Solidarity with Salman:

Hundreds of writers are to gather in New York this week to read from Salman Rushdie’s works, in a recreation of an event first held after the fatwa on the author was issued in 1989.

Authors including Paul Auster, Tina Brown, Kiran Desai, Amanda Foreman, AM Homes, Siri Hustvedt, Hari Kunzru and Gay Talese will be among those taking part in the “Stand with Salman” event.

The writers will gather on the steps of the New York Public Library on Friday morning, exactly a week after 75-year-old Rushdie was stabbed during an event at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.

…

Friday’s event is being organised by PEN America, the New York Public Library,

Word is that Boston Children’s Hospital has removed all its Whoopee Gender-affirming Everything videos from its website, so it’s useful that people have saved them. Here we have another example of the oh so perky cheery celebration of tampering with adolescents’ puberties.

“Potentially sensitive content” indeed.

“And the really nice thing about puberty blockers? is that they are reversible. So it’s a really nice way for an adolescent to be able to explore their gender.”

Yes it’s all just so nice.… Read the rest

So that’s women’s rights gone.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has become the first appellate court in the country to find that gender dysphoria is covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act, after a transgender woman sued Fairfax County for housing her with men during her time in jail.

Oh ffs. Gender dysphoria may be a disability; it doesn’t follow that men get to force themselves on women.

“Being transgender is not a disability,” the court wrotein an opinion issued Tuesday, but “many transgender people experience gender dysphoria,” or distress over the discrepancy between their identity and their assigned sex. “A transgender person’s medical needs are just as deserving of treatment and protection as anyone

BCH tries to convince us that it’s the victim here.

Condemnable behavior for harassers who bullied and threatened the #1 children's hospital in the country. Leave our doctors and nurses alone. pic.twitter.com/ckgGbXvVUs

— Chrisi (@chrisiousity) August 17, 2022

BCH does not and will not, it says fiercely, “perform a hysterectomy as part of gender-affirming care on a patient [that is, a girl] under the age of 18.” But it will on a girl 18 or older. It will also continue to refer to medically unnecessary hysterectomies as “part of gender-affirming care,” as if that category were as well-established and reliable and sciencey as how to mend a broken bone.

What if they’re wrong? What if the whole idea of “gender-affirming … Read the rest

Boston Children’s Hospital is claiming to be the victim in all this.

Boston Children’s Hospital has become the target of a harassment campaign based on inaccurate information about its transgender surgery program. Hospital staff say the campaign includes aggressive calls, emails and death threats for some providers.

Obviously there shouldn’t be threats, but “aggressive calls”? Define “aggressive.” Is it aggressive to say hospitals shouldn’t be performing medically unnecessary hysterectomies? Especially on girls age 18 or 19? Is it aggressive to say hospitals – especially children’s hospitals – shouldn’t be actively promoting and celebrating such elective surgeries?

“We are deeply concerned by these attacks on our clinicians and staff fueled by misinformation and a lack of understanding and respect for our

Libby Brooks at the Guardian raises an eyebrow at the hiring of a man to be period wrangler:

The appointment of a man to a new regional role promoting period dignity has provoked criticism and consternation.

Why? Perhaps I can explain. It’s because men don’t know, do they. They don’t know what it’s like to have a period. They don’t know what it’s like to be mocked or shunned or banished for having a period. They don’t know what it’s like to be a young girl and have this thing happen to you. They don’t know what it’s like to wonder if you’re smelly that day. They don’t know anything about it from the inside. With half of humanity to … Read the rest

Saudi Arabia has sentenced a woman to 34 years in prison for having thoughts.

A Saudi student at Leeds University who had returned home to the kingdom for a holiday has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists.

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Salma al-Shehab, 34, a mother of two young children, was initially sentenced to three years in prison for the “crime” of using an internet website to “cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security”. But an appeals court on Monday handed down the new sentence – 34 years in prison followed by a 34-year travel ban – after a public prosecutor asked the court to consider

News from Port Townsend:

An angry white crowd screaming at a Black woman pleading for civil rights. Threatening her. Intimidating her. Senior women linking arms to protect a rape survivor trying to speak. A lesbian being shouted down by a mostly male mob decked out in Pride colors. A man with an AR-15 imposed over a Trans flag on his ball cap, the impression of a handgun in his left cargo pants pocket, hiding behind sunglasses and a mask that made identification difficult.

This man:

“DEFEND EQUALITY” with an assault rifle and a concealed face. That kind of equality.

Most of the jeering, intimidating mob of hundreds pressing elder women against the wall of the Cotton Building appeared to

The buffoons who hired a man to be Period Officer are saying they were right to do it and shut up.

A group in Tayside has defended its decision to appoint a man as a period dignity officer.

Jason Grant’s hiring sparked a heated online debate, with critics saying the job should have gone to a woman.

…

The job advert said the suitable candidate needed a “successful track record of engaging and empowering a large range of people from a diverse range of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, in particular young people who menstruate”.

Maybe everybody all along the line was confused – maybe none of them realized menstruation is something male people are not equipped to do, ever, under … Read the rest

Oh look, the actual job advert for the “Period Dignity Officer” –

Job Description

(This post is funded through Period Dignity Partnership and will be hosted by Dundee and Angus College)

Period Dignity Regional Lead Officer
Regional Post (working with community partners Dundee & Angus College, Perth College, Dundee City Council and Angus Council)
35 hours per week / Fixed-Term to 1st August 2024
Salary: DA10, £33,153 – £36,126

Working in partnership across the Tay Cities Region to aid in the implementation of the Period Product Act, this post aims to coordinate and streamline the approach to Period Dignity across Perth & Kinross, Dundee and Angus.  The Lead Officer will provide outstanding project leadership and management for a range of

Are the walls closing in on Treasonboy?

The US Department of Justice has asked a judge not to release the affidavit that gave the FBI probable cause to search Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, worsening distrust among top Trump aides casting about for any insight into the intensifying criminal investigation surrounding the former president.

The affidavit should not be unsealed because that could reveal the scope of the investigation into Trump’s unauthorized retention of government secrets, the justice department argued, days after the Mar-a-Lago search warrant showed it referenced potential violations of three criminal statutes.

Aha. Could it now. How interesting.

In arguing against unsealing the affidavit, the justice department also said that the disclosure could harm its ability to gain

Water cuts in the southwest states:

Water cuts are expected to be announced Tuesday to western states in the grip of a severe “megadrought” that has dropped levels in the country’s largest two reservoirs to record lows.

The flow of the Colorado river, which provides water to more than 40 million people across seven states and Mexico, will be stemmed to reduce supply to Arizona and Nevada initially, if the federal government confirms the proposal.

The crisis, which has dropped levels in Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US to an 80-year low of barely one-quarter its 28.9m acre-feet capacity, is threatening the future of the crucial river basin.

It turns out to have been … Read the rest

Ontology for fantasists.

Most men are born male, but a minority transition later in life. Whether you're cisgender or trans, you're a man if that's how you live your life.

You seem confused, so I hope that helps! https://t.co/aeq0PTZqm1

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) August 16, 2022

That’s a general principle then? So if you live your life as a snail you are a snail? If you live your life as a rutabaga you are a rutabaga? A car, a tree, a river, a planet, anything and everything?

Please offer further detail.… Read the rest

The Times on the bad behavior of Joanne Harris:

JK Rowling and fellow writers have accused the bestselling novelist Joanne Harris, who is head of the Society of Authors, of betraying the principle of freedom of speech in her stance on gender identity.

Rowling said that Harris, who wrote the award-winning novel Chocolat, had “consistently failed” to defend female authors who disagreed “with her personal position on gender identity ideology”, allowing the women to be intimidated into silence.

She cited the cases of two authors, Rachel Rooney and Gillian Philip, who had suffered “severe personal and professional harm” because they dared to “challenge a fashionable ideology which has been remarkably successful in demonising those who protest against the

Scotland is drunk.

Scotland has just appointed the first Period Dignity Officer… and it’s a man.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. pic.twitter.com/yFfdIFLwGJ

— Samantha Smith (@SamanthaTaghoy) August 15, 2022

Obviously men know more about periods than women do.

Dundee man and former personal trainer Jason Grant is the newly appointed period dignity officer for the Tay region – who has the task of promoting access to free sanitary products across schools and colleges – where he will also discuss issues around the menopause.

…

Mr Grant gushed of his new role as he claimed it affects men and boys too and people regardless of gender in a nod to inclusivity toward a minority of young trans men.

No it doesn’t. … Read the rest

Trump’s having a busy day. He’s also been telling the FBI what to do via his personal social media platform. That should work.

Donald Trump has demanded the return of some documents seized by the US justice department in an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida last week – apparently under the impression that posts on his Truth Social platform carry legal weight.

Or any other kind of weight.

In a post on Sunday, the former president wrote: “By copy of this Truth, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!”

Woman man person camera tv.

On Saturday, citing anonymous sources, Fox News reported that

Trump is told he should hurry up and declare he’s running so that he can…make the world a better place? No, of course not; so that he can avoid criminal investigation. That’s a good reason to run for president!

Donald Trump “has to” announce a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 in the next two weeks, a senior Trumpworld source said, if the former president wants to head off being indicted under the Espionage Act after the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago last week.

Awesome campaign slogan. “The Feds were hot on the trail so I announced my campaign to be president to foil them!”

In communications reviewed by the Guardian, the source indicated Trump needed to announce because

Kenan Malik on the attack on Rushdie and free inquiry:

The Rushdie affair was a watershed in British political and cultural life, thrusting to the surface issues such as radical Islam, terrorism, the boundaries of free speech and the limits of tolerance. It was also a turning point in the way many thought about these issues. There developed in its wake both a greater hostility to Muslims and a stronger sense of the moral unacceptability of giving offence to other cultures or faiths in a plural society.

…

Rushdie was charting this new terrain, capturing the sense of displacement and dislocation, which he found exhilarating. The Satanic Verses was, he wrote while in hiding, “a love-song to our mongrel

Jolyon deploys the irregular verbs.

…especially the ones who spout off about “relative power” without seemingly understanding what it means in the real world.

— Kenan Malik (@kenanmalik) August 14, 2022

Oh but I’m sure posh rich smug pale Jolyon knows far more about it than mere community-havers like Kenan.

Jolyon, your view seems to be that you criticising my article is “conspicuously polite” but me challenging your criticism can only be the product of “hostility or personal animus”. Let’s just say that I conspicuously politely disagree.

— Kenan Malik (@kenanmalik) August 14, 2022

Honestly. You couldn’t make it up. Maugham tweets a stupid ignorant criticism of Kenan’s piece on Rushdie and free speech, and then whines about “hostility or … Read the rest

The Hunger Stones have appeared.

Severe drought has caused water levels of the river Elbe to drop, exposing centuries-old “hunger stones”.

One stone, now visible in Děčín, where the Elbe flows from the Czech Republic into Germany, was carved with a warning in 1616 which reads: “If you see me, weep.”

The stones, embedded into the banks to mark water levels during famines, have been exposed as drought continues to afflict Europe. Other stones, which were common in German settlements from the 16th to the 19th century, were inscribed with similarly macabre warnings in the event of falling water levels.

Water levels during famines – not something we can technology our way around. Crops need water, and if the … Read the rest