Again. They’re appallingly consistent about this.

The ACLU has allowed the trans lobby – or maybe just Chase Strangio all by herself – to bully it into erasing women from its reporting and publicity.

Oh no, the ACLU had to name the bill and the bill has the word “women” in the title.

Ewwww women’s ewwwww they must have been feeling very sick having to say that.

But they fixed it in the subsequent tweets.

Whew, that’s better! No more mention of women. Patients, people, we, but no women. Purity restored!

The ACLU is still at it (aka “doubling down”).

We? Who’s we? Who are “all of us”?

They mean women, of course, but they’re hell bent on not saying so. It’s Chase Strangio’s world now, and the only women who matter are men.

The linked article uses the word once. One single time. I suppose the word appears that one time so that women like me won’t be able to say never. But the grotesquely sanitized language remains. It’s written by Paige Alexandria and was apparently carefully scoured by an ACLU editor, or perhaps Strangio herself.

The U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately overturn the law in June 2016, just months after I had my abortion, bringing relief to Texans seeking basic health care.

This month, Texans like me hoped our rights might be protected by the Supreme Court again. Instead, they let us down by allowing the most restrictive abortion law in the country to take effect. Now, in my work with a fund supporting Texans’ access to abortion, I’m hearing every day from panicked, confused patients who are trying to get an appointment as I did in 2016, and facing wait times as long as a month — too late for many to access care under SB 8. I’ve been reminding some patients to do what I did: keep calling each day to see if any cancellations open up earlier appointments.

Emphasis added to highlight all the places where “women” would be more normal. They’re Texans, they’re patients, they’re many, but by god they’re not women, because who knows how many of them identify as men??? It could be all of them!

SB 8 bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy — before many people even know they’re pregnant; roughly 85 to 90 percent of people who get abortions are at least six weeks into pregnancy….

This law is cruel, and it’s violating.

You know what else is cruel and violating? Removing all mention of women from discussions of their own rights and needs.

I’ve been hearing from many people with housing insecurity who are struggling to quickly figure out how to travel hundreds of miles out of state to access abortion care. And it was already difficult to access abortion as a Texan, especially for people with low incomes, Black women, Indigenous folks, people of color, undocumented folks, our queer and trans communities, disabled people, and youth.

There it is, that’s the one place where the word “women” appears – only to be swiftly choked by a torrent of people and folks and people and youth and communities.

SB 8 is racist, classist, and ableist, and these communities are the first to experience the impacts of abortion restrictions. Some folks living in Southern Texas have no way to even leave the state because of border patrol checkpoints. Getting abortion care is hard for everyone in Texas, but now it can be outright impossible, and will continue to be hardest for these Texans.

But of course getting abortion care isn’t hard for everyone in Texas, because it’s not everyone who needs it, it’s only women who do. But women can’t be mentioned. The word “women” is an obscenity.

While this assault on our rights would be terrible at any time, it’s especially dangerous during a pandemic. Texans were already forced to jump through these political hoops last year when our governor deemed abortion non-essential and banned it for over a month at the beginning of COVID-19. Patients were turned away from the clinic at the last second and forced to travel as far as Oklahoma and Colorado, much like now. At a time when Gov. Abbott should be protecting Texans, he is more concerned with regulating our bodies and putting our health and lives at risk — again…

Though things may feel isolating and scary right now, I want Texans to remember that abortion is still legal in all 50 states… We are here to help you sort through the confusion and get the resources you need.

…Everything I am as a person now is because I had an abortion. It allowed me to be the parent I wanted to be, led me to a career I love, and it was the first time I really understood what it meant to be a supporter of abortion rights. We may have a right to a legal abortion, but that doesn’t mean it’s accessible. Under SB 8, that’s more true than ever, but we are going to continue to fight for our right to safe and legal abortion, regardless of our zip code, and regardless of how much money we make, no matter what.

And who is this “we”? Why, people who need abortion, of course!

Another one of these. She barks like a seal at the sheer horror of being asked if women are allowed to talk about our own bodies now.

Child Psychiatry Fellow at Stanford Medical School Jack Turban to Jessica Taylor in response to her objection to a man, Mridul Wadhwa, as director of a women’s rape crisis centre:

Women “demanding” female staff at rape crisis centers is not repeat not comparable to white people demanding white staff at anything. Women are not dominant over men, women don’t rape men, women are not the oppressor class in relation to men, women are not comparable to white people and men are not comparable to black people in discussions of power imbalance or dominance/subordination or perpetrator/victim or violence/injury.

Something nice for a change!

In January 23, a group of five women climbers summitted Aconcagua, in Argentina, at 22,808 feet, the highest point in the Western and Southern Hemispheres. It took them seven days from when they started ascending the mountain’s flanks to when they safely returned to the bottom. This wouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy if not for the makeup of the crew.

They’re all Bolivian Aymara indigenous women who until recent years worked as cooks and caretakers for well-heeled, and mostly male, mountaineers from around the world. These women had been working at high camps for years, catering to the crews headed to the high peaks of the Andes. Finally, they decided to strap on crampons and hike up to the top themselves.

They call themselves the “Climbing Cholitas.” “Chola” can be a derogatory term for indigenous women in some Spanish-speaking countries; the women took it back and have turned it into a point of pride. They climb in their traditional dress, with alpine boots, ice axes, helmets, and modern packs incorporated into their wardrobe consisting of colorful dresses called polleras (sometimes the dresses get caught in their crampons, the women say, but they’re used to hiking through mountains in long skirts). The women range in ages from 24 to 52 years old.

In the past four years, the Cholitas, a group of as many as sixteen women, have climbed seven significant peaks: Huayna Potosí, Illimani, Acotango, Pomarape, Parinacota, Sajama, and, now, Aconcagua. Initially, they climbed with no training. The women had learned enough to reach their first summit, Huayna Potosí, simply by watching experienced mountaineers in camp. Eleven of them set out to bag that first peak, which towers at 19,974 feet, and all eleven of them summitted.

“I had a long time of being a cook, I wanted to go up, to know how it felt there,” said Lidia Huayllas Estrada, the group’s coordinator, of what motivated her to first reach for the climbing gear. When she asked her husband, an Andes guide, what it was like to scale the region’s highest peaks, he suggested she give it a try herself.

So she gave it more than a try.

Sonia Sodha on “white feminism”:

Blaming women for the ills of the world might appear an odd feminist call to action. But an idea gaining traction is that the “white feminism” dominant in the United States and the UK is not only a driving force of societal racism, but responsible for a host of other bad things, from the war on terror to the hypersexualisation of women in popular culture, to the dreadful abuses of power we see in international aid. It’s part of a growing tendency on the left to look for scapegoats at the cost of building the solidarity needed for social change.

It’s that and it’s also part of a longstanding tendency on the left to treat women with just as much contempt and hostility as the broader culture does. The revival of feminism (aka “second wave” feminism) was born out of that contempt and hostility on the left in the 1960s and 70s.

[I]t’s quite a jump to move from the observation that women are no more immune to racism than men to holding the feminist movement accountable for the plight of women of colour around the world. A new book, Against White Feminism, by Rafia Zakaria, makes precisely this case. To stack up the argument, she stereotypes feminism beyond recognition as a shallow, consumerist and exclusionary movement dominated by selfish white women who care little about scrutinising the male violence perpetrated by white men.

…

The mainstream anti-racist left has a bad track record of hanging out to dry women of colour challenging misogyny within their communities, for fear of upsetting cultural sensitivities. Examples abound: the Newsnight investigation that revealed several Muslim female councillors who have experienced pressure not to stand from Asian Labour party members, which prompted the Muslim Women’s Network to call for an inquiry into systemic misogyny in the party that was met with overwhelming silence; the smears the MP Naz Shah has faced from local Asian men in her party; the negative response to the anti-FGM activist Nimco Ali from her local Labour party. The white privilege discourse makes this more not less likely, because it makes people more scared of being culturally insensitive.

In other words it’s far less painful and damaging to be seen as misogynist than it is to be seen as racist. Lefty men have been choosing the first over the second as long as there have been lefty men.

[W]hite feminism critiques strengthen patriarchal forces by falling into the trap of the privilege Olympics. We need analysis of outcomes by class, race and sex to understand the extent of inequalities, but it should never be overextended to imply all white women are more privileged than women of colour…

Yet that is exactly what lazy polemics about terrible white feminism do: they empower men to use the fact that all white women are supposedly high up in the privilege pecking order to tell middle-aged women to shut up or, even worse, accuse them of weaponising their abuse and trauma. It doesn’t help women of colour, either: it implicitly posits Asian male crime against women as somehow lesser than white male crime, because Asian men are victims too.

…It is telling that Zakaria chose not to engage with a critical book review by Joan Smith, the longstanding campaigner against domestic violence, instead launching a personal attack on her “old and white” appearance.

Solidarity for…some.

You have got to be kidding.

It shouldn’t be said. It’s not right.

So I guess it shouldn’t be said and it’s not right that women are the ones who gestate and give birth to all human beings without exception. I guess it shouldn’t be said and it’s not right that men can’t do either of those things. I guess it shouldn’t be said and it’s not right that men have always sought to harness and control that ability women have. I guess it shouldn’t be said and it’s not right that men are also bigger and stronger than women, and that those two facts combined are why women still have to fight to get rights and freedom and equality and basic respect.

We might as well be hat stands for all men like Keir Starmer care.

So…

So that letter is here, and published with permission. Atwood sent it to several people.

Hi Steve,

Harriet has told me that you stated that her article “dragged SBM into a raging controversy.” She feels, and I agree, that it was your retracting that article and replacing it by very bad articles written by advocates of “gender affirmation” that dragged SBM into a raging controversy. I’ve attempted to explain why previously, but here I’ll mention a couple of the most obvious reasons. 

You claimed that Harriet’s article was below SBM’s minimal standard for “high quality scientific evidence and reasoning to inform medical issues.” Yet you replaced it with articles stating things such as the following: 

“Biology is a binary and differences of sex development (DSDs) are vanishingly rare”. False. DSDs are as common as 1 in 5,000 births, and increase to 1 in 200 or 1 in 300 if you include hypospadias and cryptorchidism. Biology is very, very well known to be a spectrum.

[Lovell attributes the sentence in quotes to Shrier; I’ve been unable to find it in her book]

Do you, Steve, think that sex is a spectrum? Yes, I know Lovell wrote “biology is a spectrum,” but that is an incoherent claim. Her implication is that sex is a spectrum. If that were true, it would upend all that we know about sex in mammals and many other life forms, including sexual dimorphism, reproduction, and selection. Do you think that Lovell’s statement constitutes “high quality scientific evidence and reasoning”? OMG, apparently you do. What’s happened to you?

Do you think that hypospadias and cryptorchism are DSDs? They are not, and to suggest that they are does not meet SBM’s minimal standard for reasoning about medical issues. 

The citation is to a paper that discusses real DSDs, not cryptorchism or hypospadias, and makes no claims about a “spectrum.” It supports the very statement that Lovell claims to be false (even though Shrier seems never to have made that statement). Where was the editor here? 

There’s more along the same lines. It’s stinging. He wraps up with:

Speaking of editors, it appears that there have been none at SBM other than the original five. Of those, two ruled to retract Harriet’s review, two (Harriet and I) would have kept it, and one is dead. I knew Wally well enough to feel confident that he would have voted to keep the review, and that he would have been shocked, probably to the point of resigning, when you published the embarrassments by Lovell and Eckert and when you banned Andy Lewis from commenting.  

No, it was not Harriet who dragged SBM into a raging controversy. It was you and David, because of some very poor choices, made worse by your doubling down after every reasonable objection by Jesse Singal, Andy Lewis, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, Abigail Shrier, me, and several others.  

Sincerely Yours,
Kimball

Stinger.

This very young MP is a piece of work.

That might sound reasonable if you didn’t know what zealots like this novice mean by “transphobia.” She doesn’t mean cruelty or persecution of trans people, she doesn’t mean inciting hatred of trans people (although she probably thinks she does), she means not agreeing that men are women if they say they are, and arguing that men cannot become women just by saying so (or any other way).

In other words she’s calling an entirely ordinary and obvious truth claim “phobic.” If we can’t tell ordinary obvious truths what can we tell? Nothing but lies?

But what about women? What about women who face higher violence rates, homelessness, rape, murder? What about women?

Yiiiiiiiiikes.

The Lancet’s “bodies with vaginas” tweet is getting scorching replies.

On the same day National Public Radio erased women from a story on abortion rights.

The Lancet has tangled with the wrong crowd.

God damn NPR.

The U.S. House on Friday approved a bill that Democrats say will protect a person’s access to abortion.

A WOMAN’S.

A woman’s, god damn it; if it were a man’s no bill would be needed. Say the damn word. Say our name.

Passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act to floor is a response to a Texas law that essentially bans abortion after six weeks, before most people realize they are pregnant.

WOMEN. Before most WOMEN realize they’re pregnant.

The Women’s Health Protection Act would protect a person’s ability to decide to continue or end a pregnancy and would enshrine into law health care providers’ ability to offer abortion services “prior to fetal viability” without restrictions imposed by individual states, like requiring special admitting privileges for providers or imposing waiting periods.

WOMAN’S. A WOMAN’S ability to decide to continue or end a pregnancy. It’s right there in the title of the bill so DON’T CHANGE IT. It’s about women. It’s not about men. Men don’t do this to men; people don’t do this to men. It’s only women who get bullied this way. SAY OUR NAME.

The reporter who wrote this idiotic piece is called Barbara Sprunt. Would she like us to call her Robert?

On the one hand, global warming is rapidly getting worse, on the other hand…

Southern California is dealing with a traffic jam unlike any other, as a record number of container ships have been stuck waiting in the waters outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to unload cargo.

The bottleneck this week at America’s busiest port complex is the result of a shortage of trucks and drivers to pick up goods, coupled with an overwhelming demand for imported consumer products.

Let’s import all the things! Let’s ship stuff back and forth so that we can dump ever more carbon into the environment!

As of Wednesday, 62 container ships were waiting offshore to unload cargo, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.

The backup of ships has grown since last week, when 60 ships were waiting to unload. On Sunday, there were a record 73 cargo ships waiting to enter the ports.

…

With the peak shipping period getting under way as the holiday shopping season approaches, in recent weeks the ports have been setting new records for ships in port almost daily. Traffic has been rising since last summer amid a pandemic-induced buying boom that created a backlog at both ports and overwhelmed the workforce, some of whom were themselves recovering from Covid.

Meanwhile, on another channel, the climate emergency gets worse every day.

“The port of Long Beach is prepared to take bold and immediate action to help the supply chain move the record cargo volumes that keep our economy moving,” said Mario Cordero, the executive director the the port.

And our planet heating.

Evil mullah promises to continue to be evil.

The Taliban will resume executions and the amputation of hands for criminals they convict, in a return to their harsh version of Islamic justice.

Which tells you everything you need to know about their religion.

In an interview with Associated Press, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi – who was justice minister and head of the so-called ministry of propagation of virtue and prevention of vice during the Taliban’s previous rule – dismissed outrage over the Taliban’s executions in the past, and warned the world against interfering with Afghanistan’s new rulers.

…

“Everyone criticised us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Turabi said in Kabul. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Qur’an.”

Yes we will, and he can’t stop us. Unless and until his loathsome religion takes over the world, we damn well will tell them and everyone that their laws are disgusting. Fuck the Qur’an.

Aw imagine going to all the trouble of an audit only to find your opponent does even better.

A partisan, Republican-instigated so-called “audit” of the 2020 election result in Arizona has confirmed that Joe Biden did indeed beat Donald Trump in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous county, according to a draft report of the review.

A month-long hand count of the 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, found that Biden actually won 360 more votes than Trump than was reported in the November election. Biden won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes on his way to getting more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history during the election.

I think “Biden actually won 360 more votes than Trump than was reported” should read “Biden actually defeated Trump by 360 more votes than was reported.”

The investigation is the most extensive partisan effort to date to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election and has been widely celebrated by Trump and allies who falsely believe the election is stolen.

So now they’re stuck with it.

Regardless of what the report says, Republican efforts to conduct similar reviews are underway. Republicans in both the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania legislatures are moving forward with similar investigations into the 2020 race. And on Thursday, Trump called for a review of the 2020 race in Texas, a state he carried in 2020 by nearly six points. Experts worry that the reviews suggest a new normal, where the losers of elections simply refuse to accept the results.

That would be bad.

She’s a senior editor at The Lancet. Her review starts well –

The silence, shame, and stigma surrounding menstruation are increasingly being challenged from various cultural domains…In some settings, period poverty, combined with shame and insufficient knowledge about menstruation, can lead to missing school, thus threatening girls’ education. From among a new wave of activists stepping up to address this issue came director Rayka Zehtabchi and producer Melissa Berton’s Oscar-winning documentary film, Period. End of Sentence. (2018), which follows a group of young women in an Indian village as they learn how to operate a machine that makes low-cost sanitary pads, empowering the women economically and challenging stigmas.

What a relief. Some people still manage to say the words “girls” and “women” when talking about subjects like menstruation.

And on the heels of that documentary is a new book by Anita Diamant, Period. End of Sentence. A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice (2021). Weaving together reclaimed traditions with personal accounts from menstruators around the world, Diamant shows just how much our stories matter.

Oh damn. I spoke too soon. That’s the very first paragraph, so…

 Taking a historical approach felt like a natural step for the Vagina Museum, according to its director, Florence Schechter. “One of the questions that we always get at the Vagina Museum is ‘what did people do in the past with their periods?’”, she told me.

People? Why would she say people?

It’s not a nitpick by the way. Menstruation is one of the aspects of being female that cause disadvantage, ostracism, disgust, fear, violence.

Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected—for example, the paucity in understanding of endometriosis and the way women’s pain has been seen as more likely to have an emotional or psychological cause, a hangover from centuries of theorising about hysteria.

Is “bodies with vaginas” there an evasion or an emphasis? Since it goes on to say “women’s pain” it could be emphasis rather than evasion, or it could be some of each.

Menstruation is a difficult topic to collate museum objects around, but although the exhibition depends heavily on text, objects are also displayed that help create a rich experience and reveal how people who menstruate have dealt with their periods at different times.

If it had been people, though, the whole subject would be radically different. It’s because it was only women who did that menstruation was seen as dangerous, witchy, toxic.

Punctuating the display are various artworks: enormous custom-made menstrual cups and tampons, complete with red sequins that glitter as if in defiance of the centuries of negativity; standing in front of them felt like a celebration.

What about that negativity though? Who was the target of it? Was it people? Was it men? No. Who then?

The final paragraph kind of contradicts some of the rest of the review.

The lockdown confinement has highlighted the importance of physical places like museums. This exhibition is particularly special in its focus on gendered histories, the medical visibility of women’s bodies, and the cultural movement against menstrual shame and period poverty.

I wonder if the concealing language was forced on her.

Updating to add: But the Lancet chose one of the “people” versions for the pull-quote.

Why would anyone get Owen Jones onto a tv news show to talk about violence against women? Of all people? Owen Jones doesn’t give a rat’s ass about women. He’s one of the throwers-overboard, like Keir Starmer and the rest of them.

Selina Todd says Labour should be the party for women but these days isn’t so much.

But recently it hasn’t been clear that a future Labour government would define women in a way that makes sense to anyone with a basic grasp of biology, let alone advance their equality.

Party activists and prominent MPs claim that men’s exclusion from women’s changing rooms, hospital wards and sports is ‘transphobic’. Labour backbencher Rosie Duffield’s support for women’s sex-based rights provoked threats. The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, remained silent.

By doing so he reminded women for the billionth time that we will be thrown overboard the instant the sea gets a little rough.

Until now. This week, Starmer’s spokesman announced that Labour will ‘support the implementation of the Equality Act, including the single-sex exemption which allows the provision of women-only spaces’…

Starmer clearly hopes this announcement will keep those on both sides of this debate quiet. His spokesman later clarified that Labour would only support single sex provisions for women ‘in specific circumstances.’

Why? Why do women have to be policed this way? Why do women’s needs and wants come second to other people’s? Why are women treated as the dominant and privileged party in these disputes? When was it decided that women are the oppressors and men are the oppressed?

Ignoring sex doesn’t make sex-based discrimination and harassment go away, it just prevents you from dealing with it. Keir Starmer should reclaim Labour’s history of standing up for women’s rights. Otherwise the spectre of Jo Swinson — who was unable to define ‘woman’ on BBC Radio 4’s Today show , and shortly afterwards lost her seat and her leadership of the Liberal Democrats — may return to haunt him.

Also, otherwise he’s a sexist asshole.