Editing to add: People tweeted at me to tell me Julian Vigo is a woman, so I’m correcting.

Julian Vigo’s piece on online horribleness is rather diffuse and overlong, but it makes good points.

She starts with Jesse Singal’s article in New York mag “How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired” and the Twitter abuse he got after it appeared.

And no matter where you stand on the subject of transgenderism and children — a very controversial subject to be certain — the conscious misrepresentations of Singal’s meticulously researched 11,000 word article are as denigrative as they are exploitative of a social media that allows for critique to pass through 140 characters.

You see what I mean about diffuse: that’s not the best wording I’ve ever seen. But we get her drift.

After several years of watching a series of attacks on people who write coherent and considerate pieces on gender, I have grown accustomed to the almost textbook responses to attentive criticism and water-tight journalism: from the fabrication of outright slander, claiming ideas that are in complete contradistinction to what the author has written, insinuating that the reader’s PTSD has been triggered, accusing one’s interlocutor of being wealthy and white (even when this is not the case), to charging those who do not follow a specific belief system are complicit with the murder — even genocide — of transgender persons.

Or not even complicit – just plain commit it. One unhinged rhetorician (that I know of; maybe there were others I didn’t see) said online that I have trans people’s blood on my hands. Really said that.

But critiquing theory is not the only object of silencing around transgender politics, for it would seem that anyone who is not on board with Caitlyn Jenner’s courage and beauty must automatically be a transphobe. It becomes painfully clear that a vast majority of Singal’s detractors had not even read his article and instead moved to troll the Twitter sphere often writing .@jessesingal with the full stop which guarantees that the harassing tweets will be seen by all of Singal’s followers on Twitter…

No, it doesn’t guarantee that; far from it. I certainly don’t see everything that’s tweeted that way to everyone I follow – that would be thousands of tweets every day, and I spend very little time on Twitter. It guarantees that the harassing tweets will be in their feed, that’s all. But anyway, the point is that it’s an extra level of bullying, and I agree with that.

…often writing .@jessesingal with the full stop which guarantees that the harassing tweets will be seen by all of Singal’s followers on Twitter thus bringing the discussion from the bilateral to the polylateral, or rather a massive pile-on par excellence.

In addition to the defamatory comments made against his person in social media, later the same week, publications such as Feministing took aim at Singal with much the same recklessness and illiteracy of Twitter. And such articles often instigate the Twitter pile-ons which like the Feministing article elide the research and facts demonstrated and rely on emotionalised arguments which negate facts. Intimidation tactics which insinuate slurs such as “transphobe,” “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), and “bigot” are all familiar measures to shut down dialogue and to tarnish the public image of individuals through these and other trolling tactics. And Singal was no exception to these methods as one writer states that Singal “certainly seems to be somewhat uncomfortable with trans people existing at all.” Any cursory reading of Singal’s article would simply not give this impression at all, no matter where you stand on the issue of transgenderism and children.

But they feel that he is, and that’s all that counts.

The events surrounding Singal’s publication reminded me of Twitter attacks I faced in 2013 when I published an article chronicling the assault on gender critical feminists in CounterPunch. After the publication of this piece, I was Twitter trolled and threatened (as well as my editor and both our children). Thereafter came a libellous piece co-published by Jacobin and Salon which commits similar acts of wilful misinterpretation, hyperbole and outright lies (ie. that my article was “about whether a group of people should exist” and that both CounterPunch and I do not regard trans as “human beings”). My article made no such allusion either directly or circuitously.

And Salon and Jacobin blew him off when he objected.

But hey, why publish properly researched facts when you can invoke vitriol through offensive epithets (ie. TERF), thinly veiled threats, labelling a reputable leftist publication and myself as part of a “hate group,” while taking part in the ongoing “oppression Olympics” of truthiness that social media and mainstream publishing currently foment? It appears that allowing for the healthy discussion about gender — a topic that affects everyone in societies throughout the world — is considered anathema to the mandate of certain allegedly leftist publications.

Ya think? Of course it is. Gender is held to be the property of trans people and trans people only; people who are not trans are therefore “cis” and “cis” people have “cis privilege” and that disqualifies them from talking about gender. “Cis” people are not oppressed by gender, only trans people are, so only trans people get to analyze gender. Only the right trans people that is – not ones like Miranda Yardley, who I guess must be honorary “cis” people.

So imagine the irony when one of Jacobin’s editors, Connor Kilpatrick, after linking to Singal’s article on Twitter, was called out through very similar language with which Jacobin had smeared CounterPunch and me three years ago. Watching Kilpatrick’s surprise regarding the caustic reaction to his tweet and The Week’s Ryan Cooper comparing such cyber trolling to a witch hunt made me wonder where some of these men had been over the last several years. Then it hit me: it took men being attacked for there to be any sizeable discussion about or backlash against what has been and continues today to be intellectual bullying, cyber trolling, and vast misrepresentations, to include calumny and generous doses of misogyny. To be fair, when I first read Singal’s article, I wrote him to ask if he was being harassed to which Singal astutely noted: “I’m a male so I only get a tiny fraction of the harassment women do.” For most, however, that women have been the usual victims of these tactics seemed to have had little to no effect on the public perception of slurs like “TERF,” “transphobe,” or the notion that by being gender critical one is somehow murdering people with words. Indeed, it is an unhappy coincidence that such exceptions only demonstrate how sexist the practices of publishing academic or scientific debate has been in recent years, as many of these male writers were at the very least spared rape threats.

Yeah. Well, that’s all part of the cis privilege that we cis women get.

While there is some perfunctory satisfaction in knowing that a publication which went out of its way to publish a hack piece about CounterPunch and me is now being categorised as “transphobic” and as forming part of a “transphobic circle-jerk,” I am nonetheless concerned that ostensibly leftist editors of publications such as Jacobin do not understand how this sort of linguistic blowback functions. And worse, that these publications by censoring content, unwittingly contribute to the anti-intellectualism at the heart of any movement whose ethos rides uniquely on epithets and acronyms.

Bingo. The anti-intellectualism is a scandal.

Twitterbating cries of transphobia in response to articulate and respectful publications constitute, like trigger warnings, a means to stifle discussion about an issue which actually affects us all — gender. Unless we intend to ask that journalists and scholars write endlessly boring articles about “courage” and red carpet moments, we must adopt thicker skin when it comes to accepting that on the subject of gender, everyone has a horse in this race.

Lordy, she does mix her metaphors – but anyway, yes, we need to be able to talk freely about gender because it affects all of us. Silencing people who take a critical approach to the subject is not useful or pro-intellectual or fair or anything else good that I can think of.

No.

No no no no no.

SparkNotes, which is one of those embarrassing American things that help people pass English tests by translating literature into the vocabulary of Sports Illustrated – SparkNotes, I say, has translated Heart of Darkness that way, and they should be arrested. Perhaps flogged. I don’t approve of flogging, but I might have to make an exception.

Behold.

Conrad:

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

Sparky:

The Nellie, a small sailboat, was anchored in the river. There was no wind and the only thing to do was sit and wait for the tide to change before heading down the river and out to sea.

WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT?

Look. Here’s the thing. Conrad wasn’t just sharing some facts. He wasn’t just telling a quick story before the brandy and cigars. The language he used is what he was doing. The language matters. That abortion up there is like drawing some stick figures with labels under them and saying there’s Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride or Gaugin’s Nave Nave Moe.

Don’t translate Conrad into Sports Illustrated. Just don’t do it.

There was a peace vigil in Brussels yesterday. It was confronted by a gang of fascists shouting about immigrants. Deutsche Welle reports:

Riot police backed by water cannon vehicles were called to the Place de la Bourse-Beursplein in the center of the Belgian capital, Brussels, on Sunday to keep right-wing groups away from demonstrators wanting to show solidarity following the deadly attacks on Tuesday.

Black-clad protesters shouting slogans against immigrants and the jihadist “Islamic State” group faced off with police in front of the city’s stock exchange building, where a group of other demonstrators had gathered to mourn the victims of the attacks.

Complete with Nazi salutes:

The Independent says they singled out Muslim women for abuse:

Muslim women were confronted and intimidated by right-wing protesters disrupted a peace vigil dedicated to victims of the Brussels attacks.

The women were singled out by members of a group of 400 demonstrators at an initially peaceful gathering held to remember the victims of last week’s terror attacks in the Belgian capital.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Tehmina Kazi has a brilliant article on the murder of Asad Shah and what needs to happen about sectarian hate crime.

It is unbearable to think that someone who reached out to others, no matter what their background, has been extinguished by a mindset that was the antithesis of everything he stood for. Mr Shah was one of those newsagents who would go the extra mile for every customer. Not only did he remember everyone’s names, but he would send people Christmas cards or Eid cards, depending on their religion. He took an interest in people’s lives, be they young, old, black, brown or white.

Two vigils were organised for him — one with 500 people, including Nicola Sturgeon, in attendance — in a testament to how loved he was.

But some people don’t like that kind of thing. They prefer hatred and rage.

Tehmina points out that there’s been no statement from MEND or MPACUK.

Glasgow Central Mosque put out a long statement, which decried the murder as “abhorrent and unacceptable” and said it would “stand shoulder to shoulder with all communities to eradicate this intolerance from society.”

However, this statement appeared to gloss over Whatsapp messages recentlyposted by their most senior imam, Maulana Habib Ur Rahman. Referring to the Pakistani Government’s execution of Mumtaz Qadri — who had killed anti-blasphemy law campaigner Salman Taseer in 2011 — Rahman said: “I cannot hide my pain today. A true Muslim was punished for doing which [sic] the collective will of the nation failed to carry out.”

That kind of thinking is working out so well in Pakistan at this moment.

If a group expects to be taken seriously in its attempts to bring communities together, it must abandon supremacist ideologies insofar as they discriminate against others, or lead to hate crimes against others. As a general rule, the ethic of reciprocity must guide us here: it is all well and good to advocate for the human rights of one’s own community, but what we really need is empathetic advocacy work, where campaigners get to grips with the struggles that other communities face, and offer genuine solidarity instead of meaningless platitudes.

As several Muslim groups did after the floods in the north of England a few weeks ago.

South of the border, The Muslim Council of Britain has condemned the killing, adding that “there is no place for hatred of this kind.” While this sounds encouraging at first, their own initiatives have not been as inclusive of different sects as one would hope. In 2014, they announced a “Historic Intrafaith Unity Statement” which solicited signatures from various Muslim groups, in an attempt to forge common ground. But as the blogger John Sargeant pointed out, Ahmadi Muslims — both Lahoris and the larger Rabwah branch — were conspicuous by their absence.

Furthermore, Muslim media outlets like 5 Pillars (who claim to be promoting “normative” Islam) previously described the Ahmadi Baitul Futuh mosque in Morden as a “temple,” when it was engulfed in flames during a suspected arson attack in September 2015. The site’s Deputy Editor, Dilly Hussain, tweeted in 2014, “I’ve known monkeys that have a more legitimate claim to Islam than Ahmadis.”

Ugly ugly stuff, and dangerous.

What I would really like to see is a statement from groups like the MCB, which unequivocally and unambiguously defends the right of Ahmadis to refer to themselves as Muslims. I would also like to see religious leaders from both sects express a more positive approach to Sunni-Ahmadi marriages, which are — anecdotally — still discouraged.

In short a liberal, tolerant, generous approach, instead of a theocratic, hate-filled, narrow approach. Be less like Dilly Hussain and more like Asad Shah.

Muslim Women’s Network UK has a statement on the murder of Asad Shah.

We at Muslim Women’s Network UK (MWNUK) are shocked at the brutal murder of Glasgow shopkeeper, Asad Shah, which was carried out by another Muslim. This murder sadly highlights the rising religious bigotry within our own communities.

Muslim Extremists seek to not only polarise different communities but also try and bring discord within their own communities.  Some religious zealots will castigate anyone who does not share their version of Islam. Muslims in Britain are from different ethnic backgrounds and are diverse in their perspectives and practice of Islam. They come from all walks of life, are from different denominations of Islam and are from across the religious spectrum. An individual’s belief is his or her own personal concern.  No one should be bullied or have to fear for their safety when expressing their views.

MWNUK Chair, Shaista Gohir said: “The rise in religious sectarianism abroad is starting to have an impact in Britain’s Muslim communities.  For example, extremists are exploiting these to cause tensions between the minority Shia community and the dominant Sunni groups. Hate speech against the Ahmadiyyah community is also not uncommon.  It appears that such hate speech has now spilled over into violence with the murder of Asad Shah who was from this community.  Such incitement of hatred is not acceptable and must be robustly challenged.  Muslims cannot demand rights for themselves while at the same time displaying bigotry towards other minority groups.”

In recent weeks a few imams in the UK have acted irresponsibly by glorifying the actions of Mumtaz Qadri who murdered Pakistani politician Salman Taseer because he stood up against the persecution of Christians. Instead of hailing this man as a hero and martyr, they should be condemning the murder. This not only promotes intolerance but also sends the wrong message that it is acceptable to take the law into ones own hands and punish Muslims who disagree with your religious beliefs.  These faith leaders should also be challenged and organisations that they are associated with should show leadership and take action.

A member of the public has set up a support page for Mr. Shah’s family and more than £50000 has been raised so far.  You can also make a donation here.  If you or anyone you know is being subjected to hatred, bullying and intimidation, you can call our helpline for advice on 0800 999 5786 / 0303 999 5786.  Anyone who fears for their safety should contact the police immediately.

A Taliban splinter group says it did the Lahore bombing that killed more than 70 people (and more of the injured are expected to die).

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar said it had targeted Christians celebrating Easter, though police have said they are still investigating the claim.

There were scenes of carnage as parents searched for children amid the debris.

What a glowing advertisement for a religion: We Blow Up Children.

M Ilyas Khan of BBC News Islamabad offers analysis:

The bombing of the amusement park on Easter Sunday was the bloodiest attack on Christians in Pakistan since the 2013 Peshawar church bombing that killed more than 80 people.

But many believe there may be a wider context to the latest attack – 27 March was the deadline set by an alliance of more than 30 religious groups for the provincial government of Punjab to withdraw a new women’s rights law they oppose.

Ah, I see – so on the deadline a “religious group” aims its bomb at women and children playing in a park. “If the government won’t take your rights away, we’ll do it by killing you. Let’s see your fancy ‘rights’ now, bitches.”

And supporters of Mumtaz Qadri, a police guard executed last month for the 2011 killing of a provincial governor who advocated reform of the blasphemy laws, have also launched protests. They brought forward the customary 40th day mourning for Qadri by 13 days to coincide with 27 March and several thousand have now occupied a high-security zone in Islamabad to press demands which include the implementation of Sharia law.

God’s fascists taking over bit by bit.

The explosion, believed to have been carried out by one suicide bomber, hit the main gate to the Gulshan-e-Iqbal park in the early evening, a short distance from the children’s playground.

Officials said the device had been packed with ball bearings.

Read that slowly. Think about it.

Sarah Peace on the so-leftwing-it’s-rightwing idea that it’s colonialist to oppose FGM.

I was to find out that my brazen anti-FGM stance is ‘regurgitating the hideous colonial project that imposed itself on the rest of the world on a civilizing mission to rescue the women of the third world from its savage men’. The rationale I am told, is that even as a Nigerian born woman, I cannot speak for other less privileged Nigerian women, how much less, a white woman on behalf of ethnic minorities.

It was at Goldsmiths University that I came to witness this betrayal first hand, which ascribes brutality onto people from other places as part of culture but fashions itself so self-righteously.

Goldsmiths – well of course it was.

Goldsmiths, very much like SOAS seems to be the hotbed of this double standard reinforced by some academics and propagated by a faction of student activists. In December 2015, the feminist and LGBT societies at Goldsmiths left even their own members baffled by their decision to extend ‘solidarity’ to the Islamic society, whose members disrupted human rights campaigner Maryam Namazie’s lecture. They had deemed Namazie a ‘notorious Islamophobe’, for referring to the veil as ‘bin bags’. During the lecture, Namazie backed up her statement and reinforced the importance of continued opposition against traditions such as FGM which are an affront to women’s rights.

When probed on the matter, a representative of the Goldsmiths LGBT society responded that as a white person, she “cannot condemn FGM because of my colonial past.” Is this putative desire to carry the burdens of the past squarely on one’s shoulders echoed among feminists?

Some of them, yes. I wrote a furious post in 2008 about some on the Women’s Studies mailing list.

Back to Sarah Peace:

Germaine Greer once argued that attempts to outlaw FGM amounted to ‘an attack on cultural identity’, stating: “one man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation.” Greer was widely condemned, almost unanimously. Nearly 20 years on, some fields of study in academia including critical race and gender theory are reawakening the same argument albeit from a postcolonial perspective – the difference now being that a generation of ethnic minority students have themselves, bought into this defeating narrative. The narrative becomes upturned, and any cause that contravenes the ugly history of colonialism is one they would sign up to, regardless of the implications.

This pattern of taking an apologetic stance is increasingly expressed on the far-reaching left, reinforcing the idea that concerns of gender based violence become a separate issue to feminism if the perpetrator is brown or black. The issue is deemed as ‘their own problem’, inherent to their culture, which should be left to them.

Rather the way the Final Solution was the Jews’ own problem which should have been left to them, I suppose.

It is possible that lecturers are finding it increasingly difficult to swim against the wave of regressive thought endemic to courses in humanities, nevertheless students should be presented with the plural sides of the debate. There was no mention of African feminists who have dedicated their lives to banishing FGM, such as the [late] Ghanaian activist Efua Dorkenoo, who worked tirelessly for 30 years and pioneered the global movement to end the practice, along with Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, a vocal abolitionist. In the diaspora, campaigners of African heritage include Mona Eltahawy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Amal Farah, Nahla Mahmoud, Bogaletch Gebre, Alishba Zarmeen, Jaha Dukureh, Hibo Wardere, Salimata Knight, Mona Walter,Sainab Abdi, Leyla Hussein, Nimko Ali and many others too numerous to list.

Unlike veiling, FGM is not a category to which we can apply surplus doses of cultural relativism or justification by brandishing theories of orientalism and notions of colonial resistance. If we truly stand for universal human rights, we must demand better from our institutions.

Universal human rights of course are what lefties of the Goldsmiths type don’t stand for, and that’s what makes them so right wing under the left wing makeup.

The Andrew Wakefield “documentary” is no longer part of the Tribeca Film Festival.

In a statement, Robert De Niro, a founder of the festival, wrote: “My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family. But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.”

I don’t know what that “an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family” shit is supposed to mean. That’s an annoying thing to say, and I wish he’d left it out. Vaccination is personal to everyone, and it’s also impersonal to everyone. It’s not Special to the family of Robert DeNiro, and his being a movie star doesn’t make it so. Vaccination is a very public issue, and people who start thinking of it as “deeply personal” are likely to go on to think of it as something they get to opt out of, because they’re so special…while they depend on other, not-special people to go on vaccinating so that the no-vaxxers can still benefit from herd immunity.

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said on Saturday that he believed “the entire board as well as Mr. De Niro have learned a lot in the last several days.”

“My hat is off to them for listening, thinking about it, discussing it and responding,” he said.

Nevertheless, Dr. Schaffner said, it was troubling for scientists that a film promoting “discredited ideas” got so close to a forum as prestigious as the Tribeca Film Festival.

For scientists and also for all the rest of us, who prefer not to see a measles epidemic thanks very much. And yeah – it’s good that they pulled it but they shouldn’t have included it in the first place.

“It gave these fraudulent ideas a face and a position and an energy that many of us thought they didn’t deserve,” he said. “We’re all for ongoing reasonable debate and discussion, but these are ideas that have been proven to be incorrect many, many, many times over the past 15 years.”

And they’re harmful. They’re not just wrong, they’re harmful. Measles can kill.

People pointed out that the film’s presence on the schedule gave it credibility, and now Wakefield can play the “banned by BigPharma” card.

Doctors and infectious disease experts also spoke out. “Unless the Tribeca Film Festival plans to definitively unmask Andrew Wakefield, it will be yet another disheartening chapter where a scientific fraud continues to occupy a spotlight,” Dr. Mary Anne Jackson, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said in an interview on Friday.

As the criticism mounted on Friday, Mr. De Niro defended the film, saying that he and his wife, Grace Hightower, have a child with autism and that “we believe it is critical that all of the issues surrounding the causes of autism be openly discussed and examined.”

Sigh. They’ve been openly discussed and examined, Bob. People with the right kind of knowledge have found that Wakefield committed fraud in that discredited study. It’s a technical subject, and technical subjects, unlike political and ethical ones, don’t need public discussion to get things right. The discussion and examination happened years ago, the findings were published, there is no need to keep discussing.

Ah this is nice – Cubans in Havana are lining up in their tends of thousands for a free concert by the Rolling Stones, who used to be banned as “decadent.”

Fans travelled from many parts of Cuba and other countries to witness what some described as a historic moment.

“It was forbidden. We couldn’t have the Beatles or some singers from Latin America. Now we are allowed to hear what we want to hear,” a fan told the BBC.

“The visit from Obama [earlier this week], and now the Rolling Stones. It’s just unique and historic. So, yeah, nice to be here,” said another one.

The Rolling Stones released a short video saying their concert was a sign of change in Cuba.

“Time changes everything. So we’re very pleased to be here,” said Mick Jagger.

“It would have been surprising for this to happen 10 years ago,” he added.

At least a million people are expected to watch the British band’s first concert in Cuba from 00:30 GMT (20:30 local).

The Beeb has lots of happy photos.

Alice Dreger has posted an open letter to Tony Valenzuela, ED of the Lambda Literary Foundation.

She thought a tweet telling her about the nomination was a joke at first, because this nominating for an award and then rescinding the nomination routine has happened before. Dreger wrote about it in her book.

In my book—as in the earlier article that led to the misery that led to me to doing that book—I had traced out what happened in 2003 to J. Michael Bailey’s book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, when it had been named a finalist for a “Lammy”: A group of transgender activists upset with Bailey for writing about autogynephilia—a sexual orientation that reasonably motivates some natal-male’s transition to women—had launched a campaign against the Lambda Literary Foundation.

Deirdre McCloskey objected to Bailey’s book, the then ED Jim Marks asked the committee to vote again and they voted to keep it on the finalist list.

McCloksey and her two chief collaborators in the smear campaign on Bailey, Lynn Conway and Andrea James, upped their efforts. As I and Dr. Anne Lawrence (a transgender woman) have explained, the real “problem” was that Bailey’s book put forth ideas about women like McCloskey, Conway, and James that they didn’t want disseminated. They wanted to kill the book to stifle the ideas and stories in it, presumably also to stop others from talking about autogynephilia.

At the time of this mess, writer Victoria Brownworth, who was on the committee, said she saw the withdrawal as akin to censorship. But facing increasing harassment, the committee voted a third time, one vote flipped, and Bailey’s book had its finalist status withdrawn.

Harassment works. Bullying works. People are harassing Alice on Twitter right now, such that she has stopped looking at notifications.

Naturally, given the shitstorms I’ve been in with Bailey’s detractors since I showed in excruciating detail what they did to try to shut him up with a host of patently false charges, I had been assuming my book would never be named a finalist for the same award. Why would the Lambda Literary Foundation take that risk, particularly given that Andrea James had relentlessly harassed Jim Marks online even long after it was all over?

But it was true: my book was named a finalist in the non-fiction category. Learning it was real, I felt enormously honored and happy. I thought this was a sign that perhaps the foundation had decided that there was no way to make everyone in the LGBT world happy, and I’d done good enough work that even if some were unhappy, my work—on the Bailey book controversy, on the abuse of intersex children, on attempts to medically prevent lesbianism with prenatal treatments—was well worth recognizing.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have reasonable disagreements? I’m not talking about unreasonable disagreements, I’m not talking about making common cause with people who think all Xs are scum – but reasonable disagreements.

When I wondered who might have advocated for the book to receive a Lammy, I am happy to say that so many people I respect came to mind: Jim Marks, Victoria Brownworth, Dan Savage, Anne Lawrence, and others. The more I thought about it, the more finalist status made sense to me. Why should the Foundation, thirteen years after it was harassed unjustly, do anything other than march on without cowardice?

So I joyfully answered the congratulatory email I received from Lambda and started making plans to attend the awards ceremony in New York. Not too surprisingly, Conway and James soon launched a campaign against my book’s finalist status, but I pretty much ignored this. I figured the Foundation knew this would happen and was prepared to weather the storm.

But no. You caved. And quickly—much more quickly than the Foundation did under Marks in 2003. In spite of all the LGBT people who have actively praised my book, who have thanked me for the work, you quickly caved to a small group of bullies who have proven time and time again that they will do anything they can to get attention and to force everyone to adhere to their singular account of transgenderism, even when it negates the reported childhoods of gay and lesbian people, even when it denies the reality of many transgender people and attempts to force them into closets because of their sexual orientations.

It’s tragic.

I wonder if Tony Valenzuela will even reply. I wonder what he can possibly say.

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon:

There are not two sides to every story. Not every issue requires us to legitimize an opposing view. Like, for instance, when the other perspective is totally crackpot. For example, if you’re a disgraced fraud, maybe you’re really not the best source for information about vaccines.

Totally crackpot and harmful as well. The crackpot in question is Andrew Wakefield.

This week the Tribeca Film Festival announced it’s debuting a provocative new documentary with the flamboyant name “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Controversy.” The film’s description promises, “Digging into the long-debated link between autism and vaccines, ‘Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe’ features revealing and emotional interviews with pharmaceutical insiders, doctors, politicians, parents, and one whistleblower to understand what’s behind the skyrocketing increase of autism diagnoses today.” It is directed by Andrew Wakefield. Yeah. That Andrew Wakefield.

The one who’s done more than anyone else to bring back measles.

In 2000, measles had been considered virtually eliminated in the U.S. — and in 2014 there were 644 measles cases spanning 27 states — more than than the previous four years put together. In Orange County the same year, 41 percent of kindergarteners were not vaccinated. Oh and here’s the thing: In 2011, Wakefield’s stunner of a report was fully retracted as “an elaborate fraud.” The British medical journal BMJ’s editor said at the time that “It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors. But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.” Wakefield is now barred from practicing medicine in the UK.

Now that’s a guy who actually merits no-platforming.

From last month – the Independent reports on a Danish aid worker who rescues Nigerian children who’ve been abandoned because someone thinks they’re “witches.”

An aid worker whose rescue of an emaciated two-year-old boy made headlines around the world has spoken about how she gave up everything in Denmark to help “the witch children of Nigeria”.

Anja Ringgren Lovén was pictured offering water and biscuits to a small and very thin little boy called Hope, who had been abandoned by his family because of local superstitions about witchcraft.

Ms Lovén took Hope in, and he is now one of 34 children being cared for at the African Children’s Aid Education and Development Foundation (ACAEDF) which she founded with her husband David.

Brace yourself.

Speaking in an interview with the Huffington Post, Ms Lovén said she first saw the problems created by superstition in rural Nigeria when she travelled there alone three years ago and met children “who had been tortured and beaten almost to death because they were accused of being witches and therefore left alone on the street”.

…

“Being rejected by your own family must be the loneliest feeling a child can experience, and I don’t believe that anyone can imagine how that must feel like.”

…

“We rescue and we give love and support to the vulnerable children accused of witchcraft in Akwa Ibom. But to put an end to superstition, exorcism and black magic performed by pastors and the so-called witchdoctors, advocacy work must be carried out,” she said.

Also some law-enforcement would be useful.