Jo Bartosch asks one of those questions we’re not supposed to ask: Why did trans women lead the Women’s March?

If the ‘transracial’ Rachel Dolezal were to give a keynote speech at a Black Lives Matter event there would rightly be an outcry. And yet this year the ‘Women’s March’ in London was fronted by someone who has identified as a woman for less time than I’ve had the shoes I’m wearing. Munroe Bergdorf is a transgender model who was chosen to speak by the London chapter of the global Women’s March. In a baffling address Bergdorf offered insights into Brexit, austerity and womanhood. The crowd cheered as Bergdorf explained that laws preventing brothel-keeping were bad for women

Oh gee, whaddya know, the Twitter account that got the Covington thing going appears to have been one of those disrupter types.

Twitter suspended an account on Monday afternoon that helped spread a controversial encounter between a Native American elder and a group of high school students wearing Make America Great Again hats.

The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found. Twitter suspended the account soon after CNN Business asked about it.

…

The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. “Teacher

This has been doing the rounds:

Note the ND after the first one. (I missed it at first.) The N is for naturopathic. NOT A REAL DOCTOR.

By the way there’s a measles outbreak here in Washington state, mostly via unvaccinated kids.… Read the rest

This again. Farking birtherism.

Kamala Harris is NOT eligible to be President. Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960

Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization

Kamala was raised in Canada

— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) January 22, 2019

And before you worthless leftist trolls call me a "birther", read the confirmation that Barack Hussein Obama was indeed raised in Jakarta, Indonesia https://t.co/0pHxLkt2dI

— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) January 22, 2019

I've been getting emails/tweets about the (completely false, utterly racist) "Kamala Harris isn't a natural-born American" narrative for weeks, but it seems to be ramping up up on the fringes of the right now that

Helen Saxby takes a look at the idea of Gender Dysphoria:

There is an argument around the meaning and relevance of the term gender dysphoria since it has replaced ‘gender identity disorder’ in the medical literature. On the one hand there is a push to remove gender dysphoria from the list of necessary conditions to being assessed as transgender in law, but on the other hand the diagnosis is being jealously guarded by trans activists and allies. In summary the attitude seems to be ‘We may not need gender dysphoria anymore but you sure as hell aren’t going to have it either’. This plays out in the outrage shown towards two main groups of women: those who were tomboys

And then there’s Alex Sharpe writing at Diva:

Are some feminists asking the wrong question about who counts as a “lesbian”?

Why are there scare quotes on the word “lesbian”? Are we treating that as some sort of “problematic” or tendentious or confusing or reactionary word now? Are we holding it out with tongs because lesbians say no to penis?

Kathleen Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University, and enfant terrible of gender critical feminism, has recently asked: “can a biological male be a lesbian?” Of course, framing the question in this way tends to suggest a particular conclusion, one Stock wants us to draw, which is that trans women cannot be lesbians.

And framing the question as “Are … Read the rest

Women’s March London…

Dear all, please see the attached statement clarifying our position on the use of the term 'menstruators' and reiterate that we are a fully inclusive, intersectional feminist movement. pic.twitter.com/asHYl23rWT

— Women's March London (@womensmarchlon) January 21, 2019

“A fully inclusive intersectional feminist movement”…meaning, they include people who aren’t women, and they avoid the word “women.” You can’t have feminism while treating the word “women” as if it has political cooties, and you can’t have feminism while trying to bully women into being “inclusive” of people who aren’t women. Just like other people, women are allowed to organize around the concerns of women; they are under no obligation to be “inclusive” of people who have different concerns. Feminism … Read the rest

Exactly.

H/t Katrina… Read the rest

Of course they did.

Without fanfare or even notice, the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women made significant changes to its definition of domestic violence in April. The Obama-era definition was expansive, vetted by experts including the National Center for Victims of Crime and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. The Trump administration’s definition is substantially more limited and less informed, effectively denying the experiences of victims of abuse by attempting to cast domestic violence as an exclusively criminal concern.

The previous definition included critical components of the phenomenon that experts recognize as domestic abuse—a pattern of deliberate behavior, the dynamics of power and control, and behaviors that encompass physical or sexual violence as well as forms of

President Trump made no remarks about Martin Luther King during a very brief visit to the memorial built in the great leader’s honor.

He laid a wreath, thanked the press for coming and ignored shouted questions as he departed. pic.twitter.com/oGloYOYjia

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) January 21, 2019

Very brief. How brief?

Two minutes.

About the time it took for Pence to make that wildly obnoxious claim.

Pence quotes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech to argue for Trump's latest pitch for wall money: "Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy." pic.twitter.com/oJPZEG59BQ

— Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) January 20, 2019

Most of us don’t think King considered a massive wall built to keep brown … Read the rest

Priests will be priests:

Across India, the nuns talk of priests who pushed into their bedrooms and of priests who pressured them to turn close friendships into sex. They talk about being groped and kissed, of hands pressed against them by men they were raised to believe were representatives of Jesus Christ.

“He was drunk,” said one nun, beginning her story. “You don’t know how to say no,” said another.

At its most grim, the nuns speak of repeated rapes, and of a Catholic hierarchy that did little to protect them.

Well it’s a male hierarchy, isn’t it, organized around a male god and another male god and a bird-thing representing a male Spirit. It’s all about the males. … Read the rest

No, I don’t think so.

Today we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for standing up for the self-evident truth Americans hold so dear, that no matter what the color of our skin or the place of our birth, we are all created equal by God. #MLKDay https://t.co/pEaVpCB8M4

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 21, 2019

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on A fate worse than.

It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. We shouldn’t be altogether surprised when a Grue turns up.

I have tremendous sympathy for people who feel alone, unloved and unrepresented. We have systematically failed those people for as long as we’ve been people and we don’t appear to have learned much along the way. People are feeling desperate about gender identity? I sympathise. Heaven fucking forbid that we try to fix societal expectations, though. It’s obviously far better to reinforce that gender bullshit by mutilating children and.. well… what then?

Seriously. Many of the things I do for a living require that I keep really quite complex and … Read the rest

The smiling kid in the video has given a statement about what happened, one which I gather is corroborated by other, longer videos.

I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.

When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I

Oh go put your head under a truck wheel, Pence.

In a Sunday interview with CBS News, Vice President Mike Pence likened President Donald Trump to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sure, don’t you remember how King clamored for a Wall? A Wall keeping black kids out of white schools? A Wall keeping black people from sitting at the Woolworth’s lunch counter? A Wall keeping black people out of white neighborhoods? A Wall keeping all the good jobs for white people and the ones that promise hard labor at low pay for black people? Wasn’t that a time.

“And honestly,” he opined, “the hearts and minds of the American people are thinking a lot today about [this] being the