I don’t think Owen Jones is the right guy to talk about it.

In fact I think he’s absolutely the wrong guy to talk about it. Not the only or the most wrong guy, but still the wrong guy.

It’s entitled men who hate women, that’s what it is and what’s driving it. Owen too is entitled and Owen too hates women. The up front reasons for the hatred are different, but the gut instinct is the same.

Solution to the problem of violent men found at last.

Make sure that women are given to these men – like so many apples or hats or tennis rackets.

Of course that is the arrangement in all too many places, like Afghanistan for instance, but that doesn’t mean we like to see men saying it as if it were just common sense.

And given to them for what purpose? For the purpose of sticking the penis is. Without a living breathing female human to stick the penis in, the man is too likely to step outside and kill some people.

You’d think by now the engineers could have come up with a reliable replacement, a nice programmable vagina to stick the penis in without having to get an actual woman from somewhere.

Not then but now.

Heatwaves and the heavy rains that cause flooding have become more intense and more frequent since the 1950s in most parts of the world, and climate change is now affecting all inhabited regions of the planet. Drought is increasing in many places and it is more than 66% likely that numbers of major hurricanes and typhoons have risen since the 1970s…

And the consequences of humanity’s massive act of atmospheric interference are now clear: what is hot today will become hotter tomorrow; extreme floods will become more frequent, wildfires more dangerous and deadly droughts more widespread. In short, things can only get worse.

And they can only get worse faster. It’s happening fast. The massive wildfires are not a gradual thing.

Indeed, by the end of the century they could become threatening to civilisation if emissions are allowed to continue at their present rate.

If you ask me they’re threatening now.

In fact, they could become utterly catastrophic with the occurrence of world-changing events – such as continent-wide forest die-backs or collapsing Antarctic ice sheets, says Prof Andrew Watson of Edinburgh University. “The IPCC report gives a comprehensive update on the knowns of climate change, and that makes for grim reading. But it also makes the point that climate models don’t include ‘low probability-high impact’ events, such as drastic changes in ocean circulation, that also become more likely the more the climate is changed. These ‘known unknowns’ are scarier still.”

Or the collapse of the Gulf Stream, as we saw the other day.

The rest of the piece is about the need for radical action starting right now, and…we all know that’s not going to happen. It’s as if there are two planes, that don’t meet at any point. On one plane the earth is heating up like a skillet on a hot burner and we have to make drastic changes starting immediately, and on the other plane we can’t get people to wear masks during a pandemic, we can’t get people to drive less and walk more, we can’t get people to stop throwing litter out of their cars as they barrel down the freeway. Yes we have to make drastic changes immediately, and no there’s no way anybody can make that happen.

From Pliny:

See the original for sharper image.

Siberia is hot. Not just hot for Siberia, but hot – which makes it terrifyingly hot for Siberia.

It’s not just the Western region of the US that’s sweltering right now. Siberia in Russia is baking, and satellites are bearing witness to a brutal heat wave above the Arctic Circle. Copernicus Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B satellites captured a snapshot of land surface temperatures on June 20, and it was hot.

According to NASA, “Land surface temperature is how hot the ‘surface’ of the Earth would feel to the touch in a particular location.” The Sentinel image shows a peak ground temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) near Verkhojansk, a small town usually known for its extreme cold temperatures.

Siberia is where the permafrost is, and from what I recall, if the permafrost melts that’s another massive tipping point because it will release colossal amounts of methane. In other words the planet is doomed.

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space, which implements the Copernicus program, tweeted that the town of Saskylah saw air temperatures of about 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) on June 20, the highest on record there since 1936.

Not Texas, not Australia, but Siberia.

Remember that Times article I quoted from yesterday about Trump’s plan to fire the DoJ guy who wasn’t helping him steal the election? Remember how cautiously worded it was, so that it took extra effort and attention to grasp that they were reporting on Trump’s effort to steal the election?

On the other hand, today, we get Maureen Dowd:

Jay Gatsby gave big, lavish, new-money parties at his sprawling mansion on the water because he wanted to seem cool. He wanted Daisy to notice him.

Barack Obama gave a big, lavish, new-money party at his sprawling mansion on the water because he wanted to seem cool. Being cool is important to him.

On the one hand corrupt criminal evil man tries to steal election, on the other hand man who is none of those things…has a birthday party.

Is this high school? What did she write that for? Why didn’t the editor ball it up and throw it back at her desk?

I know, news and editorial are separate, opinion writers have a lot more freedom to be snide and worse than snide than reporters do, but all the fucking same. Obama had a party. That’s it? That’s what you’ve got?

It’s hard to stop thinking about the over-the-top fete the former president held at his Martha’s Vineyard manse for his 60th birthday. 

No it isn’t. It’s dead easy. Dowd was stuck thinking about it because it was such hard work to justify whining about it.

I mean yes, Obama is a rich dude now, and he knows a lot of famous people. No shit. But is that really such a hot issue that it’s worth griping about when there are rather more serious issues available?

We already knew Obama gravitated to stars but it was disillusioning to see it on such a grand scale last weekend.

Not if you paid no attention it wasn’t. You don’t actually have to care about what stars Obama invited to his party.

Debbie Hayton on Scotland’s “guidance” on how best to trans children:

Revelation, we are told, can come early in life:

Some young people are exploring their gender identity in primary school settings.

If a young person in the school says that they now want to live as a boy although their sex assigned at birth was female, or they now want to live as a girl, although their sex assigned at birth was male, it is important to provide support and listen to what they are saying.

Is it the same if they say they now want to live as a tiger? A dolphin? A tomato? Will it be important to take the children to the sea and throw them in, or plant them in the ground?

It’s really not teachers’ job to tell children their fantasies are true, or to encourage them to believe that they are what they are not.

Teachers are instructed to not only listen, but also believe:

If others deny this, it may have a detrimental impact on the young person’s wellbeing, relationships and behaviour.

On the other hand if others affirm this it may also have a detrimental impact on the young person’s wellbeing, relationships and behaviour. Quite a large one in fact, because the other children may well decide the deluded child is creepy and nuts and all wrong and thus in need of bullying. It’s not a simple and uncontroversial fact that if a very young boy says he’s a girl, the adults in the vicinity must rush to agree with him and say yes that’s exactly what he is. That’s not an established truth, it’s a new and stupid dogma.

Reports elsewhere suggested that children as young as four will be able to change their name and gender at school in Scotland without their parents’ consent. And teachers are told that, ‘if a young person comes out as transgender there is no immediate need to inform their parents’ meaning the child’s mother and father might not even know what is happening.

The authors appeal to emotion, and fear of the law.

A transgender young person may not have told their family about their gender identity. Inadvertent disclosure could cause needless stress for the young person or could put them at risk and breach legal requirements. Therefore, it is best to not share information with parents or carers without considering and respecting the young person’s views and rights.

Of course, among the young person’s rights are rights to the care and supervision of their parents, which they need because they are children. It’s not simply a slam-dunk that schools are inevitably and entirely correct about this while parents bumble around in the darkness of not being trans.

I fear that the Scottish government is suggesting that schools can say to children, ‘Don’t worry, this will be our secret. Your mum and dad need never know.’ That is not only chilling, it could potentially be a safeguarding catastrophe.

To put it mildly.

It’s also just offensively presumptuous. There are crap parents in the world, to be sure, and sometimes children do need outside help, but schools shouldn’t be just assuming that as the standard and making plans to hide children’s “trans status” from their parents.

Kindly Scotland even approves of girls wearing binders.

Binders can lead to shortness of breath, can be painful during physical exertion and there are health risks associated with wearing binders that are too tight.

Binders can, however, have a positive impact on a young person’s mental health so staff should allow a young person to decide for themselves about whether or not to wear a binder, to help them join in. Some transgender young people may be willing to wear a looser binder than usual during PE.

Soon they’ll be doing mastectomies in the cafeteria.

This, exactly.

So do I, and I see the lists all over the place. Race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity – the end.

YOU MISSED ONE

THE BIG ONE

THE ONE THAT APPLIES TO HALF OF HUMANITY

The recurring question – why are Republicans so hell bent on killing off themselves and their own fellow party-members?

Some Republican leaders are seeking to support Joe Biden’s efforts to beat the pandemic by encouraging the public to get vaccinated as soon as possible. But others are actively trying to undermine the president’s offensive by embracing what critics regard as [a] lethal mix of ignorance, irrationality and nihilism.

And that lethal mix is going to bite them in the ass a lot harder than it bites us.

These Republicans seem intent on scoring political points by appealing to a pandemic-weary’s public yearning to get back to something like normal life. Still in thrall to former president Donald Trump, they fiercely oppose mask or vaccine mandates by invoking traditional party tenets of individual freedom, personal responsibility and resisting state interference.

And blah blah blah, but we can’t have absolute individual freedom unless we abandon society altogether and go live on a barren rock for a few days until we starve to death. If we can find a barren rock, that is – if all 350 million of us try we’ll run out of rocks in a matter of minutes. The benefits of society entail giving up some freedoms. The freedom to spread a lethal virus isn’t really a freedom worth having, let alone defending.

But with America now averaging about 113,000 cases a day, an increase of nearly 24% from the previous week, and hospitalizations up 31% from the week before, Republicans stand accused of causing the deaths of their own voters as the highly contagious Delta variant scythes through red states where vaccination rates are low.

Oops. But freedom freedom freedom.

In the past week Florida and Texas, states whose leaders take pride in riling the Biden administration, have accounted for nearly 40% of new hospitalizations across the country.

“We’re number one!!”

Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, welcomed hundreds of thousands of people to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally where no masks or vaccines are required, while Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina, declared: “Mandating masks is not the answer. Personal responsibility is the answer, common sense is the answer. And we have an abundance of both in South Carolina.”

He says, displaying reckless irresponsibility and lack of common sense.

Critics say the governors have abandoned the conservative principle that decisions should be made at a local level but they have support from prominent Republican senators such as Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Paul, a licensed physician and senator for Kentucky, urged civil disobedience against coronavirus restrictions, saying in a video: “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us.” He has been banned from YouTube for a week over a post that questioned the efficacy of masks.

That’s outright evil. Resistance is for when it’s the fucking Nazis pouring over the border, it’s not for public health measures DURING A PANDEMIC.

Democrats are dismayed by such willingness to turn even a matter of life and death into a partisan issue. They note that a minority of the population is hampering the entire nation’s recovery and needlessly endangering more lives, including children.

For political jollies, or just plain spite. The moral bankruptcy is a sight to behold.

It’s women’s fault.

The gunman who killed five people in a mass shooting in Plymouth ranted at a 16-year-old girl that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief” in some of his final online exchanges just a few days before he embarked on Britain’s worst mass shooting in more than a decade.

Arrogant and entitled in the sense of not offering to have sex with him?

His comments and membership of the incel community again raise questions over the police’s decision not to treat the worst mass shooting in Britain since 2010 as terror-related.

It depends on how you’re defining “terror-related.” If you decide that it means having explicit demands addressed to specific governments, then the Plymouth slaughter doesn’t count, but that’s not the only way to define it.

The incel movement is known to promote violent misogyny and has inspired a number of high-profile murders in the US.

These include the case of US student Elliot Rodger who in 2014 shot dead six of his contemporaries before killing himself after leaving a message saying that he was angry because he had failed to form a relationship with a woman.

…

Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said: “Incels are terrorists. They seek to teach women a lesson, to remould society, to change through violence that which they could never possibly achieve through the ballot box or persuasion.”

Ahmed said that ungoverned online spaces were allowing hateful views to propagate and radicalise new followers.

“Male supremacist incel communities form specifically to share and deepen one another’s hatred of women. There, they undergo a process of radicalisation unchecked by broader social norms because of these digital spaces’ isolation from the rest of society’s tempering institutions and forces,” he added.

Of course, society’s institutions also feature quite a lot of contempt for women, belief that women are subordinate to men, assumption that women are required to be attractive and compliant to men, and the like.

Ahmed added: “That so many malignant ideologies – from anti-vaxxers to antisemites to incels – are accelerating their radicalisation and developing violent mobilising elements is a function of both the ease with which they can build their communities online and the inherently radicalising nature of those spaces.”

Little slime pits everywhere.

Nazir Afzal straight up says it.

Others also say it.

Joan Smith has been saying it and saying it.

How to Empower Birth: say that everyone can give birth.

Full text:

Most people who become pregnant and give birth will identify as women. There are some trans men who get pregnant and give birth, and they are not women. There are also some non-binary people who get pregnant and give birth, and they may not be women. There are some intersex people who get pregnant and give birth, and they may not be women either.

In recent history white people were very worried that a small number of black people might grow in number and influence, and somehow dilute the whiteness of their society. There were academic papers written about the ‘problem’. We now thankfully realise that black people are people and that whiteness is not supreme, and there are movements towards equality and justice.

Today some radical feminists are very worried that a small number of transgender, non-binary and intersex people might grow in number and influence, and somehow dilute the effort towards women’s rights and equality. There are many social media posts about the ‘problem’. We once again need to realise that diminishing the recognition, rights and belonging of one group of people in order to further the status of another is not acceptable.

Unlike whiteness, feminism is a valid agenda, but its success does not lie within the disqualification of birth amongst people who are not women. The fight for women’s rights and equality does not rest on holding transpeople to ransom until they admit a feminine identity and accept being misgendered.

Feminism is more than that. It is more respectful, more loving, more kind. It is more inclusive and more powerful, with a much further reach. Feminism is not defined by the ability to birth, as feminists and women who cannot or chose not to birth will attest. Feminism is not defined by exclusion and will not be diluted by efforts to respect every human, fullstop.

Not all people who give birth are women. And that’s ok.

Yes…they are!

That’s some stupid shit right there.

Also, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: feminism is not “more loving, more kind.” That’s not our job, and it’s not what we are. That’s not to say we’re hatey and cruel, it’s to say being “more loving and kind” is part of the role that has been forced on women forever, and it has nothing to do with the political struggle for our rights. Feminism isn’t here to be nice, to suck up, to suck anything, to make the dinner, to kiss the booboos. Feminism is here to collect what’s owed to us, not to beg. You want loving and kind, get a puppy.

The College Fix wrote about the Carol Hooven/Laura Simone Lewis clash on Twitter a couple of weeks ago:

“I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my dept,” wrote Laura Simone Lewis following the appearance by Human Evolutionary Biology colleague Carole Hooven on “Fox & Friends.”

Lewis continued: “Let’s be clear: if you respect diverse gender identities & aim to use correct pronouns, then you would know that people with diverse genders/sexes can be pregnant incl Trans [sic] men, intersex people & gender nonconforming people. That isn’t too hard for medical students to understand.”

Yes let’s be clear. People with “diverse sexes” can’t be pregnant. Only one of the two sexes can be pregnant. That’s how you be clear. You don’t be clear by trying to get a man pregnant.

‘You know, we can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns,’ [Hooven] said on Wednesday.

‘So understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.’

I have to say though – it’s not really treating people with respect. It’s more the opposite. It’s treating people as too fragile (or stupid or self-indulgent or something) to be able to face reality, so you decide to humor their delusions so that they don’t fall apart in front of you. Does that sound like respect to you?

Or you might be treating them with fear as opposed to respect. You might humor their delusions because if you don’t they will get you fired or otherwise punished, so you do what they bullied you into doing. That too is not respect. It’s respect in the Vito Corleone sense maybe, but who wants that?

Would it be respect for academics to refer to their students as kittens or bears or space aliens because the students are so addicted to fantasy that they can’t stand being human? Hardly.

As the Taliban swallows Afghanistan…

In many districts captured by the Taliban, new rules have already been imposed, including restrictions on women’s movement. Women are not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male guardian and fully covered in the traditional burqa.

Why? You know why. Because men are people, and women are nothing but gaping holes. Men make the rules, women wear bales of cloth to hide their obscene gaping holes. Men can’t avoid raping women, so women have to be walking shrouds on the rare occasions they’re allowed to go outside. Men matter, and women are garbage. Men need children, and women are the only way to get children, so women must be bullied and punished and extinguished so that the children won’t be contaminated by them.

Most terrifying, however, is the practice of forced marriages of young girls and widows to Taliban fighters. “We are very worried about the forced marriages by the Taliban. If they come for us like this, then we will end our lives. It will be the only option for us,” says Tahira.

The Taliban hates women because God hates women.

Katie Benner at the Times reported a couple of days ago:

Byung J. Pak, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that his abrupt resignation in January had been prompted by Justice Department officials’ warning that President Donald J. Trump intended to fire him for refusing to say that widespread voter fraud had been found in Georgia, according to a person familiar with his testimony.

To put it another way, Trump tried to coerce a US attorney [i.e. a DoJ employee] in Atlanta to lie about voter fraud in Georgia, and was going to fire him for refusing to comply. Trump was going to fire a DoJ attorney for refusing to lie for Trump.

While he did not discuss Mr. Trump’s role in his decision to resign at the time, he told the Senate panel that the president had been dismayed that Mr. Pak had investigated allegations of voter fraud in Fulton County, Ga., and not found evidence to support them, according to the person familiar with the statements.

Mr. Pak testified that top department officials had made clear that Mr. Trump intended to fire him over his refusal to say that the results in Georgia had been undermined by voter fraud, the person said. Resigning would pre-empt a public dismissal.

To put it another way, Trump intended to fire him for not lying about the election so that Trump could overturn it.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is examining Mr. Pak’s departure as part of its broader investigation into the final weeks of the Trump administration and the White House’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to falsely assert that the election was corrupt.

To put it another way, the committee is digging into Trump’s efforts to force the Justice Department to steal the election for him.

The NY Times doesn’t allow itself to put things as bluntly as we can, but the result is that the dirty reality gets lost under the polite language.

Mr. Trump met with top Justice Department officials to discuss the possibility of replacing the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, with Jeffrey Clark, a department leader who was willing to falsely tell Georgia officials that fraud might have affected the election outcome.

Trump wanted to replace the acting AG with one who would commit crimes for him in order to steal the election for him.

Terry Gross talked to Benner yesterday, which is good, because she too can put things more bluntly than the Times allows itself to.

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election results and declare himself the winner are being investigated by the Department of Justice’s inspector general, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

See? First substantive sentence, she’s already clearer than the Times house style. I kind of wish their house style weren’t quite so cautious. I kind of wish Benner could have led with: Trump tried to steal the election, and a DoJ lawyer he tried to force to help him testified to Congress today.

My guest, New York Times reporter Katie Benner, broke the story that led two investigations. That article revealed that Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, tried to get DOJ leaders to falsely claim that investigations into voter fraud in Georgia cast doubt on the Electoral College results. She also reported that Clark had plotted with President Trump to oust the acting attorney general, replace him with Clark and use the Justice Department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

In hopes of stealing the entire election and installing Trump as dictator. We’d be another Belarus right now if they’d succeeded.

There’s a story going around that Trump was supposed to be “reinstated” today. Cool word choice: it suggests that he was uninstated illegitimately when in fact this time he lost the electoral vote along with the popular (aka actual) vote.

“The morning of August 13 it’ll be the talk of the world,” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow impresario and purveyor of discredited conspiracy theories about a stolen presidential election, warned during a recent appearance on a conservative podcast. Lindell, who is being sued for billions in damages by Dominion, a maker of voting machines that the right-wing bedding entrepreneur has called fraudulent, promised a day of reckoning, when the “Communists” would be kicked out of power and Donald Trump would rightly reassume his place in the Oval Office. Trump, himself no stranger to barely intelligible theories of political change, was reportedly a believer, telling underlings that he would somehow be reinstated as president in August.

He could always draw himself in with a Sharpie.

One of the more annoying thought-terminating clichés of the moment is the “please, let’s not talk about the roots of misogynist violence now when the news is fresh, lets give the families time to mourn” one.

I say this because I’m grinding my teeth over one I just saw.

Joan was on Womans Hour because she has a new book on the subject, and because the Home Office has heeded her advice. But behold, a man appears.

I’ll refrain from sharing his actual tweets, but I’ll damn well quote what he said, because I find it so annoying.

Hi Joan, I agree with you on extreme misogyny and radicalisation but can we wait until things are a bit calmer? My parents live a stone’s throw from there – these are raw wounds for the people of Plymouth.

Of course they’re raw wounds for the people of Plymouth, but what’s that got to do with Joan Smith talking about policy on Twitter? Are the people of Plymouth going to be made more upset by Joan’s tweets?

Of course not! And what do this guy’s parents have to do with anything? What does their proximity to the exact spot have to do with anything?

Bupkis. I think he just grabbed the opportunity to say something pious. And the pious (stupid) thing he said amounts to saying can we wait to talk about this until no one is paying attention? And the answer is no, you fucking fool, because the whole point is for people to pay attention.

He amplified:

I fundamentally agree that it should be talked about beforehand. Misogyny and the violence associated with it is a dangerous and worrying trend in society. But I feel like leaving it a few days so the families can mourn the victims is appropriate.

Again: that’s stupid. It’s a cliché, for some reason, and it’s utterly stupid. It’s become a conventional thing to say, and why? I don’t know, I guess because people enjoy saying pious stupid things. It’s stupid because talking about the connection between violence and misogyny does not in any way interfere with anyone’s mourning.

If advertisers were hammering on the doors of people who are mourning the victims to offer promotion opportunities, that would be interfering with the mourning. But public discussion? Don’t be ridiculous.

The Times yesterday on the male CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis:

The head of one of Scotland’s largest rape crisis centres has claimed that “bigoted” people seeking help from her organisation could be “challenged on their prejudices” in an apparent comment on trans rights and women-only spaces.

Not a great lede – the waters are muddied already. The head of that rape crisis centre is a man, but nobody who didn’t already know that would realize the waters have been muddied. It’s not “her” organisation. I know we’re under strict orders to use the pronouns that match the lie, but if we do that we mislead the people we’re supposed to be informing.

Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman and former SNP parliamentary candidate, was appointed chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis in May, a job that was advertised as being reserved for a woman.

Which he’s not. Jobs that are reserved for women should not go to trans women, even if you believe that trans people should be obeyed and flattered and chucked under the chin. Trans women shouldn’t even try to get jobs that are reserved for women. Why is it that we’re supposed to give them everything they demand while we get nothing? Why don’t they have the basic decency to realize that they shouldn’t be grabbing jobs running rape crisis centers and that their “identities” aren’t what matter in that situation?

Some feminist campaigners claimed she had no gender recognition certificate and has not undergone gender reassignment surgery so is not legally entitled to be classed as a woman.

And even if he were legally entitled under some stupid set of stipulations he still shouldn’t be, because he shouldn’t have that job. It’s fucked up. It’s rapey.

Wadhwa has issued a statement.

It says that as if we were longing to hear more from him, rather than much much less. He probably wrote the tweet himself.

I am writing this because I want to make clear what I said on the Guilty Feminist Podcast, whilst I wish my language had been clearer, a few sentences in particular have been taken out of context. My input on the podcast is based on almost two decades of experience I have in working to tackle violence against women and support survivors of sexual violence.

But he’s still a man. He’s still a man who feels entitled to be CEO of a rape crisis shelter. Whatever decades of experience he may have he’s still a man, forcing himself on women.

Let me make this very clear, if a woman engages with our services, through any route, and she feels she is not comfortable with the support worker allocated to her, we will of course, prioritise that need and will do whatever we can to provide the right support – this is the very basis of a person-centred approach and is a foundation of service delivery in advocacy work and support services across a number of sectors.

But she will have to ask. We won’t just refrain from allocating a man to her, we will make it her problem, so that she will have that to deal with in addition to the rape.

Alongside this, it is also critical that we act as proactive bystanders and lead by example as an organisation dedicated to equality and human rights. If what we see/hear from someone is clearly prejudiced and we are not responding to their urgent support need it is also part of our role to provide a space to explore and challenge this, in as kind a way as possible.

And by “is clearly prejudiced” he means “is able to recognize a man when she sees one.” She sees a man, and tries to get away from him, and the staff explores and challenges this instead of providing the support she is there to find.

In order for us to create a safe space for survivors it also needs to be a safe space for staff and volunteers, where everyone feels valued, safe and respected.

Except women who want to be in a women-only shelter in the wake of being raped. They won’t feel valued, safe, and respected.

That must be a priority if we are to be an ethical service provider for all survivors using our service, as well as an employer, taking seriously our role in creating a fairer society; this would be the case for any prejudice experienced be it racism, classism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or transphobia.

That’s not even true. Ambulance crews don’t pause to try to re-educate the person on the stretcher on classism or homophobia. Fire crews don’t cut the hoses to re-educate the bigots whose house is in flames. Nurses don’t pause intubating a patient to explain trans doctrine.

I, the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre or the Rape Crisis movement in Scotland is not looking to re-educate survivors when they come in for the urgent, potentially life-saving support they may need – that would be inappropriate. What we can do, when they are ready and if they are interested, is to help them take part in wider discussions about how violence against women is a cause and a consequence of a deeply unequal and sexist society.

But he’s a man. We don’t want to hear it from him. He’s the wrong person to be telling women that. He shouldn’t even be there.

When I speak about sexual violence and domestic abuse, I speak from my experiences; as a migrant, as a woman of colour and as a trans woman – I am open about all of that, because being open about our experiences and being able to tell our own stories is one way that we can create a fairer society and fight back against the inequality that silences us.

There’s that ploy again – he gets to count himself twice, because he’s a woman of colour and a trans woman. He gets to count himself as more oppressed than mere women, because he’s a woman and a trans woman.

I am drawing a line under the podcast and in desperate hope that my words here are understood in full and with the compassion and integrity I am writing with.

So that’ll be zero then. You got it.

I was re-reading Richard Noll’s The Jung Cult this morning and there was this passage from a 1974 essay by Mircea Eliade that reminded me of some things.

What is more general is a rejection of Christian tradition in the name of achieving an individual and, by the same stroke, a collective renovatio. Even when these ideas are naïvely or even ludicrously expressed, there is always the tacit conviction that a way out of the chaos and meaninglessness of modern life exists and that this way out implies an initiation into, and consequently the revelation of, old and venerable secrets. It is primarily the attraction of a personal initiation that explains the craze for the occult. As is well known, Christianity rejected the mystery-religion type of secret initiation. The Christian ‘mystery’ was open to all; it was ‘proclaimed upon the housetops,’ and Gnostics were persecuted because of their secret rituals of initiation. In the contemporary occult explosion, the ‘initiation’ — however the participant may understand this term — has a capital function; it confers a new status on the adept; he feels that he is somehow ‘elected,’ singled out from the anonymous and lonely crowd.

It is primarily the attraction of a personal initiation…it confers a new status on the adept; he feels that he is somehow ‘elected,’ singled out from the anonymous and lonely crowd.

That. All too familiar, isn’t it. It’s that adolescent delusion that one is Special, Different, Interesting. Singled out from the boring conventional cis crowd.