All entries by this author
Mar 13th, 2021 10:25 am |
By Ophelia Benson
All women.
There should be no limits of the types of women protected from hate crime says Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, as she begins her consideration of whether Scotland requires a standalone offence to tackle misogynist abuse.
Well duh. Of course there should be no such limits. Misogyny doesn’t limit itself so why would a law against misogynist abuse limit itself?
Ok I’ll stop playing dumb now. We know why.
Kennedy is immediately clear on how she would define the scope of specific protection she is charged with: “This is about hatred. Trans women, gay women, journalists, parliamentarians, all women get a whole lot of horrible stuff slung at them – disproportionately – and I’m not narrowing down those
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3 comments
Mar 13th, 2021 8:59 am |
By Ophelia Benson
This happened last night in Montreal.
https://twitter.com/christophelston/status/1370526998011973636
https://twitter.com/christophelston/status/1370550694168702977
https://twitter.com/christophelston/status/1370550679606018050
https://twitter.com/christophelston/status/1370577428733640704
That’s broken all right.
https://twitter.com/christophelston/status/1370589591728717824…
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
9 comments
Mar 12th, 2021 10:16 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Grooming much?
It’s for 5-9 year olds. Class is once a week. Classes are all sold out!
Description
Class Experience
This group is for our youngest learners who might be binary transgender, nonbinary transgender, gender-expansive, gender-nonconforming, nonbinary, agender, queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or exploring their gender or sexual orientation. Neurodivergent learners and/or learners with disabilities are very much welcome. The aim of this group is to be as multisensory and multimedia as possible in an online setting, and to rely less on verbal discussion than in my older groups.
Youths will interact via live video chat. This youngest group has been created at the request of parents of students who have felt that the elementary LGBTQ clubs are “too
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4 comments
Mar 12th, 2021 6:57 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Hey, whatever moves the product, right? If it’s a man talking about his boobs right next to a row of murdered women, them’s the breaks.
On your left, murdered women; on your right, a man “making her pronouns permanent” and “shouting down abuse.”
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
20 comments
Mar 11th, 2021 4:05 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Good timing. Good front paging.
The headline at the top is a man bragging about being a woman while directly under that is more coverage of a woman who was grabbed off the street and murdered.
If being a woman were a promotion, if it were an honour, women wouldn’t get grabbed off the streets and murdered.
I’m so tired of this self-indulgent self-centered nonsense that shoves women aside for the sake of narcissistic men who play at being women. So tired of it.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
16 comments
Mar 11th, 2021 1:17 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Scotland has a shiny new hate crime bill that doesn’t include women.
Scotland’s controversial hate crime bill is set to pass later on Thursday amid anger about its current exclusion of women and assurances that the legislation will not criminalise those whose views are considered by some to be transphobic.
It did pass.
The final vote was delayed from Wednesday, after a marathon five-hour debate over a lengthy series of amendments resulted in one of Holyrood’s latest sittings and concluded the rocky passage of the bill. It is intended to consolidate existing hate crime laws but also creates a new offence of “stirring up hatred” on the grounds of religion, sexual orientation, age, disability or transgender identity.
But not … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Mar 11th, 2021 12:38 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Councillor Dom Armstrong wrote Tuesday:
It is with great sadness that I tender my resignation to the Green Party.
I have been a member since 2015 and a councillor since May 2019 in Washington/ Sunderland, a role which I will also be giving up.
In that time they accomplished good things.
I joined the Greens, and agreed to stand for public office, simply because I have two daughters. I did hope that through joining the Greens, and fighting climate change, this would be a worthy way to honour them. They didn’t always understand, especially when they were younger, why their Dad was working at nights, or at weekends, or posting leaflets in the snow, or responding to emails during
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11 comments
Mar 11th, 2021 11:29 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Well now we all want to know what “dinner party TERFs” are and why we haven’t been invited.
It’s some guy called Ryan Broderick who came up with the label, but it’s very misty what he meant by it. It’s something about Glenn Greenwald and a NY Times reporter called Taylor Lorenz which is too uninteresting to describe further.
Greenwald is part of a cadre of writers who position themselves as neither left or right-wing, instead focusing on culture war Twitter drama about being “canceled” and trans people in bathrooms and woke college students to make the actually very standard and traditional right-wing status quo that they’re defending sound slightly less tedious. Other writers in this network are people
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10 comments
Mar 11th, 2021 10:33 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Rachel Hewitt makes an interesting point about street harassment and who own public space.
The disappearance of Sarah Everard while she walked through Clapham, south London, at 9pm on 3 March gives horrific shape to the hum of fear that women constantly feel in public spaces. My social media timelines are full of women who are distressed by Sarah’s disappearance, and terrified that it could have been them. Men have asked what they can do to help women feel safer. But what’s needed beyond the education of individuals are urgent political solutions to counter men’s attempts to claim public spaces as their exclusive domain.
Street harassment of women by men is so common that there are no women … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
5 comments
Mar 11th, 2021 8:08 am |
By Ophelia Benson
That’s some very feeble reasoning. Men are the most likely to hurt anyone simply because men are stronger than women; that doesn’t mean less muscular men are women’s sisters. Men don’t become our sisters by getting beaten up by men. Having something in common with a set of people isn’t the same as that set of people morphing … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
8 comments
Mar 10th, 2021 4:41 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Well, anyway, I’m relieved that Major hasn’t been exiled to Delaware permanently, which is what I thought I’d read yesterday (or I did read it and the reporting was wrong). I know it’s trivia but I liked having dogs back in the White House after that Lump of Nothing who hates all animals.
Major got a little bitey but he’s only exiled while DOCTOR Biden is traveling.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that on Monday, the 3-year-old German shepherd was “surprised by an unfamiliar person and reacted in a way that resulted in a minor injury to the individual.”
Psaki did not disclose any information about the person who crept up on the pooch but she did
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14 comments