A razor-close vote

Oct 30th, 2022 5:02 pm | By

There’s a surprise – Bolsonaro lost.

Challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won Brazil’s election after defeating incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in a razor-close vote.

According to the country’s election authority, Lula secured 50.8 percent of the vote compared to 49.2 percent for Bolsonaro on Sunday.

So we can expect Stop the Steal agitation and violence, with Trump egging it on. Bad moon rising.

It remained to be seen if Bolsonaro would concede defeat. Without proof, he has described the voting system as fraud-prone, raising concern he may not concede, following the example of his ideological ally, former US President Donald Trump.

Bad moon.

What’s left of the Amazon hangs in the balance.



The audacity

Oct 30th, 2022 4:38 pm | By

“Just get it right, and you won’t have to get sprayed.”



Guest post: The existing chains just get doubled

Oct 30th, 2022 3:16 pm | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Just a reminder.

Apart from the sting of invalidation, how are transmen and enbies hurt if abortion is treated as a women’s issue?

I think the real pushback against the framing of abortion as a women’s issue is from TiMs. Campaigns for “inclusive” language that erase women by reducing them to body parts and functions is not equally applied to men. That tells you all you need to know about the politics and optics of this “movement.” Men are the Standard; women are the Other. The Other is defined by, and in contrast to the Standard. Can’t go messing with the Standard now, can we? There’s no telling where that might lead!

Who is it that benefits from the disconnection of the definition of “woman” from material reality? Men who claim to be women. Decoupling the material facts of female embodiment from the definition of “woman” (not all women have a uterus, some women have penises, men can get pregnant, etc.) dissolves that material definition, and removes it from a straightforward state of being, into an amorphous laundry list of attitudes, proclivities, and preferences. This allows men, who embody none of the material facts, to claim womanhood (and femaleness) through the idea of womanhood, by performative mimicry of some or all of this laundry list. Note that the performance is partial and often exaggerated; you’re going to see more glamourous, dolled-up, hypersexualized performances than those that take on the role of the underpaid, scut-working charwoman.

Notice how the fight for abortion rights is now often subsumed into a general fight for “bodily autonomy” that is the focus of TiMs (!) invited to speak at pro-choice events. They can never get pregnant, but such opportunities make a great platform to centre their own needs, whether it’s wrong sex hormones or ramping up the transing of kids to recruit the next cohort of fully committed trans activists. At some point this redirection and dilution will see nominal “abortion rights” campaigns that fail to use the word “abortion.” There are already plenty of such campaigns that have stopped using the word “woman.” See above. If you stop using the word “woman” it’s harder to see (or correct) the fact that bans on abortion target women. If it targets “all gender identities” then it’s no longer about women at all, and the underlying sexism and patriarchal power go unaddressed. Which is the point of the operation. Struggles focused on “gender identity” liberate nobody. The existing chains just get doubled, and painted in pink and baby blue.

No one has meltdowns when breast cancer-related activism frames breast cancer as a women’s health issue, even though breast cancer also affects actual adult human males, albeit in far lesser numbers. In fact, men could conceivably make the case that they are ill-served by the branding of breast cancer as a women’s disease.

It’s not uncommon to see online threads about Female Genital Mutilation get mobbed or trolled by men wanting to include or shift the focus to circumcision. So much easier to take over someone else’s campaign than it is to put in the hard work of launching one’s own. (See: forced teaming of T with LGB.)

TiFs and enbies are useful tools and camouflage, but the campaign isn’t really for their benefit. If this were a movement exclusively by and for them, it wouldn’t have got very far at all. They’re just convenient pretexts for dismantling “woman” and rebuilding it in Man’s image.



Nobody asked

Oct 30th, 2022 11:28 am | By

Very normal. Not at all catastrophizing or narcissistic, no no.

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1586362428668919810

He’s “been asked to comment” – he is just that important. Asked by whom? Modesty forbids. It was probably the pope, or the UN, or Amnesty International.

Of course Jolyon is too important and too much asked to comment to pause to tell us what rights he’s talking about.

Yeah we have trouble holding our heads up in polite company on account of we still think women have rights. How shameful of us!

Women who think women have rights are “fascist adjacents.” What a nice man he is.



Desperate

Oct 30th, 2022 9:36 am | By

Willoughby illustrates.

https://twitter.com/soniasodha/status/1586656367401738242

Willoughby of course is not at all desperate. Placid as a stagnant pond, he is.

Updating to add his not at all outrageous retort.

Uh huh. White man Willoughby claims persecuted minority status for himself. Very convincing.



No not you

Oct 30th, 2022 6:45 am | By

More ways to make it a crime to feminism:

New laws will criminalise incitement to hatred against transgender people and those with a disability, the [Irish] Cabinet agreed on Tuesday when approving a Bill intended to make prosecutions for hate speech and hate crimes easier.

The Bill will add gender, including gender expression and identity, as well as disability to a list of “protected characteristics” which already include race, colour, nationality, religion, ethnicity or national origin and sexual orientation.

But not sex. Being a woman is not a protected characteristic, while being a man who pretends to be a woman is. Women can be punished for not agreeing that men are women, but men are free to incite hatred against women.

Ministers were told the protected characteristics are being expanded based on best practice internationally. In the case of gender and sex characteristics, this was to reflect the experiences of certain groups of people targeted for hate crime.

And among those groups you will not find women. It seems women are not targeted for hate crime. Who knew??



Out of hand

Oct 30th, 2022 6:39 am | By

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.



Meaning

Oct 30th, 2022 6:16 am | By

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.



Guest post: Just a reminder

Oct 30th, 2022 5:39 am | By

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room 9.

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

May be an image of text that says 'JUST A REMINDER... ALL GENDER IDENTITIES GET ABORTIONS! (AND HAVE SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME) ABORTIONA ABORTION ACCESS FRONT'

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”.



Happy to be a non-believer

Oct 29th, 2022 4:30 pm | By

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!



Queer as folk

Oct 29th, 2022 4:02 pm | By

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.



Not worth it

Oct 29th, 2022 11:42 am | By

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.



Its association

Oct 29th, 2022 10:09 am | By

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.



Fruity like old brandy

Oct 29th, 2022 9:52 am | By

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!



“We don’t want them to engage with us”

Oct 28th, 2022 5:27 pm | By

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.



Utmost

Oct 28th, 2022 5:22 pm | By

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.



The crass ignorance

Oct 28th, 2022 10:50 am | By

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.



His potential motive

Oct 28th, 2022 10:01 am | By

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.



Is that a serious thing?

Oct 28th, 2022 9:45 am | By

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.



Why that house in particular?

Oct 28th, 2022 9:11 am | By

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.