The BBC on The bleak reality behind the red light district:

Behind Amsterdam’s red light district hides a secret world of sexual exploitation and human trafficking. What is viewed by many as little more than an edgy tourist attraction is in fact an area rife with crime.

“Edgy” here refers to men renting women. Right up there with a canal ride or a visit to the Rijksmuseum.

With the advent of mass tourism, the situation has become even more out of hand. Throngs of tourists flood the narrow streets and alleys. In a bid to combat the problems, and create better working conditions for the sex workers, the mayor of Amsterdam has proposed a plan to close the windows and to set up an erotic centre elsewhere in the city.

An erotic centre forsooth. I think we’ve attained peak euphemism. The point of this documentary is clearly that the famous legalized prostitution of Amsterdam is actually legalized rape, yet we still get “erotic centre” as opposed to knocking shop.

Meanwhile, vulnerable women continue to be subjected to harassment, violence and exploitation. Former sex workers and other people who know what really goes on in the world of window prostitution share stories of extreme tourist nuisance, violence against sex workers, and forced prostitution. Will the Dutch capital ever regain control over what once was one of its most beautiful historic neighbourhoods?

What are we talking about here? Brutalized exploited women, or beautiful historic neighborhoods? Make up your damn mind.

The FFRF (or its Twitter wrangler) didn’t answer my question about what they meant by “queer” in tweeting

“In Nebraska, kids were getting the same Sex Ed. their grandparents received. We finally updated the curriculum.” — NE State Sen. Megan Hunt, first queer woman elected to district

so I looked it up. Voterly tells us

Megan Catherine Hunt (born May 9, 1986) is an American entrepreneur and politician serving as a member of the Nebraska Legislature. A member of the Democratic Party, Hunt represents the 8th legislative district in Omaha, consisting of the midtown neighborhoods of Dundee, Benson, and Keystone. She succeeded term-limited Nebraska State Senator Burke Haar. She identifies as bisexual, and was the first openly LGBT person elected to the state legislature of Nebraska, as well as the first woman to represent the 8th district. 

There are many other sources saying the same thing.

Ok so why did FFRF, or its Twitter handler, translate “bisexual” to “queer”?

I would really be interested to know. I also wonder if Megan Hunt wants to be called that, and if anyone asked her before calling her that.

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room 9.

Picture shared by Abortion Access Front (used to be Lady Parts Justice League):

Just a reminder… All gender identities get abortions! (And have since the dawn of time)

I beg to differ.

A reminder? No, a claim, and a false one at that.

All gender identities get abortions? No. Women get abortions. Women may or may not claim to have gender identities, these gender identities don’t’ get abortions, the women do. Men don’t get abortions. Men may also claim gender identities. The idea that the set of gender identities claimed by men (for example, “cis male”) is a subset of the set claimed by women strains credulity. So this fails in multiple ways.

Since the dawn of time? Not before the Earth existed. Not before humans existed. Not before language existed. Not before some people decided that how you feel inside was more important for classification than your actual sex. And that wasn’t until a small number of years ago. So, very far from “the dawn of time”.

Better tweets from FFRF since that mysterious “first queer woman” one:

Maybe “first queer woman” means “first non-believing woman”?

Kidding. But good that she’s an unapologetic non-believer. (If she were apologetic she wouldn’t be saying it at the FFRF conference, in fact she wouldn’t be there at all.)

Hunt other people down in order to deprive them of their liberty and rights.

I’m wishing I were there!

Freedom From Religion Foundation tweets from its conference in San Antonio:

What’s a queer woman? I don’t know what people mean when they say that. I assume they don’t mean lesbian, because if they had they would have just said lesbian. Wouldn’t they? Has “lesbian” somehow become too shady to use? Is it seen as terfy? Is it exclooosianary? Is it Karenish?

She certainly doesn’t present herself as “queer”…unless “queer” now has such esoteric meanings that it has reversed itself and is synonymous with “mainstream.” She wears makeup and nail polish, she has wavy blonde hair, she wears a pink cardigan, she has a pleasant smile. Her work life doesn’t seem very “queer” either.

Megan Hunt is an entrepreneur and small business owner, community activist, and mother representing the Nebraska Legislature in District 8.

So far so mainstream. So…”queer” how?

I suppose “updating the Sex Ed. curriculum” means telling the kids people can change sex and what sex you are is determined by what’s in your head.

I don’t like crowds. I guess that’s a good dislike to have? A lot of people have been killed in a Halloween-celebrating crowd in Seoul.

At least 120 people are understood to have been killed in a crush during Halloween celebrations in in Seoul’s Itaewon district.

It was the first outdoor no-mask Halloween event since the pandemic.

“The area is still chaotic so we are still trying to figure out the exact number of people injured,” Moon Hyun-joo, an official at the National Fire Agency told Reuters news agency.

Avoid crowds.

Concerns over inclooosivity. Concerns, I tell you.

A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling.

Rowling has been the subject of significant controversy in recent years, due to her outspoken views on trans rights, which many consider to be transphobic.

It’s funny how it’s never put the other way. Trans ideology has been the subject of significant controversy in recent years, due to its habit of trampling all over women’s rights, which many consider to be misogynist. Why don’t we talk about it in those terms for a change? Why is it that Varsity and the Guardian and the BBC would never ever frame it that way? Why are women the people who are not allowed to defend our own rights?

Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.

Removing JKR from the planned event over this fatuous claim is inherently sexist.

After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.

But what about women? What about a safe space for women? And anyway it’s not “the LGBT+ community,” it is at most the T community. The constant thumb on the scales of adding LGB people to beef up the numbers is cheating. Some people who consider themselves the T community are angry that JKR doesn’t endorse trans ideology, so they get her disinvited and deleted and erased every chance they get, and journalists obediently report this shunning as if it were a courageous civil rights movement.

Speaking to Varsity, the JCR committee detailed that they “endeavour to create a safe and inclusive space for everybody at Girton” and therefore “do not wish to hold any event that causes offence to any member of our community”.

But by bowing to the Transpolice they are creating an unsafe and uninclusive space for feminist women at Girton. You can’t have everything. If you do the bidding of one petulant entitled group then you’re letting that petulant entitled group run things, whether everyone else is ok with that or not.

With hey ho, the wind and the rain:

In dozens of early letters, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe raved about walking in extreme wind. “I love it,” she wrote, again and again. A few other walkers have enthused about mud, snow, rain, darkness and cold. And yet, as the days draw in and the temperature falls, most of us hang up our walking boots.

I’m with O’Keefe. Wind is very energizing. It’s not ideal to walk in really hard pouring rain, but other than that, cold and wet are great for walking.

In the last few years researchers have begun untangling some of the little-known benefits of walking in wintry conditions. It turns out that the conditions most deterring us from taking a stroll are, in fact, excellent reasons to step outdoors.

Cities are often at their most walkable in the winter, when wind disperses pollution, and rain washes the air of dirt and germs.

No kidding. Seattle had the worst air on the planet a week ago, and then the rain and wind finally arrived (a couple of months late).

If you’re in the country, a downpour is the perfect time to walk – but for quite different reasons. The pounding of raindrops causes plants, trees and soil to release sweet-smelling compounds which then mingle and combine in the air we breathe. The Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd, loved walking after rainfall, noting that birch trees released a perfume “fruity like old brandy”.

Same same same same. If you’re in the country or if you can get to a really good large heavily wooded park you can get to those sweet-smelling compounds.

Marchons!

Women’s March is not for women. Take a hike, bitches!

In other words they’re blocking as many feminists as they can.

It’s the Men’s March.

Alan Johnson at Jewish News:

Should gender critical views be considered ‘shameful’ and ‘hateful’? That was the question that sprang to mind while reading an article on the Jewish News website headlined: ‘Appalled and disgusted’: Rabbi accused of transphobia over Eddie Izzard tweet’.

I am not on Twitter and I do not comment here on the rabbi, other than note he wrote the hardly-hateful comment: ‘We have to treat transgender people with the utmost kindness and respect, and accommodate them legally, but they must not be allowed to displace women’s rights.’

Yes to the “they must not be allowed to displace women’s rights” part, but I take issue with the “utmost kindness and respect” part. No we don’t have to treat them with that, any more than we have to treat anyone else with that. Utmost kindness and respect is extra, and not something we owe people except in emergencies. Basic decency, yes, but hyperbolic utmost anything, no. I quibble because this claim that trans people need and deserve this kind of extra has become a kind of gospel, and it’s nonsense. We can lavish them with kindness and respect if we want to, of course, but it’s far from an obligation. We really don’t need to give away the store in the first half of our sentences to buy ourselves the space to say “BUT we would really like it if they would stop dynamiting women’s rights” in the second half.

Johnson goes on:

There are three fundamental reasons why gender identity ideology is not simply the latest iteration of the liberation movement – women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, disability rights – that has unfolded from the 1970s.

First, the ideology demonstrably involves the ongoing erasure of the hard-fought and desperately needed sex-based rights, protections, spaces, prisons, rape crisis centres, DV centres, sports, language, dating sites, dignity and safety of women and girls.

He adds the gaslighting of lesbians and the ongoing medical scandal.

The Jewish News article contained an appeal for ‘pastoral care’ to be prioritised. Well, indeed. But [why] is pastoral care not extended to women and girls who are losing their rights and spaces and who, when they object, are then silenced, cancelled, shamed, gaslighted, doxxed, suspended, excluded and driven from the public square and employment?

Why indeed?! He’s a comrade. Read the whole thing.

I saw people talking about this guy and it reminded me of the days when I was on the same blog network as he was. Fun times.

The crass ignorance is it. So educated people all know perfectly well what “living as a woman” means? They fully grasp the distinction between being a woman and living as a woman, and understand it, and think it makes perfect sense? It’s only the crassly ignorant who think being a woman is all there is, and that “living as” a woman is just silly contemporary jargon that names an impossibility?

What “reality of the transgender experience” can change the meaning of the word “women” such that it applies to men?

Says the man, placidly. Easy for him. Easy for him to call it a “moral panic”; he’s not one of the people at risk if men can freely use all spaces marked for women. He’s not one of the people who will lose their full, equal participation in society if men who identify as women continue to push us out.

CNN is doing live updates on the Pelosi attack:

The person who attacked Paul Pelosi was searching for the speaker of the House, according to a source briefed on the attack.

The source told CNN the intruder confronted the speaker’s husband in their San Francisco home shouting: “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?”

Police have arrested a man suspected of carrying out the attack and his potential motive is under investigation, according to the speaker’s office.

Mitch McConnell claims to be horrified. Yeah I’m sure he’s all broken up.

Eddie Izzard instructs Rosie Duffield to “join the 21st century”:

Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield railed against the idea of ‘gender self-identification’, speaking out at a conference of the LGB Alliance – a campaign group that claims to advance lesbian, gay and bisexual rights.

Nice impartial journalism there – calling saying something “railing” and saying the LGB Alliance merely claims to advance LGB rights.

Duffield was asked about the possibility of making “misgendering” a crime. She responded:

 “Is that a serious thing? Is that coming to Parliament any time soon? I hope not because you might as well arrest me now. I’m not calling Eddie Izzard a woman.”

In response, Izzard said: “Some people aren’t up to speed, some people haven’t joined the 21st century and, well, they’ve got to get on the bus now because I’ve been out for so long now that I don’t know why they didn’t bring this up before.

No, we haven’t “got to” get on his bus now. I don’t give the tiniest fuck how long he’s been “out” (as a narcissist, presumably), he doesn’t get to dictate reality to the rest of us. He’s not the boss of Rosie Duffield and he doesn’t know better than she does.

“It’s different now that I’m going for a parliamentary seat, but I don’t think bullying is a great thing to be happening and so I’m just going to carry on.”

It’s not bullying. He bullied those teenage girls in the public toilets in Islington that time; Rosie Duffield is not bullying him.

Trumpy lies and rhetoric make things happen. In other news –

An intruder broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home early Friday morning and “violently assaulted” her husband, Paul Pelosi, according to a statement from Drew Hammill, the speaker’s spokesperson.

“The assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation,” the statement read.

“Mr. Pelosi was taken to the hospital, where he is receiving excellent medical care and is expected to make a full recovery.”

The motive is under investigation but I’m going to go right ahead and speculate that it’s likely to be trumpy maga-y proud boysy stop the stealy rage. The Feds are on the case.

Mysterious person does mysterious persony things, police seek help finding mysterious person.

Were the two teenagers girls by any chance? Or did mysterious person select teenage boys as “their” victim?

This is the police. This is the police seeking a man sexually abusing girls in a public toilet, and those police are carefully not being specific about what they’re looking for, because it’s more important to honor and protect the idenniny of the creepy dangerous man in the wig and skirt than it is to protect any teenage girls he might decide to terrorize.

It is an amazing speech, but not in the sense Kirsty Blackman seems to mean.

But it’s not about the right “to simply be who they are.” That’s the whole point. They’re claiming a right to be recognized, treated as, embraced as, who they are not. There are two lies in this formula, not just one. The first lie is that it’s about who they are when in fact it’s about who they are not, and the second lie is that it’s just about them, doing their thing, when in fact it’s about forcing everyone else to endorse and support and help with their personal fantasy. That is not a right. Compelling all other people to “validate” your personal private fantasy is not a right.

“…fighting other women just because their experience looks different to your own gets you nowhere.”

Maybe so, but that’s not what this is. They’re not other women, we’re not fighting them, our refusal to obey their orders is not because their “experience looks different” from ours.

I’m so fed up with all this baby talk from legislators.

The Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary wants to provide period products for…well that’s where it gets tricky.

One of our NURS 289 clinical groups is partnering with The Moss Bag Project to provide period products for the houseless and vulnerable in Calgary! Mulitple donation boxes are in various locations on campus: Professional Faculties Building at the PPE station, Wellness Centre, UofC Bookstore, and TFDL. Donations are accepted from now until November 15th

Useful, helpful. But…

Bleeding bodies.

The trans wars seep into everything.

Only, as onlookers have pointed out, Badenoch didn’t spread misinformation about Mr. Cohen.

I won’t hold my breath while waiting for that apology.

Reverse victim and offender. Can do! says “Katy” Montgomerie.

No. That’s a reversal. No you’re the man pretending to be a woman; no you are; no you; etc. Reality blows the whistle hard: only women are women; men are not women; women only are women.

Six people on the panel, one of whom was a woman and one of whom was…Eddie Izzard.

Shortly before the Brexit referendum, I was invited to appear on Question Time. Knowing how much of a cage-fight such occasions can be, I asked the producer if there would be another woman on the panel. I didn’t want to be the only one. “Yes, of course, don’t worry,” came the reply. 

In retrospect, I was being a bit feeble; I was a big girl and I could hold my own. It was just that, in the past, I had always much preferred shows when there was another member of my sex taking part. A dash of oestrogen dilutes the gamey testosterone with which our political class is so richly imbued. Besides, it was hardly controversial to expect half the human race to occupy a third of one current affairs panel. 

Welllll not to you maybe, but to the fans of gamey testosterone…

Anyway, I got to Brighton and was sitting in the green room where all that night’s guests were assembling. Nigel Farage was there in a natty velvet-collared check coat, comedian Eddie Izzard sported a pink beret and there was a Tory Transport minister among the rest. But no female guest. Where was she? 

She asked the producer. He said they stopped looking after Eddie said yes.

I was dumbfounded. Did a pink beret and matching lippy really qualify Eddie Izzard to be a female panellist? Did anyone seriously think that someone who lacked all of the key milestones and experiences of a woman’s life (not to mention the matching female genitalia) was qualified to take one of only two places reserved for a woman? Astonishingly, the answer was, clearly, yes. In the eyes of the BBC, at least, although not in mine and not, you can bet, in the minds of the majority of viewers who were about to tune in. 

But we’re considered demonic for seeing through those eyes.