Is this real advice or is it satire? I don’t know.

In trying to find the source I found advice from the Unitarian Universalist Association, which included this bullet point:

• Use words that encompass all genders rather than only two
  For example, “people of all genders” instead of “women and men”; “children” instead of “boys and girls”; “siblings” or “kindred” instead of “brothers and sisters.”

Hmm.

The things you happen on when stumbling around Twitter. I found an article by someone named Wardah Khalid, which says some strikingly unpleasant things about reformist Muslims and ex-Muslims.

The title, which may not have been her choice, is a bad start:

The Ayaan Hirsi Ali problem: why do anti-Islam Muslims keep getting promoted as “experts”?

That’s a stupid question. You can be opposed to X and be an expert in it. That’s not even unusual. Why shouldn’t people who are critical of Islam get promoted as experts?

And since she raised the question I tried to find out why she gets promoted as an expert, and I couldn’t find much reason. I think it’s probably because she’s a … Read the rest

The Muslim Reform Movement on Facebook:

Hizbut Tarir Australia has been found guilty of discriminating against women for making them sit at the back of PUBLIC POLITICAL meetings following a suit raised by progressive woman activist, Alison Bevege. Bevege has since been viciously subject to slurs such as “Islamophobe” and “bigot” by Hizbut Tarir members.

She writes on her twitter (@AlisonBevege): “progressive ‪#‎Muslims‬ and non-muslims together win – no forced gender segregation”

Video report

The Sydney Morning Herald:

Controversial Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir has been ordered to stop forcibly segregating men and women at its public events after a NSW tribunal found the practice constituted sexual discrimination.

Former NT News journalist Alison Bevege sued the organisation and

I cringe that this is my country. (I’m not very cis-American.) Donald Trump talks about the size of his penis in campaigning for president.

It’s “yuge” — or at least that’s what Donald Trump wants you to believe.

The leading contender in the GOP’s race for president made sure the size of his hands — and his manhood — were front and center during the Fox News debate on Thursday night.

“Nobody has ever hit my hands before. Look at those hands,” Trump said while holding them up, spread-fingered in a bid to address previous suggestions by rival Sen. Marco Rubio. “He referred to my hands — if they’re small, something else must be small.”

He added:

And then there’s India. Reuters via the Guardian:

India has denied visas for a delegation from the US government agency charged with monitoring international religious freedom.

The delegation from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom had been scheduled to leave for India on Friday for a long-planned visit with the support of the US state department and the US embassy in New Delhi, but India had failed to issue the necessary visas, the commission said.

The Indian embassy in Washington hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

Last year, despite a much-heralded fresh start in US-India ties under Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the United States ran into problems arranging visits by the head of its office to

Mehreen Zahra-Malik reports at Reuters:

A powerful Pakistani religious body that advises the government on the compatibility of laws with Islam on Thursday declared a new law that criminalizes violence against women to be “un-Islamic.”

Thus throwing a massive spanner into the project of liberal secular Muslims who argue that it’s violence against women that’s un-Islamic.

The Women’s Protection Act, passed by Pakistan’s largest province of Punjab last week, gives unprecedented legal protection to women from domestic, psychological and sexual violence. It also calls for the creation of a toll-free abuse reporting hot line and the establishment of women’s shelters.

But since its passage in the Punjab assembly, many conservative clerics and religious leaders have denounced the new law

More from Sheffield University ASH. A later comment on that Facebook thread explaining why they were afraid to invite Maryam to speak:

Ellen Woods I ran this society several years ago (with a fairly “hardline” approach) and we had an ever increasing membership. I am frankly embarrassed by this statement.
I met Maryam Namazie at an event with Sheffield Humanist society a few years ago as well as rallies in London and think she, and everything she stands for, is fantastic.
I have honestly no idea who runs or is involved in the University society now but I apologise on behalf of myself and previous members. What a shame.

And a reply by the ASH Secretary, who is probably … Read the rest

Surprised not surprised – it turns out that contraceptives reduce the abortion rate. Women’s Health reports:

The new analysis from the Guttmacher Institute, which was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reveals that the unintended pregnancy rate declined by a whopping 18 percent between 2008 and 2011, bringing it to the lowest it’s been in 30 years.

The study’s authors also found that 42 percent of unintended pregnancies in 2011 ended in abortion, as compared with 40 percent in 2008—meaning that although the number of abortions has declined (due to the lower rate of unintended pregnancies), the proportion of unintended pregnancies that end in abortion has actually remained about the same (and even increased slightly).

“These

That icon of progressivism and social justice, Caitlyn Jenner, wants to be Ted Cruz’s trans ambassador.

To The Advocate, Jenner revealed that she wants to be Cruz’s “trans ambassador” should he become president. Here’s the relevant excerpt from Dawn Ennis’s Jenner profile:

Jenner reveals she met Cruz prior to her transition, more than a year ago, “and he was very nice.”

“Wouldn’t it be great, let’s say he goes on to be president,” she tells me in relating a conversation on the tour bus. “And I have all my girls on a trans issues board to advise him on making decisions when it comes to trans issues. Isn’t that a good idea?” she asked me.

“You’re going

The new issue of Free Inquiry is online, and my column is one of the items not subscribers-only this time. It’s about the odd fact that we consider Islamic State an enemy while we consider Saudi Arabia a valuable ally. (By “we” of course I mean Anglophone countries at government level.)

Saudi Arabia is officially an ally of many liberal democracies, yet it spurned the UDHR in company with newly apartheid South Africa and authoritarian communist states. This should seem stranger to us than it does. The hostility toward human rights of apartheid South Africa eventually made it a pariah state, and its pariah status in turn forced an end to apartheid. The stark absence of human rights in the

More on the University of Sheffield Atheist Secular & Humanist Society, and that post on their Facebook page.

We are in no way abandoning Maryam Namazie. This year the society has shifted it’s focus from hard line atheism as it tends to stagnate numbers and decrease membership, to focus on humanism, which has had the opposite effect. We had a slow start in this and managed after a lot of hard work to be invited to events ran by the CU and Isoc. These are important because we feel that better relations mean they will feel more comfortable joining events that we host, making the society more diverse and the atmosphere more comfortable. We would be terrified of hosting

Meanwhile, in the getting shit done department –

The Peace Corps announced on Wednesday that it had more than doubled the number of countries participating  in the Let Girls Learn initiative, which aims to address the challenges that prevent 62 million adolescent girls from attending school and completing their educations.

Launched by the U.S. president and first lady on March 3, 2015, the government effort has since — with the help of corporate partners and individual donors throughout America — funded nearly 100 Let Girls Learn projects in 21 countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Central America, and trained more than 800 Peace Corps volunteers to become catalysts for community-led change. Another 23 countries have been added this year.

Is this peak cis? From the Telegraph:

A new startup is reinventing smartphone design, turning phones from rectangles to circles. The circular smartphone, called Cyrcle, is aimed at women, whose smaller pockets often can’t accommodate large phablets.

Ah yes, women and their biological smaller pockets.

The company behind the phone is called Dtoor – which stands for “Designing the opposite of rectangle” although the Cyrcle smartphone is currently their only proposed product. The founders Christina Cyr and Linda Inagawa are ex-Microsoft employees…

So everything right-angled will be designed into circularity to accommodate poor woolly women who can’t handle corners? Books will be round, magazines will be round, doors will be round, paper currency will be round?

The

Maryam tells us about a new installment in the ongoing saga of…of…I don’t even know what to call it now, because it’s become so tangled and contradictory since Sam Harris’s worshipers joined the fray. Of bizarro-world reasons students come up with to claim she’s an Unapproved Person.

A student at Sheffield University messaged the University’s Atheists, Secularists and Humanists Society to suggest inviting Maryam to speak there. Here is the ASH president’s response:

Can you believe it?

“The discourse in the zeitgeist” – meaning the chatter on the bit of social media the writer is aware of, which hardly amounts to the discourse in the zeitgeist, if there even is such a thing. But it makes for an official-sounding “reason” … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Josh Spokes on “We hope discussions on trafficking would not disproportionately focus on sex work”.

The reversal of meaning that’s happened to the word “stigmatizing” in this context is disturbing. I think it’s worth unpacking. I also think well-meaning people are accepting a perverse use of the term because it’s become de rigeur. Please reconsider.

“Stigmatizing sex workers” in a harmful way has always been understood to include things like:

• calling women whores and streetwalkers
• jeering at prostitutes
• treating them as unrapeable
• Trying to sweep them away like untidy garbage (you know, like how we do the homeless)

I think most of you would agree that this is a sensible, ordinary use of the term.… Read the rest

Behold the gruesome corruption, sleaze, and all-round disgustingness of US politics.

Back when Dodd-Frank mandated the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency proposed by Elizabeth Warren with the goal of protecting American families from predatory lending practices, few probably imagined the agency would face pushback from the chair of the Democratic National Committee. And yet, here we are in 2016, in the midst of one of the most bizarre election seasons on record, and Wasserman Schultz, along with several other Floridians in Congress, is challenging the CFPB’s forthcoming payday lending regulations.

Because what could be more worth protecting from regulation than an “industry” that preys on poor people by charging sky-high interest rates on payday … Read the rest

The Women’s Liberation Group within the Edinburgh University Student Association is worried that there is going to be an event on human trafficking at the university. The group issued a statement.

Recently, it was brought to the Women’s Group attention that there is an event being organised within the university on Human Trafficking. The Women’s Group have a few concerns with the event.

Any conflation of human trafficking with sex work is incredibly harmful and damaging to both sides. We hope discussions on trafficking would not disproportionately focus on sex work, as from the statistics provided (an estimated 28 million are trafficked and 4.5 million are part of the sex trade) this would make up around 1/6 of trafficking.

A statement by Inspire:

Inspire is shocked and disappointed that some British imams, Muslim groups and individuals in our country have expressed their support and paid tribute to Mumtaz Qadri following his execution* yesterday in Pakistan, by declaring him to be a “martyr” who defended the honour of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him)

Mumtaz Qadri assassinated Punjab Governor Salman Taseer in January 2011 for his stance against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and his robust defence of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman who is currently on death row for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). 

Governor Taseer pointed out in November 2010 in an interview with CNN that the blasphemy law is