Cornel West and Jeremy Tate in the Post last April:

Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.

Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.

Don’t cancel the discussion, join it, expand it, add to it, improve it.

Owen Jones is so important that even Oxfam explains itself to him.

“Senior management agreed that it would be unethical to sell the product, and it was therefore pulled.”

I’m not sure I believe the story, but even if it is true, why would it be “unethical” to sell (or give away) the product?

It wouldn’t. It’s only because there’s this exaggerated wild-eyed panic about the Specialness of being trans that lets people get away with that kind of absurdity. Page is a woman, who now “identifies as” a man, but the fact that Page now claims to be a man doesn’t mean everything relating to Page has to be brought up to date. Are they going to tweak Juno so that it’s about a trans guy who gets pregnant and decides not to get an abortion because the fetus has fingernails? No, and they’re not going to withdraw it from circulation, either, so why is it “unethical” to sell or donate a game that was accurate at the time it was created?

That’s not Owen’s point though, of course; Owen’s point is to remind us how much he hates feminist women who don’t do what he tells us.

The Times reports that Oxfam refuses to clarify that threadbare Twitter “explanation” of its decision to erase women.

Oxfam has removed a children’s game celebrating “inspirational women” such as Marie Curie, Rosa Parks and Emmeline Pankhurst from its shops because transgender and non-binary staff complained that it did not “respect people of all genders”.

No Rosa Parks for you, bitches!

Wonder Women, a bingo game, features 48 women “who have made a mark on the world, from scientists and artists to writers, activists and beyond”.

Then it quotes Rob’s explanation on Twitter, which I think does not come across as official enough to be Oxfam’s only explanation, but it seems Oxfam doesn’t agree. We don’t even know who “Rob” is but pfffft, we should go away and play with our gender-respectful dolls.

The charity declined to clarify what was concerning about a children’s game celebrating the achievements of women also including Malala Yousafzai, Ada Lovelace, Jane Austen and Amelia Earhart.

It also refused to explain whether staff were upset by the inclusion of the authors JK Rowling and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, both of whom have been accused of transphobia for challenging trans rights campaigners’ views, or whether it was linked to the inclusion of the actor Elliot Page.

Because the game came out before Page did blah blah so it has the wrong name blah blah besides she’s not a woman after all anyway blah blah blah all of which is an excellent reason for dumping women in the nearest trash bin.

Oxfam’s decision prompted anger and dismay from some women who work for the charity, with at least one bookshop volunteer saying that she would resign in protest.

Ulrike Bullerby, 50, a mother of two with 25 years’ experience as a bookseller, said she had handed in her notice at the Oxfam shop where she had volunteered for ten years. She told The Times that the decision to ditch the game was “an affront” to all the women who fund-raise and donate to the charity.

And to all women. Good, well done Ulrike Bullerby.

Oxfam confirms yes it really is committed to erasing women whenever a trans lobby tells it to.

A man explains that yes indeed Oxfam removed a bingo game celebrating female achievement because of its commitment to respect people of all genders.

So. That’s clear. In Oxfam view, prodded by its “trans and non-binary colleagues,” it is no longer permissible to celebrate female achievement. It’s mandatory to erase women and exclude them from all publicity, journalism, promotion, boosting, scholarships, interviews, lists – everything.

And why? Why do Oxfam’s trans and enby colleagues think that celebrating women fails to respect “all genders”?

Rob didn’t explain. It would be good to know what the thinking actually is here. Surely even Team Trans Dogma can’t think that the word “women” itself “fails to respect all genders”? But how else can they justify withdrawing a product that celebrates women?

It’s all-out war on women, with not a shred of veiling left.

So some members of Congress were in on it, and actively helped plan it.

As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent. 

I think we can guess who some of them were.

The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, describe participating in “dozens” of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol as his election loss to President Joe Biden was being certified. 

“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” the organizer says. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.”

…

Along with Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

It’s a race between climate change and the death of democracy.

This is police business because…………….what?

Raise your hands everybody who wants the police explaining you about AsxUal Idenninies.

You’re a tough crowd.

I have to wonder why the SMH saw fit to publish this childish drivel.

Before the movie begins, I duck off to the bathrooms. Down a dim corridor I find the signs: F and M. The same old binary. There’s no other choice. For the umpteenth time, I sigh. Which of two bad options to choose today? I’m neither man nor woman, but I must pretend to be one or the other if I’m to empty my bursting bladder. Outside the entrance, I hesitate, weighing up the dilemma.

But of course he is either man or woman. His name is Yves Reese so apparently a man but who knows, maybe he gave himself a go on, guess name. But either way he’s one or the other.

And of course it’s “the same old binary.” Also the doors are tall enough but not too tall, and the seats are designed for human bodies not snakes or ostriches or ants. No, sunshine, the movie theater hasn’t been redesigned to accommodate precious you and your gem-encrusted idenniny.

Since I cropped my hair and started binding my breasts, I’ve been attracting hostile stares from women perturbed by my presence in this feminine space.

Ah there it is, ok now we know.

What to do? I just want to pee and then watch a movie, not have my identity scrutinised by strangers. And no matter which option I choose, I’ll be misgendering myself.

But yourself also wants to pee so yourself will forgive yourself if you just shut up and go in the women’s and empty your bladder without all this self-involved blather.

Out in the world, non-binary people are erased, wiped off the domain of the possible. We know ourselves to be neither men nor women, but the world refuses to acknowledge that people like us can even exist. Our self-knowledge is dismissed. Through the architecture of everyday life, we are made inconceivable. There’s literally no space for us.

You don’t know yourselves to be neither men nor women. You may think you do, but you’re wrong. You’re a gender non-conforming woman, now go get on with your life by thinking about something not yourself.

H/t GW

Why?

Priti Patel says don’t record crimes by men who claim to be trans as crimes by women in the statistics (for blindingly obvious reasons), and a woman cop who is co chair of the LGBT+ network for cops says well in that case don’t record women as victims? Wtf???

Where does she get the “so” and the “then”? So and then imply logic, or a chain of causation, or something along those lines. But what could such a chain be? Men who claim to be trans are not women, so they should not be recorded as women in the statistics when they commit crimes. That’s obvious. The point of the statistics is to record the truth of who does what to whom. They need to be accurate to do that job. If you make them not accurate by recording the wrong sex on the basis of men’s fantasies, what possible use are they? So men who commit crimes should be recorded as men in the stats, no matter how they say they “identify.”

The same applies to recording women who are victims of crime (as women are all too often) in the stats. You don’t want to mess up the stats by recording fictions. You want to know how many women really are victims of crime…so why would you stop recording them as such because you’re also not recording that men are women in the stats?

Besides sheer idiotic spite, that is. But surely a woman cop wouldn’t stoop to that kind of spite? Surely?

Updating to add: she did explain her thinking. It’s as bad as it appeared.

But the issue is recording men as perpetrators. That’s what Patel is talking about. Obviously men shouldn’t be reported as female victims either, but the issue here is the perps.

And it’s not “erasing” people as people to record their sex accurately. They’re still people and they’re not erased. Police statistics are not about personal whimsical identities, they’re about the basic realities.

This fucking fool shouldn’t be a cop at all.

So Atwood posted a video.

Not a good choice of video. A big chunk of it is about Maya Forstater and of course gets a lot wrong. (Of course because they always do.) Maya sets her straight.

As many women are pointing out it’s Do it to Julia. That’s no good.

Ok get over it already.

As a violent mob pushed past barricades protecting the U.S. Capitol, then dragged, beat and bludgeoned police officers before roaming the halls with abandon on Jan. 6, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice watched and wept. The emotions, she said, were similar to those she felt on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I thought: ‘I study countries that do this. I didn’t think it would happen in my own country,’ ” Rice, a Republican who teaches political science at Stanford University, said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View.”

In her own country and with the tacit consent of her own political party. It wasn’t a national insurrection, it was a specific, partisan, one-sided, right-wing insurrection. Most of the country is appalled and disgusted by it, and wants to prevent it from ever happening again. We’re funny that way.

The assault on democratic processes that day, as protesters sought to interrupt the certification of the presidential election, “was wrong,” Rice acknowledged — but she qualified that it’s time for lawmakers to “move on.”

It is? Why? Have they done enough to make sure it will never happen again? Have they done enough to ensure it won’t happen again in three years? No and no, so why is it time for them to move on? Why is it time for any of us to move on?

The former White House official’s comments were a response in agreement to remarks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gave on Tuesday. McConnell told reporters it was time for lawmakers “to be talking about the future and not the past,” referring to the discussion about false claims of election fraud pushed by Trump and his allies, which ultimately led supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6. McConnell said the issue should no longer be of concern.

He’d be saying exactly the same thing if it were Democrats who had attempted to overthrow an election and seize power by slaughtering half the Congress, right?

Rice, who served as secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration from 2005 to 2009, said she agreed with McConnell. She added that it’s time for lawmakers to “move on in a lot of ways” and focus on issues affecting U.S. citizens.

Oooh, oooh, you know something that affects US citizens? A right-wing coup that installs a dictator and does away with all our rights, that’s what. Making Donald Trump that dictator, that’s what. Joining the glorious company of Putin and Bolsonaro and Lukashenko, that’s what.

“I’m one who believes that the American people are now concerned about what we call ‘kitchen table issues’ — the price of gasoline, inflation, what’s happening to kids in school,” Rice said.

Also the empty shelf space where Oreos should be, and that pothole on Reagan Boulevard, and the fact that it’s raining. Real problems that affect real people. An insurrection to install a deranged corrupt dictator is just egghead abstract pie in the sky stuff.

Oh did they indeed.

No inspirational women allowed.

Oxfam has bowed to the transgender lobby by withdrawing a children’s bingo game celebrating ‘inspirational women’ from sale in its stores and online.

Inspirational men are no problem, of course, but women…ick.

The game, which sold for £14.99, uses pictures of 48 famous women rather than numbers on cards that are matched with tokens showing the same female figures, including Jane Austen, US civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, climate-change activist Greta Thunberg and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

And JK Rowling. Enough said.

But in an email last week, the charity told staff: ‘We have taken the decision to withdraw the product Wonder Women Bingo as it has been brought to our attention that it is not in line with Oxfam’s values.’

So Oxfam’s values include disappearing and stifling inspirational women? Why’s that?

Oxfam, which campaigns to end poverty and improve women’s rights, told The Mail on Sunday last night it had cleared the game from its shelves after transgender staff complained about it.

It added: ‘We took the decision to remove the game from sale following concerns raised by trans and non-binary colleagues who told us it didn’t live up to our commitment to respect people of all genders.’

Well no, not all “genders.” They certainly have zero respect for women in light of this move.

Women criticised the decision, including Labour MP Rosie Duffield MP, who decided not to attend her party conference last month after receiving threats from trans activists for insisting that ‘only women have a cervix’.

‘I am disappointed Oxfam considers taking a political view of gender identity politics more important than raising as much money as possible for those most in need,’ she said. ‘The track record of some charities with regards to women’s rights has been far from good, and discriminating against some women due to their beliefs will do nothing to repair that.’

Nor will removing a game intended to teach children about women who get shit done.

Julie Bindel suggested the game may have been ditched because it includes Rowling and fellow author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who have challenged the transgender belief that there is no difference between trans and biological women.

In short there’s a filter in place now for everything to do with women, that filters out all women who question the stupid reality-denying new dogma that men are women if they say they are, while leaving men to carry on as normal, no matter what they think and say about trans dogma. Men are to be unmolested, women are to be punished and threatened and erased from public life. That’s fair, right?

The Times on Stonewall:

Today The Times reports on the newest foray into corporate boardrooms under the misleading guise of breaking the gender glass ceiling. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which regulates the financial industry, has drawn up diversity guidelines. These would require every company listed on FTSE indices to declare the percentage of women serving as board members. The new rules, however, do not require that companies declare their board members’ legal or biological sex but their gender identity, regardless of when in their career they adopted it. Using this new definition, the FCA is now recommending that 40 per cent of boards should be women.

But they could all be men. Companies could comply with such recommendations without actually promoting a single woman.

The Equality Law 2010 recognises only legal sex, not gender identity, and there is no right to self-declare your sex under UK law. The FCA guidelines therefore risk setting firms up for a clash with employees with protected characteristics under existing equalities law, who may argue their own rights have been infringed. Using self-identification rather than legal and biological sex as the basis for compiling gender diversity data could, for example, give a misleading picture of a company’s performance under this metric.

Not to mention that it could give companies a veil behind which to continue not promoting women.

The reality is that Stonewall lobbied intensively to change the law but was ultimately halted by an outcry from critics warning of the dangers to women of allowing self-identification to trump biological sex. It is now looking increasingly as if it is getting its way regardless by persuading employers to adopt its agenda. 

And who loses? Women. Of course.

Women not impressed by ActiVists trying to school Margaret Atwood:

By latsot, originally a comment on Today in London but it got held because of links while I was out for a walk to Lake Union and back so now it’s a post instead of a comment.

YNNB:

Yes. And the dinosaur costumes were another genius PR idea from Posie Parker. It’s impossible to see one waddling down the street (or getting on a bus)

  without paying attention. And when people do, the explanation is a perfect lead into a discussion of Stonewall.

The event was brilliant, I’m glad I went. Everyone was incredibly nice and kind and looked after each other all day. People helped me get in and out of the pub and fretted about me crossing busy roads. It was genuinely moving. It was kindness given without thought or obligation.

Women were helping the dinosaurs walk around, too, because they couldn’t see their feet. At one point, a dinosaur had a handbag in one hand and the other was held by a guide, who was giving instructions. She was like a rally co-driver except she was saying things like:

There’s a bit of a dodgy kerb there…. Mind that cracked paving stone… There’s a puddle there that might be piss…but you might be all right, it could just be rainwater, it’s up to you whether you want to go round it.

I really wish I could have filmed that, but I need both hands for getting around.

To begin with, we met at the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square and I handed out leaflets for a while. A lot of people were passing and most took the leaflets. Lots more came to Talk With Dinosaurs. Everyone had either heard or heard of the Nolan investigation so there was always a good way into conversation. This is significant; previously, I’d have had to cover a lot of ground before even getting started on Stonewall but now most people seemed to have a much better idea of what’s going on. It was hugely encouraging.

After that, I was interviewed by the police, but they just wanted to know what the protest was about. I gave them a leaflet and refused to tell them where we were going next. In fairness, they couldn’t have beaten it out of me if they’d tried because I didn’t know where we were going, either. And as it turned out, neither did anyone else.

Where we did go was the buildings of various government departments and other public services. We went to the Home Office, New Scotland Yard, then to the Foreign office but I think that was by mistake. Various other places. We shouted about Stonewall getting out, children being left alone and the gay not being amenable to transing away. I had not expected, that morning, that I would be standing outside the offices of the Metropolitan police with a crowd of women shouting “get autogynophiles out of the police”. Especially since it was followed by a discussion about whether we really minded autogynophiles being in the police or not. The consensus was that we didn’t really mind as long as they weren’t dressed as latex dogs when they came to arrest us.

Then we ate our packed lunches like we were on a school trip and got on the bus to the BBC.

The BBC security guards were out in force and not happy to see us. We chanted a lot, argued with a man who came out to be a dickhead at us, there was some ill-advised singing and dancing and one dinosaur’s gyrations got out of control. Then we went to the statue of Orwell for some photographs and went to the pub. There was a lot of energy there, and a lot of righteous anger. Women are angry and that genii is not going back in the bottle.

I met some brilliant people in there (some of them even recognised me!) then went to speak with menno for a while. He’d been asked to recount his GC origin story, which is an absolute rollercoaster ride. Tears fell. He spoke of how he has always been bad at expressing anger and a particular event caused all his pent up anger to be released in a single instant, which was a major peaking event.

So, predictably, I was then asked how I’d got into all this. If you know menno, you’ll know he’s a difficult act to follow at the best of times and if you know me, you’ll know my origin story isn’t exactly a thrill ride. I didn’t Fall so much as saunter gently downwards, as Pratchett might have said. But at least I could confirm, to the nods of everyone there who follows me on Twitter, that at least I’ve never had any difficulty expressing anger.

Then – to my lasting regret – I had to leave to get my train. I wish I’d been able to stay and wish even more that I’d decided to go after all to the LGBA conference the previous day. I’d thought about it but figured that I shouldn’t take up a place an LGB person might want. But everyone in the pub said I was an idiot and should have just gone. Next time, I will.

On the way back to the station, I reached what I like to believe were record speeds down Oxford Street and in the transfer tunnel at Green Park. There was a lot of weaving around bewildered, angry people and hairpin, rubber-screeching turns into lifts.

It was good to get out and great to meet some of the best people. It was even good to be in London after so long, even now that it’s getting back to fully annoying capacity. I wish I could have been in Edinburgh and Belfast as well (I know people who were at both!) I’ll definitely go to more of these things in the future and I’m speaking with some GC groups up North to see if we can arrange some in Newcastle or Durham. There isn’t much activity around here and that’s a shame because I think we North-Easterners are natural born TERFs, if anyone is.

I’ll give you plenty of notice, guest ;)

As twiliter says, you can see pictures and videos at #ComeOutOfStonewall on Twitter. The picture Ophelia used shows around half the people who started the tour and a fifth of the dinosaurs. Some of the dinosaurs had to leave to go to work, others deflated involuntarily due to battery failure. The real reason they became extinct.

Theocrats pick another fight:

Thousands of supporters of a banned radical Islamist party have departed from the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore, clashing with police for a second day, a party spokesman and witnesses said on Saturday.

The group formed on Friday with the goal of reaching the capital, Islamabad, to pressure the government to release Saad Rizvi, the head of the Tehreek-e-Labiak Pakistan party.

“Radical” coupled with Islamist means deep hatred of women and “blasphemers.” (They consider most people blasphemers.)

Rizvi’s party gained prominence in Pakistan’s 2018 elections, campaigning on a single issue: defending the country’s blasphemy law, which calls for the death penalty for anyone who insults Islam. It has a history of staging violent protests to pressure the government to accept its demands.

What constitutes “insulting Islam”? You know. Disagreeing with anything the fanatics say about it.

Judith Butler has a crappy predictable abusive piece in the Guardian complaining of a “backlash” over sacred Gender.

The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by extensive rightwing Catholic and evangelical organizations. Although not always in accord, these groups concur that the traditional family is under attack, that children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.

Meanwhile, in the real world, feminist women object to being shoved aside and told to shut up by men who claim to be women.

It is not easy to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement because they do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence. 

That’s just a quite vulgar lie. She’s choosing to treat conservative anti-feminists as in the same “movement” as gender critical feminists, which she has to know perfectly well is a lie.

They assemble and launch incendiary claims in order to defeat what they see as “gender ideology” or “gender studies” by any rhetorical means necessary. For instance, they object to “gender” because it putatively denies biological sex or because it undermines the natural or divine character of the heteronormative family.

Well yes “or” as in those are completely different sets of people. Speaking of any rhetorical means necessary. She has no shame.

lthough nationalist, transphobic, misogynist, and homophobic, the principal aim of the movement is to reverse progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI and feminist movements.

Another lie.

Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments. The inconsistency of their arguments and their equal opportunity approach to rhetorical strategies of the left and right, produce a confusing discourse for some, a compelling one for others. But they are typical of fascist movements that twist rationality to suit hyper-nationalist aims.

A whole crowd of lies there.

In his well-known list of the elements of fascism, Umberto Eco writes, “the fascist game can be played in many forms,” for fascism is “a collage … a beehive of contradictions”. Indeed, this perfectly describes anti-gender ideology today. It is a reactionary incitement, an incendiary bundle of contradictory and incoherent claims and accusations.

She says, inciting people to think feminist women are fascists.

There are three more paragraphs of bullshit about fascism, concluding with “The time for anti-fascist solidarity is now.” What a revolting lying fraud she is.

Remember Charles Clymer the “male feminist” who was always talking over women? Then declared he was “Charlotte” and it all made sense? As Charlotte he gets to talk over everyone.

And Charles is a man. He is not a woman. Being a woman is not his experience (7 years in the army azza man) and he is not qualified to talk about what is and isn’t offensive and intrusive and misogynist to the female community. Stay in your lane Charles.

Let’s have a campaign against spiking women’s drinks in order to rape them and let’s make sure our campaign is incloosiv of men.

The campaign started on Instagram, and that’s also where it was interrupted and hijacked and bullied into including men, thus making it a completely meaningless campaign to stop people doing something to people.

We’re sorry!!! We’re sorry we’re sorry we’re sorry – we’re so sorry we said it was about girls, we’ll never do it again, please don’t hit us, please don’t drug us and rape us, please, we promise we’ll be good, please please please please

Originally a comment by As the smoke rises upward on A long-awaited judgment.

One can make the same argument for selling organs. There are thousands of desperately poor people in rural India suffering from the lifelong health effects of having one kidney because they—ostensibly voluntarily—sold the other one.

Here’s another, more obscure analogy: midget bowling. If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with this phenomenon, it’s the practice of tossing a little person down a bowling lane in place of a bowling ball, which is apparently high comedy to certain crass fratboy types. Some little people rent themselves out to would-be midget bowlers, but some state legislatures have passed laws prohibiting the practice, on the grounds that it is inherently hazardous to the person selling the service (being tossed around like a literal ball is dangerous for anyone, but especially dangerous to little people, who tend to have fragile spines). Simply put, laws against midget bowling boil down to the conviction that it’s not okay for a bunch of dudes to have a good time by putting other people at real risk of serious harm, even if the people taking the risk have agreed to do so in exchange for money.

Of course, one can take the extreme libertarian position that any transaction should be permissible as long as there is the appearance of consent; the exchange of money sanctifies anything that the payer might do to the payee. Sweatshop workers, diamond miners, gestational surrogates, organ sellers, midget bowling balls, prostitutes—they all knew the work and the wages and they chose to accept. If it’s all right for me to grind away at my tedious and stressful white-collar job because I need the money, then it must also be all right for a homeless eighteen-year-old girl to allow strange men to ejaculate in her orifices because she needs the money. Really, what’s the difference? Everyone hates their job.

But I’m less interested in abstract questions than I am in concrete realities. Overwhelmingly, the women and girls (and the smaller number of men and boys) who are in prostitution are harmed by it and do not want to be there. Many of them are trafficked, many of them are drug addicted, many of them come from abusive backgrounds, many of them are being exploited by pimps, and many of them develop PTSD. The large majority of prostitutes—around 90%—interviewed in several countries say that they would leave the sex industry immediately if they could. As one study (from 2006, but I doubt much has changed since then) dispassionately concludes, “Sex work is associated with excess mortality and morbidity including the sequelae of STI, mental health problems, and substance misuse.” In plainer terms, buyers of sex do very real damage, both physical and psychological, to the people (mostly women and girls) whose bodies they buy.

Addendum/clarification: apparently, midget bowling is less common than the closely related “sport” of dwarf tossing, which involves tossing the little person against a velcro wall rather than down a bowling lane.

We’re not confused.

I’m not confused, but I’ll have a look.

Beyond these clinical technicalities, for many people pregnancy also starts before conception in a figurative sense.

I’m definitely not confused, I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re pandering to a stupid fad for pretending that we don’t know which sex does the baby-having.

…two medical centers in the US, Baylor University Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, are now offering uterus transplants to allow XX-carrying people lacking a functional uterus to gestate their own children after all…

…The OB/GYNs I saw during that time seemed to be focused more on the people having babies than on those who were unable to. And for women requiring other sorts of remedies for infertility, from IVF to uterus transplantation, costs are often paid from their own pockets. 

Whoops! Missed one.

A note from the EIC regarding the language used in this issue

I happily turned over the editorial pen to The Scientist’s managing editor, Jef Akst, for this special issue on pregnancy. But the TS editorial team had such a rigorous conversation surrounding the language we used in these stories that we thought it was necessary to include a brief mention of this facet of creating this body of work. Specifically, we wanted to be mindful of using inclusive language in discussing the science of pregnancy. From my own perspective, considering pregnancy as a phenomenon that extends beyond “women” did not occur automatically. But as we got down into the nitty-gritty of the subject matter at hand, I was made aware (via the thoughtful input of my colleagues) that we risked excluding nonbinary and transgender individuals from the discussion if we did not carefully consider our words.

So they decided to exclude women instead.

… other studies of pregnancy simply recorded that subjects were female. Where possible, we included these types of specifics in discussing particular studies (see the mention of “XX individuals” above). In other spots that considered the broader applications or impacts of research or healthcare involving pregnancy, we referred to “people” rather than “women.”

Go us! We veiled women with our words!