In case the murder of Professor Rezaul Karim Siddique wasn’t enough, there was also the murder of a provincial Pakistani minister for minority affairs.

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN:  A provincial Pakistani minister for minority affairs was shot dead in his car by on Friday [by] men on motorbikes in the country’s restive northwest, officials said.

Sardar Soran Singh, who was a Sikh, had held one of several seats reserved for religious minorities in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial assembly.

“Gunmen riding on two motorbikes came in front of the car and started indiscriminate firing which killed the minister on the spot,” Khalid Hamadani, district police chief told Agence France Presse.

All gunmen all the time.

Meghan Murphy says no, Prince was not trans. Prince was a guy who defied gender stereotypes. Defying gender stereotypes ≠ trans.

As Prince is mourned by millions across the world, his life and artistry are rightly being embraced as unconventional and as boundary-pushing in many ways, including in terms of gender. But, whereas 10 or 20 years ago, a man like Prince would have been celebrated, in death, as someone who did not conform to gender norms, today he is instead being transed. And this is a problem.

Well, to be precise, he would have been celebrated for that by some and ridiculed or excoriated by others. It’s not as if defiance of gender stereotypes was universally celebrated 10 years ago. But I think she means celebrated, by those who celebrated him, as someone who did not conform to gender norms.

It’s not a problem, to be clear, because people who suffer from sex dysphoria or who don’t conform to the gender binary are a problem, but because we need to allow people to push past gender stereotypes without being forced out of their sex. It is not progressive to say that a male who does not act like a stereotypical man must actually be a woman — it is regressive.

Emphasis added.

If we start to say that anyone who refuses or isn’t able to perform gender in the way society teaches them to is “trans,” we assume that the gender binary is real — that a person who is big and tall and hairy and who acts aggressively or pursues sex with women is a man and a person who wears heels and dresses and is gentle and polite and is objectified by men is a woman. Anyone who strays from these norms is, then, proclaimed “trans,” leaving no room for the rest of us to exist outside of these stereotypes.

We need both options. People who want to live as the other sex should be able to do that, and be happy and unmolested doing so. People who want to exist outside the stereotypes without switching sex should be able to do that. Both options.

Let’s celebrate men like Prince and David Bowie and women like K.D. Lang and Patti Smith for refusing to fit into the stereotypical boxes patriarchal society laid out for them, not assume that those who rebel must, naturally, be the opposite gender or trans.

Yes let’s do that.

Yesterday Samantha Power visited the refugee camp in Yola, Nigeria for women and girls fleeing Boko Haram. Here’s one story from one refugee:

When the boy next door joined Boko Haram, Mummy Ibrahim knew she had to run.

For the past few months, her next door neighbor had been telling everyone in their village just outside of Maiduguri that he was going to force Mummy, a soft-spoken girl with large eyes, to be his bride.

And, she said, he had finally figured out the way to do it: by pledging allegiance to Boko Haram and then taking, by force, the girl he had watched grow up into a gorgeous 15-year-old.

This is what I’m always saying – religion is such a useful tool for men who want to treat women as livestock belonging to them. Boy next door wanted to fuck Mummy Ibrahim, so he joined a murderous religious group that would give him “permission” to do just that, never mind what Mummy Ibrahim thought about it.

Mummy fled. In the middle of the night, she and her family crept out of their house and ran. It took two days to get to the village of Wuba, where friends hid them for two weeks, and then another week to make it to this town, where the United Nations has set up a refugee camp populated primarily by the women and children Boko Haram has driven from their homes.

On Friday, as Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, toured the camp, she was confronted by hundreds of those women and girls, standing over coal pots, sitting on mats, playing with babies. Ms. Power, who has been touring the region most affected by Boko Haram this week, promised them that President Obama had not forgotten them, that the United States would not rest until all the thousands of women believed to have been kidnapped by Boko Haram have been freed.

The whole thing is just so damn heartbreaking.

There was another Mummy: Mummy Jabula, 16, standing at the outdoor kitchen and looking curiously at the delegation of Americans. Boko Haram militants killed her parents four months ago, in their village not far from Maiduguri, she said. Mummy Jabula, the oldest of her parents’ six children, had grabbed her little sister and her four younger brothers and fled.

“I am the mother now,” she said. Asked about her parents, she started to cry and said something in Hausa. A woman standing nearby translated: “It pains her heart,” she said. “She can’t talk anymore.”

…

A few miles down the road, Christiana Joel, 14, said she was at church for a children’s day in April 2015 when Boko Haram fighters attacked her village of Lassa, in Borno State. Her father hustled her and her eight brothers and sisters back to their house, told them to leave only when it started looking really bad, grabbed his gun and took off to fight the Boko Haram militants. When the children eventually bolted from their house, Christiana’s oldest brother, Levi, disappeared in the melee. She has not seen him since, and seemed overcome when she spoke of him. She said he was her favorite brother.

Homo homini lupus.

Paul Fidalgo and Michael De Dora wrote a piece for CNN the other day on the murders of atheists in Bangladesh. It’s good to see them on such a mainstream site.

An innocent young man is brutally hacked to death in the street by marauding thugs with machetes, and the government’s response is to effectively blame the victim. This is the outrageous and absurd situation in the supposed democratic state of Bangladesh, where a bloody campaign of terror is being waged against secularists and atheists who have criticized radical Islam. But rather than act to protect the rights and safety of its people, Bangladesh’s leaders are coddling the killers and chastising the dead.

…

One would expect in a civilized world to see the government stand up for the rights of its people and unify the country against this kind of violence based on religion. But that’s not what has happened. Rather than condemn the killers, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan scolded the victims, telling CNN: “The bloggers, they should control their writing. Our country is a secular state. … I want to say that people should be careful not to hurt anyone by writing anything — hurt any religion, any people’s beliefs, any religious leaders.”

This is only the latest shameful example of the Bangladesh government doing exactly what the terrorists want: to make people terrified that if they have something critical to say about religion, they could pay for it with their lives.

And lest we feel smug – the US and UK governments have done the same thing in the past, especially during the uproar over the Motoons. Both of them talked nonsense about respecting people’s cherished beliefs.

And now we have Nazimuddin Samad, a bright, promising young law student, brutally slaughtered in public for exercising his basic human rights to freedom of belief and expression. Appallingly, as Samad’s blood still stained the street, Home Minister Khan said that part of the investigation would be “to see whether he has written anything objectionable in his blogs.” This is not how a democratic state should respond to the killings of innocent civilians.

Since the beginning of this emergency, our organization, the Center for Inquiry, has been working with the U.S. State Department, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and other nongovernmental organizations to find ways to protect or bring to safety at least some of the secularists who fear for their lives, and urge the Bangladesh government to stand strong for human rights. We have also worked to see pressure placed on Bangladesh by the United Nations, and supported a U.S. House resolution introduced by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, that demands Bangladesh affirm its secular constitution, protect minorities, and prevent the growth of extremism.

A mosaic dating to 2,400 years ago was dug up in what was Antioch in Turkey in 2012.

AA Photo

The inscription translates as “Be cheerful, enjoy your life.”

Another one – except that this time the murdered person is not an atheist.

A university professor has been hacked to death in Bangladesh, in an attack police say is similar to killings of secular bloggers and atheists by suspected Islamist extremists.

AFM Rezaul Karim Siddique, 58, was a professor of English at Rajshahi University in the country’s north-west.

He was attacked with machetes as he left home to go to work.

So-called Islamic State militants say they killed him for “calling to atheism” in Bangladesh.

The claim was made by IS-linked Amaq Agency, cited by US-based SITE Intelligence Group which monitors jihadist groups.

But Siddique’s colleagues say he was not an atheist and did not write on controversial subjects. (In Bangladesh I suppose “controversial” means anything that will annoy religious fanatics.) Police think he was chosen for the machete treatment because “he was involved in cultural activities.” I’m guessing that anodyne phrase could apply to a huge number of people in Bangladesh. Siddique founded a music school and edited a literary magazine.

Hundreds of students at Rajshahi University are reported to have protested on campus against their teacher’s death and demanded the immediate arrest of the perpetrators.

Siddique is the fourth professor at the university to be have been killed in the past 12 years. It is not clear why they have been targeted and no culprits have been punished.

…

There have also been attacks on members of religious minorities including Shia, Sufi and Ahmadi Muslims, Christians and Hindus.

When in doubt, destroy everything.

Taslima spoke to the European Parliament on Wednesday.

I spoke at the European Parliament today about how freethinkers getting killed,& govt remains silent in Bangladesh.

Then it was lunch and discussion with the Human Rights Action Unit of the Parliament.

And a meeting with Elmar Brok, Chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs at the Parliament.

Tell them, Taslima.

If you’re planning a jaunt to Iran any time soon, you should plan to break its dress code. Lizzie Dearden in the Independent spells it out:

As more and more Western tourists visit Iran, foreign women are being urged to break the country’s strict Islamic dress code to “make a stand” about the restrictive laws.

…

[T]housands of Iranians have been risking punishment by taking off their hijabs (headscarves) in public and snapping photos as part of a defiant online campaign to counter the “oppressive” law.

Now, the founder of My Stealthy Freedom is urging Western tourists to join them in a show of solidarity.

Masih Alinejad, who left Iran in 2009 and now works as a journalist in New York, said non-Muslims should join the fight against compulsory dress codes.

“The Islamic Republic that demands even non-Muslims visiting Iran to wear the hijab,” she told The Independent. “When compulsory hijab affects all women, then all women should raise their voice.”

Ms Alinejad said she was inspired by the actions of an Air France cabin crew who refused to fly to Iran after being ordered to wear headscarves upon arrival in Tehran earlier this month.

Mind you, I’m a coward, so I’m glad I don’t have a trip to Iran planned. I’d be terrified of the morality police.

For Ms Alinejad, the restrictions imposed on women’s dress are a key part of the government’s “discriminatory laws” and should be opposed by Western politicians and diplomats visiting the country.

Iranian authorities have labelled her a heretic, whore and CIA operative for her activism but [she] has vowed to continue her fight for women’s rights.

I hereby brand the Iranian authorities fascists, women-haters, and poopyheads.

Have you ever been so open-minded that your brain fell off? #FacebookVSFreespeech @MaryamNamazie @CEMB_forum pic.twitter.com/jRwjJY6KLz

— Rayhana Sultan (@rayhana) April 22, 2016

In Mauritania –

An appeal court in the west African state of Mauritania has upheld the death sentence of a blogger accused of blasphemy, a judicial source told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

Cheikh Ould Mohamed Ould Mkheitir, who has also been named as Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed, was initially handed the death sentence in 2014 on charges of “apostasy”.

The appeal court on Thursday upheld the sentence but downgraded the charge from apostasy to the lesser charge of being an “infidel” after the blogger repented, the source said.

A land where the state tells you what to believe, and the penalty for refusal is death.

The accused, aged in his thirties, was arrested in 2014 after uploading an article onto the internet that authorities considered blasphemous.

The original announcement of the death penalty was met with public celebrations in two Mauritanian cities.

People can be so hateful.

“He wrote a post on a blog criticising people who use religion as a means of discrimination and injustice,” said Gaetan Mootoo, a west African specialist at Amnesty International.

But we can plainly see from this very story that there are no such people and that never happens.

From January, Eiynah of Nice Mangos talks to the CBC.

Pakistani-Canadian blogger Eiynah says there is an important group left out of these conversations: Muslim and ex-Muslim women who see misogyny and oppression in Islam. She argues those critiques of Islam are ignored by the Canadian left, and hijacked by the Canadian right to further anti-Muslim narratives.

Eiynah is a pseudonym. She has asked for anonymity because of the frequent threats she has received for her writing.

Many Ex-Muslims are pseudonymous for reasons of safety.

It’s a very nuanced point of view that you have, and you can see it in your own self-description: a “critic of Islam who loathes anti-Muslim bigots.” Walk us through that. 

Oh come on. Ima let Eiynah speak in just a sec, but come on – it’s not all that nuanced to think that two possibilities are not all there are. Just imagine, she is able to think of a third! Come on. Let’s not treat that as so nuanced and bizarre that most people can’t even conceive of it.

It’s something that’s hard for people to understand, because they automatically conflate criticism of an ideology sometimes with bigotry toward a people. And I think it’s terms like Islamophobia that actually confuse the matter more. When I talk about anti-Muslim bigotry, I mean specifically generalizing large groups of diverse people. Muslims are a very diverse group, and Islam is an idea. Just like any other idea, it should be open for debate, up for critique. I don’t think there is an issue with people criticizing Islam — there isn’t one with people criticizing Christianity and any other religion, so why is there this unique term for Islam the religion?

We know why it exists, but why it is so widely accepted is another story.

When you criticize misogyny and homophobia in Islam, how [d]o people on the Canadian and American left typically respond to that? 

They’re defensive, they deny, and then they lash out and accuse me of being a bigot. I’m a woman of Pakistani origin, and I’ve been called a white supremacist, an imperialist, a race betrayer, a textbook racist more times than I can tell you.

Why do you think that is? Where does that reaction come from? 

I hope it comes from a good place, where people are trying to protect a minority that they feel is persecuted — and it is, in a lot of ways — but in doing so they trample on the rights of minorities within that minority, like women, like the LGBT, like apostates and ex-Muslims, atheists who are called terrorists and killed for disbelieving.

Sadly, people can be both persecuted and persecutors. Parents who take their daughters out of school to marry them off to cousins may be persecuted by racists.

But do you ever worry that when you critique Islam, you could inadvertently end up reinforcing someone’s bigoted ideas about Muslim people? 

It does happen, but why should that be a reason for me to stay silent about my own oppression? It does happen. My work has been hijacked and published on right-wing websites without my permission. What I try to do is in each essay that I write, I will include a paragraph in detail about anti-Muslim bigotry and how it’s a big issue and how I do not agree with these bigots. I try to proof it like that against them hijacking, but if they still take my work there’s nothing I can do. I mean, then literally you can’t talk about any oppression if you worry about this…. You can always feed into someone’s bias, but that doesn’t mean you should stop talking about victims of oppression.

Eiynah’s one of the best. Nice Mangos is here.

The Times of India reports:

The Islamic State, notorious for its brutality, has reportedly executed 250 girls in northern Iraq for refusing to become sex slaves, according to a media report.

The girls had been ordered to accept temporary marriages to the terrorists and were murdered, sometimes alongside their families, for their refusal to be sex slaves in Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul.

ISIS began selecting women of Mosul and forced them into marrying its militants, calling it temporary marriage since it has taken control over Mosul, and the women who refused to submit to this practice would be executed, said Kurdish Democratic Party spokesman Said Mamuzini.

“At least 250 girls have so far been executed by IS for refusing to accept the practice of sexual jihad, and sometimes the families of the girls were also executed for rejecting to submit to IS’s request,” Mamuzini told London-based Kurdish news agency ‘AhlulBayt’.

It’s not “marriage” temporary or otherwise. It’s rape and slavery.

This is where the definition of marriage is important. It’s not whether it’s between people of the same sex or people of different sexes. It’s whether it’s on pain of death or not. If men with guns tell women they have to “marry” the men with guns or be killed, then that’s not marriage. It’s rape, enslavement, extortion, menacing, abduction, assault.

Another official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party Ghayas Surchi said that human rights were being widely violated in all IS-held territories, particularly the womens’ rights as they’re seen as commodities and have no choice in choosing their spouses.

Surchi said that women were not allowed to go out alone in Mosul and cannot choose their spouses.

Commodities have no minds and no rights.

An ad for a cab company in India:

Vox breathlessly tells us that an American dictionary has added two new Socially Approved words.

Big news for LGBTQ folks: On Wednesday, Merriam-Webster announced that it added the words “cisgender” and “genderqueer” to its unabridged dictionary.

What do those words mean? Here are Merriam-Webster’s definitions:

• Cisgender: of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth.
• Genderqueer: of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as solely male or female.

But what does “gender identity” mean?

I don’t call myself nonbinary or genderfluid or genderqueer, nor do I claim to be a trans man. On the other hand I do point out that I perhaps am in some sense nonbinary or genderfluid or genderqueer, but also that so are most people, or even all people, since nobody can fit all the stereotypes for any one gender 100 percent of the time.

But I don’t call myself a trans man. Is that all it take to be “cis”? If that’s all it takes, then I’m cis…but the trouble with that is that the way “cis” is used in discourse, that’s absolutely not all it takes. “Cis” is used in discourse to mean “conforming to one’s assigned gender” at best, and “totally fine with all the stereotypes about one’s assigned gender” at worst. Neither of those remotely applies to me…and again, that’s true of most people.

So what does “gender identity” mean? Does it mean just not calling yourself trans? Or is it much thicker than that, meaning a whole bunch of related things, not all of which are compatible with each other?

Usually, it means the second – and that’s the problem. I have no issue with agreeing that I don’t call myself trans anything, but I have a lot of issues with claims that I have a “gender identity” and that it can be meaningfully summed up with the word “woman.”

Vox goes on to draw a fatuous conclusion from the new definitions:

The additions reflect how society is expanding its discussions over gender identity, gender expression, and transgender issues: As conversations about gender broaden, the vocabulary used in these conversations is set to change, too.

I don’t think the conversations about gender do broaden, most of them; I think they narrow. I think way too many people are making a cult of “gender identity” and that that reverses the healthy trend set off by the return of feminism in the 1970s to make “gender identity” less important instead of more so.

Lionel Shriver experienced being female as an imposition as a child, in much the way I did and most or perhaps all women I know did.

But I was historically fortunate. By the time I entered university in 1974, a revolution was well under way. As I understood it, “women’s liberation” meant that the frilly cookie-cutter template of femininity had been chucked out. Being female was no longer defined in terms of skirts, high heels, and homemaking. Men and women were equal. Both sexes were just people. We had entered the post-gender world.

And then we turned around and went right back into Gender World, and to make it all the more excruciating, this time we did it in the delusion that it was the progressive thing to do. Well I didn’t, but much of the libertarian left did.

We have entered instead an oppressively gendered world, in which identity is more bound up in one’s sex than ever before. (Note: dictionary definitions regard gender and sex as interchangeable, and I will, too.) As Jemima Lewis wrote in the Daily Telegraph in March: “You can be agender, bi-gender, cisgender, demigender, graygender, intergender, genderless, genderqueer or third gender—but by God, you will accept a label.” The gay and lesbian world having gone so mainstream as to become a big bore, western media has moved on to an enthrallment with trans-genderism bizarrely out of proportion to the statistical rarity of true gender dysphoria—though children and people generally being so suggestible, the condition will doubtless grow more common. Facebook has extended its gender options beyond the 71 it reached a year ago (thrillingly, two options in this dizzying smorgasbord of self-definition are “Man” and “Woman”). Users are now allowed to infinitely customise their profiles. As the Facebook Diversity Team published, “Now, if you do not identify with the pre-populated list of gender identities, you are able to add your own. As before, you can add up to 10 gender terms…”

I was a tomboy as a kid, and scrabbled in the dirt with my brothers playing with model cars and making toy trains crash spectacularly from a height. I shunned Barbies and detested baby dolls. I reviled dresses, spurning lace and flounces for jeans and flannel shirts. At 15, I changed my name from Margaret to Lionel. Were I to have grown up 50, 60 years later, it’s entirely possible that my parents would have taken me to see a therapist and put me on hormone therapy.

I’m glad they didn’t. Not because being a woman is so swell, but because being either a woman or a man doesn’t matter that much to me. I certainly experience myself as female in relation to other people. But alone in a room, falling asleep, hiking by myself in the woods, writing at my computer, thinking—I do not experience myself first and foremost as a woman. I do not walk around all day contemplating labias and breasts and ovaries, much less determining to get my nails done or to make an appointment for highlights. For me, my very self has no gender. While obviously I can only testify to my own experience of being a person—to my knowledge, I’ve only been this one—I cannot imagine that I alone enjoy such a self-perception. If selfhood is real and not a neurological illusion, it transcends gender.

That describes my experience too – but other people have a different experience. For some people, their sex does feel like a core aspect of the self. But then our whole sense of the self is riddled with illusions, especially illusions of continuity. The illusions are useful, but they’re not so useful that they make self-obsession a good thing.