It went from a day to a month to now a whole fucking season?
What is the 2 in LGBTQ2? Last I saw it was + but now it’s 2?
Anyway…this is a government thing. Not some hopped-up “gender fluid” loony but a government Something, complete with Twitter account that tells people to be respectful or else.
Women have never had a month, let alone a season. All women do is create all human beings, so they don’t matter enough to have more than one day.
Alison Phipps wrote a blog post a month ago to air her smug misogynist shite about “white women’s tears” again. Nothing novel, just the same trendy smearing and hissing, not to mention victim-blaming.
She starts with the murder of George Floyd and Amy Cooper’s calling the cops on Chris Cooper in Central Park, then announces that they’re connected.
These incidents are linked by more than just a moment in time. White women are deeply, and often deliberately, complicit with white supremacist violence, and our complicity usually takes the form of victimhood that appeals to the punitive power of the state. And although her allegation against Christian Cooper was false, Amy Cooper has something in common with mainstream feminist movements that coalesce around genuine victimisation and trauma, such as the recent viral iteration of #MeToo. The focus of these movements tends to be naming and shaming perpetrators and calling for institutional discipline or criminal punishment to get these ‘bad men.’
Oooops! She totally forgot to say how the incidents are linked. Even if she’s right that “White women are deeply, and often deliberately, complicit with white supremacist violence,” she forgot to say what that has to do with the murder of George Floyd – which would have been difficult since the answer is absolutely fucking nothing.
Sorry. I get heated. She really infuriates me with this glib destructive careerist garbage.
My book Me, Not You describes the political dynamics of mainstream white feminism in the core Anglosphere and parts of Europe. It makes a difficult and uncomfortable argument: that this movement, exemplified by #MeToo, not only centres bourgeois white women but also treats other groups as disposable.
It’s not an argument though, it’s just an assertion. She’s a bad writer and a bad thinker and she doesn’t have an argument.
She cites the protests in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everhard.
Yet mainstream demands following Everard’s murder promised more power to the carceral system – calls for the criminalisation of street harassment and for misogyny to become a hate crime.
The demands themselves were unsurprising, but that such carceral feminism persists even after a white woman has allegedly been murdered by a cop shows how deeply mainstream feminism is mired in white supremacy.
Women should just put up with it, I guess.
White women’s experiences of sexual violence enter a world in which ‘protecting white womanhood’ is really about protecting racial capitalism and white supremacy. Because of this, we claim protection that has always been predicated on Black death and the deaths of other marginalised people. Furthermore, although bourgeois white women are not usually subject to state violence, the same white men who purport to protect us from the Others do reserve the right to abuse and kill us themselves.
This is what I mean – there’s no argument there. It’s just saying.
And what it says has now made its way into Oxfam’s staff training. Brilliant.
An Oxfam staff training document says “privileged white women” are supporting the root causes of sexual violence by wanting “bad men” imprisoned.
Sexual violence is…the fault of women?
It seems to me we’ve been here before.
In the wake of sex scandals that have rocked the charity, Oxfam has produced guidance which states that: “Mainstream feminism centres on privileged white women and demands that ‘bad men’ be fired or imprisoned”.
Uh huh. It’s all rich bitches forcing men to rape them so that they can complain to the manager.
Accompanied by a cartoon of a crying white woman, it adds that this “legitimises criminal punishment, harming black and other marginalised people”.
Jesus. I’ve run out of sarcasm.
I can’t find the “training document.” I want to read the whole thing. A search turns up only the Telegraph article and shares of the Telegraph article.
Oxfam says it’s not their guidance and they just want to help staff understand the issues.
However, the charity was warned on Wednesday night that the document, compiled by its LGBT network and seen by The Telegraph, could breach equality laws as it suggests reporting rape is “contemptible”.
The four-week “learning journey” recommends that staff read Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism, a book by Alison Phipps, a professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex.
Oh that book. Sure enough, we have been here before. The feminism of people who hate and have contempt for women.
Summarising the book’s central premise, the Oxfam document says white feminists need to ask themselves whether they are causing harm when they fight sexual violence.
It then links to Prof Phipps’s Twitter account and a thread which summarises the main themes of the book, including: “White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetuate through white supremacy.”
This is why I loathe Alison Phipps.
Naomi Cunningham, a discrimination and employment law barrister, says the document may breach the Equality Act, which bans harassment in the workplace on the basis of sex.
I wonder if that will make Alison Phipps proud.
The training manual was written after the charity’s LGBT+ network wrote to the leadership team demanding that they publicly support trans people and suggested that any debate about rights was part of a “patriarchal and white supremacist narrative” used by the far right.
In other words men wrote to the leadership team demanding that they demonize women and order them not to report sexual violence, and accuse them of racism and white tears for good measure. Trans rights are human rights!!
The letter called for specific resources to be made available, adding: “To argue that trans-inclusivity would undermine the vital work we do for women and girls is not only transphobic, but also perpetuates the white saviour complex that assumes that we know best for the people we work with.”
And instead of telling them to fuck right off Oxfam said yes sir yes sir whatever you say sir, women are the worst.
The document produced in the wake of the complaint tells staff that protecting single-sex spaces for women has “contributed to transphobia and undermining of trans rights”.
It says the charity stands “firmly against” any attempt to exclude trans women, adding in an “important context note”: “Oxfam stands actively against any implication that the realization of trans rights and inclusion poses a threat to creating a safe environment for all.”
Now is it clear enough that “trans rights” mean the cancellation of women’s rights?
Ok when sports stars are saying it some people might actually listen.
Save Women’s Sport Australasia has penned an open letter to Minister for Sport Grant Robertson and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern over concerns around the “fairness and safety” of women competing against transgender athletes.
The letter, signed by some of New Zealand’s highest-profile athletes and administrators, has called for Sport New Zealand to urgently extend consultation on its draft document ‘Principles for the Participation of Transgender Players in Sport’ and is seeking the support of Robertson and Ardern to extend the period of consultation while widening its scope.
The letter starts with saying All the Right Things before getting down to it, because of course you have to.
“However, the inclusion of trans women athletes, specifically those who have transitioned after puberty, raises issues of fairness and safety in all sport. And in this context, we believe an important principle of women’s rights has been disregarded in the draft principles.”
It quite obviously has. Belief isn’t necessary.
The open letter reads like a who is who of New Zealand sport with five-time Olympian and gold medallist Barbara Kendall CNZM and MBE, former All Black Jeff Wilson, Professor David Gerrard who has been a New Zealand team doctor and Chef de Mission at the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games plus a Commonwealth Games gold medallist, Boston and New York City Marathon winner Allison Roe MBE, Double Olympic gold medallist Danyon Loader ONZM, former All Blacks, Olympics and Commonwealth Games team doctor Dr Deborah Robinson and two-time Ironman World Championships gold medallist Erin Baker MBE among the 43 names in support of the letter.
Another step.
H/t Rob
It’s interesting how often fundamentalism and exploitation get married and have kids. The NY Times last month:
Federal law enforcement agents descended on a massive temple in New Jersey on Tuesday after workers accused a prominent Hindu sect of luring them from India, confining them to the temple grounds and paying them the equivalent of about $1 an hour to perform grueling labor in near servitude.
Lawyers for the workers said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, a Hindu sect known as BAPS that has close ties to India’s ruling party and has built temples around the world, had exploited possibly hundreds of low-caste men in the yearslong construction project.
The workers, who lived in trailers hidden from view, had been promised jobs helping to build the temple in rural Robbinsville, N.J., with standard work hours and ample time off, according to the lawsuit, a wage claim filed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey. The majority are Dalit, the lowest rung in India’s caste system.
Of course they are, and that makes it easy for a fundamentalist Hindu sect to treat them like shit.
They were presented to immigration as skilled workers, but they were treated as…Dalits.
Lawyers for the men, however, said they did manual labor on the site, working nearly 13 hours a day lifting large stones, operating cranes and other heavy machinery, building roads and storm sewers, digging ditches and shoveling snow, all for the equivalent of about $450 per month. They were paid $50 in cash, with the rest deposited in accounts in India, the complaint said.
…
The lawsuit said the men’s passports had been confiscated, and they were confined to the fenced-in and guarded site, where they were forbidden to talk to visitors and religious volunteers. They subsisted on a bland diet of lentils and potatoes, and their pay was docked for minor violations, such as being seen without a helmet, according to the claim.
A diet of lentils and potatoes isn’t just bland, it’s also extremely low in nutrition. And what else? Cheap.
“They thought they would have a good job and see America. They didn’t think they would be treated like animals, or like machines that aren’t going to get sick,” said Swati Sawant, an immigration lawyer in New Jersey who is also Dalit and said she first learned of the men’s plight last year.
She said she secretly organized the temple workers and arranged legal teams to pursue both wage and immigration claims.
…
The organization has strong ties with Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party…
The organization also pledged the equivalent of about $290,000 to Mr. Modi’s most important election promise: building a temple in the city of Ayodhya, where a mosque had stood before Hindu devotees destroyed it in 1992. The destruction of the Babri Mosque set off waves of sectarian violence, and the construction of the temple in Ayodhya is a significant step in the quest by Mr. Modi and his party to shift India from its secular foundations toward a Hindu identity.
And towards an obliteration of Muslim identity, along with Sikh and Jain and so on (which is one reason secularism is so necessary).
Daniel Werner, a lawyer in the wage claim suit, said he believed this could be the first forced-labor case of its scale in the United States since dozens of Thai garment workers were discovered laboring in horrible conditions in El Monte, Calif. in 1995 — a landmark case that helped lead to the creation of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
Same old same old – squeeze the poor to make the rich richer.
Oh good, another “how about injecting bleach to kill the virus?” moment.
Welp, Keir Starmer just threw women under the bus.
At 2:22 he says Labour is committed to updating the GRA to introduce self-declaration for trans people.
Spared punishment for…saying women have vaginas:
A LAW student who was investigated by a Scottish university for saying women have vaginas and are not as strong as men has been cleared of any wrongdoing.
Lisa Keogh, 29, was investigated by Abertay University after classmates complained she had made “offensive” and “discriminatory” remarks at a lecture.
She had argued the difference in strength between the sexes meant it was not fair that women should have to compete against trans women in sport.
Which you’d think would be something everyone knew, and the reason women have their own teams and games and competitions in the first place, but you know…”offensive”…
Ms Keogh, who was supported by the SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC and the Free Speech Union, said she was delighted at the victory but saddened the episode took place.
She said she had been targeted in a “modern day witch hunt” because of her gender critical views and belief in sex-based rights, and accused Abertay of being “needlessly cruel” in dragging on an the investigation for two months during her final year exams.
She was targeted and she’s far from being the only one. This is the new Social Justice: organized persecution of women for saying that women are women and men are not women.
Keogh continues:
“No woman should face discrimination in the way I have because she believes in sex-based rights.
“I want to say a special thank you to the Free Speech Union for helping me through this stressful time, in particular Fraser Hudghton, the Case Management Director, who has been on hand at all hours to answer my calls and navigate me through this.
“I also want to say a massive thank you to the SNP MP Joanna Cherry who is someone who I look up to. The fact that she had my back throughout gave me the strength to carry on.
Ms Cherry added: “I’m pleased at this outcome. But Lisa should never have been put through this ordeal in the first place and the University should review its free speech and equality policies to make sure that future students are not subject to the stress of spurious complaints nor discriminated against, harassed or victimised for their beliefs.”
And that should go double for “beliefs” as fundamental as the “belief”(actually the knowledge) that men are not women.
Women who are academics can’t really rely on their union, because its secretary is Jo Grady, who…
He feels it in his very BONES.
“You don’t even have bones.”
Well that could change things.
Police forces have been threatened with legal action over their links to Stonewall, amid concerns the controversial charity’s transgender training is impacting their impartiality.
Campaigners have written to chief constables warning they will begin legal proceedings against any force that remains part of the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme beyond a “period of consideration”.
I wonder if Police Scotland is having second thoughts.
Some 250 public authorities, including about half of police forces in England and Wales, pay at least £2,500 a year for advice on gender-neutral facilities and pronouns, which leading barristers have said “misrepresents” the 2010 Equality Act.
It’s an odd thing when you think about it. Who are Stonewall to be giving this “advice”? They’re a campaign group, not a collection of legal experts. Campaign groups are a good thing, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily have a kind of expertise that police forces should be paying for.
I also wonder if any women’s group has ever had this kind of ability to tell the police what’s what.
Now in a letter to police chiefs, seen by The Telegraph, former constable Harry Miller has warned forces that their affiliation with Stonewall breaches police rules on political activity and association with groups that could create a conflict of interest.
That’s another way of saying the above. Stonewall aren’t experts but activists; why do cops get training from activists rather than experts? What’s the thinking here?
The Telegraph understands that two forces are currently investigating officers’ use of Twitter accounts to push Stonewall’s trans stance, including one tweet that said it had “reported” users’ comments deemed “hateful” towards trans and non-binary people.
Finally! We’ve been objecting to this pattern for months and months.
The pressure comes as the Ministry of Justice is leading an “exodus” of Government departments from Stonewall, with Justice Secretary Robert Buckland understood to be concerned about its “dubious” training and approach to free speech.
A Stonewall spokesperson said that “organisations come and go” from their Diversity Champions programme, but it is “continuing to grow” with 30 organisations joining in the past year.
They said they are “confident in our advice on the Equality Act” and “very proud” of their work with member companies.
But who made them the boss of anything? Are they accountable to anyone?
Karen Ingala Smith has a more detailed transcript of Benjamin Cohen’s disinformation about what Stonewall is advocating.
Justin Webb: Just on the point about abolishing legal provisions for single sex spaces, do you not accept that it is perfectly acceptable for women to campaign for those single sex spaces and to say that those who have changes sex should not be in them?
Benjamin Cohen…..[Evades question and talks about something else for a few moments] and goes on to say, over again, it’s a debate about trans issues without a single trans voice being heard
Justin Webb: Hang on, number one, you don’t know anything about me; number two, I asked you a question, would you answer it?
Benjamin Cohen: Sure but, I just, I’ve made a statement, is this a debate about trans issues with no trans voice?
Justin Webb: Yeah, you’ve made your statement, now could you answer the question?
Benjamin Cohen: You made the statement which is that the provisions around who gets access to single sex spaces has changed, that hasn’t changed, the Equality Act was passed in 2010, there’s been no changes to that
Justin Webb: Yeah, hang on, what I’m suggesting is that Stonewall would like to change it, and a lot of women are worried about
Benjamin Cohen: Sorry, you just claimed that but that’s not actually true. So, Stonewall supports self-ID (Justin Webb : Exactly) which is about, simply about paperwork, so you’ve been able to self-ID for practical purposes for the Equality Act, since 2010,
Justin Webb: But not for instance to go to a safe space for women, like a women’s refuge, those are protected aren’t they
Benjamin Cohen: (speaking over Justin Webb): yeah, and they continue to be protected.
Justin Webb: And does Stonewall …
Benjamin Cohen: Can you answer me a question, Justin, has Stonewall said that those spaces should be open to trans people, I don’t believe they have
Justin Webb: Well, exactly
Benjamin Cohen: this is the problem,
Justin Webb: But hang on, I think we agree on this
Benjamin Cohen: It’s such misinformation
Justin Webb: Hang on, I think we agree on this in that case because, is it the case, or is it not the case that Stonewall, is campaigning for those safe spaces not to be women only?
Benjamin Cohen: They aren’t campaigning for that, that’s just misinformation being spread by a homophobic and transphobic media, I’m afraid.
Karen then comments:
The thing is, Benjamin, you’re the one that’s not telling the truth here. The extract below shows that Stonewall are campaigning or did campaign for the removal of the protection of women’s single sex spaces. This is from Stonewall’s submission to Women & Equalities Select Committee Inquiry on Transgender Equality submitted on 27 August 2015. Stonewall’s recommendations included:
““A review of the Equality Act 2010 to include ‘gender identity’ rather than ‘gender reassignment’ as a protected characteristic and to remove exemptions, such as access to single-sex spaces”
She has the screenshot to prove it.
On Radio 4 this morning –
Three men talk about the way Stonewall’s conception of trans rights affects women’s rights.
At 6:35 Benjamin Cohen, CEO of Pink News, says emphatically that Stonewall is not campaigning for women’s safe spaces “not to be women-only.”
“They aren’t campaigning for that,” he says, “that’s just misinformation being spread by a homophobic and transphobic media.”
The hell it is.
Of course in the through the looking-glass world of trans dogma, what he said is true because transwomenarewomen. But in the real world where real women have to live and survive, trans women are men, and women have no way of knowing which ones are a threat, which is why women-only spaces are needed in the first place.
Another crack in the ice.
During the presidential campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the Democratic candidate, slammed his opponent, Donald J. Trump, for a highly unusual legal move: bringing in the Justice Department to represent him in a defamation lawsuit stemming from a decades-old rape allegation.
At one of their debates, Mr. Biden accused Mr. Trump of treating the Justice Department like his “own law firm” in the suit, filed against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll. “What’s that all about?” he sarcastically asked.
But now…his DoJ is defending Trump against Carroll.
But on Monday night, nearly eight months after Mr. Biden’s attack, his own Justice Department essentially adopted Mr. Trump’s position, arguing that he could not be sued for defamation because he had made the supposedly offending statements as part of his official duties as president.
In a brief filed with a federal appeals court in New York, the Justice Department acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s remarks about Ms. Carroll were “crude and disrespectful,” but the department also claimed that the Trump administration’s arguments were correct — a position that could lead to Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit being dismissed.
How can it be part of the official duties of a president to make defamatory remarks about a woman he sexually assaulted? I’m not seeing the duties part, or the official part. He was having a tantrum, and fending off a personal threat – that’s not his “official duties.” That’s personal.
I’m not the only one who thinks so, either.
last September, one month after a state judge issued a ruling that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump sitting for a deposition before the election, the attorney general, William P. Barr, stepped into the case. In a highly unusual move, Mr. Barr transferred the case to federal court and substituted the federal government for Mr. Trump as the defendant.
Federal law forbids government employees from being sued for defamation, meaning that if the move was successful, Ms. Carroll’s claim would be dismissed.
Mr. Barr’s move raised the question of whether Mr. Trump had in fact made his comments about Ms. Carroll as a government employee — a position that Ms. Carroll’s lawyers roundly rejected. “There is not a single person in the United States — not the president and not anyone else — whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted,” the lawyers said in a filing last year.
What I’m saying. Not official duties. Personal time; off the clock; extracurricular.
The brief filed on Monday night was the first time the Biden administration’s Justice Department, now led by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, weighed in on the issue. In the brief, department lawyers said that when Mr. Trump had denied raping Ms. Carroll, through the White House press office or in statements to reporters in the Oval Office and on the White House lawn, he was acting within the scope of his office.
No, it’s the other way around. The filthy sleazebag used that “office” to defend his own personal worthless hide. Defaming the woman he assaulted doesn’t become an official duty just because he does it inside the building.
Just two years after California celebrated the end of its last devastating drought, the state is facing another one. Snowpack has dwindled to nearly nothing, the state’s 1,500 reservoirs are at only 50% of their average levels, and federal and local agencies have begun to issue water restrictions.
Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a drought emergency in 41 of the state’s 58 counties. Meanwhile, temperatures are surging as the region braces for what is expected to be another record-breaking fire season, and scientists are sounding the alarm about the state’s readiness.
From the selfish point of view I’m dreading that fire season, because it makes the air poisonous up here in the north.
That’s no good.
Along with wildfire risks, short water supply is putting immense pressure on the state’s agricultural industry, which grows over a third of the country’s vegetables and supplies two-thirds of the fruits and nuts in the US. Already farmers are culling crops and fallowing fields in anticipation of water shortages. Karen Ross, California’s food and agriculture secretary, told the California Chamber of Commerce that she expected 500,000 acres would have to sit idle this year.
No good.
Oh good, now we’re going the “treat miscarriage as child murder” route.
In March, a woman miscarried in a Spokane hotel. Police investigated. They searched her room, told her they’d meet her at the hospital and found it suspicious when she did not show up. They filed a search warrant in hopes of finding her.
Considering the fetus her dependent, officers suspected that the woman could be guilty of criminal mistreatment of a child if she did not call 911 soon enough to potentially save her pregnancy, according to a warrant filed at the time.
A fetus is not a child. Abortion is still legal.
Sara Ainsworth, a Seattle attorney with national nonprofit IfWhenHow, which focuses on reproductive law, said she could not find any reason to suspect a crime in the warrant filed in Spokane County Superior Court.
“Under Washington law, everything about this is discriminatory and potentially violating of constitutional rights,” Ainsworth said.
…
The case arises as reproductive freedoms have been restricted in Republican-led Legislatures from Texas to Idaho, and with the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly poised to curtail or even overturn the abortion rights enshrined in the landmark Roe v. Wade case. While abortion remains legal in all 50 states, Ainsworth said under Washington’s Equal Rights Amendment, investigating pregnancy losses could be discriminatory as such investigations are necessarily biased against women, Ainsworth said.
…
On March 24, a woman in her early 20s miscarried in a hotel room in downtown Spokane. A 911 caller, unidentified in the warrant, told a dispatcher that the fetus was about five weeks along.
EMTs who arrived at the hotel room were all men and the miscarrying woman refused to let them in, asking for a female medic instead, according to the warrant. When the woman EMT arrived, she saw a dead fetus in the room’s toilet. She estimated the fetus to be about five months along, according to the warrant.
The EMT urged the bleeding woman to go to the hospital and the woman resisted before texting a friend who she said could drive her there, the warrant said.
In the meantime, three police officers arrived. According to the warrant, EMTs called police “due to the fact that they believed the female needed to get medical attention and that something needed to be done with the fetus which was still in the toilet.”
After knocking on the hotel room door to no answer, the three officers decided to enter the room to ensure “nobody was inside destroying evidence,” the warrant said.
Don’t call the police on a woman who’s had a miscarriage.
H/t takshak
Ah yes, this is very intelligent.
Yes indeed, feminism is just so old-fashioned, so yesterday, so uncool. The passage of time negates everything we knew and we have to start entirely over every…ten years? Thirty? You’ll notice her arithmetic isn’t great, since she thinks 2021 is “over 2 decades” past 1988. But anyway point is, if it’s one or two or three decades old it’s wrong. It’s wrong, it’s lame, it’s uncool. Those stupid women who kicked over the traces in 1968 and after were right then, but time passed and so they became wrong. Now it’s now, and we have to believe the New Truths, or be sneered at by Sally Hines.
What a fucking twerp she is.
Canada’s answer to Dylan Roof:
A 20-year-old man was charged Monday with four counts of murder and one count of attempted murder in a hit and run Sunday involving a pickup truck, in what London, Ont., police believe was a targeted attack on a Muslim family of five.
Evidence indicates it was premeditated.
The family members who died are:
The youngest, a 9-year-old boy, is in the hospital with serious injuries.
Police say that at 8:40 p.m. ET, the family was walking along Hyde Park Road and were waiting to cross the intersection, in northwest London, when the truck mounted the curb and struck them.
Horrible.
Via YNnB
Sonia Sodha’s piece on Stonewall has been much discussed. I had one problem with it, in the conclusion.
Two of Stonewall’s founders have accused the charity of losing its way. An independent review by a barrister into the unlawful no-platforming of two female academics found that Essex University’s policy on supporting trans staff, reviewed by Stonewall, misrepresented the law “as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than as it is”, to the detriment of women. And following the Equality and Human Rights Commission leaving Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme, the equalities minister, Liz Truss, has reportedly pushed for government departments to follow suit.
Stonewall pretends it’s all right-wingers who object, which is just another example of how shamelessly they bully feminist women and related critics.
Gender-critical feminists believe that in a patriarchal society women’s bodies and their role in sex and reproduction play a major role in their oppression. Gender identity – the feeling of being a man or a woman regardless of one’s biological sex – can therefore never wholly replace sex as a protected characteristic in equalities law and women have the right to organise on the basis of their sex and to access single-sex spaces.
Gender identity not only can’t wholly replace sex as a protected characteristic, it can’t partly replace it either. Sex as a protected characteristic must not be replaced at all, not even a little bit.
[M]y feminism has matured into the understanding that male violence is a more important tool of oppression in a patriarchal society than board appointments. In case you think I’m exaggerating, almost one in three women will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime, a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every four days in the UK and seven in 10 of us have been sexually harassed in public spaces.
I’m surprised that three out of ten women haven’t been sexually harassed in public spaces.
Women must be free to express the view that it is risky to allow men who self-identify as women to access female-only spaces as default. It’s not theoretical: abusive men go to great lengths to access female victims and we have never been able to rely on institutions such as the police and prisons to protect us. Karen White, a trans woman who committed indecent assault, gross indecency involving children and two rapes while a man, was placed in a women’s prison where she sexually assaulted female prisoners.
Shrugging this off as of no account is not the best way to convince us 1. that they’re women and 2. that they give a rat’s ass about our concerns.
By equating gender-critical views with racism, Stonewall is losing the opportunity to win the argument and build solidarity via compromise: we understand why some women want safeguards for certain single-sex spaces; can you see why in many other circumstances there’s no reason why trans women should be treated differently from those born female?
It depends on what you mean by “many other circumstances.” If you mean basically in private, among friends, and so on, then sure. If you mean in many parts of public life, then no. Same old same old. We’re still working hard to get a fraction of the time and attention and promotions and rewards that men get, so no, we don’t want to make that fraction even smaller by sharing it with men who call themselves women. No. We get to fight for our own rights just like everyone else.
Originally a comment by Sastra on Catching them early.
Kids are more likely to understand a wide spectrum of gender…
Kids are more likely to “understand” that if you put a dress on a Ken doll he becomes a girl. Children are notoriously sexist in that they learn what they think are rules about what the sexes can and can’t do and apply them strictly.
I read one of those “gender guides” aimed at the elementary grades — with the teacher’s notes — and the first few lessons were exemplary basic feminism. Boys can play with dolls and they’re still boys; girls can roughhouse and they’re still girls. Reject gender roles and assumptions! Teachers were warned how children are already prejudiced and judgmental about what makes a real girl or real boy. Let’s help them to be free to be themselves!
Then it took a sudden swing to “gender identity” and now kids were pure, uncontaminated, and completely trustworthy in knowing whether they’re a boy, girl, both, or neither. It’s not at all about stereotypes they’ve picked up culturally. It’s about knowing who you are, absent any of that. Let’s help them be free to be themselves!
If they do the first part, they’ve taken care to distance Gender Identity Theory from children being so rigid when it comes to sex and gender.
