Oh yes, that weirdo type of feminism that is only for women, not women plus men who say they are women. So unreasonable.

Another brand of feminism that only includes ‘some’ women. Even your hashtag tells its own story. Btw I’m pleased to say my views on trans women are the views of our collective party and shadow cabinet including my boss Jeremy. #LoveAllMySisters https://t.co/IWsJFnzlQr

— Angela Rayner (@AngelaRayner) June 18, 2019

Imagine talking smack about a brand of anti-racism that only includes people of color instead of being for people of color and white people who say they are people of color.

But that wouldn’t happen, because it’s only women who are seen as accommodating enough and supine enough … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Feeling≠being.

Practically speaking, in most situations, I wouldn’t say anything, for the same reasons I generally don’t get into discussions about very personal matters.

But if this were one of those conversations that is an exception for some reason: no, I wouldn’t say “you’re wrong.” But I would ask — with genuine curiosity — “how do you know? What does being a woman FEEL like to you?”

Because frankly, I wouldn’t know how to answer the question “what does it feel like to be a man?” [Insert jokes about my inadequacies here. You can’t ask for a better setup.] I could tell you a bit about how it feels to be treated… Read the rest

Daughters are not slaves.

Muslim father faces jail for psychologically abusing his daughters in the first case of its kind.

Salamat Khan, 63, exerted such domineering control over his household that his children felt like they were “living in a prison”.

His daughters felt as if they were living in a prison, not his children. His son joined in the psychological abuse of the daughters. Is there some sort of pattern here? To do with what kind of people abuse and what kind are the abusers? I have a feeling there is but I can’t quite pin it down.

The father-of-nine had already married off three of his daughters to selected husbands, but “cast out” two of his daughters,

Another strange thing to think.

https://twitter.com/DrJoGrady/status/1140729246110953472

Universities & colleges should be sanctuaries, not spaces where staff & students are exposed to oppressive attitudes from those charged to teach them.

Really? Universities and colleges should be sanctuaries? What about being places where people on the edge of adulthood learn things they didn’t know before, and learn how to learn new things, and learn to question things they thought they knew, and to ponder why they thought they knew them?

In short, no, universities and colleges should not be sanctuaries. They should of course be places where people are treated decently, and where the older professionals in charge don’t use their status to bully or abuse students or other underlings…but sanctuaries, no. … Read the rest

Trump loves to say US air quality is getting cleaner and cleaner thanks to him. Is he right?

Pfffffffff. Of course not.

Over the last two years the nation had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data shows. While it remains unclear whether this is the beginning of a trend, health experts say it’s troubling to see air quality progress stagnate.

There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.

Some of that has to be because of the summer wildfires … Read the rest

Hope Hicks is refusing to answer questions. They think they’re gods, don’t they.

Former White House communications director Hope Hicks is not responding to any questions about her time at the White House in a closed-door congressional interview Wednesday, angering Democrats who say they expect to go to court to force her to answer their questions.

White House attorneys are objecting to all questions related to the White House, Democrats say, all the way down to where Hicks sat in the West Wing. But Hicks is answering questions about her time on the Trump campaign, which is not covered by executive privilege.

None of it is covered by “executive privilege.”

The White House is not asserting executive privilege, but

Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham and President of Humanists UK, has been Twitter-arguing with people who found the Natural History Museum’s tweets about queer giraffes and non-binary gorillas absurd.

This one is particularly interesting to me:

https://twitter.com/theAliceRoberts/status/1141261931556286464

It’s her reply that interests me, but I’ll just note about the quoted passage from her book…I wonder if she would write that now. I wonder if now she would stop, and think, and frown, and then censor herself. I wonder if she would stop to think about it and then decide that it would be “transphobic” to allow that sentence to appear.

That’s a hypothetical though. Her actual reply today says “If someone who … Read the rest

A woman expresses passionate eagerness to erase the very category of women and girls.

https://twitter.com/VetNurseVibes/status/1130584532237856768

So after all these years of trying and trying and TRYING to get marketers to stop dividing humans into strong bold brilliant boys and weak pretty stupid girls were a big mistake? So we actually shouldn’t be trying to tell girls they can be strong and bold and brilliant? We should actually stop doing that because her “trans son” wants to rise above the muck of being a female person? Well fuck that for a game of soldiers.… Read the rest

The Smithsonian Magazine notes that concentration camps started long before Hitler took power.

Spain was having trouble persuading the Cuban people to stop rebelling, so they decided to round up the peasants who were supporting the rebels.

Civilians were forced, on penalty of death, to move into these encampments, and within a year the island held tens of thousands of dead or dying reconcentrados, who were lionized as martyrs in U.S. newspapers. No mass executions were necessary; horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people.

…

These camps did not rise out of nowhere. Forced labor had existed for centuries around the world, and the parallel institutions of Native American reservations and

Many people have reacted to Liz Cheney’s “internment camps for migrants are not the Holocaust, learn some history” tweet.

https://twitter.com/KatzOnEarth/status/1141028078468128770

Enuf w/ “ICE camps are concentration camps but they’re not gassing people” or “we should take action before things get worse.”

Concentration camps aren’t good enough?? Even if Auschwitz was never built the Warsaw Ghetto wasn’t reason enough to tear down the Third Reich??

— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) June 18, 2019

GOP seems to be embracing the "it's not as bad as Auschwitz" defense for their concentration camps on the border. That's a bad defense.

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) June 18, 2019

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1141010617257668608

And in the “massively missing the point” category, step up Dinesh D’Souza.

Nazi concentrarion camps were

Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, thought she had a gotcha on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this. https://t.co/NX5KPPb2Hl

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) June 18, 2019

It’s Cheney who needs to learn some history. The Nazis didn’t go from zero to Auschwitz in 30 seconds; it took them years to get to Auschwitz. It was a process, with stages. Herding people into camps was an early stage. Trump is putting us at that stage. There is no magic mechanism guaranteeing that we won’t go on to further stages. That’s AOC’s point, … Read the rest

It’s strange how men who assault women, or defend other men who assault women, keep turning up in Trump’s administration. The acting secretary of defense just resigned.

The Washington Post pressed the button to launch this story at 12.58PM ET today, one minute ahead of the time logged when Donald Trump announced Shanahan’s withdrawal from the process to find his forever home at the Pentagon.

It’s pretty raw, beginning:

In the months that he has served as President Trump’s acting secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan has worked to keep domestic violence incidents within his family private. His wife was arrested after punching him in the face, and his son was arrested after a separate incident in which he

A philosopher sent Brian Leiter a guide to Philosophical Discussion of Trans Identity.

Members of the profession have doubtless seen the recent letter from MAP, objecting to the participation of Kathleen Stock at a recent meeting of the Aristotelian Society. As the letter writers thoughtfully advised: “scepticism about the rights of marginalised groups and individuals, where issues of life and death are at stake, are not up for debate. The existence and validity of transgender and non-binary people, and the right of trans and non-binary people to identify their own genders and sexualities, fall within the range of such indisputable topics”.

Junior members of the profession may be wondering what sorts ideas may be discussed and

The NY Times is still normalizing breast-mutilation.

A recent Times article on chest binding prompted a discussion among readers about the practice, which some transgender and gender-nonconforming people use to compress their breasts and treat body dysphoria, as well as how we covered it.

I bet it did.

So the Times asked readers to report on their adventures in binding. They got more than 200 responses, mostly from very young people (of course – this wasn’t a fashion ten years ago).

I am 31 and have been wearing constrictive sports bras since I developed breasts in high school. I didn’t know about binders until well into my 20s. I wish I had. Without the availability of binders, many people

There’s a counter-letter to yesterday’s letter to the Times. Of course there is.

The title is “University support for LGBTQIA+ people”…as if the letter to the Times were about refusing to support people.

The letter is bad. It’s bad the way these things are always bad – it’s all buzzwords and rote phrases that are abstract and not defined. Academics shouldn’t be writing bad letters of that kind.

As academics and other colleagues working in higher education, we are writing to register our support for policies and practices which are inclusive and supportive of our trans colleagues and students.

What does that mean? Inclusive in what sense? Supportive how?

There is reasonable inclusion, which means not excluding people … Read the rest

Ok ok yes I know I can’t force people to believe ridiculous things…but I sure as hell can bully them into pretending to believe them!

i know, but i can apply social pressure to at least make them act like they believe it, which is good enough for now

— David_Nagy (@davidanagy3) June 17, 2019

Useful, in a way, to see one of them admit it. “Come here, bitch, I need to apply some social pressure to you.”

false comparison. by denying trans people's identities, you are materially and emotionally hurting them.

— David_Nagy (@davidanagy3) June 17, 2019

Well, by claiming that sex/gender is an identity, trans dogmatists are intellectually and politically harming feminists. Impasse? How about we call it … Read the rest