Anna Moore at the Guardian:

Patrick Stewart was five years old when his father returned from the second world war to wage his own war on his wife. On weekend nights, Stewart would lie in bed, alert, awaiting his father’s return from the pub, ready for his rage, braced to throw himself between his parents to protect his mother.

Two years ago, Luke and Ryan Hart’s father shot dead their mother, Claire, and their 19-year-old sister, Charlotte, before turning his gun on himself. This happened days after Charlotte and Claire had left the family home in Lincolnshire in a bid for freedom. Until then, Lance Hart had exercised total control over his family.

The three of them were … Read the rest

Sigh.

Woman wins major sports prize. Man tells her to shake her booty.

What should have been a historic moment in football was ruined when Ada Hegerberg was asked to twerk on stage at the sport’s night of nights in Paris today.

Norwegian Hegerberg, who plays for Olympique Lyonnais in France, won the inaugural Ballon d’Or award for the best female player in the world, beating out 14 other nominees including Australia’s Sam Kerr.

Normally reserved for the men throughout its 62-year history, the 2018 Ballon d’Or finally recognised football’s best women and Hegerberg was rewarded for her outstanding international and club form before the man next to her put a dampener on her big moment.

DJ Martin Solveig,

Nope.

Dutch motivational speaker Emile Ratelband may feel like a 49-year-old but according to Dutch law he is still 69.

A Dutch court on Monday rejected Ratelband’s request to shave 20 years off his age in a case that drew worldwide attention.

Well he can’t literally shave any years off his age; he was asking to change his records – to lie officially about how old he is.

“Mr. Ratelband is at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly,” Arnhem court said in a press statement . “But amending his date of birth would cause 20 years of records to vanish from the register of births, deaths, marriages and registered partnerships. This

It turns out doctors can’t just fling meds around like so much potato chips. There are regulations.

The GP prosecuted for failing to register her online advice services for transgender patients with a health regulator in Wales says she has moved her service to England.

But Helen Webberley admits she has still not registered with inspectors there either.

She was fined £12,000 by a district judge who called the offence “serious”.

…

Webberley was also told to pay £11,307 costs and her company, Online GP Services, has been fined £2,000 at the court hearing in Merthyr Tydfil.

The Abergavenny GP started a private service for transgender patients online in 2015, and said she has treated thousands of patients in that

Oh look, the Asian Women’s Handball Federation Championship yesterday.

Guess who was in Group A.

It’s our old pal Hannah Mouncey!

I thought rugby was Hannah’s sport, but no, handball is Hannah’s real favorite.

I have always been a handball player first. It’s the one constant I’ve had in my life from the age of 18 up until now, almost 30, and all the changes that have happened in between. As much as I’ve tried to get that across, it has somehow always got lost in the media’s obsession with football and the mainstream sporting codes.

I played football last year in Canberra with my mates, just to enjoy it. This year, with Darebin in the VFL,

From Pliny:

… Read the rest

Milo Yiannopoulos is having money problems.

The far right activist Milo Yiannopoulos was more than $2m in debt during 2018, according to a collection of documents assembled by his former Australian tour promoters and seen by Guardian Australia. Creditors listed in the documents include employees of his company, a wedding venue and his former sponsors, the billionaire Mercer family.

The documents indicate that as of April 2018, Yiannopoulos owed $1.6m to his own company, $400,000 to the Mercers, $153,215 to his former lawyers, $76,574 to former collaborator and Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, and $20,000 to the luxury jewellery brand Cartier.

As of 2 October, Yiannopoulos owed sums of several thousand dollars to far right writers including Ian Miles Cheong,

Andrew Gilligan in the Times (the real one):

An official who agreed a policy allowing male-bodied sex offenders into women’s prisons was a sex offender who hoarded 22,000 indecent pictures of children.

Gordon Pike, a senior official of the Scottish Prison Service, was one of those responsible for its “gender identity and gender reassignment policy”, documents seen by The Sunday Times show. The policy is significantly more liberal than England’s, stating that transgender prisoners must normally be housed according to the “social gender” with which they self-identify, “whether or not” they have legally changed it.

“Liberal” (in the sense of generous) from the point of view of transgender prisoners but not necessarily anyone else.

Two years after approving the policy,

Very good point.

The current crisis raises some very important questions when it comes to feminism and the Global North/Global South divide. We cannot have a women's rights movement that denounces breast ironing of brown and black girls but supports breast binding for white girls, as "a right".

— RaquelRosarioSánchez (@8RosarioSanchez) December 2, 2018

Women's organisations and feminists in Global North can't act shocked when feminists are jailed and prevented from speaking "in developing countries" when we are seeing leftist politicians and political parties in the Global North veer towards making feminism a hate crime…

— RaquelRosarioSánchez (@8RosarioSanchez) December 2, 2018

And feminist like #MeghanMurphy in Canada or @Womans_Place_UK in UK, face onslaughts of abuse for having meetings. If you

A Vancouver radio station talked to Meghan about the latest bullying:

Meghan Murphy, who is at the centre of a controversy over a talk on transgender rights scheduled for Jan. 10 at the Vancouver Public Library, says a report of a cancellation are not true.

“The only news I have heard of this cancellation upon waking up and reading my email, which informed me that I had sent an email in the middle of the night and cancelled — it sounds like somebody is playing a joke on the media,” Murphy tells NEWS 1130.

The founder and editor of The Feminist Current adds that a report of her receiving a large number of critical emails leading to a decision

Originally a comment by iknklast on Shut her up.

It’s so tiresome to discuss who is a woman and who is a man, you see

The problem is, we are determined to keep a huge distinction between women and men, so we’ll know who is pink and who is blue, who is thinky and who is feely, who has testosterone toxicity and who has that estrogen vibe. We are not ready to get rid of rape culture, so women would feel less need to have women only spaces. We are not prepared to pay women equally, allow them equal access to the corridors of power, and not grope, ogle, or grab them by the pussy, so women need to … Read the rest

More on the relentless campaign to silence Meghan Murphy:

This guy is the president of BCTF, the union representing BC’s public school teachers. He’s very “active” in the anti-Meghan campaign.

https://twitter.com/glenhansman/status/1068347392133451776

He retweeted this

To those upset that Meghan Murphy had her Twitter account suspended for constant transphobic harassment, and who are threatening to also leave twitter in transphobic solidarity with her, I definitely think you should do so. Do fight for your terrible principles… somewhere else.

— Jake Pyne #Free Palestine (@JakePyne) November 24, 2018

and this

https://twitter.com/AmberDawnWrites/status/1067645934190772225

and this

I agree that women’s voices need to be heard. But we have a responsibility to ensure that public spaces are safe for all women. Hate speech from a woman

And, again.

Shame that a diversity of views not allowed at an anarchist bookfair. @helensteel12 and I just chucked out. Literally. What a mess. We'll never be able to reach a compromise on trans rights and women rights if only 1 view is heard.

— Catherine B (@toddybann) December 1, 2018

https://twitter.com/beyondbarsuk/status/1068953501491974144

So anarchists are upset by disruption?

But, more to the point, were the two women disrupting at all? From what I can see they were distributing pamphlets…at a book fair. It doesn’t sound all that disruptive. It could be, in theory; racists distributing pamphlets calling for lynching at an anti-racist or feminist book fair would be disruptive, but feminists don’t call for lynching.

They “had to be carried … Read the rest