Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on All the poles are reversed.

If there is no difference between a cis woman and a trans woman, if “trans women are women” – then it shouldn’t make any difference.

But of course, there is a difference.

Anyway the more I see these stories, the more this runs through my head:

You’ve heard of TERFs, you’ve heard of SWERFs, now introducing the hot new radical feminism, WERFs.

That’s right, Women Exclusionary Radical Feminism, for when you want to call yourself a feminist but think the only women whose voices matter, are those women who have penises.

Do you think it is okay to threaten 60 year-old-women with baseball bats while still claiming … Read the rest

More from The Festering Sewer Dispatch:

On Monday, President Trump retweeted a fake image of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer in Middle Eastern garb standing in front of an Iranian flag. The badly-photoshopped image showed Pelosi wearing hijab and Schumer with a turban on his head. “Democrats 2020,” the text on the bottom of the image read.

https://twitter.com/D0wn_Under/status/1216667026191605760

Hur hur hur.

Telling Trump he can’t unilaterally commit an act of war is not the same as embracing the target of the act of war. It’s a little more complicated than that.

The fake image was just one of the anti-Pelosi messages the president retweeted on Monday, many of them using the same hashtag: #NancyPelosiFakeNews. Bot Sentinel

… Read the rest

The Daily Beast has the least cryptic reporting I’ve found on the Parnas Papers so far.

On the eve of a Senate trial to remove President Trump, House Democratic investigators have released a trove of documents obtained from the phone of Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani’s who was tasked with carrying out key parts of the plot to pressure the new president of Ukraine to do political favors for Trump.

…

In one exchange from March 2019, Robert F. Hyde, a Trump donor and Republican Congressional candidate whose involvement in the Ukraine saga has not been previously detailed, sent texts to Parnas that implied he had access to people spying on Yovanovitch in Kyiv, according to the

… Read the rest

Breaking news.

NEWS tonight: Records turned over by Lev Parnas to House Intel show Parnas communicated with a GOP congressional candidate who said he had former Ambassador Yovanovitch under physical and possibly electronic surveillance in Kyiv

— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) January 14, 2020

I have to wonder what business a congressional candidate – of any party – had surveilling an ambassador. I would wonder the same about a member of Congress.

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1217226564200534019

Will go down with ‘do us a favor though’ https://t.co/FmUkKEs0ae

— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) January 14, 2020

Um holy sh*t. This certainly makes it sound like Parnas and co. were actively tracking Yovanovitch's movements. This could explain why Yovanovitch was moved out of Ukraine so quickly. https://t.co/4rBRB06ZGN pic.twitter.com/5Gc8WcGPih

… Read the rest

Let’s look at this one again.

3. Two cis women debating trans equality is like two men debating women’s equality – paternalistic and inappropriate. We are not the voices that should be centred.

You see what she’s doing there. It’s what the “activists” do…including, so often, so bafflingly, women. They pretend the magic of “trans” makes men the subordinated party as opposed to the subordinating. They pretend the magic of “trans” makes women Privileged in relation to men. They pretend the magic of “trans” flips the terms and makes women the people who oppress and dominate men.

I will never understand it. Never. I can see thinking that men who are acutely uncomfortable being men have an unhappy lot, … Read the rest

Take a moment to feel compassion for a guy who wants to be a criminal genius but is constantly hampered in his quest by a stupidity so profound it can’t be measured. Poor schmuck can’t keep his story straight from one day to the next.

President Donald Trump authorized the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani seven months ago if Iran’s increased aggression resulted in the death of an American, according to five current and former senior administration officials.

The presidential directive in June came with the condition that Trump would have final signoff on any specific operation to kill Soleimani, officials said.

Which isn’t much of a condition, because how likely is it that Trump would ever say no?… Read the rest

Oh, look, it’s “Jessica” Yaniv getting handsy again.

Caution in case you’re at work: there’s a lot of “fuck” and “fucking.”

J. Yaniv just punched me in the back of the head. Just spoke to police. Luckily there are two security cameras directly overhead at the courthouse. I need an advil. pic.twitter.com/3hfm2CfYhq

— Keean Bexte (@TheRealKeean) January 14, 2020

… Read the rest

Gwyneth Paltrow is mocking us.

So Gwyneth has made a candle called This Smells Like My Vagina because, well, of course she has. It is priced at a comparatively bargain £58…

Hadley Freeman isn’t making it up, they do sell it.

$75 US. That’s quite pricey for a candle, even a scented one. Maybe harvesting the scent has high overheads.

Whole religions have been founded trying to answer the big questions: what is the meaning of life? What is reality? How can we cope with the concept of mortality? Goop is a quasi-religion in itself, from its messianic head figure, its deluded self-belief, its ludicrous claims and its overflowing bank account accrued from the desperate and vulnerable, estimated

… Read the rest

Deborah Cameron has a post on how the news media talk about rape, with Harvey Weinstein and the Cyprus case as examples.

The BBC captioned a program on the latter in a…”problematic” way.

In a clip from the interview which was tweeted out from the programme’s account, you can see a ribbon at the bottom of the screen reporting on a rally which had been organised to support the woman and protest her treatment by the authorities. The caption reads: ‘Rally in support of woman in Cyprus “rape” case’.

I almost did a post on that caption last week, but then decided you could see the scare quotes in more than one way and I didn’t feel like … Read the rest

Mary Beard takes a look at the whole “blame the woman” phenomenon in connection with the bizarre way the UK gutter press has “reported” on Meghan Markle. (Buzzfeed has a piece that places stories on The Other One next to stories on MM and the contrast is quite startling. I don’t know for sure of course whether the examples are representative, but it seems likely that they are since otherwise Buzzfeed would get swiftly eviscerated. The creepiest one I saw before I stopped reading was “aw how sweet the way Kate cradles her bump” compared to ” ew look at Meghan virtue-signaling with all this touching her bump.”)

I wrongly thought that the Harry and Meghan story would be a

… Read the rest

Oops we seem to be boiling the oceans.

The heat in the world’s oceans reached a new record level in 2019, showing “irrefutable and accelerating” heating of the planet.

The world’s oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities.

Boiling the oceans seems like something we don’t want to do, as well as a sign that we’re doing other things we don’t want to do (like frying the lands).

Hotter oceans lead to more severe storms and disrupt the water cycle, meaning more floods, droughts and wildfires, as well as an inexorable rise

… Read the rest

It’s just right below the surface. Sometimes a mere scratch will reveal it.

https://twitter.com/Fisher_Download/status/1215688801680601090 https://twitter.com/MagetasticV/status/1216475157578911744

It takes my breath away.

A woman gestated twin babies for a gay couple, and Pink News calls the babies “their” (meaning the two men’s) daughters. A woman goes through all the exhaustion and discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth, and Pink News refers to her daughters as belonging to two men who have done no work so far apart from one ejaculation.

And then some bystander guy says “they aren’t her kids” and “she was literally just a vessel.”

A vessel is something like a pot or vase or urn, an inanimate object that can contain liquids. A vessel has no mind, … Read the rest

Good to know.

There is no "reproductive system" common to females. We each have our own. Not all of them look or work the same, or for the same purposes.

— Long Covid Killed Fiqah (@DestinySugarB) January 9, 2020

Each one is a mystery. Some are like coconuts, some are like locomotives, some are like Kansas City, some are like law school, some are like November…it’s all totally various and random and ??????… Read the rest

Human Rights Watch tells us the Trumpers are messing with human rights.

The United States State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights risks calling for a dangerous downgrading of international human rights protections. On January 10, 2020, the Human Rights Watch executive director, Kenneth Roth, testified at the commission’s fourth open session.

While the fundamental rights set out in the human rights treaties are clear, the Trump administration has taken issue with the rights they uphold, such as reproductive freedom or the rights of LGBT people not to face discrimination. Human Rights Watch expressed concern that the commission’s exercise in identifying “unalienable” rights is the administration’s unilateral attempt to rewrite international law based on its own beliefs.

That certainly … Read the rest

Cis privilege strikes again.

Samira Ahmed has won her equal pay claim against the BBC in a landmark case that lawyers say could leave the broadcaster facing a bill running into the millions for similar claims by other female staff.

Ahmed, the presenter of viewer feedback programme Newswatch, claimed she was owed almost £700,000 in back pay because of the difference between her £440-an-episode rate and the £3,000 an episode Jeremy Vine received for hosting the similar Points of View programme.

Ooof, that’s quite a gap.

An employment tribunal unanimously concluded that the BBC had failed to provide convincing evidence that the pay gap was for reasons other than gender discrimination, although the BBC continues to dispute this.

No, … Read the rest

About those lavish and unusual apologies…

https://twitter.com/moviefeminist/status/1215736843423055873

McLaughlin is the founder of MeTooSTEM.

Yes, grovel and debase yourself some more. Well done you.

— Jurassic Snark (@underhandrea) January 10, 2020

More apologies. It’s a retort as opposed to a serious statement, but still. More apologies? After that stream of abject prostrate lachrymose apologies they’d already issued?

https://twitter.com/McLNeuro/status/1215748705338515461

Flippant dismissal of the concerns of women, from the woman who founded MeTooSTEM. What did they do to her?

https://twitter.com/McLNeuro/status/1215749880783785984

They get “folks” asking if a group that opposes sexual harassment of women in STEM can change the subject and be about trans people instead – and the founder of the group thinks this is a good thing.

People have lost their damn … Read the rest

The @MeTooSTEM grovel got even more grovelly.

https://twitter.com/MeTooSTEM/status/1215786039232602113

When has anyone ever talked to actual women like that? When has anyone ever apologized to women for sexist insults or misogynist epithets like that? When has anyone ever repudiated something a volunteer retweeted in such abject and sympathy-oozing terms?

Never that I know of. I haven’t seen all the content that exists, of course, but I have paid a lot of attention to how people talk to and about women on social media and this kind of belly-crawling and sobbing with pity on behalf of women is starkly unfamiliar to me. “We are so sorry for the hurtful content” – nope, that’s not how that goes when it’s mere women at … Read the rest

13 former White House press secretaries and foreign service/military officials call for the return of regular White House and other press briefings. 

All of us have experienced the challenges of a regular press briefing whether at the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon. We all had days where the last place we wanted to be was behind one of those podiums. But day after day, we persisted.

We believed that regular briefings were good for the American people, important for the administrations we served, and critical for the governing of our great country.

It’s not that great. It’s really not. It’s behind all other developed democracies on a whole list of items, like maternal mortality for instance. … Read the rest