Speaking of menstruation…

The UCLA student newspaper The Daily Bruin ran an opinion piece by Zoey Freedman arguing that necessary menstrual products should be covered by health insurance.

The editors attached a stipulation at the beginning:

Editor’s note: This blog post refers to individuals who menstruate as women because the author wanted to highlight gender inequality in health care. We acknowledge that not all individuals who menstruate identify as women and that not all individuals who identify as women menstruate, but feel this generalization is appropriate considering the gendered nature of most health care policies.

Yes, it’s such a shocking generalization to refer to people who menstruate as women.… Read the rest

Facebook thinks women are ooky. Kate Ng in the Independent:

A feminist blogger has been censored by Facebook for blogging about periods and the history of menstrual products.

Alaura Weaver, also known as ‘Bad-ass Motherblogger’, started an ongoing series of blog posts detailing the history of menstrual hygiene.

I took a look. It’s interesting. Well worth a read, and not worth censoring.

She tried to boost one of her posts on Facebook, and they said no, you can’t, not allowed.

According to Facebook, the post violated their Ad Guidelines, which state: “Ads are not allowed to promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including toys, videos, publications, live shows or sexual enhancement products.”

When she … Read the rest

More from Maryam:

Maryam Namazie ‏@MaryamNamazie Nov 7
Banner of women protesting stoning of Rakhshana #Afghanistan:
“End reach of merchants of religion from our country”

More photos:

There are more at the link.

… Read the rest

Via Maryam on Twitter:

Maryam Namazie ‏@MaryamNamazie Nov 7
Mothers against execution in Iran
Long Live.

An editorial from the Daily Times in Pakistan:

Pakistani society’s deep rooted acceptance of despicable misogynistic behaviour once again came to light recently when a mixed gender group of students at Karachi University (KU) who were playing a casual game of cricket together within the bounds of the university were assaulted for doing so by the activists of the notoriously thuggish fundamentalist Islami Jamiat-e-Talba (IJT), the student wing of the Jamat-e-Islami. The IJT and its members are a menace across the universities of the country, and they have defaced and perverted these supposed places of learning and critical reflection into fearful places of demagoguery and reactionary backwardness.

Imagine if Mormons or Baptists were doing that on university campuses in … Read the rest

John Knight, LGBT Project Director at the Illinois ACLU, posts about a suburban Chicago school district that refuses to let a trans girl use the girls’ locker room, instead making her use a separate room.

My clients started meeting with the District more than two years ago to explain why their daughter should be treated as a girl at school in all ways, including when using the locker room. As the District has no policy guiding the treatment of transgender students, the parents had to initiate the discussion regarding how the school would treat their daughter in accordance with her gender. They provided medical information regarding her diagnosis with gender dysphoria and her transition to living fully as a girl,

The Guardian reports on A New Study that finds that children from godbothering families are less altruistic than children from non-godbothering families.

Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.

They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.

“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.

I can’t say that that surprises me. I don’t think religion necessarily makes people less altruistic, or that atheism necessarily does … Read the rest

There was a big rally in Madrid today to protest violence against women.

The rally, organised by feminist groups, was attended by representatives of all the main political parties.

Activists dressed in black [lay] on the ground to remember hundreds of women murdered over the years in what they described as “macho terrorism”.

They said laws against domestic abuse should be extended to include all violence against women.

Isn’t violence against women kind of last century? Kind of second wave? Kind of over?

A survey carried out by the European Union last year estimated that 13 million woman in Europe experienced physical violence in 2013.

But statistics and surveys suggest the problem is less prevalent in Spain than other

The NSS reports that Turkey is working on treating violence against women more gently, kindly, compassionately – to the perps, that is, not to the women.

Proposals by the Turkish Ministry of Justice to treat sexual harassment and violence against women less severely have drawn widespread condemnation from campaigners.

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) is “deeply concerned” by the draft proposal and has warned that if passed the plans will allow perpetrators of crimes normally punishable by five years’ imprisonment “to engage in negotiations with prosecutors to reduce their sentence to one year, postpone their sentence, do community service or pay money to avoid jail time.”

They note that the proposal “covers a number of crimes that

I’m going through the past three years of Jesus and Mo, so I thought you’d enjoy this one:

Ontological bomb-shelter – that’s so exactly right. You can’t see it or talk to it, you can’t get messages from it, you can’t register complaints with it – it’s beyond your reach. Permanently…Except after you’re dead, they say, but then that’s very easy to say, isn’t it – you’re not going to be able to show them wrong. It’s the perfect con, and most people fall for it.

The Patreon is here.… Read the rest

So this is where we are.

Morgan M Page ‏@morganmpage Nov 4

TERFs are commiting acts of genocide against trans women under the UN’s definition of genocide. http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_analysis_framework.pdf …

Shivoa Birch ‏@Shivoa Nov 4
Imagine writing a piece telling queer/trans* youth to remember elders & saying “yes, call me a Terf or a Swerf” #ToneDeaf #TransGenocide

Morgan M Page ‏@morganmpage Nov 4
The entire anti-trans radical feminist agenda has always been upfront that their purpose is genocide. We need to start calling it that.

Genocide.

And they accuse other people of inciting hatred.

Reason (the libertarian website) agrees with the libertarian feminists, of course. Elizabeth Nolan Brown says the usual things:

In a recent interview with Time magazine, feminist icon Gloria Steinem—currently promoting a new travel memoir—says that the biggest threat to reproductive rights today is “patriarchy… the very definition (of which) is that men control women’s bodies in order to control reproduction.”

The way johns do, for instance. But Brown isn’t having any of that, thanks.

It’s a nice sentiment—but alas, Steinem’s concept of human rights and bodily integrity only applies to certain people. Steinem has been an outspoken proponent against sex workers’ right to bodily integrity.

Over the summer, Steinem was one of a group of Hollywood celebrities and

In Pakistan too.

A gunman on a motorbike shot dead a Pakistani journalist in the country’s restive northwest on Tuesday and hours later the Taliban claimed the killing, bringing to 71 the number of journalists and media workers killed in Pakistan since 2002.

Zaman Mehsud, 38, was a journalist working for the Pakistani Urdu newspaper Daily Umet and SANA news agency, and also worked for the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

A journalist and a human rights worker. Of course they killed him.

Taliban commander Qari Saif Ullah Saif told Reuters: “We killed him because he was writing against us … we have some other journalists on our hit list in the region, soon we will target them.”

Katha Pollitt on Germaine Greer and the fatuous attempt to no-platform her and the absurd demand that a feminist be 100% perfect (in the sense of: agrees with me in all particulars) or be banished.

She starts with the fact that Greer has always been all over the place. There’s always plenty to disagree with in what she writes and says. Nobody could agree with everything she says.

Still, when I was invited to interview her a few years ago about Shakespeare’s Wife, her biography of Anne Hathaway, I was delighted. I did not start a petition to have her invitation canceled on the grounds that anyone who approves of cutting off little girls’ clitorises has no place on

Guest post by Josh Spokes. An email from Consumers Union to members, and his reply.

Policy and Action from Consumer Reports

If you want the right to know, speak out now.

Monsanto is telling Senators you don’t need to know about GMOs in your food. We think you have the right to make up your own mind! Tell your Senators to support GMO labeling.

Take action

Dear Joshua,

If you want the right to know what’s in your food, now is the time to speak out. If you wait, you may forever be kept in the dark.

As you read this, Senators are writing a bill that could determine the fate of GMO food labeling. They will decide whether you … Read the rest

Journalism again treating violent unreasonable reactions to other people’s reasonable actions as “provoked” or “sparked” or “ignited” by the people who did nothing wrong. Charlie Hebdo “sparked” the violence that left nine of them dead; Lars Vilks “set off” outrage; Raif Badawi “triggered” his own ferocious punishment.

This one is the New York Times:

An actress from Iran has gone on the run after igniting a backlash by posting photos of herself on social media showing her not wearing a hijab…

Seriously: journalists need to be more careful with the way they write these stories. She didn’t “ignite” anything.

Sadaf Taherian began posting the controversial photos on Facebook and Instagram over the last two weeks and the response