Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Sobsobwhinesobwhinesobwhine

    Great god almighty.

  • He said he said

    The Beeb has more on Trump’s interventions:

    During remarks to a crowd of supporters, Mr Trump said Israel had to “straighten it out because they’re fighting, potentially a very big force”.

    He called Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant a “jerk” and repeatedly called Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group in Lebanon, “very smart”.

    Mr Trump also said that Israel had initially agreed to work with the US on a 2020 drone strike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, but that they backed out at the last minute.

    “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” he said. “That was a very terrible thing.”

    That “Bibi” crap is so grating. He wants to remind us that he knows Netanyahu personally. Just leave it at home, Don.

    Mr Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, noted a pattern in his old boss’s foreign policy statements.

    “Hezbollah aren’t smart, they’re evil,” he said in a radio interview on Thursday.

    “But the former president also said when Russia invaded Ukraine in a similar, unprovoked, unconscionable invasion a year-and-a-half ago, he said Vladimir Putin was a genius.”

    Well they can of course be both. Trump himself is “smart” in the sense of “good at committing crimes with impunity.” But in the case of Hezbollah and Trump, how “smart” they are is irrelevant to how profoundly evil they are.

  • Salting the wounds

    The Washington Post editorial board on Trump’s contribution to the response:

    In a reckless category of their own, however, were the comments of GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump. To be sure, he labeled the Hamas attack a “disgrace” shortly after it occurred — then pivoted to blaming it on Mr. Biden’s policies. That was about par for the partisan course, alas. Yet the former president went in a bizarre new direction Wednesday by heaping scorn on Israel itself for failing to anticipate the attack and lecturing the Jewish state to “step up their game.”

    He labeled the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group “very smart,” comparing it to an authoritarian he rates highly for ruling “1.4 billion people … with an iron fist”: Chinese President Xi Jinping. And he referred to Israel’s defense minister as a “jerk” for purportedly revealing weaknesses in the country’s northern defenses. To top it off, the former president said Mr. Netanyahu had “let us down” by refusing to aid the deadly strike Mr. Trump ordered against the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force on Jan. 3, 2020.

    An Israeli spokesman denied the account and dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments as “shameful.” There’s a lesson here for Mr. Netanyahu, who forged a close relationship with Mr. Trump during his presidency, based on the latter’s generally uncritical support for Mr. Netanyahu. There’s a lesson, too, for the Israeli public, among whom Mr. Trump was popular while in office.

    The lesson is: Don’t be fooled by a momentary alignment of Trump’s views with your own, because he doesn’t have any real views, he has only HimSelf, and he will turn on you in an instant if he thinks it will give him some kind of jollies.

    Mostly, though, it is Americans who need to take notice of these comments — especially Republicans, both voters and politicians. To their credit, some of Mr. Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination denounced his remarks. Even by his standards, they showed an extraordinary penchant for rubbing salt in the wounds of an ostensible friend and for converting an international crisis into a drama about himself. Mr. Trump’s latest outburst showed how fortunate this country is that he is not in the White House now and how unfortunate it would be if he ever returned to it.

    “Unfortunate” is putting a little too mildly. It would be a catastrophe.

  • Talk to the hand

    An “activist” (and stripper) called Tom Harlow is making quite a name for himself.

    He’s so oppressed by those women.

    He might want to be a little cautious though.

  • There’s a CHART

    It’s SCIENCE.

    https://twitter.com/IslaTopham/status/1713440038325743824

  • When women gather

    So a surprise guest turned up at the Filia conference.

    https://twitter.com/MaraMatria/status/1713501610956005865
    https://twitter.com/Wild_Womyn/status/1713497740980728246

    All the cool kids.

  • Punchy McPuncherson

    And speaking of hatred and incitement to violence – heavily filtered man in a dress brandishes his fists in our general direction.

    Watcha gonna do, Indy, punch the nearest woman? What’s your point?

    He takes us through his morning, which starts with checking Twitter for what people are saying about him.

    I dry my hair, do my make-up. Head off to the cafe where I’m writing my book.

    And, after ordering my usual pot of Darjeeling, sit down, and open my email.

    “Congratulations on being nominated as a 2023 Woman of the Year”.

    Congratulations on being even more of an insult to women.

    Wow. Considering I live on what is now internationally known as Terf Island – where trans visibility and recognition is close to outlawed – I can’t believe it.

    And I know it’s going to infuriate Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, GB News, and all the other forms of life that have grown like bacteria since 2018.

    No mention of women though, the people he so insultingly tries to replace with his own glorious self.

    I re-read the email. The nomination came from a panel of women. Interesting, considering I and the rest of the UK trans population are constantly told that the female population view woman like me as a threat and an offence to their dignity.

    We also know perfectly well that there are many captured women.

    Instead of moving forwards, Britain has hurtled backwards. It’s now normal to watch or listen to studio debates of non-trans people explaining what trans is, and how awful we are, with nobody trans there. Wouldn’t happen to any other minority.

    You’re a white guy, Willz. You’re not an oppressed minority.

  • According to plan

    The BBC four days ago:

    Antisemitic incidents in the UK have more than quadrupled since Hamas’s attack on Israel, says a charity which helps Jewish people in the UK. The Community Security Trust (CST) recorded 89 “anti-Jewish hate” incidents from 7 to 10 October. That marked a more than four-fold rise on the 21 antisemitic incidents recorded in the same period last year.

    Security Minister Tom Tugendhat said he was “very concerned” at reports of an increase in antisemitism.

    …

    Mr Tugendhat said he took the rise in antisemitism in the UK “extremely seriously” and urged a crackdown on the spread of hate. He compared the ideology of Hamas to that of the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s. “What the Nazis were doing is exactly what Hamas is doing today,” he told Sky News. “It is preaching a blood libel, preaching a hatred for Jews and preaching a hatred that extends around the world.”

    …

    The Met Police’s deputy commissioner Dame Lynne Owens has written an open letter to London’s Jewish community to reassure them that the force will “do all that we can to make sure you feel safe and protected here at home”.

    All they can do turns out to be not very much.

  • How dare she refuse

    Goodness gracious me, a woman refused to have a conversation with a random guy who walked up to her in the street and requested a chat.

    Nobody has to consent to invitations to talk from total strangers encountered randomly out in the world. Nobody. An appeal for help is one thing, but a request to chat is very much another. A man accosting a woman for a “conversation” of course has certain overtones, but women aren’t entitled to demand a conversation either. No one is.

  • Guest post: Why curl yourself into such a tight uncomfortable ball of insularity?

    Originally a comment by YNnB (yes again) on A blanket fort for big babies.

    Happily, this is a task at which anthropology should excel: spotting where the preoccupations of one cultural order—in this case, that of a late-modern, mostly Anglophone, very-online ecumene—are fervently insisted upon by members of that order as constitutive of reality itself.

    Wait. Is she saying that the freshly-minted concept of “transness” is a narrow, Western, hegemonic, colonial imposition on the rest of the world’s varied cultures?! Say it’s not so!

    This is just so outrageously meta, with anthropologists failing to recognize the global projection and reification of their own particular, parochial concerns and ideas. They can see the arbitrary, constructed, local nature of everyone else’s belief systems, but not their own. They’re giving a pass to the incoherence and contradictions within their own thought system, nodding in agreement at the punishment of anyone daring to step outside this awkward, stuffy little frame of reference to point out the peculiar restrictiveness of its tenets, all the while insisting that “this is how things are; agree or else.” They can’t see they’re just like any other cult which has found the Truth.

    Like the Church’s self-defeating persecution of Galileo, the cancellation of Lowrey’s panel makes the anthropological community look foolish. My understanding of Galileo’s intention was that he was trying to strengthen the Church by suggesting that its teachings should conform to reality rather than try to dictate it. He could see with his own eyes (and through reading Copernicus, who was clever enough to wait until he died before publishing his heliocentric hypothesis) that the Church’s attachment to Ptolemaic geocentrism was going to be a problem. Lowrey can see that her field’s attachment to gender ideology is a problem right now. Except the worldview the anthropologists are clinging to isn’t some centuries old, sclerotic orthodoxy, but a jumbled, incoherent, faddish confection of word play and reality denial slapped together in the last decade or so. She doesn’t want to destroy anthropology, but save it from itself, restoring its practice to the proper, provisional relationship to observable reality, before it stumbles further into heedless, blinkered, trendiness.

    Why curl yourself into such a tight uncomfortable ball of insularity when you can pop out, stretch your legs and enjoy the sunshine? The sun will always be there, so the fight to remain in self-imposed, cloistered darkness will be never ending. Future anthropologists will look back, shaking their heads and use this episode as an object lesson in professional self examination.

  • Hur hur sux 2bu

    Two men win top spots in women’s race:

    Transgender athletes – biological men – have been infiltrating women’s cycling for quite some time and now the absurdity has hit a new level with a pair of trans cyclists winning gold and silver in the women’s division of Chicago’s CycloCross Cup.

    Tessa Johnson took the top place on the podium during the women’s SingleSpeed with Evelyn Williamson finishing second. Allison Zmuda, a biological female earned bronze in the competition, and somehow stood on the podium with a smile on her face after losing to two biological men who competed against her with a biological advantage.

    Two men cheated and the woman who came in third pretended to be happy.

  • Guest post:

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on True inclusion requires more and more and more.

    Getting to true inclusion for LGBTQIA2S+ employees requires much more than an inclusive and respectful workplace policy


    Oh? “Much more?” For most people, you’d think that would be sufficient.

    True inclusion for LGBTQIA2S+ employees means creating a psychologically safe workplace environment


    Please define “a psychologically safe workplace environment. ” Isn’t this a good thing for everyone to have? Why do I get the feeling that “psychological safety” isn’t going to be as “inclusive” as it should be, and that some employees’ “needs” are going to be prioritized over others. We saw this with Maya Forstater and Alison Bailey. All this “true inclusion” seems to come with not-so-fine print and a hefty price for women being forced to stay silent about sex-based rights, which are inevitably eroded when men who declare they are women make claims to women’s positions and facilities. That would seem to run counter to women’s psychological safety.

    and expanding allyship practices across all departments.

    Allyship? When someone goes to work, they’re expecting to be joining as colleagues within their company, not storming the beaches of Normandy or joining NATO. In the context of trans “rights” the concept of “ally” has been thoroughly poisoned, as many of the most beligerent, hair-trigger bullies in this movement are self-styled “allies” using this supposed struggle on behalf of the “most marginalized” as a convenient pretext and licence to unleash their misogyny. So forgive me if the call to “expand allyship across all departments” sounds more like a recruitment drive for the office Stasi.

    When publicly identifying as LGBTQIA2S+, an individual is inviting people into a personal part of their life journey. A part that requires being vulnerable and that should be protected and celebrated.

    Wait, we’re at work, right? Isn’t oversharing considered rude? I’m not interested in some trans-identified person using aspects of their personal life as some sort of “centering,” team-building exercize that makes them more special than anyone else. I don’t want to be forced to be part of someone’s narc supply. And as for “celebrating,” let’s leave that to the occasional staff birthday, wherein everyone in the workplace (assuming they wish to be so acknowledged) gets their own special day. Pass me a slice of cake, but don’t make me kiss your ring.

    All this “allyship” and “celebration” is just so infantilizing. TiMs (and let’s face it, their demands are the driving force behind most of this twaddle) are grown-ass men. Dress it up with all the language of the oppressed, downtrodden, and fragile, but men are not “marginalized,” and to help them don the mantle of the “most victimized” is insulting to anyone who is actually an oppressed, downtrodden victim.

    Forced teaming allows the T to hitch themselves up to the history of Gay Rights and AIDS awareness that is not theirs, projecting the “presence” of transness (as it is currently promulgated) decades farther back before it existed. The aspiration to “continue to promote a safe world for LGBTQ individuals to live truthfully and openly,” would be great if “TQ” individuals actually did live honestly as the sex they are, rather than insisting that the entire world recognize, treat, and “celebrate” them as the sex they are not. Making the world safe for the propagation and enforcement of lies is not a laudable goal.

    Coming out of the closet, shortened to “coming out,” is often a metaphor used to describe LGBTQIA2S+ people’s self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation or gender identity.

    When I first became aware of the concept of “coming out” it referred to sexual orientation and nothing else. Again forced teaming at work. The problem with T is that it’s not content with coming out of the closet, it wants to ascend the throne, with all the bowing, scraping, and hosannahs thrown in to boot. Still not kissing that ring.

    “Coming out” is experienced variously as a psychological process or journey. In coming out there is: decision-making or risk-taking; a strategy or plan; a matter of personal identity; a rite of passage; liberation or emancipation from oppression; feelings of LGBT pride, shame and social stigma; or even a career-threatening act.

    With the T it’s also a power play when it invades women’s spaces. Resisting or even questioning this intrusion can be a career-threatening act.

    Everyone deserves a life free from bias, discrimination and hate — and we are working hard every single day to make sure that is a reality for you and for everyone.

    Does that include women who know, and say openly, that men are not women?

    We are going to build a world where every LGBTQIA2S+ person can be healthy, safe, liberated, celebrated and joyful in every area of our lives – without exception!

    But you can’t do this. Trans ideology is profoundly misogynistic, homophobic, and untrue. Making the world safe for it means making it unsafe for half the population. The world you’re proposing is a nightmare we’re supposed to welcome with rictus grins and hymns of praise. Genderism encourages body-hatred to the point of self-mutilation and lifelong , debilitating medicalization in pursuit of an impossible goal. How does any of that lead to health, safety, or liberation? It doesn’t. It is not my responsibility to make people who’ve encouraged to follow this ghastly pathway feel “joyful” about their decision to do so, and to demand our obedience, compliance, and silence in the face of this monstrous untruth. I’m not going to kiss the ring; I’m not even going to smile.

  • The miracle of a certificate

    A woman is somebody who is born a woman or somebody who has a certificate.

    So, a rabbit is somebody who is born a rabbit or somebody who has a certificate. A shark is somebody who is born a shark or or somebody who has a certificate. A polar bear is somebody who is born a polar bear or or somebody who has a certificate.

    How does this work, exactly? How does a certificate change the facts of the DNA of a living organism? Can anyone explain it?

  • A blanket fort for big babies

    Have a hair-raisingly brilliant piece of writing by anthropologist Kathleen Lowrey:

    How Anthropology Canceled Sex

    We’ve met her before via Anthropologists made of crystal and Let’s you not talk last month, about the panel abruptly canceled at the last minute for the usual stupid reasons.

    I was motivated to propose the panel by my concern that anthropological publications increasingly deploy “gender” in a manner that implies gender systems are neutral manifestations of human diversity. Second, more and more anthropological literature seeks to reverse-engineer “sex” as if it takes the form of a “spectrum,” while presuming that “biological sex” is possessed of no independent analytic utility.

    These developments have generated a conceptual tangle in desperate need of unraveling. Happily, this is a task at which anthropology should excel: spotting where the preoccupations of one cultural order—in this case, that of a late-modern, mostly Anglophone, very-online ecumene—are fervently insisted upon by members of that order as constitutive of reality itself.

    Oh but – but – that can’t be right. The late-modern, mostly Anglophone, very-online ecumene can’t be a cultural order subject to analysis; it’s reality itself, truth itself, the way things are.

    Ours was not selected as an executive panel, but not necessarily for political reasons: The competition is no doubt fierce. Nonetheless, I wanted to know whether one member of the three-person selection committee had recused herself when our panel came up for judgment. This was Sarah Shulist, an anthropologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, who had published two denunciations of me on an anthropology blog (of which I had been a founding contributor) in the aftermath of my 2020 dismissal as chair of undergraduate programs in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. The committee wrote back to assure me the selection process was rigorous and thorough. I responded that I had no doubt at all that it was, but only specifically wished to know if Shulist had recused herself during deliberations over our panel, given that I was its organizer. To date, I haven’t received any response to this follow-up query.

    That seems just a little shifty and evasive of the committee, wouldn’t you say?

    So anyway, they resubmitted their panel as a regular conference session and were accepted, albeit in a dud time slot.

    We received notice of our acceptance in July and set about reserving hotel rooms, booking flights, discussing overlaps and the possibilities for socializing outside the panel itself. Then came the Sept. 26 email letting us know we were removed.

    Almost as if they did it on purpose. “I know, let’s tell them they’re accepted, and then at the last minute say hahaha no you’re not.”

    Not for the first time in my experience as a canceled feminist, I feel I have gained some insight into how humans have, at many points in history, managed to gin one another into activities like burning heretics at the stake. Such outcomes cascade from the unreality of an initial premise. The proposition that “some lesbians have penises” requires showy demonstrations of faith. To balk is to suggest you might not think that assertion is true after all. No one wants to be the person who says the next punitive step is a step too far, as there is never a shortage of fanatics eager to make the point that the hesitant must be those whited sepulchers we have all been warned about.

    No one even wants to be the person who fails to get a kick in, because uh oh whited sepulcher. That’s what it looked like to me back in summer 2015 when the goons at Freethought blogs solemnly lined up one by one to add their mite to the pile. “Don’t do it to me, look, I too am denouncing her, look, look!”

    For nearly four years now, I have felt as if I were the inhabitant of a living-history diorama, albeit one dreamt up by a satirist of the George Saunders variety. At my workplace, I lead a semi-zombie existence. I turn up at department meetings with a wooden stake spectrally hanging out of my chest; my colleagues now treat me with a combination of embarrassed politeness and distinct resentment. Sure, perhaps they didn’t behave quite as they ought, but isn’t it also a bit rude of me to still be hanging about above ground, rather than staying decently buried?

    Ugh. I’m so lucky not to have to encounter any of my goons ever again.

    Just last week, I had a cordial exchange with none other than AgustĂ­n Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, who, along with two other anthropologists, wrote a letter supporting the AAA’s removal of our panel. The exchange was spurred when a senior anthropologist wrote to us both simultaneously. I replied to say I would welcome an exchange of ideas, perhaps at some future conference from which I haven’t been removed. Fuentes responded that he felt sure it would happen someday, and that he has always “found my takes intriguing” (presumably not the ones he alleges are eugenics-adjacent).

    I don’t find this sort of thing all that strange anymore. Exactly such sorry for running over your dog, backing up and doing it again several times, see you at the raffle! â€œneighborliness” characterizes many of my professional interactions. I can’t tell you the number of people who have denounced me as something approximating a Nazi on the internet who nevertheless smile gamely, if a little wanly, when we cross paths on campus. Allow me to confess that I almost always return a feeble smile of my own. What’s the alternative? Fisticuffs?

    Well you could make the smile mostly a sneer. Or entirely a sneer. Or you could bare your teeth in a terrifying exaggerated grin like The Joker.

    All of this diminishes my ability to crank up the machinery of high dudgeon upon the occasion of the people in charge of an august scholarly conference running the thing as if it were a blanket fort for big babies. The ridiculousness of it all ripples along my ribs, reminding me of my anthropological avocation: my duty to try to understand the odd things people do.

    Hahahahahahaha I love her.

    Our panel pretty faithfully reflects our discipline: a mix of people who try to make sense of human biology and people who try to make sense of human society. While it is possible, although not strictly necessary, to be pretty buttoned-up most of the time if you have hold of the biology end of the human species, the socio-cultural end is awash with delirious excesses of every variety. Socio-cultural anthropology loses one of its most sensitive analytic instruments—a sense of humor—when it succumbs to the current fashion for po-faced earnestness about all the foibles to which human beings are heir.

    For examples of such folly, we need look no further than the measures taken by the anthropological tribe itself, and the broader left-academic milieu of which it is part, to maintain and enforce a cultural order that solidified not so long ago. These days, once you start living as a “TERF,” you can get punched in the face, hit with projectiles, hung in effigy, face masked mobs at your workplace, lose your livelihood, lose your children, lose your liberty, be inundated with rape and death threats. At the same time, you are engaged in battle with opponents so outrĂ©, many respectable people refuse to believe they truly exist, and you can end up looking like the crazy one if you try to explain it all. I think this, more than any fundamental cowardice, explains the evident relief of members of academic or medical associations when the leadership assures them it’s an issue no one should be talking about anyway—that “the science is settled.”

    The link under outré is to the giant-tits guy in Ontario. I love this woman.

  • From inside the safe rooms

    This is hard to read. I had to take it in stages.

    Hamas attack on Israel kibbutz Be’eri captured by mothers’ WhatsApp group

    Shortly after sunrise on the morning of Saturday 7 October, a message pings on 200 phones of the Be’eri mothers’ WhatsApp group.

    Minutes later another message lands: “We have a terrorist on the stairs. Call someone.”

    WARNING: Some readers may find details in this article distressing.

    Hamas gunmen had just begun a day-long rampage through this kibbutz in southern Israel, and over the next 20 hours the women channelled their horror, disbelief and reassurances through the chat – as militants roamed the neighbourhood shooting residents dead and setting fire to homes.

    Hiding in their safe rooms these women – some huddled with their families – described the shouts and explosions they heard outside, told each other where gunmen were, shared tips on coping with smoke that filled their rooms, and repeatedly called for help. In some cases, that help never came.

    Go slowly.

  • Peter said

    Bonne nuit.

  • Always tweak the wording

    Students pushing the envelope just a tad.

    Hanin Barghouti, the women’s officer at Sussex University’s student union, gave a speech in Brighton endorsing the attacks by Hamas, calling them “a victory”.

    Ellie Gomersall, the president of the National Union of Students (NUS) Scotland, apologised after reposting messages justifying Hamas’s actions in Israel. She wrote: “I shared content last night that I deeply regret sharing. In doing so I promoted hate and division. I shouldn’t have. I have deleted it.”

    Carefully missing the point as usual. The issue isn’t hate and division so much as it is mass murder. Translating that to abstract hate n division is just self-soothing, not to say self-flattery.

  • Accuse the victims some more

    So this is what Dr Jonny Dennis got up to when feminist women dared to attend a conference he disapproves of.

    https://twitter.com/genericeddie/status/1712751152117199280

    Note the ratbag in orange next to him who is pulling or pushing at the women as they struggle to get past Jonny and his thrusting crotch to get through the opening in the fence. Jonny, remember, whined on Twitter afterwards the the women “kicked” and “stood on” the poor sad feeble tragic protesters.

    I usually don’t agree with calls for universities to fire the more excitable trans “activists” but I think this toad should be out on his ass.

  • Guest post: True inclusion requires more and more and more

    Via J.A. at Miscellany Room, a little missive from his HR department:

    Written by PRIDE: LGBTQIA2S+ employee resource group

    Getting to true inclusion for LGBTQIA2S+ employees requires much more than an inclusive and respectful workplace policy or rainbow branding each year for Pride month.

    True inclusion for LGBTQIA2S+ employees means creating a psychologically safe workplace environment and expanding allyship practices across all departments.

    The PRIDE employee resource group has been actively advocating and working toward inclusion for LGBTQIA2S+ employees in both big and small changes this year, such as promoting inclusive benefits and policies for LGBTQIA2S+ employees and intentionally recruiting for LGBTQIA2S+ representation. PRIDE has also been working with HR on smaller steps like including personal pronouns in communications and HR systems and providing employee training to decrease the frequency of microaggressions (such as automatically asking women about husbands/boyfriends, asking men about wives/girlfriends, misgendering, tokenization of identity, use of derogatory language, failure to acknowledge queer relationships, exclusion from socializations, etc.).

    And part of true inclusion starts this week with National Coming Out Day which is commemorated each year on Oct. 11 and aims to “continue to promote a safe world for LGBTQ individuals to live truthfully and openly,” (Human Rights Campaign website). National Coming Out Day can trace its roots back to the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The march aimed to draw attention to the federal government’s inaction in confronting the AIDS crisis and the Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling upholding Georgia’s anti-gay sodomy law.

    The march marked the unveiling of the AIDS memorial quilt (a massive patchwork honoring those lost to the virus) and at the time an unprecedented show of support for gay rights: More than half a million people showed up to demand their rights that fall.

    36 years later, the PRIDE employee resource group recognizes that there are still areas where employees experience a workplace environment where “coming out” is not welcomed. Coming out of the closet, shortened to “coming out,” is often a metaphor used to describe LGBTQIA2S+ people’s self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation or gender identity. “Coming out” is often framed and debated as a privacy issue in the workplace. “Coming out” is experienced variously as a psychological process or journey. In coming out there is: decision-making or risk-taking; a strategy or plan; a matter of personal identity; a rite of passage; liberation or emancipation from oppression; feelings of LGBT pride, shame and social stigma; or even a career-threatening act.

    Our PRIDE employee resource group acknowledges that “coming out” has been the common term for someone who acknowledges being LGBTQIA2S+ but it is a lived experience and therefore is experienced differently by different individuals. It is also important to note that this language centers on the people that are the audience to the “coming out” rather than the LGBTQIA2S+ individuals themselves who are coming out. It gives the impression that people who don’t identify as cisgender or heterosexual are hiding something from society and need to be honest and come out, rather than acknowledging how homophobia and transphobia create an unwelcoming environment.

    When publicly identifying as LGBTQIA2S+, an individual is inviting people into a personal part of their life journey. A part that requires being vulnerable and that should be protected and celebrated. “Coming out” is not about your LGBTQIA2S+ co-worker(s) asking permission to be themselves. “Coming out” is the opportunity for LGBTQIA2S+ people to control the narrative, as well as who and what they allow into their life.

    This October the PRIDE employee resource group wants you to focus on the collective power of expanding allyship practices across all departments and creating a psychologically safe workplace environment. We want you to not look at National Coming Out Day as a mandate for gays to out themselves but as an opportunity to uphold an inclusive and respectful workplace environment for all employees and celebrate the month of LGBT history.

    Everyone deserves a life free from bias, discrimination and hate — and we are working hard every single day to make sure that is a reality for you and for everyone. We are going to build a world where every LGBTQIA2S+ person can be healthy, safe, liberated, celebrated and joyful in every area of our lives – without exception!

  • They came out to shout at the women

    Off to a good start.

    https://twitter.com/scepticalPhil/status/1712770278344827040
    https://twitter.com/scepticalPhil/status/1712735266065068354