Horrific news from Palmyra.

Islamic State (IS) militants beheaded an antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his body on a column in a main square of the historic site, Syria’s antiquities chief said on Tuesday.

IS, whose insurgents control swathes of Syria and Iraq, captured Palmyra in central Syria from government forces in May, but are not known to have damaged its monumental Roman-era ruins despite their reputation for destroying artifacts they view as idolatrous under their puritanical interpretation of Islam.

Syrian state antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim said the family of Khaled Asaad had informed him that the 82-year-old scholar who worked for over 50 years as head of antiquities in Palmyra was executed

Guest post by Josh Spokes

Thoughts on the conversations left-leaning 20-somethings are having lately about what’s being called “identity” and “identifying as”. This is an important conversation, but it’s vastly under-theorized. It’s not at all clear what “identity” and “identifying as” truly means. These are issues that those of us who are decades older struggled with and still struggle with – to the surprise of many younger people, who invented queer theory and social justice back in 2011.

Preemptive note: None of these thoughts imply, or mean to imply, that any class of people  is not “real.” Because of the recent controversy over how we discuss transgender issues, readers will likely take this essay to be primarily about transgender people … Read the rest

Katha Pollitt points out that all those women who’ve had abortions and moved on need to stop being so quiet about it.

We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it’s good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we’re trying to combat. What, you didn’t agonize? You forgot your pill? You just didn’t want to have a baby now? You should be ashamed of yourself.

The stigma is what makes it so vulnerable.

The second

I don’t read exclusively things I already agree with. I read a range of things. I read some things I disagree with. I read some things I strongly disagree with.

Reading things one disagrees with isn’t the same thing as complicity with those things one disagrees with. Reading something ≠ complicity.

There are so many reasons for reading – they might even be infinite. One reads for information – for ideas – for inspiration – for pleasure – out of curiosity – for understanding – for getting a sense of different views on a subject.

That’s only a fraction of possible reasons for reading.

There’s something oddly cargo-cultish about thinking reading something is complicity with that something.

I read that … Read the rest

One troublesome fact that feminism has always had to deal with is that not all women are feminists. Some women are apolitical, some women don’t really know from feminism, some women are explicitly anti-feminist, some women are minimalist feminists (votes, good; equal pay, good; tweaking the culture, bad), some women are officially submissive, usually on religious grounds.

So feminism has to accommodate that fact. (The same of course applies, mutatis mutandis, to other movements.) Feminism wants to end the subordination of all women, but that doesn’t mean feminism considers all women feminists for the sake of being inclusive. Feminism can’t help being aware that some women are not feminists.

Here’s a shocker: the same thing applies to trans women. … Read the rest

One troublesome fact that feminism has always had to deal with is that not all women are feminists. Some women are apolitical, some women don’t really know from feminism, some women are explicitly anti-feminist, some women are minimalist feminists (votes, good; equal pay, good; tweaking the culture, bad), some women are officially submissive, usually on religious grounds.

So feminism has to accommodate that fact. (The same of course applies, mutatis mutandis, to other movements.) Feminism wants to end the subordination of all women, but that doesn’t mean feminism considers all women feminists for the sake of being inclusive. Feminism can’t help being aware that some women are not feminists.

Here’s a shocker: the same thing applies to trans women. … Read the rest

John Horstman posted this comment at the vacated blog over there yesterday, and I wouldn’t want it to be overlooked here.

From Stephanie Zvan:

Because the answers I’m hearing are that you just shut up for the sake of harmony at your blog network and watch as trans people are once again erroneously painted as bullies targeting heroic feminists who just have questions about gender, a trope used against them any time they advocate for themselves.

Emphasis added. This is more dishonest overgeneralizing. How, exactly, does critique of a particular model of gender identity, one not shared by all trans people, and denunciation of a very specific group of people, trans and not, who are lashing out … Read the rest

I didn’t know that the technical term for “another one of those irregular verbs” was “emotive conjugations.” Wikipedia has the story:

In rhetoric, emotive or emotional conjugation mimics the form of a grammatical conjugation of an irregular verb to illustrate humans’ tendency to describe their own behavior more charitably than the behavior of others.^[1] It is often called the Russell conjugation in honour of philosopher Bertrand Russell who expounded the concept in 1948 on the BBC Radio programme The Brains Trust,^[2] citing the examples:^[3]

I am firm, You are obstinate, He is a pig-headed fool.

I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss over nothing.

I have reconsidered the matter,

In thinking about the frenzied monstering of me on Freethought Blogs over the past few weeks, I realized I must have been laboring under a misapprehension all the time I was there. I thought it was a network that was partly about thinking – thinking as such, thinking as a value, thinking as a goal and a pursuit and a method. I knew it was about other things too, of course, especially secularism and atheism and also progressive causes, but I did think it put the “thought” part front and center.

Either I was wrong all along, or it’s changed. I don’t really know which. I don’t know much about Freethought Blogs at all, it turns out, despite having been … Read the rest

Sean Carroll wrote about Ben Barres and Joan Roughgarden on his blog in 2006. (Physicist SC, not biologist SC.)

Barres underwent treatments about ten years ago to go from being female to male, so he has a unique perspective on the different ways that male and female scientists are treated. Not completely unique, of course; the WSJ article also quotes Joan Roughgarden, also at Stanford, who was “Jonathan” up until 1998:

Jonathan Roughgarden’s colleagues and rivals took his intelligence for granted, Joan says. But Joan has had “to establish competence to an extent that men never have to. They’re assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise. I

In this post back in November 2010, I quoted from a Wall Street Journal article about Ben Barres, formerly Barbara.

The top science and math student in her New Jersey high school, she was advised by her guidance counselor to go to a local college rather than apply to MIT. She applied anyway and was admitted. As an MIT undergraduate, Barbara was one of the only women in a large math class, and the only student to solve a particularly tough problem. The professor “told me my boyfriend must have solved it for me,” recalls Prof. Barres…

Although Barbara Barres was a top student at MIT, “nearly every lab head I asked refused to let me do my

Salty Current said something that caught my attention in a comment on that discussion of whether or not we have to give up our “cherished right to self-expression” if we want to be allies of marginalized groups.

people who want to be allies of marginalized groups

But I’m a member of a marginalized group. We’re talking here about relations between and among marginalized groups. At some point, fucking solidarity has to be the key. And solidarity is not a one-way street.

Yes, that’s true. It’s not a matter of us non-marginalized people keeping silence in order to be allies to marginalized people – it’s marginalized people and other marginalized people. Solidarity is important. It’s far better than being “allies” in … Read the rest

A trans man lists some kinds of privilege he noticed he had after he transitioned – 25 of them to be exact, and he says he could have listed lots more.

I was being treated better by everyday America because people were reading me as a young, white, straight (?!) male. And I recognized many new privileges that came my way because of it.

For the record, this isn’t an article meant for transphobic people to share around and say, “See?! See?! Trans guys are totally reaping all the benefits of patriarchy, and WE MUST HATE THEM!”

If you think this is true, you’re not paying attention. And clearly haven’t educated yourself appropriately on trans issues. Or patriarchal issues.

Speaking of things one notices as a woman – Bernice Sandler gave a talk on the subject at CFI’s first Women in Secularism conference in 2012.

… Read the rest

Lane Florsheim on What Happens When Trans Women Lose Their Male Privilege.

Two months after she transitioned to female, Deirdre McCloskey found herself having a quintessentially female experience. She was chatting with fellow economics professors at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, all of whom happened to be men. She was attempting to make an argument, but no one seemed to be listening. A few minutes later, a male professor articulated the same idea. “What a great point, George!” others exclaimed.

Welcome to the wonderful world of being female.

“A lot of trans women are aware that there is male privilege before we transition–that women are not treated with as much respect as men,” says Julia Serano, author of Whipping

Do I agree that people who want to be allies of marginalized groups “must necessarily give up some of their cherished right to self-expression, recognizing that some thoughts, even valuable ones, may not be worth expressing in a particular way if that would needlessly cause pain to others”?

No, I don’t. Not put that way at least. But then it’s inconsistent – it’s “must necessarily” at the beginning but then “may not be worth expressing” at the end. It’s definite at the beginning but then has three hedges in a row at the end – may not, in a particular way, if that would. The “must necessarily” gets modified almost as soon as it appears. But hedged or … Read the rest

Another contradiction in the Amnesty / free market position on prostitution, besides the one between “sex should be enthusiastically consensual” and “sex work is a job like any other job” position, is that between intimacy and rape.

That is…Amnesty said in an early position paper that sex is a basic human need, and at least some fans of the “let the market in sex be free” position endorse that claim. Critics point out the need can be met without requiring the help of another human being, and proponents say no it can’t, because the need isn’t just for orgasm, it’s for intimacy.

But if the crucial aspect of sex is intimacy, how do you account for the pervasiveness of … Read the rest