From the Australian Feminist Law Journal, an abstract:

Sexually Dimorphic Bodies: A Production of Birth Certificates

Birth certificates produce bodies? Who knew?!

Registering a newborn’s gender/sex on the birth certificate is usually seen as a mere formality that reflects a natural state of affairs. This article, however, shows that the registration of gender/sex does something else than record naturally given sex differences in bodies; it actually produces and shapes bodies to develop in a way conformant with understandings of sexual dimorphism.

Hmm. I wonder what Lena Holzer means by “shows.” I say that because I doubt that a journal article can “show” something nonsensical.

Sexed bodies are therefore not pre-discursive and static objects, but they are constantly in the

Someone who probably knows what he’s talking about explains why Trump’s tweet about the virus was so terrible.

As both an emergency manager and as someone who helped manage the 2014 USG Ebola response, let me tell you why this is such a damaging tweet.

This is the loudest voice in the US government sharing actively problematic risk communication. https://t.co/L3PPHX4gW8

— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) February 24, 2020

Because it’s not “very much under control,” right?

This directly contradicts what CDC has said (albeit too tepidly) about the potential for community spread and the need for consider enhanced precautions. pic.twitter.com/W6OfkD3Qbl

— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) February 24, 2020

But which is more important, telling the truth so that we can try to … Read the rest

Some children have to be tricked into eating vegetables.

Donald Trump, a 73-year-old man who has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal at his fingertips, must be tricked into eating vegetables. The White House staff has also sought to cut down the president’s ice cream consumption by making it “less accessible.”

They put it in the library.

The newsflash is from an interview with the former White House doctor in the NY Times.

In public, [Ronny] Jackson lauded Trump’s health as “incredible.” At one point, he even told reporters that Trump could live to 200 years old.

Behind the scenes, however, Jackson said he wanted Trump to lose 10-15 pounds. He mapped out a workout routine involving an

The story is by Pink News “gender and identity” reporter Vic Parsons, who is or pretends to be incredulous that any women or girls ever have issues to do with excess bleeding.

Conservative peer Lord Lucas has spoken out about gender-neutral toilets, which he bizarrely thinks should be scrapped because women don’t want to “wash their bloody underwear” in front of men.

Vic Parsons doesn’t explain what’s bizarre about that.

The reality is that women don’t want to wash bloody underpants in front of anyone except possibly immediate family. Certainly having to wash blood out of one’s underpants in any public restroom/toilet would be a depressing and embarrassing need, but it would for sure be much worse in a “gender … Read the rest

Pink News arrives at peak misogyny.

Tory peer wants to scrap gender-neutral toilets so women can ‘wash their bloody underwear’ in publichttps://t.co/nwyRcamtlU

— PinkNews (@PinkNews) February 25, 2020

… Read the rest

The BBC is live-updating news on the virus.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US’s top public health agency, has warned Americans to brace themselves for a spread of coronavirus within the country.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen,” Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), said.

And it will be bad.

In Iran however they’re saying don’t worry, it’s all good.

Amid fears around Iran’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, President Hassan Rouhani has appealed for calm, saying he expects the situation to be “normal” by this Saturday.

He

The CDC says look out, it will be bad. Trump says he’s got everything totally under control.

The CDC says:

New outbreaks in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are renewing fears of a coming global pandemic, even as the spread in China appears to be slowing.

RIGHT NOW “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad,” a C.D.C. official said.

Trump:

The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2020

He … Read the rest

Now Trump is pretending to think the sane Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves.

President Trump criticized remarks by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as “inappropriate” and said the Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves from cases involving the president.

“I just don’t know how they cannot recuse themselves for anything Trump or Trump related,” Trump said Tuesday in a wide-ranging news conference in New Delhi.

It seems very rude to prattle about something so parochial when he’s in India. But…theory of mind again. He’s not capable of stopping to think that people in New Delhi have other concerns.

He then had the gall to say Sotomayor said something “highly inappropriate.” Dude.

The remarks are an apparent reference

Meanwhile in another (yet related) part of the forest, Mhairi Black MP is defending her decision to take a drag queen to one of those children’s story time gigs we hear so much about. The thing is, the drag queen is on Twitter, with photos, and…well I’ll let a reporter tell the story:

Renfrewshire MP Mhairi Black has defended a decision to invite a drag queen into a primary school to read to pupils, despite an outcry from parents over sexually-explicit social media posts.

Drag queen FlowJob was invited into Glencoats Primary, in Paisley, last week to speak to pupils about the notorious Section 28 Act, which was later repealed.

Flowjob. Erm…is that really a necessary part of the … Read the rest

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1231744865974792195

The Russians are interfering in our democracy again and the president is firing anyone who talks about it.

This is how fascism comes to America.

— Translate Things (@TranslateThings) February 22, 2020

Can we move to Greenland?… Read the rest

This again. Again. Rewire News:

Across the country, the anti-abortion movement continues to shame, pressure, and punish people who understand that abortion is a human right.

No, it doesn’t. It continues to shame, pressure, and punish women. The anti-abortion movement is about as far from being gender-neutral as it’s possible to be.

For nearly two decades, nearly three million people have ended their pregnancy with medication abortion.

Nope. Not people. Women. It’s not people who end their pregnancies, it’s women.

Self-managing an abortion consists of two sets of pills to be taken at or under ten weeks after the first day of a person’s last period: The first, mifepristone, blocks the hormone essential to advancing pregnancy. In

I’ve never understood the point of Chris Matthews anyway: he seems to me to be just what you don’t want in a tv pundit – a loud unmodulated screamy voice saying stupid things without pausing for breath. Now people are saying he should go away because too ignorant for primetime.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is facing calls to resign after he compared Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucus to the Nazi invasion of France. Sanders won the Nevada Democratic caucuses with 47 percent of the vote, the Associated Press reported.

As the results came in and Sanders took an early lead on Saturday night, Hardball host Matthews claimed Republicans would release opposition research on Sanders that would “kill him”

Actual photo of service dogs watching Billy Elliot The Musical as part of their behaving in a theater training.

My heart can’t take it pic.twitter.com/d7Gi6g246V

— Todd Spence (@Todd_Spence) February 21, 2020

… Read the rest

Oh it gave her pause. Well that’s all right then.

Lisa Nandy has said she was given “pause for thought” about signing a pledge card from the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights.

The one about expelling feminists who don’t lie down so that trans women can walk on them.

The pledge calls on candidates in the Labour leadership race to back the expulsion of party members who hold “bigoted, transphobic views”.

It also describes Woman’s Place UK, a group that backs biological sex to be acknowledged as part of maintaining women’s rights, as a “trans-exclusionist hate group”.

Nandy was on a tv chat show today, and that’s where she admitted to the pause.

“I have to say, that was

Sarah Chayes points out that Trump’s corruption is very public for a reason.

In Kabul, Western officials scratched their heads as to why Karzai would want to confess, in an interview with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, to meddling in judicial affairs. The U.S. and other donor nations on which he depended for his very survival would certainly be displeased. So he must have a very good reason, I thought at the time. And then I realized that he was broadcasting a message to his network: Don’t worry. I stand by the deal.

Even a cursory look at the list of Trump’s February 19 beneficiaries suggests that his aim was not to right the wrong of prosecutorial overreach, but to send