At Fitnah, Maryam talks to Marieme Helie Lucas about gender segregation:

Maryam Namazie: Universities UK’s guidance first said (though it has now been withdrawn as a result of pressure) if women are not made to sit at the back of the room but are segregated alongside men, since none are disadvantaged, then there is no discrimination. Your views?

Marieme Helie Lucas: Whether at the back or on the side, the old argument is always that this is done to protect women – for their own good, of course, and by doing so to restrict their freedom of movement. By the same logic, some twenty years ago, Bangladesh suddenly restricted women from leaving the country as there was a lot of

Huffington Post reports:

CBS News reporter Sopan Deb was arrested Friday night while covering protests surrounding Donald Trump’s canceled rally in Chicago.

Deb, who has covered the Republican presidential front-runner‘s candidacy since last summer, was filming video of a man whose face was bloody and lying on the ground near police at the time of his arrest, according to a “CBS This Morning” report Saturday.

“Deb continued to roll as police kept watch,” the CBS report noted. “Without warning, Deb was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground.”

A police officer placed his boot on Deb’s neck to keep him in place on the ground, according to the account he provided his network.

Illinois State Police

IS is nostalgic for the way women were treated like shit in the prophet’s day.

Locked inside a room where the only furniture was a bed, the 16-year-old learned to fear the sunset, because nightfall started the countdown to her next rape.

During the year she was held by the Islamic State, she spent her days dreading the smell of the ISIS fighter’s breath, the disgusting sounds he made and the pain he inflicted on her body. More than anything, she was tormented by the thought she might become pregnant with her rapist’s child.

But no problem, because he made her take birth control pills. When she was sold to another man, the pills went with her.

According to an

Shaheen Hashmat won a True Honour award from IKWRO, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, last week.

LONDON, March 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – At 12 years old, Shaheen Hashmat left her family home in Scotland to escape the threat of forced marriage to a stranger in Pakistan. At 13, she attempted suicide.

Hashmat, who now campaigns against forced marriage and “honour based” violence, says Britain urgently needs better mental health services for girls and women escaping these situations.

“There needs to be far more training about the increased risk of suicide and the impact of family estrangement,” said Hashmat, who won the True Honour 2016 award on Thursday for her bravery in standing up to honour abuse.

Helen Griffiths at Human Rights Watch says hashtag solidarity with women and girls is nice, but what’s needed is action.

Last weekend, I attended a Women of the World event in Cambridge, England, where experts from several sectors discussed what exactly is preventing girls from getting into and staying in school. They agreed that numerous factors play a role, including early marriage, pregnancy, disabilities, lack of accommodation for menstrual hygiene, cultural beliefs, and traditional caregiver roles.

These barriers are not new.

And what do they all rest on? The material reality of being female – of being the sex that gets pregnant, that bears the children, that lactates. (The disabilities part is the exception – either … Read the rest

I’ve always hated snowmobiles – at least, I have since encountering one racing all over a Seattle park after a heavy snow one day back around 1980. I know they have their uses, though, as long as the people using them aren’t mean bastards. But one snowmobiler is a very mean bastard.

One dog has been killed and multiple dogs have been injured by a snowmobiler in what appears to be an intentional attack on competitors in the Iditarod Race in Alaska.

Iditarod veteran Aliy Zirkle was the first to report an attack.

A snowmachiner had “repeatedly attempted to harm her and her team,” the Iditarod Trail Committee says, and one of Zirkle’s dogs had received a non-life-threatening injury.

More on the mess in South Sudan, from the UN.

11 March 2016 – A new United Nations report on the human rights situation in South Sudan published today describes a multitude of horrendous violations in “searing detail,” in particular by Government forces, including cases of civilians burned alive or cut to pieces and a teenage girl being raped by ten soldiers.

Although all parties to the conflict have committed patterns of serious and systematic violence against civilians since fighting broke out in December 2013, the report says State actors bore the greatest responsibility during 2015, given the weakening of opposition forces.

The scale of sexual violence is particularly shocking, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human

South Sudan doesn’t have the money to pay its armed militias, so it lets them extract payment in kind, such as raping women for example.

South Sudan lets fighters rape women as payment, the UN rights office said Friday, describing the country as “one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world.”

“The assessment team received information that the armed militias… who carry out attacks together with the SPLA (South Sudanese army) commit violations under an agreement of ‘do what you can and take what you can,'” the rights office said in a new report.

“Most of the youth therefore also raided cattle, stole personal property, raped and abducted women and girls as a form of payment,”

Pink News reports on a gay UKIP candidate who tweeted that all feminists he’s spoken to on Twitter are “man hating cunts.” (What’s that we’re always being told about how in the UK “cunt” NEVER means a woman? Never never never ever you stupid Yank?)

Alex Nierora is the party’s candidate for Ealing and Hillingdon on the Greater London Assembly, ahead of the election on May 5.

The candidate – who is vocal within the party’s LGBT group despite previously opposing equal marriage – has spoken out to defend himself after he was caught referring to feminists as “c**ts”.

In the since-deleted tweet, sent in December, he claimed: “all feminists I have spoken to on here [Twitter] are man hating

The Times reports:

CHICAGO — Donald J. Trumpabruptly canceled a large rally here on Friday night as scuffles and shouting matches erupted on the arena floor between large groups of his supporters and protesters angered by his campaign.

Cable news networks broadcast live scenes of chaos inside the arena that showed people on both sides screaming at, punching and shoving each other.

So that sounds healthy.

The protests at Mr. Trump’s rallies have increased and so has the pushback surrounding them. One protester in North Carolina this week was sucker-punched by a rally attendee. Mr. Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has insisted he does not condone the violence but that in the “good

The Independent has a story from Pakistan:

A 13-year-old girl in Pakistan was raped for three months by her school teacher and made pregnant.

The teenager, from the city of Larkana in southern Pakistan, suffered months of sexual abuse at the hands of the teacher while her family were also threatened to remain silent.

…

Muzafar Mirani, the schoolteacher at Government Primary School in Nauabad who has now pleaded guilty, reportedly at first placed pressure on the girl’s family to remain silent, along with his “supporters”.

He has powerful friends, while the girl’s family are poor.

That is privilege. The real thing, not the made up kind.… Read the rest

Some background on the clash over intersections at the University of Cape Town, specifically on why UCT suspended Chumani Maxwele:

According to the university[,] on Mayday, Maxwele went into the Mathematics building after being informed that “as it was a public holiday, all lecture theatres and classrooms were locked. Once inside the building, and after ascertaining that the said rooms were in fact locked, he is alleged to have:

• raised his voice at the lecturer (who was in the department to mark student papers), stating that she was “a white woman who takes all the rights of the black students”;
• shouted aggressively that “the statue fell; now it’s time for all whites to go”;
• stated that he was not

This is a tragic story of intersections tangling instead of smoothly and lovingly intersecting.

The Rhodes Must Fall Exhibition, “Echoing Voices from Within” was disrupted yesterday by members of the University of Cape Town’s Trans Collective, a student led organisation that prioritises the rights of transgender, gender non-conforming and intersex students at the University of Cape Town.

That’s the trouble with the trans activism branch of intersectionalism right now, isn’t it – that it prioritizes its own rights instead of promoting or defending or raising awareness of them. In other words, it’s the opposite of intersectional: it says Put Us First. As it did here, by disrupting an anti-colonialist exhibition for the sake of it’s not clear what exactly.

Students

Miranda Yardley wrote a piece about the problems with what she calls transgender ideology the other day. It’s a list of “some of the things the things that transgender ideology needs to do so that it may support the lives of women.”

1. Accept that feminism and other women’s movements do not and should not centre transgender people. At the moment, trans is dominating the discussions, even causing huge ideological rifts, within feminism, yet here in the UK today’s news (22 June) reports hospital statistics showing 632 new cases of Female Genital Mutilation in the West Midlands (apparently girls “are brought to Birmingham to be cut”) from September 2014 to March 2015.

That first item on the list all … Read the rest

Glosswitch writes about school uniforms and stereotype threat and the trousers of power.

There’s a group in the UK, Trousers for All, that campaigns to allow girls to wear trousers as part of their school uniform.

As is the case with so many seemingly trivial points of differentiation between men and women, what matters is not the thing in itself, but what it signifies. If the right to wear trousers had no broader meaning, women would not have had to fight for it, but fight for it they have. Trousers are associated with male privilege and dominance (hence the question “who wears the trousers?”). Female politicians were not permitted to wear them on the US Senate floor until

From the Washington Post:

Multiple videos show a protester at a Donald Trump rally in North Carolina being sucker-punched by a Trump supporter.

The videos, which appeared on social media early Thursday and are shot from different perspectives, show an African American with long hair wearing a white T-shirt leaving the Trump rally as the audience boos. He is being led out of the rally by men in uniforms that read “Sheriff’s Office.” The man extends a middle finger to the audience on his way out.

Then, out of nowhere, the man is punched in the face by a pony-tailed man, who appears to be white, in a cowboy hat, black vest and pink shirt as the crowd

Caitlin Moran explains some things about being a woman for readers of Esquire. Item 3 is menstruation.

3. Periods

We’re still pretty traumatised about our periods, even though we’re now 40. Being a woman doesn’t make “being a woman” any easier. All that womb-shit is nuts. It’s like having an exploding, insane blood-bag of pain up in your business end — nothing really prepares you for when it all kicks off. One day, you’re just a kid on your bike. The next, you’re suddenly having to wedge a tiny Barbie mattress in your knickers, crying while you watch Bergerac, and eating Nurofen Plus like they’re Tic Tacs.

And then deal with the tiny Barbie mattress and wedge in … Read the rest

Guest post by Tigger the wing.

I fear that my generation may have been far too indulgent of baby mtf trannies, when I discover them saying things like this:

Reminder to not use vaginas, periods, or slogans like “pussy power” as symbols for feminism!!! don’t exclude women who don’t have vaginas :)

How DARE you! How VERY dare you, you entitled little shits‽

Your grandmothers, mothers, sisters, ftm cousins, and older transwomen, have been fighting these battles for decades before most of you decided that you’d like to wear dresses and make-up. Did you have no idea, when you discovered your feminine internal person, that by joining the underclass you would automatically lose all the privileges that being born with … Read the rest

The second season of Caitlyn Jenner’s show about Caitlyn Jenner has started, CBS reports.

Don’t expect to see Caitlyn Jenner campaigning for Hillary Clinton anytime soon.

The avowed Republican — who recently expressed interest in working with Ted Cruz on transgender issues — chastised Clinton during the second season premiere of her reality series, “I am Cait.”

“If we’re unfortunate enough to get Hillary as our next president, we need her on our side,” Jenner said during a political discussion featured on the show. “Although she won’t be … she couldn’t care less about women. She only cares about herself.”

Hmmmmm.

One of Jenner’s friend, Jennifer Finney Boylan, then asks her which of Republican would be likely to help