At Fitnah, Maryam talks to Marieme Helie Lucas about gender segregation:

Maryam Namazie: Universities UK’s guidance first said (though it has now been withdrawn as a result of pressure) if women are not made to sit at the back of the room but are segregated alongside men, since none are disadvantaged, then there is no discrimination. Your views?

Marieme Helie Lucas: Whether at the back or on the side, the old argument is always that this is done to protect women – for their own good, of course, and by doing so to restrict their freedom of movement. By the same logic, some twenty years ago, Bangladesh suddenly restricted women from leaving the country as there was a lot of trafficking of women in the region. What appeared to be their solution was NOT to arrest pimps-protectors, but to prevent women from travelling without a wali (a male guardian from their family). Please note that Bangladesh does not even abide by the Maliki School, in which the institution of wali is legal.

What is discriminatory is to assign a place to somebody, whatever that place may be. It says: keep to your place; to women’s place!

In other words it enforces the gender binary…and in a world where that has always meant men dominant and women subordinate, men great and women not up to much, it’s pretty much impossible to enforce the gender binary without enforcing male dominance and female subordination.

Maryam Namazie: Separating men and women isn’t necessarily discriminatory and can reflect personal preferences, such as women-only gyms on women-only refuges.

Uh oh. That could get her in trouble.

The head of Universities UK which issued the guidance endorsing segregation of the sexes says: “It is possible for women to choose to be educated in an all-women environment. It’s not something which is so alien to our culture that it has to be regarded like race segregation, which is totally different and it’s unlawful and there’s no doubt about that whatsoever.” Are racial and gender segregation incomparable? Why is it that everyone can see the distinction between a black university and racial apartheid but when it comes to gender, it’s not as obvious?

Marieme Helie Lucas: This is a very crucial question that I have debated a lot, including more than twenty years ago with feminist friends in the USA. While sex segregation was rapidly expanding in Algeria under the heavy weight of the first fundamentalist preachers and religious groups, I was trying to warn them about the potential backlash of their gender segregation policy in the name of feminism.

Many of our feminist weapons have been turned against us along the years… and I have come to this very sad conclusion that we were not smart enough to think, as thinkers and philosophers should, about all the facets of the concepts we were grappling with. Just think of our feminist praise for diversity, whilst all along we knew that difference was used to legitimise the racist South African apartheid regime, or the segregationist states of the USA. This concept is now used to legitimise the imposition of differences on women that make them unequal in the name of religion, ethnicity or culture.

It’s a very difficult question. I’m not sure there is a problem-free answer – I think there are problems either way.

On the other hand it’s not terribly difficult to argue that the motivations of Islamists are different from the motivations of feminists.

Then they talk about cultural relativism, and Helie Lucas says:

There is a relativist culture of non commitment and neutrality that has been expanding – certainly in the West, under the influence of liberalism, of human rights organisations and of political correctness and the fear of appearing racist. Accordingly, everything is equal; everything has to be respected on par – the right of the capitalist and the right of the worker, the right of the one who holds the gun and the right of the one who runs for his life away from the gun… It is high time to admit that there are conflicting rights, antagonistic rights.

It seems to me that progressive people have forgotten the virtues of being partisan. I want to stand for the right of the worker, not that of the capitalist, for the right of the man who runs for his life, not for the right of the man who holds the gun, and for the right of women to live their lives without interference from extreme-Right religious people.

Maryam talks about the trick of portraying oppressive practices like gender segregation as a matter of “rights” and Helie Lucas tells a couple of stories along the same lines:

At the beginning of the 70’s in Algiers I had two similar experiences:

I was in a queue waiting to vote when the man before me handed eleven (11, you read well) ID cards for all the women in his family whom he was voting for to the voting booth authority. I objected that this was illegal; the staff at the voting booth, the very person who was supposed to guarantee the respect of law accused me of being against the right of women to vote. These women, he said, could not get out of the house, hence their only way of voting was by giving their IDs to the male in the family. And who was I, a woman, objecting to women’s rights as citizens; how dared I?

Also in the early seventies, when for the first time a non-indigenous form of veiling appeared in the streets of Algiers, in fact an early Iranian style of chador that women in Turkey still wear, a sort of long rain coat on trousers, with a tight head scarf, it was labelled ‘the students’ dress’. Most female students in Algiers, especially during the first decade after independence, usually wore western clothes and did not cover their heads. It was clearly an offensive from Muslim fundamentalist groups; they were doing a lot of social work and, together with other goods, would distribute to poor families the so-called students’ dress, in fact the early model of  what was to become ‘the Islamic dress’. Orhan Pamuk described the same thing in Turkey, saying that it was virtually impossible to refuse this ‘gift’ while accepting all the others indispensable ones.

When I raised the issue of veiling young women, I was told that I was preventing women access to universities; that I was denying women the right to study! Without this outfit, fundamentalists said, fathers would not allow girls to go to university (a blatant lie, as Algerian fathers after independence were most willing to send all their children to university, boys and girls alike; schooling was entirely free and lunch was provided), hence I was depriving girls of their right to education by questioning their alien outfit…

We get that here too – all the religious fundamentalists insisting on their “rights” and their “freedom” to harm other people because Mr God said they could.

Huffington Post reports:

CBS News reporter Sopan Deb was arrested Friday night while covering protests surrounding Donald Trump’s canceled rally in Chicago.

Deb, who has covered the Republican presidential front-runner‘s candidacy since last summer, was filming video of a man whose face was bloody and lying on the ground near police at the time of his arrest, according to a “CBS This Morning” report Saturday.

“Deb continued to roll as police kept watch,” the CBS report noted. “Without warning, Deb was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground.”

A police officer placed his boot on Deb’s neck to keep him in place on the ground, according to the account he provided his network.

Illinois State Police charged Deb with resisting arrest though the network reported that neither his video, nor that of a nearby film crew, showed any sign of resistance. The reporter can also be seen on video identifying himself as a credentialed member of the media.

Remember when Trump was just a blowhard real estate developer? Now we get a living breathing fascist, scaring the fuck out of everyone and working up the crowds.

Last month, a Secret Service agent choke-slammed Time magazine photographer Chris Morris after he left the pen to cover a Black Lives Matter protest.

On Friday, Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields filed a police report related to Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski allegedly assaulting her after the candidate’s Tuesday night press conference.

Oh well, it’s only the free press.

IS is nostalgic for the way women were treated like shit in the prophet’s day.

Locked inside a room where the only furniture was a bed, the 16-year-old learned to fear the sunset, because nightfall started the countdown to her next rape.

During the year she was held by the Islamic State, she spent her days dreading the smell of the ISIS fighter’s breath, the disgusting sounds he made and the pain he inflicted on her body. More than anything, she was tormented by the thought she might become pregnant with her rapist’s child.

But no problem, because he made her take birth control pills. When she was sold to another man, the pills went with her.

According to an obscure ruling in Islamic law cited by the Islamic State, a man must ensure that the woman he enslaves is free of child before having intercourse with her.

Strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, eh? Enslaving women for the purpose of raping them is just fine, and Mo and his boss Mr The God are both totally down with it, in fact they kind of think men who don’t enslave women are losers. But it’s terribly important that she not be pregnant when he rapes her.

In its official publications, the Islamic State has stated that it is legal for a man to rape the women he enslaves under just about any circumstance. Even sex with a child is permissible, according to a pamphlet published by the group. The injunction against raping a pregnant slave is functionally the only protection for the captured women.

The Islamic State cites centuries-old rulings stating that the owner of a female slave can have sex with her only after she has undergone istibra’— “the process of ensuring that the womb is empty,” according to the Princeton University professor Bernard Haykel, one of several experts on Islamic law consulted on the topic. The purpose of this is to guarantee there is no confusion over a child’s paternity.

So you’d think they’d stop with the pills after a month, so as to have a shot at creating more soldiers for Mr The God, but apparently this is one of those belts and suspenders things.

J., an 18-year-old, said she had been sold to the Islamic State’s governor of Tal Afar, a city in northern Iraq. “Each month, he made me get a shot. It was his assistant who took me to the hospital,” said J., who was interviewed alongside her mother, after escaping this year.

“On top of that he also gave me birth control pills. He told me, ‘We don’t want you to get pregnant,’” she said.

When she was sold to a more junior fighter in the Syrian city of Tal Barak, it was the man’s mother who escorted her to the hospital.

“She told me, ‘If you are pregnant, we are going to send you back,’” J. said. “They took me into the lab. There were machines that looked like centrifuges and other contraptions. They drew three vials of my blood. About 30 or 40 minutes later, they came back to say I wasn’t pregnant.”

The fighter’s mother triumphantly told her son that the 18-year-old was not pregnant, validating his right to rape her, which he did repeatedly.

What a pretty story. “Here, Sonny darling, she’s yours to rape. Enjoy!”

H/t Helene

Shaheen Hashmat won a True Honour award from IKWRO, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, last week.

LONDON, March 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – At 12 years old, Shaheen Hashmat left her family home in Scotland to escape the threat of forced marriage to a stranger in Pakistan. At 13, she attempted suicide.

Hashmat, who now campaigns against forced marriage and “honour based” violence, says Britain urgently needs better mental health services for girls and women escaping these situations.

“There needs to be far more training about the increased risk of suicide and the impact of family estrangement,” said Hashmat, who won the True Honour 2016 award on Thursday for her bravery in standing up to honour abuse.

She talks about it in this stunning video from Deeyah Khan’s Fuuse. Be prepared to be shaken like a rag doll when you watch it.

Hashmat, now 33, grew up in a strict Pakistani family in which every aspect of her life was policed from the TV she watched to the people she spoke to and even the way she sat.

She was beaten and saw others in her family beaten too. Her two older sisters were forced into marriage as teenagers after being sent “on holiday” to Pakistan.

As she grew up she started to challenge what was happening around her. “If I had stayed the physical abuse would have increased because I was seen as being out of control and becoming too westernised,” she told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Forced marriage is a way of disciplining a woman who wants to make her own life choices. I was seen as having an attitude problem so I’m sure I would have been put on a plane, like my sisters were, and made to marry a stranger.”

Her sisters and the police and social services helped her escape, but once she did it wasn’t all rainbows and rejoicing – it was estrangement and heartbreak.

But the shock and difficulty of adjusting to her new life and the estrangement from her family took its toll. One year later she took an overdose and ended up in hospital for a week.

“The suicidal feelings have been a regular experience throughout my life, and that’s a huge part of the reason why I’ve started doing the work I’m doing now,” said Hashmat who now lives in London.

She cites a survey which indicates Asian women are more than twice as likely to commit suicide as women from other backgrounds in Britain, with family violence seen as a key factor.

It would be surprising if it were otherwise, wouldn’t it. Girls must end up feeling like worms.

Hashmat has since written about her experiences in a blog, challenging the taboos around mental health which are particularly strong in Asian communities.

Her dream is to set up a mental health service for women who have fled forced marriage and honour abuse.

“Estrangement from the people with whom you have created many of your most important memories – wonderful as well as awful – can be overwhelming,” she said.

“You are also often leaving behind a whole community and trying to make a new life in a completely new culture. That’s incredibly difficult.”

She’s a hero.

Helen Griffiths at Human Rights Watch says hashtag solidarity with women and girls is nice, but what’s needed is action.

Last weekend, I attended a Women of the World event in Cambridge, England, where experts from several sectors discussed what exactly is preventing girls from getting into and staying in school. They agreed that numerous factors play a role, including early marriage, pregnancy, disabilities, lack of accommodation for menstrual hygiene, cultural beliefs, and traditional caregiver roles.

These barriers are not new.

And what do they all rest on? The material reality of being female – of being the sex that gets pregnant, that bears the children, that lactates. (The disabilities part is the exception – either sex can be disabled in a variety of ways.)

Nor is this a new debate. Some 63 million girls are currently denied access to education, their birthright, and there has been little change in the gender gap in recent years. Girls remain twice as likely as boys to be out of school. Almost 16 million girls alive today and aged 6 to 11 will never go to school if current trends persist. Current government policies are already failing another generation of girls. Yet, as one panelist reminded us, this is the generation that, if educated and empowered, could end child marriage for their own daughters.

There are international laws that oblige states to implement the right to education, but of course international laws are not easily enforced.

The recurring message from panelists was that, despite the range of barriers, political will to implement the legal framework and support from nongovernmental groups can see this right made reality.

We’ve been saying that girls need access to education for decades. After another week of talk about girls’ rights and calls for change, we need to see concrete action, including concerning the allocation of resources and development of specific plans, policies, and timelines. It’s time to help those 63 million girls regain their birthright and to secure it for those who are coming next.

That would make a good change.

I’ve always hated snowmobiles – at least, I have since encountering one racing all over a Seattle park after a heavy snow one day back around 1980. I know they have their uses, though, as long as the people using them aren’t mean bastards. But one snowmobiler is a very mean bastard.

One dog has been killed and multiple dogs have been injured by a snowmobiler in what appears to be an intentional attack on competitors in the Iditarod Race in Alaska.

Iditarod veteran Aliy Zirkle was the first to report an attack.

A snowmachiner had “repeatedly attempted to harm her and her team,” the Iditarod Trail Committee says, and one of Zirkle’s dogs had received a non-life-threatening injury.

Zirkle reported the attack when she arrived in Nulato, Alaska, in the wee hours of the morning, and race officials and law enforcement were notified.

Then Jeff King, a four-time Iditarod champion who was behind Zirkle, reported a similar encounter.

King’s team was hit by a snowmobiler, injuring several dogs and killing one — Nash, a 3-year-old male.

That’s a very mean bastard.

Zirkel went on with the race, leaving one dog behind. King said, “I’m not gonna let this schmuck take any more of the fun away.”

More on the mess in South Sudan, from the UN.

11 March 2016 – A new United Nations report on the human rights situation in South Sudan published today describes a multitude of horrendous violations in “searing detail,” in particular by Government forces, including cases of civilians burned alive or cut to pieces and a teenage girl being raped by ten soldiers.

Although all parties to the conflict have committed patterns of serious and systematic violence against civilians since fighting broke out in December 2013, the report says State actors bore the greatest responsibility during 2015, given the weakening of opposition forces.

The scale of sexual violence is particularly shocking, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) notes in a news release. In five months last year, from April to September, the UN recorded more than 1,300 reports of rape in just one of South Sudan’s ten states, namely oil-rich Unity.

“The scale and types of sexual violence – primarily by Government SPLA forces and affiliated militia – are described in searing, devastating detail, as is the almost casual, yet calculated, attitude of those slaughtering civilians and destroying property and livelihoods,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.

He said the quantity of rapes and gang-rapes described in the report must only be “a snapshot” of the real total, with women and girls being considered “a commodity” as soldiers moved through the villages. Although this is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, it has been more or less “off the international radar,” he added.

South Sudan doesn’t have the money to pay its armed militias, so it lets them extract payment in kind, such as raping women for example.

South Sudan lets fighters rape women as payment, the UN rights office said Friday, describing the country as “one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world.”

“The assessment team received information that the armed militias… who carry out attacks together with the SPLA (South Sudanese army) commit violations under an agreement of ‘do what you can and take what you can,'” the rights office said in a new report.

“Most of the youth therefore also raided cattle, stole personal property, raped and abducted women and girls as a form of payment,” the report added.

Cattle, property, women and girls – it’s all payment.

In a report, the UN human rights office painted a harrowing picture of civilians suspected of supporting the opposition, including children, being burned alive, suffocated in shipping containers, hanged from trees and cut to pieces.

UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein meanwhile warned that brutal rapes had been used systematically as “an instrument of terror and weapon of war.”

As they always are.

Pink News reports on a gay UKIP candidate who tweeted that all feminists he’s spoken to on Twitter are “man hating cunts.” (What’s that we’re always being told about how in the UK “cunt” NEVER means a woman? Never never never ever you stupid Yank?)

Alex Nierora is the party’s candidate for Ealing and Hillingdon on the Greater London Assembly, ahead of the election on May 5.

The candidate – who is vocal within the party’s LGBT group despite previously opposing equal marriage – has spoken out to defend himself after he was caught referring to feminists as “c**ts”.

In the since-deleted tweet, sent in December, he claimed: “all feminists I have spoken to on here [Twitter] are man hating c**ts who think its ok to spread vile hate against men”, before asking: “are you even aware of how destructive feminism is?”

They include the screen grab:

And it’s not a stand-alone.

PinkNews found numerous records of Mr Nierora, who previously stood to become a councillor in 2014, getting in spats with strangers via Twitter.

He told a Muslim woman to “die and f**k off” after she claimed a cartoon was racist, branded Green Party members “aggressive fascist dictatorship supporting c**ts” over Natalie Bennett’s stance on ISIS, and told the Independent newspaper to “f**k off” for posting a story critical of his party leader.

He also twice called the Muslim woman “bitch.”

He explained to another publication that he was angry.

Speaking previously to GetWestLondon, the candidate explained: “I was responding to the hashtag #killallwhitemen started and promulgated by now ex Goldsmiths University Students’ Union Bahar Mustafa and a group of feminists who were defending what she tweeted.

“I felt Ms Mustafa’s hashtag to be racist, sexist and extremely offensive and the fact that some feminists on Twitter were defending her was reprehensible.

“While I regret the tone of my tweet I remain extremely concerned about the militant and aggressive nature of third wave feminists towards men.

“I would also like to apologise if I have caused any offence to feminists in general which is unintentional.”

So sweet of him. Of course if he’s only calling bad feminists “cunts” that’s fine then.

The Times reports:

CHICAGO — Donald J. Trumpabruptly canceled a large rally here on Friday night as scuffles and shouting matches erupted on the arena floor between large groups of his supporters and protesters angered by his campaign.

Cable news networks broadcast live scenes of chaos inside the arena that showed people on both sides screaming at, punching and shoving each other.

So that sounds healthy.

The protests at Mr. Trump’s rallies have increased and so has the pushback surrounding them. One protester in North Carolina this week was sucker-punched by a rally attendee. Mr. Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has insisted he does not condone the violence but that in the “good old days,” protesters were roughed up to keep them in line.

The Washington Post reports from St Louis:

Protesters and supporters of Donald Trump clashed in sometimes violent fashion here on Friday, the latest in an escalating series of confrontations that have come to define the front-runner’s rowdy campaign rallies even as he gets closer to securing the Republican nomination.

Inside the Peabody Opera House, protesters interrupted Trump eight times, prompting catcalls and chants from the crowd as security officers removed them. Scores were injured or arrested in clashes between Trump supporters and critics outside the venue, where thousands had gathered in an overflow area to listen to the event over loudspeakers.

Trump is known for his massive, raucous rallies — part campaign events, part media spectacles, part populist exaltations for his most loyal supporters. But the events have also become suffused with the kind of hostility and even violence that are unknown to modern presidential campaigns.

But that sound very like the rise of the brownshirts.

The Independent has a story from Pakistan:

A 13-year-old girl in Pakistan was raped for three months by her school teacher and made pregnant.

The teenager, from the city of Larkana in southern Pakistan, suffered months of sexual abuse at the hands of the teacher while her family were also threatened to remain silent.

…

Muzafar Mirani, the schoolteacher at Government Primary School in Nauabad who has now pleaded guilty, reportedly at first placed pressure on the girl’s family to remain silent, along with his “supporters”.

He has powerful friends, while the girl’s family are poor.

That is privilege. The real thing, not the made up kind.

Some background on the clash over intersections at the University of Cape Town, specifically on why UCT suspended Chumani Maxwele:

According to the university[,] on Mayday, Maxwele went into the Mathematics building after being informed that “as it was a public holiday, all lecture theatres and classrooms were locked. Once inside the building, and after ascertaining that the said rooms were in fact locked, he is alleged to have:

• raised his voice at the lecturer (who was in the department to mark student papers), stating that she was “a white woman who takes all the rights of the black students”;
• shouted aggressively that “the statue fell; now it’s time for all whites to go”;
• stated that he was not interested in the opinion of whites and that they should be killed;
• continuously shouted and swore at the lecturer and two other witnesses to the incident;
• started banging on the lecturer’s office door (after she had entered the office and locked her door) and when the lecturer opened the door, to have pushed her in his attempt to enter;
• continued to shout and scream at her and bang on her desk; and
• uttered the words: “We must not listen to whites, we do not need their apologies, they have to be removed from UCT and have to be killed.”

Witnesses apparently backed up this version of events, while none supported Maxwele’s, which was published by the Cape Times on the 12 of May.

The UCT Trans Collective has a Facebook page where it explains things.

This is a tragic story of intersections tangling instead of smoothly and lovingly intersecting.

The Rhodes Must Fall Exhibition, “Echoing Voices from Within” was disrupted yesterday by members of the University of Cape Town’s Trans Collective, a student led organisation that prioritises the rights of transgender, gender non-conforming and intersex students at the University of Cape Town.

That’s the trouble with the trans activism branch of intersectionalism right now, isn’t it – that it prioritizes its own rights instead of promoting or defending or raising awareness of them. In other words, it’s the opposite of intersectional: it says Put Us First. As it did here, by disrupting an anti-colonialist exhibition for the sake of it’s not clear what exactly.

Students smeared photographs with red paint and blocked the entrances to the Centre for African Studies Gallery with their painted naked bodies. The exhibition was shut down.

For not being about trans issues, apparently. But that’s not very intersectional, is it.

Whether the exhibition will be reinstated is still under discussion, as certain photographs have been removed, while others have been covered in red paint.

Curator of the Centre for African Studies Gallery Paul Weinberg asks a member of the Trans Collective to stop the disruption. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

In a statement released a short while ago, the Trans Collective stated that its “role has now evolved into speaking back to RMF and keeping it accountable to its commitment to intersectionality precisely because it is positioned as a black decolonial space.”

So commitment to intersectionality means black decolonizers have to “center” trans issues? It means they can’t talk about their own issue but have to talk about trans issues instead? I’m not seeing the intersection. I’m just seeing one big highway.

Trans Collective complained that only three out of more than 1,000 images that ended up making it onto the exhibition roll featured a trans person’s face.

What?

What?

What?

How on earth could they know that?

Miranda Yardley wrote a piece about the problems with what she calls transgender ideology the other day. It’s a list of “some of the things the things that transgender ideology needs to do so that it may support the lives of women.”

1. Accept that feminism and other women’s movements do not and should not centre transgender people. At the moment, trans is dominating the discussions, even causing huge ideological rifts, within feminism, yet here in the UK today’s news (22 June) reports hospital statistics showing 632 new cases of Female Genital Mutilation in the West Midlands (apparently girls “are brought to Birmingham to be cut”) from September 2014 to March 2015.

That first item on the list all by itself would do a lot to end the ideological rifts. Have you noticed how no other political movement is expected to do this – to stop talking about its own issues and talk about other people’s instead? Have you noticed that it’s only women who are told to do that? And many women nod enthusiastically and do just that.

Of course seeing it that way relies on thinking that trans women aren’t women in exactly the same way that women are women. The ideology, on the other hand, is that trans women are women in exactly the same way that women are women, and that it’s the worst possible thing not to agree. But then if trans women are women in exactly the same way that women are women, then what does it mean to say feminism should center trans women? This gets us to Miranda’s second item:

2. Accept that innate gender identity is based on ideas with such a tenuous link to observed science it is barely a conjecture. The transgender claim to womanhood (or manhood) is completely dependent on this concept of an innate gender identity, and taking this away strips the movement of its cloak of being a civil rights movement, championing the fight of an oppressed minority, and instead reveals this to be the cross-dressing wolf of men’s rights activism, huffing and puffing at feminism and women.

It also relies on self-description, in other words on bare assertion. That’s a problem. Reasonable people know better than to take all assertions on faith. Reasonable people understand that mere statements are not automatically true just because someone makes them. It’s very far from clear to me why that commonplace and very useful understanding is set aside in the case of “self-identification” by self-declared trans people, very especially trans women. (It’s funny how comparatively quiet trans men are, isn’t it? Or maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s more that it’s completely unsurprising and predictable. Women aren’t raised to think they get to demand all the oxygen in the room.) The idea is that “trans women are women,” end of – but at the same time it’s not that any random schmuck gets to say “I’m a woman” and that’s that. No no – it has to be a trans women. It would be very wrong for a cis man to say “I’m a woman.” But how do they know? How do they know which ones are just saying it and which ones are trans? Or, how do they know that all the ones saying it are in fact trans?

I can’t for the life of me figure that out, and no one has explained it to me.

These two items in conjunction are causing a lot of dissension. It would be nice if we could have reasoned discussions about them, but we can’t, at least not yet.

Glosswitch writes about school uniforms and stereotype threat and the trousers of power.

There’s a group in the UK, Trousers for All, that campaigns to allow girls to wear trousers as part of their school uniform.

As is the case with so many seemingly trivial points of differentiation between men and women, what matters is not the thing in itself, but what it signifies. If the right to wear trousers had no broader meaning, women would not have had to fight for it, but fight for it they have. Trousers are associated with male privilege and dominance (hence the question “who wears the trousers?”). Female politicians were not permitted to wear them on the US Senate floor until 1993. It was 2013 before an (ultimately rarely used) bylaw requiring women in Paris to ask permission from city authorities before “dressing as men” was finally revoked. Women in Malawi were not permitted to wear trousers at all between 1965 and 1994 and still face threats and attacks for doing so.

And Sudan. Women in Sudan are arrested and flogged for wearing trousers.

This is not about style or gender as play, but power, and it remains the case even if we are discussing something as seemingly minor and mundane as school uniform.

I actually don’t think it is minor. I was born too soon to have been allowed to wear trousers to school, and I badly wanted to. I wore them whenever I could, and school made a huge chunk of time when I couldn’t. I always found skirts dreadfully inhibiting, and I still do. Women in skirts still don’t move as freely and carelessly as people in trousers do. Skirts, like high heels, are a way of tamping down women’s activity and freedom.

Glossy cites another good reason though.

Numerous studies have shown that stereotype threat – a situation in which people feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to negative stereotypes pertaining to their social group – matters a great deal when considering gender and education. Simply being reminded that one is the social construct “boy” or “girl”, as opposed to just “a pupil”, can affect an individual’s perception of his or her own ability and response to particular subject areas (eg “girls are no good at maths”, “boys don’t read books” etc). A school should be the last place where gendered codes which have already been broken down elsewhere are suddenly reintroduced. For a girl to have to wear a skirt in the classroom when she can wear trousers elsewhere sends a very particular message to her. She is not simply a learner; she is a girl-learner, confined by unspoken rules which limit her individual potential and constrain her social interactions.

She’s in that group that’s not allowed to run around freely.

But then what about the other direction? What about letting boys wear skirts? Since I hate skirts my reaction tends to be “why would anyone want to?” But that doesn’t dig deep enough.

What really bothers me, though, is the one-sidedness of the approach. Why just trousers? Why not skirts, too? Why is it that, yet again, whatever the boys are doing is seen as the default thing, to which the girls should necessarily aspire? Why not campaign for no differentiation whatsoever in school uniform requirements?

I think we all know the answer to this. We don’t want to see boys in skirts or dresses, demeaning themselves, being “girly”. Indeed, were we to see a boy in a dress, we’d probably assume he wasn’t a boy at all. The more we broaden our understanding of what it means to be a woman or a girl, the more rigid and entrenched our understanding of boyhood and manhood becomes (even in David Walliams’ The Boy In The Dress, the main character’s continued inclusion in the category “male” seems to be justified by the fact that, dress or no dress, he’s still brilliant at football. Thank God for that!).

I’m all for trousers for all, but let’s have skirts and dresses for all, too. This seems to me far more revolutionary, given that the “no skirts for boys” rule applies far beyond the school gates, and the only reason for its existence seems to be to assuage male anxiety about being a “proper” man. As a fully paid-up member of Team Skirt, I say let’s deal with this nonsense once and for all.

Throw caution to the wind! Relish the freedom of having no superfluous fabric between your thighs! Come on, men. You have nothing to lose but your Corby trouser presses.

Dress your lower half however you want to! Choose the two tubes with the pelvic connector, or choose the bag with a waistband – and soar with the eagles!

Caitlin Moran explains some things about being a woman for readers of Esquire. Item 3 is menstruation.

3. Periods

We’re still pretty traumatised about our periods, even though we’re now 40. Being a woman doesn’t make “being a woman” any easier. All that womb-shit is nuts. It’s like having an exploding, insane blood-bag of pain up in your business end — nothing really prepares you for when it all kicks off. One day, you’re just a kid on your bike. The next, you’re suddenly having to wedge a tiny Barbie mattress in your knickers, crying while you watch Bergerac, and eating Nurofen Plus like they’re Tic Tacs.

And then deal with the tiny Barbie mattress and wedge in a new one, and repeat many times, and then do it all over again 3.5 weeks later. And dealing with the Barbie mattress is gross, and you’re not feeling good anyway and then you have to deal with gross every few hours, and the gross is coming from you. You’ve become a source of gross stuff, and you never asked to. It’s better when you graduate to tampons, but not all that much better, plus toxic shock syndrome.

Men, imagine if, some time around your 12th birthday, some manner of viscous liquid — let’s say gravy — suddenly appeared in your pants, in the middle of a maths lesson. And then it turned up every month for the next 30 years. You’d be all like “NO!” and “WTF?!?!” and “SRSLY??? THIS????” That’s what we’re like, too. We’re not wise, or in touch with nature, or down with it. We’re just people with a whole load more laundry issues than you. Have you ever tried to scrub blood out of a Premier Inn sheet at 6am, using just travel shampoo and your toothbrush? It’s one of the defining aspects of being a woman.

The things that can go wrong, and do. The opportunities for humiliation and embarrassment. The nuisance of it all. I like Moran’s harsh take on it.

7. Tired

We’re tired. So, so tired. From the moment we grew our tits, we’ve been cat-called in the street; commented on by relatives (“Ooooh, she’s big-boned”; “Well, you’ll be a heart-breaker”) as if we weren’t standing there in front of them, hearing all this. We’ve seen our biggest female role-models and icons shamed in the press, over and over: computers hacked and nude pictures released; sex-tapes released. So we know even success, and money, will not protect us from the humiliation of simply being a woman.

Gloria Steinem and Lands End.

Guest post by Tigger the wing.

I fear that my generation may have been far too indulgent of baby mtf trannies, when I discover them saying things like this:

Reminder to not use vaginas, periods, or slogans like “pussy power” as symbols for feminism!!! don’t exclude women who don’t have vaginas :)

How DARE you! How VERY dare you, you entitled little shits‽

The second season of Caitlyn Jenner’s show about Caitlyn Jenner has started, CBS reports.

Don’t expect to see Caitlyn Jenner campaigning for Hillary Clinton anytime soon.

The avowed Republican — who recently expressed interest in working with Ted Cruz on transgender issues — chastised Clinton during the second season premiere of her reality series, “I am Cait.”

“If we’re unfortunate enough to get Hillary as our next president, we need her on our side,” Jenner said during a political discussion featured on the show. “Although she won’t be … she couldn’t care less about women. She only cares about herself.”

Hmmmmm.

One of Jenner’s friend, Jennifer Finney Boylan, then asks her which of Republican would be likely to help the trans rights cause.

“All of them,” Jenner responded. “None of the Republicans [say], ‘Oh, I hate trans people’ or ‘I hate gays.’ They do more, ‘I want a thriving economy so every trans person has a job.'”

Later in the episode, Boylan discussed the defeat of the Houston equal rights ordinance, which she insisted was defeated in large part by anti-LGBT fear-mongering from Republicans, an assertion Jenner refuted.

“I don’t feel like they’re out to get us,” Jenner said. “Every conservative guy out there believes in everybody’s rights.”

She’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is she.