So Atwood posted a video.

Also this one: https://t.co/P9FMFFs4MQ

— Margaret E Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) October 24, 2021

Not a good choice of video. A big chunk of it is about Maya Forstater and of course gets a lot wrong. (Of course because they always do.) Maya sets her straight.

I am an ordinary woman who lost her job and her livelihood because someone shouted "transphobia".

The video that you are spreading accuses me of being "transphobic" based on lies and smears. pic.twitter.com/6hmBsGdOth

— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) October 24, 2021

If you want to say I am a "transphobe" based on things I have written then go aheadhttps://t.co/jpZB1L5WaU

Sharing this video that seeks destroy my reputation based on internet rumours

… Read the rest

Ok get over it already.

As a violent mob pushed past barricades protecting the U.S. Capitol, then dragged, beat and bludgeoned police officers before roaming the halls with abandon on Jan. 6, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice watched and wept. The emotions, she said, were similar to those she felt on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I thought: ‘I study countries that do this. I didn’t think it would happen in my own country,’ ” Rice, a Republican who teaches political science at Stanford University, said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View.”

In her own country and with the tacit consent of her own political party. It wasn’t a national insurrection, it was a specific, partisan, one-sided, right-wing insurrection. Most of … Read the rest

Oh did they indeed.

No inspirational women allowed.

Oxfam has bowed to the transgender lobby by withdrawing a children’s bingo game celebrating ‘inspirational women’ from sale in its stores and online.

Inspirational men are no problem, of course, but women…ick.

The game, which sold for £14.99, uses pictures of 48 famous women rather than numbers on cards that are matched with tokens showing the same female figures, including Jane Austen, US civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, climate-change activist Greta Thunberg and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

And JK Rowling. Enough said.

But in an email last week, the charity told staff: ‘We have taken the decision to withdraw the product Wonder Women Bingo as it has been

… Read the rest

The Times on Stonewall:

Today The Times reports on the newest foray into corporate boardrooms under the misleading guise of breaking the gender glass ceiling. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which regulates the financial industry, has drawn up diversity guidelines. These would require every company listed on FTSE indices to declare the percentage of women serving as board members. The new rules, however, do not require that companies declare their board members’ legal or biological sex but their gender identity, regardless of when in their career they adopted it. Using this new definition, the FCA is now recommending that 40 per cent of boards should be women.

But they could all be men. Companies could comply with such recommendations … Read the rest

Women not impressed by ActiVists trying to school Margaret Atwood:

Why any self-respecting woman would want a second chance to grovel more convincingly is quite beyond me. pic.twitter.com/NfbZpCnJl1

— Eliza Mondegreen (@elizamondegreen) October 23, 2021

https://twitter.com/boodleoops/status/1452011785930874880 https://twitter.com/AndreaC61264162/status/1452013603893268482

Margaret Atwood has become one of her own handmaidens, rising up against the tyranny of extreme activist trolls https://t.co/2fj8PKMR4j via @mailplus

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) October 22, 2021

… Read the rest

By latsot, originally a comment on Today in London but it got held because of links while I was out for a walk to Lake Union and back so now it’s a post instead of a comment.

YNNB:

Yes. And the dinosaur costumes were another genius PR idea from Posie Parker. It’s impossible to see one waddling down the street (or getting on a bus)

  without paying attention. And when people do, the explanation is a perfect lead into a discussion of Stonewall.

The event was brilliant, I’m glad I went. Everyone was incredibly nice and kind and looked after each other all day. People helped me get in and out of the pub and fretted about me crossing busy … Read the rest

Theocrats pick another fight:

Thousands of supporters of a banned radical Islamist party have departed from the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore, clashing with police for a second day, a party spokesman and witnesses said on Saturday.

The group formed on Friday with the goal of reaching the capital, Islamabad, to pressure the government to release Saad Rizvi, the head of the Tehreek-e-Labiak Pakistan party.

“Radical” coupled with Islamist means deep hatred of women and “blasphemers.” (They consider most people blasphemers.)

Rizvi’s party gained prominence in Pakistan’s 2018 elections, campaigning on a single issue: defending the country’s blasphemy law, which calls for the death penalty for anyone who insults Islam. It has a history of staging violent protests to

… Read the rest

Judith Butler has a crappy predictable abusive piece in the Guardian complaining of a “backlash” over sacred Gender.

The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by extensive rightwing Catholic and evangelical organizations. Although not always in accord, these groups concur that the traditional family is under attack, that children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.

Meanwhile, in the real world, feminist women object to being shoved aside and told to shut up by men who claim to be women.

It

… Read the rest

Remember Charles Clymer the “male feminist” who was always talking over women? Then declared he was “Charlotte” and it all made sense? As Charlotte he gets to talk over everyone.

https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/1451812631749275650

And Charles is a man. He is not a woman. Being a woman is not his experience (7 years in the army azza man) and he is not qualified to talk about what is and isn’t offensive and intrusive and misogynist to the female community. Stay in your lane Charles.… Read the rest

Let’s have a campaign against spiking women’s drinks in order to rape them and let’s make sure our campaign is incloosiv of men.

https://twitter.com/martinradio/status/1451829049047855107

The campaign started on Instagram, and that’s also where it was interrupted and hijacked and bullied into including men, thus making it a completely meaningless campaign to stop people doing something to people.

We’re sorry!!! We’re sorry we’re sorry we’re sorry – we’re so sorry we said it was about girls, we’ll never do it again, please don’t hit us, please don’t drug us and rape us, please, we promise we’ll be good, please please please please… Read the rest

Originally a comment by As the smoke rises upward on A long-awaited judgment.

One can make the same argument for selling organs. There are thousands of desperately poor people in rural India suffering from the lifelong health effects of having one kidney because they—ostensibly voluntarily—sold the other one.

Here’s another, more obscure analogy: midget bowling. If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with this phenomenon, it’s the practice of tossing a little person down a bowling lane in place of a bowling ball, which is apparently high comedy to certain crass fratboy types. Some little people rent themselves out to would-be midget bowlers, but some state legislatures have passed laws prohibiting the practice, on the grounds that it … Read the rest

We’re not confused.

For anyone confused by our usage of inclusive language, please read the editorial from our August issue, which was focused on pregnancy. https://t.co/MPwCT8pV78

— The Scientist (@TheScientistLLC) October 22, 2021

I’m not confused, but I’ll have a look.

Beyond these clinical technicalities, for many people pregnancy also starts before conception in a figurative sense.

I’m definitely not confused, I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re pandering to a stupid fad for pretending that we don’t know which sex does the baby-having.

…two medical centers in the US, Baylor University Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, are now offering uterus transplants to allow XX-carrying people lacking a functional uterus to gestate their own children

… Read the rest

The mindset.

https://twitter.com/Hitchcockian/status/1450063002296803347

What letters? The usual suspects.

And while he’s got your attention, he’d also like you to take his directions on what people it’s permitted to follow on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Hitchcockian/status/1450564574160334856

Nine acquaintances, and he’s telling them he’d “appreciate it” if they stopped following someone because he says so. I might as well tweet that I’d appreciate it if Jeff Bezos ran his friends past me for approval.

Pompous little dictators everywhere.

Updating to add:

"If you're a physicist and you sign any letter in support of the heretic Galileo, I will never use your work in my teaching." https://t.co/iiVmKDIE1B

— Anya Palmer (@anyabike) October 22, 2021

… Read the rest

The Come Out of Stonewall protest:

Behind us is a statue of George Orwell & the quote, “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people that which they do not wish to hear” #comeoutofstonewall pic.twitter.com/4BbEArvwJM

— Lily Maynard (@LilyLilyMaynard) October 22, 2021

That’s our mate latsot in the wheelchair in front.

It’s good that there are always dinosaurs now.… Read the rest

Ceri Black (Ceri pronounced like Kerry) spoke at a Belfast protest today.

I’m here to stand against the protection racket that is the diversity champion’s scheme, and to call for employers to join the flood of others who have left it.

But I hope you don’t mind if I take this opportunity to speak about what’s been happening to me over the last 48 hours instead of the speech I originally prepared.

You may know this already, but a man has managed to persuade the police to invite me to an interview, under caution, regarding my twitter account, @femmeloves.

I did know it already. It’s That Man Again.

If it were not prohibited by the twitter terms of service,

… Read the rest

Define the rights you’re talking about, OJ.

If this piece was a proper piece of journalism, it would note that Kathleen Stock signed the "WHRC Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, which Sussex University students contend seeks to abolish trans rights".

But there's no reference to it at all.https://t.co/Pyxh7M7wEK

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) October 21, 2021

If this piece were a proper piece of journalism – the counter-factual subjunctive exists for a reason. (Of course, the piece is a proper piece of journalism, but OJ is claiming it isn’t, but doing it badly, because he doesn’t write well.)

But the substantive point here is that the LGB Alliance is not “anti-trans rights” and that OJ is smuggling the claim in … Read the rest

Love is not a human right and neither is sex. (Remember when Amnesty International decided it is? I do. How can you make sex a human right without implying a requirement? Who are the people who would be most subject to that requirement?)

This morning the Court of Appeal handed down a long-awaited judgment in the case of Re C, a legal case fraught with tension due to the sensitive and complex nature of what lay at its heart.

In short, C, a learning-disabled man, wished to seek out the “services” of a prostituted woman to pay her for sexual access, but he lacked the mental capacity to make such arrangements for himself.

One of several legal issues

… Read the rest

Amnesty UK has a stupid mealy-mouthed blamey “statement” distancing itself from the “suck my dick you cunts”- type activism at the FiLiA event.

We have a long history of campaigning against violence against women and this continues to be a vital part of our work.

But they’ve forgotten who women are, and which people are women.

We are equally committed to campaigning for the rights of transgender people to live freely, authentically, and openly, and to have their gender legally recognised without having to go through a dehumanising, long and costly procedure. 

But the “right” of transgender people to live “authentically” entails requiring everyone to agree with them that they are their new gender in every possible sense, in other … Read the rest

Updating to add: the photo is probably (or certainly?) a fake. Just look at it as a pretty imagining.

A snapshot from the International Space Station. That’s a little item called South America.

I had no idea the moon looked like that from the ISS. … Read the rest

I hope they lock him up.

 The House voted Thursday to hold Steve Bannon, a longtime ally and aide to former President Donald Trump, in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

…

The House vote sends the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, where it will now be up to prosecutors in that office to decide whether to present the case to a grand jury for possible criminal charges. It’s still uncertain whether they will pursue the case — Attorney General Merrick Garland would only say at a House hearing on Thursday that they plan to “make a decision consistent with the principles of prosecution.”

… Read the rest