No, let’s not remember not to do that.

Abortion is trending right now and we love it! But, let's remember not to use gendered language when talking about it. Abortion bans affect everyone who can get pregnant–not just cis women! pic.twitter.com/DJLzEmP18e

— URGE (@URGE_org) May 17, 2019

Abortion is “gendered” i.e. sex-based. If men needed abortions they would be easy to get.

Also, seriously, fuck all the way off with that idiotic slogan.

We won’t stop fighting. #StopTheBans pic.twitter.com/nMv91SWI3t

— URGE (@URGE_org) May 17, 2019

Why illustrate a “keep fighting for abortion rights” tweet with a poster screaming that abortion is not “just” a “cissue”? Why post a a “keep fighting for abortion rights” tweet with an image that insults and excludes women, the class of people who need abortion rights?

The sheer cluelessness can be jaw-dropping.

The Guardian has a piece by a trans woman about another trans woman’s voice training:

But a different voice is not just a luxury, it’s also a means of protection. For trans women, voice is often times the most significant indicator of their transness to the outside world. In 2018, LGBTQ advocates documented at least 26 homicides of trans people in the United States. Two murders of trans women have already been reported in 2019. For trans women, achieving a feminine voice can serve as a cloak of protection from bias and bigotry.

And how many murders of women were there in 2018?

I didn’t find stats for 2018 but 2016 will do:

More than 1,800 women were murdered by men in 2016 and the most common weapon used was a gun, according to the new Violence Policy Center (VPC) study When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2016 Homicide Data.

It appears that for those women a feminine voice did not serve as a cloak of protection. Maybe they all had particularly shrill feminine voices?

Then the author shifted to the personal note.

Throughout my own transition, I’ve often wondered whether my voice, which is deeper than that of the typical cisgender woman, diminished my value as a woman. Hormones and surgical alterations had feminized my exterior, however, my voice had not changed and was a persistent source of frustration and angst for me. At times, I wished for nothing more than a voice that was considered “pretty” and “passable”, wanting to change every aspect of my identity in order to live up to what society expects women to be: submissive, subdued, sensual and feminine.

If only all women would work harder to be more submissive and subdued.

A couple of comments from fans of that Facebook post about families giving birth:

• I will never understand people who are offended by inclusivity. Saying “birthing individuals” takes nothing away from cis women and adds a lot for trans men. Thank you for being inclusive with your language!
• Why can’t people understand that including everyone isn’t erasing anyone?

So “All Lives Matter” takes nothing away from black people and adds a lot for white people? No. The “All” replacing “Black” is there for the explicit purpose of erasing the “Black” part and the injustice BLM is campaigning against.  Woke people understand that without the slightest struggle, don’t they, yet they deny it angrily when the word that’s erased is “women.” It’s not true that it takes nothing away from women to stop naming them when talking about subjects that concern them and indeed are at the core of why they are a subordinated group in the first place.

The struggle to be named, the struggle against being erased, the struggle to be remembered, has always been central to feminism. Women have been and are treated as afterthoughts, second-best, marginal, out of sight, unimportant, insignificant. Not being named is crucial to that treatment, and being named is crucial to ending it. That’s what it fucking takes away from us.

A retired general talks about why Trump’s possible plan to pardon a list of people convicted or accused of war crimes is such a horrendous idea.

[E]ach soldier, sailor, airman or Marine undergoes extensive training regarding rules of engagement, the ethics of the military profession, and the law of land warfare. That training is usually repeated within units every year of the service-members’ enlistment, and that training is refreshed prior to deploying to combat and is reinforced by unit leaders during combat operations.

That’s because commanders — the ones ultimately responsible for good order, discipline and adherence to professional military standards — know, as difficult as it may sound, they must ensure and apply a moral boundary and a moral approach to the most immoral of situations: that is, the controlled application of violence directed toward the enemy.

People who have access to lethal force have to be rigorously trained how not to run amok because they have access to lethal force. You could call it the Colonel Jessup problem.

Gangs and terrorists often kill haphazardly or wantonly. Those who belong to these kinds of organizations are not constrained by laws and rules of societal conduct, and that is why the actions are so abhorrent.

But a professional military force, representing a republic, must adhere to regulations, is required to maintain discipline under the toughest conditions, and the members must be cognizant of repercussion for violation of legal and professional standards. The training of the force is reinforced through the supervision and control of its commanders to ensure this happens.

And it doesn’t always work, to put it mildly. War crimes are a thing because training doesn’t always succeed at preventing them.

On several occasions, while serving as a general officer who had the authority to convene court martial proceedings, I had to charge individuals with violations of the rules of land warfare or the failure to uphold professional standards. On a few of those occasions, I agonized over my decisions because I knew the battlefield conditions were tough and confusing and the individual soldiers were subjected to extreme emotion and passion. But in those cases, when doing my duty, I was always confident in the military justice system to provide excellent legal representation and a fair trial or hearing.

It’s difficult. Punishment itself is a dubious concept, and it seems especially worrisome to apply it to people who were under a kind of stress that civilians can’t really imagine, but it won’t do to shrug off war crimes. At any rate the solution is not for an ignorant mob boss to pardon them as a Fuck You to libbruls.

A Facebook post by Childbirth International:

Birth trauma is becoming more widely discussed and parents are opening up about their experiences in pregnancy, labour, birth, and beyond. Doulas can be incredibly valuable as an addition to a family’s birth team to guide the family in making informed decisions and sharing valuable skills to help each individual advocate for their goals and needs.

With Childbirth International you can train as a birth doula and trauma-informed professional concurrently with our completely flexible, online courses.

Notice anything…peculiar?

Of course you do. The words “woman” and “mother” are carefully, awkwardly, painfully absent. We get parents opening up about their experiences in pregnancy and labour, as if both parents had such experiences. We get a family’s birth team, as if the family gave birth. We get individual, as if the word “woman” were plutonium.

A woman asks

Do these courses cover Developmental Trauma caused to the infant?

Childbirth International replies

At this time the Trauma-Informed Professional course is focused more on the trauma experienced by the birthing parent and their partner, as well as the vicarious trauma experienced by birth and allied professionals working in environments that are not trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive.

There are a lot of enthusiastic comments about the “inclusive language” and a lot of confusing replies to comments that are clearly no longer there – comments from those pesky women who keep trying to point out that erasing women (from pregnancy and childbirth ffs!) is not actually “inclusive” at all.

The stupid is falling on everything like ash from the Mount Saint Helens eruption.

The war on women escalates.

A European organization that provides doctor-prescribed abortion pills by mail is under order by the US Food and Drug Administration to stop deliveries.

The federal agency sent a warning letter to Aid Access this month requesting that it “immediately cease causing the introduction of these violative drugs into U.S. Commerce.”

“Violative” is not a word.

“The sale of misbranded and unapproved new drugs poses an inherent risk to consumers who purchase those products,” the letter says. “Drugs that have circumvented regulatory safeguards may be contaminated; counterfeit, contain varying amounts of active ingredients, or contain different ingredients altogether.”

Translation: the drugs may do what they’re supposed to do and we have orders to put a stop to that.

Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, founder of Aid Access, did not respond to a request for comment on the new letter. But last fall, soon after her work went public, she said that safety concerns about Aid Access and the medications it prescribes were “totally unfounded.” She insisted that everything she does “is according to the law” and that the FDA’s restrictive handling of abortion medication is “based on politics, not science.”

What politics? The politics of making sure women are not free to define their own lives.

In a one-month period in 2017, research published last year showed that there were nearly 210,000 US Google searches for information about self-abortion. This indicates a demand for alternatives, perhaps driven by barriers to clinic access due to financial hardship, geographic distance, fear of being publicly shamed or other reasons.

Ya think?

According to the FDA, of the 3.4 million patients who’d taken mifepristone to medically terminate their pregnancies from when the agency approved it in 2000 through December 2017, 22 died: an average of 1 in about 155,000 women. Meanwhile, calculations from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that in 2016, 1 in 5,600 women died as a result of their pregnancies.

Gee. It’s almost as if pregnancy is more dangerous than taking the abortion pill.

But never mind that, that’s not the point. The point is to keep women enslaved.

We need this.

https://twitter.com/cctv_idiots/status/1130165583616577536

This time we have to start with the title, whether a sub chose it or not.

Trans women are victims of misogyny, too – and all feminists must recognize this

No. There is no such “must.” Trans women are male people, and there is no “must” that commands feminists to extend their feminism to men. No. All trans activists must stop trying to bully feminist women into changing the subject to men. No.

The subtitle is also bad.

Some feminists claim misogyny targets only those who have female sex features (ovaries, vaginas and uteruses). We should be alarmed by this view.

No. We should be alarmed by the spectacle of people telling us men can be women, and the Guardian publishing them.

[S]ome feminists claim that misogyny targets only those who have female sex features ( such as ovaries, vaginas and uteruses). For these feminists – sometimes called “trans-exclusionary” feminists – trans women’s interests are none of their concern. Feminism, they say, is for people who are victims of misogyny, and anyone without female sex features cannot be a victim of misogyny.

We should be alarmed by these views. Feminism’s history displays a pattern of (mostly white, non-disabled and financially stable) women deploying claims about difference to justify ignoring the needs of women of color, disabled women and working-class women. The exclusion of trans women risks becoming the latest manifestation of this terrible pattern.

No it doesn’t. That’s a crude caricature. It’s fair to say that many feminists have focused on women like themselves and overlooked women less like themselves, and thus that feminists who had better access to the media thanks to their class and race didn’t always do a good job of remembering to use that access to include women of color, disabled women, working-class women, lesbians, immigrants, and so on. It’s not fair to say that those feminists systematically argued in favor of “ignoring the needs of women of color, disabled women and working-class women.”

It’s true that feminism now includes explicit arguments justifying claims that men are not women, but that’s radically different from mythical arguments justifying claims that working class women are not women or that women of color are not women. I don’t believe that anyone ever argued those last two items, while some insubordinate feminists do argue the first one. But what are we supposed to do? Working class women and women of color and immigrant women and lesbians are in fact women, but trans women are men who “identify as” women. There’s a great gulf between the two sets.

I do think it’s true that misogyny is part of why trans women are subject to high levels of violence (if not as high as the wilder claims suggest). I also think all this could have gone differently, but I differ from Robin Demroff in thinking that misogyny is a huge part of why it didn’t. To spell it out, I think way too many trans women are themselves intensely misogynist, and that’s why the whole “inclusion” thing hasn’t worked out.

Ray Blanchard talks to the National Review:

Kearns: What do we mean by “gender identity”?

Blanchard: What do I mean by it?

Kearns: Yes. Let’s start with that.

Blanchard: Well, back in the days when I was writing a lot on that topic, which is quite a while ago now, I tended to avoid the phrase “gender identity” because I think that it’s a trivial concept when it’s applied to normal people. I mean normal men and normal woman know what sex they are, and they respond to that automatically, like when looking for a washroom. But I think it’s only at very unusual moments that a normal man or woman has a conscious awareness of “I’m a woman” or “I’m a man,” and this is often a highly emotional situation.

Just as we don’t normally have a conscious awareness of “I’m bipedal” or “I’m a primate” or “I can read.” We take a lot of stuff for granted, and we don’t generally obsess over it. This is one of the places we part company with trans people: we don’t want to obsess over it, we want to obsess over things that are more interesting. Life is short, time is limited, we don’t want to waste huge chunks of it hanging sparkly ornaments on our Gender Identity.

So, I don’t find the concept of “gender identity” useful for normal people, and the concept of cross-gender identity is really not a normal gender identity which has found itself lodged in the wrong body. Cross-gender identity is a constant preoccupation with, and unhappiness about, the individual’s gender. So, I guess you could say I believe in cross-gender identity, but I don’t much believe in gender identity.

Does any of that sound political? No. That could be why it’s such an awkward fit as a branch of left-wing thought.

From a Fresh Air interview with the novelist Stephen McCauley:

GROSS: The first time we talked in 1996, we talked about how one of your characters – your main character – always felt like he was either too young and then he felt like he was too old. And he never felt like he was the right age. And you talked about how when you started teaching, you felt like you were too young to be an authority figure. And then at some point, you felt like you were too old in the sense that you had kind of bypassed the common reference points that you used to have with your students. Where are you now?

MCCAULEY: I’m at the I-don’t-care phase, you know, which is kind of a great phase to be in. I mean, I feel as if I actually feel – I mean, Terry, I hate to be so positive, but I feel as if I do have something to say to students. And I think in the same way that, you know, I stopped trying to be Tolstoy or Flaubert, whoever – that, as a teacher, I just feel like, OK, I have something to offer. And I’m going to offer it in a very authentic and – way that is true to me. And I don’t worry about that kind of attitude quite so much.

GROSS: So you came out in the 1970s, when you were in your late teens.

MCCAULEY: Yes.

GROSS: And there are so many issues relating to, like, sexual orientation and gender identity that have changed over the years in terms of how they’re expressed and how people identify themselves. And you’re seeing that not just as, like, a person in the world but also as a professor at a university. And having been at universities for years, you’ve seen, like, you know, generations of students come and go and define themselves in different ways.

There’s a character in your new book, who’s a college student, who goes by the name D – the letter D – and wants to be referred to as the gender-neutral they instead of he or she. That’s a relatively new phenomenon – and, you know, the idea of, like, gender-neutral names and gender-neutral identity, and I’m wondering how you’re processing that.

I think the proliferation of “likes” in that passage hints at a certain hesitancy in asking the question. They both sounded a bit walking-on-eggs in this part.

MCCAULEY: That’s a really good question. Its a really big question right now in academia, especially…

GROSS: I know.

She interjected that quickly and with emphasis. “I know.” In other words: “it’s a fucking minefield, isn’t it.”

MCCAULEY: Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, for me as a teacher, I am really happy to call my students whatever pronouns they want to be called by. I had a student recently who wanted to be called it. And I said, OK, I’ll try it, you know? And, you know, whatever makes people feel accepted and seen the way they want to be seen is fine with me.

Ok I’m gonna interrupt right there. I don’t think it should be fine with him; I don’t think it should be fine with anyone. It’s probably impossible for academics to say that now without seeming like sadistic monsters and without being immediately added to Jordan Peterson’s army, which no sane person could want. But I don’t think it’s all that fine, and I wish people had pushed back more from the beginning. Why don’t I think it’s fine? Because it’s asking too much extra attention from the teacher, for an exceptionally silly and trivial reason. That’s not what teachers are there for. Attention from the teacher should be around academic stuff, not personal feelings of being special.

And that’s another reason – the narcissism. Students shouldn’t be encouraged, much less celebrated, for maximizing their narcissism. Narcissism is bad, and everyone should hate it.

And one more reason: it’s too much load on the memory to expect teachers to remember a lot of special pronouns. Pronouns exist for convenience, and demanding other people use bespoke ones for you and you alone is making them the very opposite of convenient.

Narcissism is the bad thing about being young, probably the worst thing. It’s a mistake to valorize it.

At the same time, I find it a little bit confusing sometimes when people talk about the binary – the gender binary – because it seems to me – my experience of coming out in the ’70s was that the joy really of coming out as gay was that you didn’t have to think in terms of strict male and female roles – that you could define yourself as a man in any way you wanted to. And I never had any interests that were particularly traditional in terms of masculinity.

And when I began reading particularly feminist writers like Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, it was very liberating. It was like, well, you can define yourself as a man and still be a man but have the interests that you want in, you know, 1920’s music instead of rock ’n’ roll or whatever it happens to be. And I guess my – the students that I’m seeing now take a different approach to that where they are embracing it more as being gender-neutral. And so I’m trying to understand it more and be sympathetic to it.

That last sentence sounds as if it came out of the mouth of a hostage. It contradicts what he just said, and he was right the first time. Feminism – the best feminism – has been chipping away at the gender binary for decades, and the trans-enby-mypronouns bullshit is dragging us backward.

Catherine Bennett notes an interesting juxtaposition.

In terms of knowing the enemy, much of it, in the US, will certainly resemble the Alabama misogynists – the 25 white, male, no longer young Republicans who have just stripped half their state’s population of reproductive rights. Photographs have been generously distributed. But, as the men would probably be the first to admit, they couldn’t have ushered in a generation or more of unwanted children without assistance from at least two women combatants, Terri Collins and the state governor, Kay Ivey.

…

Signing the ban into law, Ivey celebrated “a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious & that every life is a sacred gift from God”. Give or take, as they appreciate on Alabama’s death row.

Hours after criminalising abortion, Ivey ruled that the life of a convicted murderer, Michael Samra, was not sufficiently precious for her to feel like saving it. He was killed by lethal injection, with witnesses to testify that this particular sacred gift from God had been returned dead, with the governor’s compliments.

By “every life” Ivey meant…um…give me a minute here…

“Drink bleach” is a version of “drop dead” or “fuck off”: it’s not a “miracle cure,” or a humdrum ordinary medical cure either. Bleach is not good to ingest. It’s toxic.

But that doesn’t stop monsters from peddling it as a miracle cure:

An American pastor from New Jersey backed by a British former clairvoyant is running a network that gives up to 50,000 Ugandans a “miracle cure” made from industrial bleach, claiming drinking the toxic fluid eradicates cancer, HIV/Aids, malaria and most other diseases.

(A former clairvoyant? He used to be able to see magical stuff that no one else can see but then lost the knack?)

The network, led by pastor Robert Baldwin and part-funded by Sam Little from Arlesey in Bedfordshire, is one of the most extensive efforts yet to distribute the “miracle cure” known as MMS, or “miracle mineral solution”. The Guardian has learned that poor Ugandans, including infants as young as 14 months old, are being given chlorine dioxide, a product that has no known health benefit and can be extremely dangerous.

Baldwin, 52, is importing bulk shipments of the components of MMS, sodium chlorite and citric acid, into Uganda from China. The two chemicals are mixed to produce chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach used in the textile industry.

Bleach can do you in if you even inhale too much of it from the air; ingesting it cannot possibly be safe. Bleach can actually dissolve cloth, so what would it do to GI tracts? Nothing good.

Baldwin, 52, is importing bulk shipments of the components of MMS, sodium chlorite and citric acid, into Uganda from China. The two chemicals are mixed to produce chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach used in the textile industry.

The American pastor has “trained” about 1,200 clerics in Uganda on administering the “miracle cure” and each in turn uses it to treat about 50 congregants, usually after Sunday service. As an inducement, Baldwin is offering smartphones to those clerics who are especially “committed” to spreading the bleach cure.

He admitted to an anti-quack activist pretending to be a journalist that he does it all covertly.

“We don’t want to draw any attention,” he said during the call, a recording of which has been heard by the Guardian. “When you draw attention to MMS you run the risk of getting in trouble with the government or drug companies. You have to do it low key. That’s why I set it up through the church.”

He added that as a further precaution he uses euphemisms on Facebook, where he raises money through online donations. “I don’t call it MMS, I call it ‘healing water’, to protect myself. They are very sophisticated. Facebook has algorithms that can recognize ‘MMS’.”

Baldwin, who trained as a student nurse and is understood to have no other medical expertise, said he chose Uganda because it was a poor country with weak regulation. Speaking from New Jersey, where he is based, he told O’Leary: “America and Europe have much stricter laws so you are not as free to treat people because it is so controlled by the FDA. That’s why I work in developing countries.”

Ah yes, we’ve been there before. That’s why the Tuskegee experiment was performed there and not at Harvard; that’s why payday loan companies and for-profit universities market to poor people not rich people; that’s why Europeans felt quite entitled to grab chunks of Africa as if they were wild berries there for the taking. “We can’t poison Americans and Europeans but we can poison Ugandans so let’s get right on that.”

Asked how babies and children were treated with MMS, he said the dose was reduced by half. “Little tiny infants can take a small amount, they will spit it out. It causes no harm – they just get diarrhea.”

Diarrhea kills. Diarrhea can kill an infant fast.

The Uganda ministry of health was alarmed to hear about the MMS trials, saying it had no information about chlorine dioxide being tested in Ugandan hospitals. Emmanuel Ainebyoona, a spokesman for the ministry, said a government investigation had been initiated.

Let’s hope so.

Where do we draw the line?

When Mary Gregory filled out the registration form to compete in a local weightlifting event, she checked the box that read “female” without hesitation.

“I mean, that’s my gender,” she said “I didn’t even think about it. That’s who I am.”

If any eyebrows were raised, Gregory didn’t notice, and on April 27, after months of training, she strode onto the platform at the Best Western hotel just east of Charlottesville and wowed the spectators and fellow powerlifters in attendance. That night she posted a picture on Instagram of herself holding a trophy, telling her 120 followers about the records she set for her age and weight class in the 100% Raw Powerlifting Federation, which organized the day’s competition.

“What a day, 9 for 9!” she posted. “Masters world squat record, open world bench record, masters world dl record, and masters world total record! Still processing …”

So were the other competitors, I daresay.

But just a couple of days later Gregory was stripped of all the titles.

“She put down female. Clearly, she’s not a female,” said Paul Bossi, 100% Raw Powerlifting Federation’s president. “Not biologically anyways.

“In our rules, we go by biological,” he said. “According to the rules, she can only lift in the men’s division. … I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings but I have to follow the rules.”

He said Gregory never volunteered that she was transgender and event organizers didn’t confirm she’d competed in the wrong category until a post-match drug test was administered.

And by the way when it comes to hurt feelings…what about the feelings of the other competitors?

“We could’ve rectified a lot of this prior had we known,” Bossi said. “In a way, we felt like we were duped.”

Gregory, 44, says she never misled anyone. Two weeks later, she is still hurt and angry, as the larger sports world continues to wrestle with defining and imposing gender classifications, finding a balance for competition that’s both fair and inclusive.

Hurt and angry because prevented from cheating women out of prizes – that is one narcissistic entitled dude.

“I felt like they were invalidating my gender and my identity,” said Gregory, who began hormone replacement treatment a year ago and feels she should be allowed to compete alongside any other female.

Why does Gregor think his “gender” and his “identity” are more important than the other competitors’ interest in having a fair contest? Why does he think it’s so important that other people “validate” his gender and his identity? (The answer probably has to do with the narcissism and entitlement; see also male socialization.)

Jeffrey Toobin reminds us to be outraged:

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called President Trump’s cries of “TREASON” on Friday morning “reckless and irresponsible,” adding that it’s yet another norm the President has broken.

“And treason is a crime for which death is a potential penalty,” Toobin said on CNN’s “New Day.” “It is so reckless and irresponsible to talk that way. One of the things that this president has done has violated so many norms.”

“It’s not illegal to say what he said, but the idea of a president accusing people of any crime — remember, he accused  Michael Cohen’s in-laws of crimes. A president, who is the head of the Justice Department, the head of the FBI, accusing people of crimes, much less crimes punishable by the death penalty, is really a grotesque abuse of power,” he added. “It’s gone on for so long now, that we’re kind of, oh, well, you know, it’s just another tweet. But it is worth pausing to recognize how reckless that is.”

It is. It always is.

Wait.

Discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women, including trans women, and move beyond outdated, exclusionary understandings of feminism. #NoTERFsonourTurf” [4/4]

— Liberation at EdUni (@EdUniLiberation) May 7, 2019

Discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women and “TERFs” must be kept out. So discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women but not the women who disagree that men can be women. So discussions on women’s rights must include men who say they are women and the women who love them but not women who refuse to agree that men who don’t “identify as” men are therefore women. So ALL women but not ALL women. Mkay.

H/t Holly

https://twitter.com/aytchellesse/status/1129408007564140544