Another visit to Rebecca Reilly-Cooper’s post on “Gender is not a binary, it’s a spectrum” because there are so many lines I long to quote I can’t leave it at just one.

If you identify as pangender, is the claim that you represent every possible point on that spectrum? All at the same time? How might that be possible, since the extremes represent opposites of one another? Pure femininity is passivity, weakness and submission, while pure masculinity is aggression, strength and dominance. It is simply impossible to be all of these things at the same time. (If you don’t agree with me – if you’re angry right now about my “femmephobia”, because I’ve defined femininity as weakness and submission – feel free to give me alternative definitions of masculinity and femininity. Whatever you come up with, they’re going to represent opposites of one another.)

It’s true. You could define femininity as empathy, interpersonal understanding, intuition – but then if that’s femininity, you have to say that masculinity is callousness and mind-blindness. If you define any X as part of femininity, you’ve committed yourself to defining not-X as part of masculinity. Otherwise the X wouldn’t be part of femininity, it would just be something some people have more of and other people have less of.

If we do go with the idea that “gender is a spectrum” then how many possible genders are there?

The only consistent answer to this is: 7 billion, give or take. There are as many possible gender identities as there are humans on the planet. Your gender can be frost or the Sun or music or the sea or Jupiter or pure darkness. Your gender can be pizza.

But if this is so, it’s not clear how it makes sense, or adds anything to our understanding, to call any of this stuff “gender”, as opposed to just “human personality” or “stuff I like”. The word “gender” is not just a fancy word for your personality or your tastes and preferences, and it is not just a label to adopt so that you now have a way to convey just how large and multitudinous and interesting and misunderstood you are.

It’s not, or it shouldn’t be, but by god it certainly is being used that way, to terrible and nauseating effect. All those boring yet privileged cis people who are convinced there are only two dull genders, when the clever exciting breakthrough Young People are all special rainbows. They are the first people in history to be gender nonconforming; please give them all MacArthur grants immediately.

I want to quote the whole of the next bit too, but I won’t. Go read it if you haven’t already.

Fortunately, what is a spectrum is human personality, in all its variety and complexity. (Actually that’s not a spectrum either, because it is not simply one continuum between two extremes. It’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, humany-wumany stuff.) Gender is the value system that says there are two types of personality, determined by the reproductive organs you were born with. The first step to liberating people from the cage that is gender is to challenge established gender norms, and to play with and explore your gender expression and presentation.

So go for it; by all means. Define yourself however you want to. Have a blast.

A problem only emerges when you start making political claims on the basis of that label – when you start demanding that others call themselves cis, because you require there to be a bunch of boring binary cis people for you to define yourself in reference to; and when you insist that these cis women have structural advantage and political privilege over you, because they are socially read as the women they know themselves to be, while nobody really understands just how complex and interesting your gender identity is.

And there’s more, as good as that, and then there’s the knockout final paragraph. Go read it if you haven’t already. At More Radical With Age.

Think Progress on the Supreme Court abortion case.

A looming Supreme Court case that could severely undermine the right to an abortion has attracted an unprecedented amount of opposition from across the country.

A slew of organizations and individuals filed 45 legal briefs in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, each brief examining the case through a unique lens and each coming to the same conclusion: State laws that restrict abortion access are unconstitutional.

The case will examine the validity of a Texas law, known as HB2, that places burdensome, unnecessary guidelines on the state’s dwindling abortion clinics. These regulations, while framed as improvements to safeguard “women’s health,” ultimately have nothing to do with patient safety — and were instead created by anti-abortion legislators to impose additional, costly red tape on clinic staff. So far, it’s been successful. HB2 has already forced half of the state’s clinics to close, thus cutting Texas’ abortion providers in half.

And if the court upholds the law – that will give the green light to every god damn state in the country to make abortion almost impossible to get.

Reproductive rights advocates have been outspoken since HB2 passed in 2013, but since the Supreme Court’s November decision to hear the case, the diversity of opponents has grown. The 45 briefs were filed by a variety of petitioners, including physicians, historians, religious leaders, military officers, scientists, members of Congress, civil rights advocates, law scholars, entire cities, and the United States federal government itself.

…

Among the briefs were voices of actual women who’ve been affected by the lack of abortion access in the past — a voice some say is forgotten in the high-level case.

“The Supreme Court justices need to hear the real effects of restrictive abortion laws on women like this one in Texas,” said Debra Hauser, the president of Advocates for Youth, a group helping young people access comprehensive sexual health education. Hauser shared her personal experience with abortion in her organization’s brief.

“What is missing from this issue are our personal stories. The reality is that one in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime.”

Why? Because women need to control if and when they get or remain pregnant.

Many of those women shared their stories in another brief submitted Tuesday, representing 110 law professionals who’ve had abortions. Some noted how they would have never had the chance to become a lawyer if they hadn’t had an abortion when they did.

“[Our] experiences demonstrate the real world effects of abortion access on the lives and careers of women attorneys, and underscore the truth of the court’s observation that reproductive choice facilitates women’s ability ‘to participate in the economic and social life of the nation,’” the brief reads.

A lot of religious boffins and organizations also submitted a brief.

A group of 40 prominent scientists also submitted a brief Tuesday, hoping to overrule the “flawed pseudoscience” that will be used in testimony to support the case.

“We hope the court is able to put abortion politics aside and focus on the illegitimacy of the medical claims propping up the restrictions,” said Robyn Blumner, president and CEO of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. “When science claims are used to infringe a constitutional right they had better be valid, but that’s not the case here.”

That brief was written by CFI’s legal director Nick Little.

A Tuesday press call drew a variety of opponents together, including Wendy Davis, the former Texas state senator who led an 11-hour filibuster in an attempt to defeat HB2, and Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards, to further illustrate the severity of this case. Jessica González-Rojas, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, also spoke on the call, representing the women already harmed the most by the current Texas law.

“For immigrants, mothers, low-wage workers, and Latinas who are all three, securing an abortion means navigating a state-created obstacle course,” she said. “Those unable to jump through these hoops will be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or take matters into their own hands.”

Since HB2 was enacted, at least 100,000 Texan women have tried to induce their own abortion, due to the cost driving to a distant abortion clinic, taking time off work to do so, and other frustrating roadblocks to make it difficult for them to legally end a pregnancy.

It makes me angry.

For the hip trendy fashion-forward woman forced to wear a black tent from head to foot – Dolce and Gabbana has the latest thing!

Exclusive: The Dolce & Gabbana Abaya Collection Debut

Mind you – in actual Saudi Arabia as opposed to whatever fantasy version Dolce and Gabbana is working with, those shoes would get that woman arrested if she didn’t get beaten to death first. Also? Her bare face would too. But no matter, because at least the black shroud is pretty.

Storied Italian House Dolce & Gabbana has launched its very first abaya collection and makes its global reveal here on Style.com/Arabia. For the most part, the collection comes in neutral hues—luxe black and sandy beige—while a sprinkling of abayas capture the Sicilian spirit of the house (and make a nod to the Spring 2016 collection) with printed daisies, lemons, and lush red roses. The abayas and hijabs come in sheer georgette and satin weave charmeuse fabrics and include copious lace details along hems. They also appear to feature a lightweight and dramatic drape, which makes this debut collection rife with special occasion overlays to be worn to celebrate the inimitable dolce vita that is distinct to us in the Arab world.

Ah yes, the inimitable dolce vita of Saudi Arabia. Remind me how Raid Badawi and Hamza Kashgari are flourishing there?

New York magazine, absurdly, has swallowed the lies.

What stands out in particular about Dolce & Gabbana’s take is that it gives the lie to the idea that one can’t follow trends and have fun with fashion while also following a religious dress code. “Modest” doesn’t have to equate to dowdy, boring, or head-to-toe neutrals. It’s not just about lowering hemlines and extending sleeves, but preserving the runway aesthetic that got everyone so excited in the first place. Even if Dolce & Gabbana’s dramatic, Sicilian-influenced designs and playful prints aren’t your personal bag, how great would it be to see Moschino‘s kidult-oriented prints, Armani‘s power suiting, or Versace‘s logoriffic wordplay adorning abayas and hijabs?

Decorate your chains, slaves, and all will be well.

I suggest you drop everything and read Rebecca Reilly-Cooper’s latest: “GENDER IS NOT A BINARY, IT’S A SPECTRUM”: SOME PROBLEMS.

Fans of gender identity think that gender is not a system of arbitrary rules imposed on all of us but “an internal, essential facet of our identity” that is much bigger and richer than any stinkin’ binary.

That idea is full of holes, and politically it’s a disaster.

First, if gender is a spectrum, then we’re all non-binary.

I would be happy with this implication, because despite knowing that I am female and calling myself a woman, I do not consider myself a one-dimensional gender stereotype. I am not some ideal manifestation of femininity, and so I am non-binary, just like everybody else is. Those who identify as non-binary are unlikely to be happy with this conclusion, however, as their identity as a non-binary person depends upon the existence of a much larger group of binary cisgender people, against whom they can define themselves as more interesting and complex, and by whom they can claim to be misunderstood and politically oppressed.

I gotta go, so that’s all for now, but you can see why you have to read every word of it yourself.

The (staid, mainstream, conformist) New York Times has less hostile coverage of Charlie Hebdo than the putative “lefty” Guardian.

A special issue of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo went on sale in France on Wednesday, amid a week of official commemorations and other events paying tribute to the 17 people who were killed one year ago in attacks last January at the newspaper’s office and other locations in the Paris area.

The commemorations have been accompanied by a flurry of book releases and new documentaries on the subject, as well as a resurgence of questions about whether French intelligence and police services failed to adequately assess security threats against the newspaper, which had been under police protection.

The newspaper has printed around a million copies of the issue, up from a typical print run of about 100,000, and it includes drawings by illustrators who were killed in the attacks as well as guest contributions.

“Charlie is insolence elevated as a virtue, and bad taste as a mainstay of elegance,” the French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, wrote in her contribution to the issue. “For all of us, continue to create, to draw freedom.”

Laurent Sourisseau, the newspaper’s editorial director, wrote, “It isn’t two little idiots in balaclavas who are going to screw up our life’s work.”

“They aren’t going to see Charlie die, it is Charlie that is going to see them die,” he added.

The Times does mention the Vatican’s disapproval, but not until 13 paragraphs in – it doesn’t make it the focus the way the Guardian did.

The New York Times story on the Köln (Cologne) mess is deeply depressing.

The tensions simmering beneath Germany’s willingness to take in one million migrants blew into the open on Tuesday after reports that scores of young women in Cologne had been groped and robbed on New Year’s Eve by gangs of men described by the authorities as having “a North African or Arabic” appearance.

The German authorities expressed outrage at the attacks and called them unprecedented in scale and nature, saying hundreds of young men appeared to have participated.

It was not clear that any of the men involved were recent arrivals to Germany over the last year from conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa and elsewhere. But the situation created a new political challenge for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose decision to take in refugees from conflict-ridden nations opened the doors to waves of migrants last summer and fall. As the number of asylum-seekers has grown and the challenge of assimilating them has become clearer, she has come under intensifying criticism for failing to anticipate the social and economic costs of her policy.

At the other end of the spectrum from Merkel and Germany are the countries that reject refugees altogether, so that you get desperate people pushed from one railway station to another, or drowning in leaky little boats, or held in nightmare refugee camps. It would be nice if the generous thing to do could work out to be also the sensible and productive thing to do, but this story doesn’t seem like a good omen.

The descriptions of the assailants — by the police and victims quoted in the news media — as being young foreign men who spoke neither German nor English immediately stoked the debate over how to integrate such large numbers of migrants and focused new attention on how to deal with the influx of young, mostly Muslim men from more socially conservative cultures where women do not share the same freedoms and protections as men.

The assaults, which went largely unreported for days, set off accusations on the right and among some political commentators that authorities and the news media had tried to ignore or cover up the attacks in order to avoid fueling a backlash against the refugees.

Far right groups are yelping, but so are groups and people to the left of them.

Several hundred people gathered in front of Cologne’s cathedral late Tuesday to protest violence against women. Several groups promoting women’s rights have complained that the authorities have not taken complaints about sexual abuse of women in refugee shelters seriously enough.

Oh I give up.

CFI has filed an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, the Texas abortion restrictions case.

Steven Pinker, Eugenie Scott, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and more than 40 other eminent scientists and public intellectuals are backing the Center for Inquiry in a brief to the Supreme Court criticizing the state of Texas’s onerous restrictions on abortion providers. CFI’s brief argues that the alleged expert, scientific testimony used to justify the restrictions is flawed pseudoscience and the Court cannot constitutionally rely on it.

In Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, plaintiffs argue that restrictions on abortion providers passed in Texas in 2013 impose an undue burden on women’s constitutionally protected right to end a pregnancy. Since only a few clinics are able to meet the law’s strictures it will result in mass clinic closures and sharply restricted access to abortion services in the state.

Texas’s claim that the regulations protect women’s health is contrary to the science and facts. As the CFI brief explains, Vincent Rue, a long-discredited anti-abortion partisan with no relevant medical credentials, coordinated the testimony in support of the state’s claim. Yet, in every case in which Rue has coordinated testimony to defend regulations requiring abortion doctors to have hospital admitting privileges—such as those at the heart of this case—the evidence presented has been discounted by the trial court.

Federal trial courts have found that the unqualified Rue substantially ghostwrote the testimony of alleged expert witnesses in a number of cases. His efforts are agenda-driven pseudoscience that seek to manufacture controversy, the CFI brief says.

“This case will affect the medical well-being of millions of women, and it is unthinkable that the Supreme Court of the United States might make such a monumental decision based on such flawed testimony, that offers only misrepresentation and misdirection,” said Nicholas Little, legal director of the Center for Inquiry. “While the Center for Inquiry as an organization wholeheartedly supports women’s abortion rights, for this case we come to the Court purely as advocates of science and reason. Justice Kennedy, in the last abortion case to reach the Court, made clear that the Supreme Court has a duty to independently examine the facts of cases where constitutional rights are at issue. The Court has wisely rejected fabricated, pseudoscientific evidence in previous cases, and we strongly urge the justices to do the same here.”

“We hope the Court is able to put abortion politics aside and focus on the illegitimacy of the medical claims propping up the restrictions,” said Robyn Blumner, president and CEO of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. “When science claims are used to infringe a constitutional right they had better be valid, but that’s not the case here.”

The brief argues that the state’s testimony, as coordinated by Rue, “fails to demonstrate even a rational relation between the restrictions and the State’s legitimate interest in women’s health sufficient to overcome the burden that these restrictions create for women in Texas who are in need of essential and legally protected medical care.”

The amicus brief, filed by the Center for Inquiry, was joined by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, along with over 40 individual scientists and experts in reason and critical thinking, including psychologist Steven Pinker, anthropologist Eugenie Scott, physicist Lawrence Krauss, skeptic icon James Randi, social psychologist Carol Tavris, astrophysicist Jill Tarter, and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

The complete brief can be downloaded at: centerforinquiry.net/TexasAbortionAmicus

I plan to read it.

And boy do I hope it succeeds.

Oh great, now street harassment of women is being organized.

The mayor of Cologne has summoned police for crisis talks after about 80 women reported sexual assaults and muggings by men on New Year’s Eve.

The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.

At least one woman was raped.

What is particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organised. Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.

Police in Hamburg are now reporting similar incidents on New Year’s Eve in the party area of St Pauli. One politician says this is just the tip of the iceberg.

…

One man described how his partner and 15-year-old daughter were surrounded by an enormous crowd outside the station and he was unable to help. “The attackers grabbed her and my partner’s breasts and groped them between their legs.”

A British woman visiting Cologne said fireworks had been thrown at her group by men who spoke neither German nor English. “They were trying to hug us, kiss us. One man stole my friend’s bag,” she told the BBC. “Another tried to get us into his ‘private taxi’. I’ve been in scary and even life-threatening situations and I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

If it’s a whole crowd, there’s really nothing you can do.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Cricketer Chris Gayle, already facing a barrage of criticism over inappropriate remarks to a female television reporter, allegedly indecently exposed himself to a woman during a Sydney training session at last year’s World Cup.

The Australian woman, who was working around the West Indies team in Sydney, has detailed the incident to Fairfax Media. In the course of her work she entered the team dressing room to get a sandwich as she hadn’t eaten all day, thinking the players were on the field training.

Instead, she found Gayle in the room with one other player. Gayle was wrapped in a towel, which she says he pulled down to partially expose his genitals to her while saying to her: “Are you looking for this?”

All part of the job, eh?

The new revelations came as the Melbourne Renegades announced they would fine Gayle $10,000 for his controversial live interview with Channel Ten’s Mel McLaughlin on Monday night. Gayle asked an uncomfortable McLaughlin if she wanted to come out for a drink with him, before quickly adding “don’t blush, baby”.

It’s always so impressive when a guy just cannot see women as anything other than potential fuck-objects.

On Tuesday morning, Gayle delivered a half-hearted apology and said his comments had been “blown out of proportion”. Renegades chief executive Stuart Coventry described his comments as a “one-off”.Several other female journalists also came forward to detail inappropriate comments or unwelcome advances by Gayle.

The female employee involved in last year’s incident does not want to be identified, but has explained she was motivated to tell her story “in support of [Channel Ten reporter] Mel McLaughlin last night, and to support the many other women working as career professionals in sport who shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of treatment”.

“It’s that moment when you have a split second to react. I was shocked, and I just walked out,” she said.

“You put yourself in an office environment in Australia, and there’s no way that’s going to fly. Put yourself back in that deserted change room and it’s somehow OK for a career professional to be subjected to sexual jokes and demeaning advances.”

…

The woman says she felt sick when she watched Gayle proposition McLaughlin on air during Channel Ten’s coverage of the Big Bash League on Monday night.

Gayle went on to be feted for his World Cup exploits, when he belted a record 215 against Zimbabwe in Canberra. “It makes me sick that people like that are emulated as heroes when they behave like that towards half the population, there is nothing heroic about the way he conducts himself towards women,” she said.

Gayle has been writing paid columns for Fairfax Media over the past month. Given the issues that have arisen over the past 48 hours, that arrangement has been terminated.

Don’t blush, baby.

Brace yourself. This one is really horrifying.

Jodhpur: In a shocking incident, a lower caste Dalit student of a government school was beaten up by his teacher till he started vomiting for touching plates being reserved for the upper caste.

According to media reports, the episode happened on October 1, a day before Gandhi Jayanti in Government Higher Secondary School in Osian town of Jodhpur, when a seven-year-old picked up a green coloured plate (reserved for the upper caste) where mid-day meal was being served.

“I picked up a plate reserved for upper caste students mistakenly and started having the rice on it. When the teacher saw this, he started hitting me badly on my head. I started vomiting,” Ramesh, a Dalit, told TOI.

That will be the Times of India.

That’s just…stunning. Special plates for the upper castes? And different plates for those dirty filthy lower ones? What must that do to children? It makes me want to cry and scream even without the beating to the point of vomiting part.

But there is that part. Teachers are allowed to hit children? On the head? And they do? Because a small child picked up a “wrong” plate?

According to Dalit Adhikar Network, “the plates there are coloured red and green for Dalits and upper castes, respectively. The seven-year-old had to be rushed to Umaid Hospital in Jodhpur. His treatment went on for six days.”

Malaram, father of the Dalit student, was also allegedly beaten up when he came to pick up his son from school.

“The cook in the school noticed Ramesh picking up a plate reserved for upper caste students. He complained about this to the teacher, who bashed up Ramesh. He kicked Ramesh and pulled his hair. He thrashed him severely, and this led to some internal injuries in his ears, because of which he still fears going to the school. When I visited the school, the teacher thrashed me too,” said his father Mala Ram.

That’s the caste system. It’s an evil invention.

Talking Points Memo addresses this whole “why did the Feds let Cliven Bundy get away with it?” question.

The situation presents a complicated challenge for authorities seeking to end the standoff peacefully but armed militia members itching for a confrontation. But some observers caution that once it is settled — however it is ultimately resolved — those involved must face consequences, unlike Bundy himself, who was never sanctioned for his armed showdown with the government and still owes some $1 million in disputed public grazing fees that triggered the initial incident.

“These folks are militant extremists and they need to be treated as such,” Jessica Goad — advocacy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group which has monitored the rise of anti-government groups — told TPM. “They need to be brought to justice in order for this thing not to keep occurring in the future.”

Because here’s the thing – if you just shrug and walk away when they do it, they’ll keep doing it.

Soon after the 2014 dispute dissipated, Alex Jones of the right-wing conspiracy website InfoWars bragged to Reuters that it was a water-shed moment for the anti-government movement.

“Americans showed up with guns and said, ‘No, you’re not,” Jones told Reuters. “And they said, ‘Shoot us.’ And they did not. That’s epic. And it’s going to happen more.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there has been a 37 percent rise in militia groups since the Bundy showdown in 2014, with the center identifying 276 militia groups – up from 202 in 2014– in its annual count released Monday.

Bad trend. Very bad trend.

Katie Glover writes in the Independent that men mustn’t be allowed to wear “women’s clothes” because that’s a “danger for trans women.”

She starts with the fact that 17-year-old Jaden Smith, son of American actor Will Smith, is going to be “the face of” Louis Vuitton clothes, specifically, women’s clothes.

Jaden seems to be up for this gender-neutral, equal clothing rights thing which allows men to wear women’s clothes without any fear of ridicule.  But there is another, more important issue afoot.

There’s a reason why men wear men’s clothes and women wear women’s clothes, and why they are generally so different.  OK, I know women have been wearing trousers for decades but they’re usually a femme version of the male equivalent – and I’m not talking about unisex clothes like jeans and t-shirts.

Not talking about them? Why not? Since they contradict that silly claim.

I’m talking about basic clothes norms that depict which gender is wearing them, even in the modern world.  Stereotypically, men wear trousers and women wear dresses and skirts.  That’s the ‘norm’ and it’s more than that – it’s a uniform.

Or, to put it another way, it’s an arbitrary custom, one that enforces a needless and oppressive gender binary, which is one reason to flout it.

But that’s not what Katie Glover is after. Quite the opposite.

When you get out of bed in the morning the most important thing you have to do all day is tell the world what your gender is, because from that, everything else flows.  You may think that your job is to be an office supervisor or a stockbroker or police officer but these are all human constructs.  Deep down your real job is to reproduce, and showing other humans your gender is the first step on that path.

Hoo-boy – evo psych in aid of enforcing the gender system yet again. No, my real job is whatever I decide it is, using my own brain and ideas and wants. Telling the world what my gender is is not even on my list of things to do, let alone at the top of it.

So, to help make it plain for anyone to see which gender you are, you put on a uniform.  Men put on trousers and have men’s haircuts, and women put on dresses and skirts, feminine tops and tights and women’s shoes to show their femininity and declare to the world that they are female.

They have women’s hair-dos and they put use cosmetics to make themselves look nicer and more presentable and to reinforce the female uniform a bit more.

So, when some people come along and want equal clothing rights, that upsets the apple cart a bit.

Male-to-female transgender people rely on props like clothes, shoes, make-up and hairstyles to create the gender identity they want to portray to the world because most of the time their bodies alone are unable to do that.  There are a few lucky ones who don’t have to do a thing to put across a female persona, but most trans women have to work hard at it.

Or not. They can just decide they don’t need to “put across a female persona” any more than they need to be visibly religious or political or of X nationality. We’re not walking advertising posters, we don’t need to be visibly anything in particular. That’s not a genuine need. It may be a desire, but it’s not a need.

The danger for trans women is that if wearing what are traditionally women’s clothes becomes the norm for men too, then trans women will no longer be able to rely on these props to help them display a female gender identity – and for many, that could be a serious problem.

Of course it will take time – a long, long time even – for things to change to the extent where men wearing skirts and girly stuff will be totally acceptable.

But trans people should be aware that well-known faces like Jaden Smith are starting to encroach on our territory.  They’re starting to wear the trans uniform without actually stating that they are transgender, and they’re claiming it for themselves under the guise of gender-neutral fashion. All of which begs the question: where does that leave us?

So there you have it. We have to continue to enforce the arbitrary customs of the gender binary because men wearing “skirts and girly stuff” is what Glover so stunningly calls “our territory.”

It could hardly be more reactionary.

Yes, people in other countries are startled to learn we have no federally mandated paid maternity leave. I just heard from a startled person on Twitter. Employers are free to provide it, but they’re also free not to.

NPR did a piece on the subject last July.

If you’ve been paying attention to the political news in the past couple of years, you know that the U.S. stands virtually alone in not mandating paid leave of any type for its workers.

It’s because we love freedom. We love the freedom of employers not to provide it, and we love the freedom of workers to be screwed over.

President Obama likewise brought new attention to paid leave this year as well, when he pointed out in his State of the Union address that the U.S. is the only advanced economy that doesn’t mandate paid sick or maternity leave for its workers.

He was right about that — it’s true that most American workers are covered by the Family Medical Leave Act, which allows workers up to 12 weeks of leave per year to care for family members. But that leave is unpaid.

I remember fuming about that during the Clinton administration (which is when the act was passed) – the media were making such a big deal of it but it was just unpaid leave. God we’re pathetic. We’re the only advanced economy that doesn’t. What a miserable distinction.

But of course our elections are sold to the highest bidder, so what do I expect?

The U.S.’s campaign finance system helps businesses keep these laws off the books, says one expert.

“Money plays a role in politics in many countries, but the extent to which the amount of dollars [is] spent on campaigns in the United States just dwarfs the amount spent in campaigns elsewhere,” says Jody Heymann, dean of the School of Public Health at UCLA. “The ability [to make] very large corporate contributions plays a much more substantial role in our elections than in other countries.”

Another miserable distinction.

Gulalai Ismail:

I had a wonderful start of the year, got to spend 1st of this year with amazing Hadiqa Bashir; a young activist from Swat who is fighting against child marriages in Swat, and she is just 14 years herself. She is very committed to the cause, and is an inspiration.

We in the US so easily lose sight of how awful we look to the rest of the world.

The UN gave three human rights experts from that rest of the world plane tickets to the US so that they could check out how women fare here. They were appalled.

A delegation of human rights experts from Poland, the United Kingdom and Costa Rica spent 10 days this month touring the United States so they can prepare a report on the nation’s overall treatment of women. The three women, who lead a United Nations working group on discrimination against women, visited Alabama, Texas and Oregon to evaluate a wide range of U.S. policies and attitudes, as well as school, health and prison systems.

The delegates were appalled by the lack of gender equality in America. They found the U.S. to be lagging far behind international human rights standards in a number of areas, including its 23 percent gender pay gap, maternity leave, affordable child care and the treatment of female migrants in detention centers.

Also domestic violence? Sexual harassment on the job? Sexual harassment everywhere else? Voice in government? Visibility in the culture?

The most telling moment of the trip, the women told reporters on Friday, was when they visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and experienced the hostile political climate around women’s reproductive rights.

“We were harassed. There were two vigilante men waiting to insult us,” said Frances Raday, the delegate from the U.K. The men repeatedly shouted, “You’re murdering children!” at them as soon as they neared the clinic, even though Raday said they are clearly past childbearing age.

“It’s a kind of terrorism,” added Eleonora Zielinska, the delegate from Poland. “To us, it was shocking.”

It is shocking.

Another main area of concern for the delegation is violence against women — particularly gun violence. Women are 11 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the United States than in other high-income countries, and most of those murdersare perpetrated by an intimate partner.

Well, it’s like this – we love guns, and we hate women.

While the delegates were shocked by many things they saw in the U.S., perhaps the biggest surprise of their trip, they said, was learning that women in the country don’t seem to know what they’re missing.

“So many people really believe that U.S. women are way better off with respect to rights than any woman in the world,” Raday said. “They would say, ‘Prove it! What do you mean other people have paid maternity leave?'”

Look at it this way: that illusion probably cheers them up.

Ok so the Bundy men are Mormons. They think “God” is telling them to grab public land and threaten anyone who comes to evict them.

As roughly 20 militants continue to occupy a federal wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon, observers are left scratching their heads. Why would an out-of-state rancher lead a self-styled militia in defending federal land far from home?

Because God told him to, Ammon Bundy said in a YouTube video posted Friday.

Oh yes? I wonder why God didn’t remind them to take plenty of food.

Bundy is a son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher known for his stand-off with the federal government over cattle grazing.

That is, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher known for threatening to shoot federal officials and getting away with it. Known for refusing to obey a perfectly legitimate order by duly constituted authority, using guns to back it up – and getting away with it without so much as a parking ticket.

In the video, Bundy, who is Mormon, said he believed God wanted him to defend Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, a father-and-son duo convicted of arson on federal land in Oregon.

“The Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds,” Bundy said in the video. “If we allowed the Hammonds to continue to be punished, there would be accountability.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just grow up for a change? He might as well say Santa Claus wasn’t pleased; it would make just as much sense.

Bundy’s rhetoric, though consistent with scripture and early Mormon teaching, is now considered extreme, and [scholar Susanna] Morrill is skeptical about attributing his motives entirely to faith.

“While the Mormon stuff seems important, it also seems like these folks just have their own agenda and may be using Mormonism for that,” she said.

Church leaders issued a statement Monday condemning militants’ actions:

“Church leaders strongly condemn the armed seizure of the facility and are deeply troubled by the reports that those who have seized the facility suggest that they are doing so based on scriptural principles. This armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis.”

But the Bundy gang can just say the church leaders have fallen into corruption. There’s no way to check this kind of bullshit.