game.

Oh horseshit. In elementary school sports aren’t divided between boys and girls are they? The issue is puberty – that’s when male people add all those physical upgrades that women don’t get, on account of how their job is to gestate babies.

They warned that a wave of 22 bans on transgender athletes at schools and colleges was harming the mental and physical health of the group and discouraging them from competing in sports.

That’s fascinating. Now, what about the mental and physical health of girls and women?

Also, there aren’t “bans on transgender athletes.” There are (not nearly enough) bans on men in women’s sports, and there are rules about doping.