A chat with Richard Dawkins:

His considerable reputation as an evolutionary biologist, atheist and intellectual was forged in the hot cauldron of public debate. With forceful clarity and occasional rattiness, he has for decades gone about slaughtering sacred cows like a bloodthirsty butcher. So if Dawkins is now afraid to speak his mind, I’m not sure where that leaves the rest of us. “I self-censor,” he admits. “More so in recent years.” Why? “It’s not a thing I’ve done throughout my life, I’ve always spoken my mind openly. But we’re now in a time when if you do speak your mind openly, you are at risk of being picked up and condemned.”

Well, we’re in a time where Twitter exists, as Dawkins knows. His speaking his mind openly doesn’t always come across well on Twitter. It can at times border on taunting, like when he kept referring to “clock boy.” (In case you’ve forgotten, a boy from a Muslim family made a clock of sorts for a school project and somebody thought “bomb!!” and things went crazy.) He did some borders-on-taunting of feminist women, starting with “Dear Muslima.” Things got heated. He never really seemed to get the point that his taunts (“speaking his mind openly”) at feminist women would trigger avalanches of abuse aimed at those women, because he’s a Name and has that power.

Dawkins is worried that the illiberalism of the left is helping to fuel right-wing populism, driving continued support to Donald Trump and the like. “Every time a lecturer is cancelled from an American university, that’s another God knows how many votes for Trump,” he says. He finds it particularly bothersome when his “own team” attacks him. “I’m much more hurt by attacks from the left,” he says. “When I get hate mail from my own people, that hurts in a way that getting it from creationists doesn’t.” It must have hit home then when Dawkins had his 1996 Humanist of the Year award withdrawn by the American Humanist Association (AHA) earlier this year.

The AHA bestows this prestigious annual award to an admired humanist: recipients have included Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. It lists them all on its website, but if you scroll down to 1996, Dawkins’s name has been scrubbed. He’s gone. Why? Because of a tweet. Back in April, Dawkins caused offence when he wondered why identifying across racial barriers is so much more difficult than across sexual barriers. He wrote: “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”

Unacceptable. Taunting feminist women, acceptable; questioning gender idenniny, unacceptable.

He recalls reading the historian Jan Morris’s 1974 book Conundrum on transitioning to become a woman. “She felt herself to be a woman trapped in a man’s body,” Dawkins says. “I think that’s a real phenomenon. I have sympathy. But when trans people insist that you say she is a woman, you redefine something. If you define a woman as a human with an XX karyotype, then she’s not a woman. If you define a woman as someone who identifies as a woman, feels they are a woman and has maybe had an operation, then by that definition she is a woman. From a scientific point of view, she’s not a woman. From a personal point of view, she is.”

To put it another way, you can change your gender but you can’t change your sex.

As a matter of “personal politeness” then, he’s happy to use whatever pronouns people ask him to use. “But I don’t like the idea that people can pillory someone like Jordan Peterson for refusing to be compelled to change his language,” he says. In this Dawkins senses something he doesn’t like: a quasi-religious faith that cannot be opposed. Or as he puts it: “Denying reality and it’s a heresy to do anything other than that.”

Quite.

Updating to add discussions here last April of the AHA rebuke of Dawkins and the [cough] strangeness of drawing the line there and not at clockboy or Dear Muslima.

April 19th

April 20th

GP by Sastra April 20th

April 20th

April 21st

“Socialist workers” forsooth. Trotsky would spurn them. Behold SWP response to letter from Woman’s Place UK.

Trans people are facing a barrage of attacks. 

No they’re not. Some people disagree with their belief system, and explain why; that’s not an attack, let alone a barrage of them.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) stands with the oppressed and unequivocally says, “Trans women are women,” and, “Trans men are men.” Trans people have the right to organise against their oppression and the right to protest against it. We stood in solidarity with the trans students and workers at the University of Sussex who were rightly outraged by Kathleen Stock’s views. 

They’re not oppressed though. Not believing wild claims about the self is not oppression. The students at Sussex were and are not “rightly outraged” by Stock’s views. (Any bets on whether the SWP knows a single thing about her views?) And what “workers” at Sussex had anything to do with the monstering of Stock? That word is obviously just thrown in so that the SWP can go on pretending to be an actual socialist party.

The attacks on trans rights are pushed by the Tories and the wider right—and go hand in hand with attacks on women’s rights. Our focus is fighting the right wing—and for a socialist society that uproots all oppression. 

Again: disagreement with fantasy-based claims about the self is not “attacks on trans rights.” Real socialists would find the whole idea laughably bourgeois and reactionary.

The BBC has internal networks of inquisitors.

It has that statue of Orwell with the now too familiar admonition: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Yes and no: people don’t want to hear “You’re ugly” and it’s not an important kind of liberty to say it. But that’s a quibble.

I’ve always felt that particular line stands for something important about the way journalism should be done.

I thought of it again last week, when a senior figure told me about ‘a climate of fear’ at the Corporation, surrounding stories on race and on transgender issues. A small but significant number of the BBC’s staff had appointed themselves would-be censors, he said.

…

But here at our national broadcaster I’ve been told about unacceptable demands to change or drop stories – demands made by members of two ‘internal staff networks’ which serve as support and discussion groups.

These are BBC Embrace, which represents Black, Asian and other ethnic minority staff, and BBC Pride, for LGBTQ staff. Delegates from these groups are accused of flinging around charges of ‘racism’ and ‘transphobia’. There are claims of ‘bullying, piling on and [using] threats of being cancelled’.

Note no mention of charges of homophobia or lesbophobia or misogyny. That’s all so last century.

Last week, BBC Online ran a brave and important story about lesbians feeling coerced into accepting trans women as sexual partners – feeling, in other words, that they had to have sex with someone who is biologically a man but identifies as a woman. The coverage included an interview with a lesbian named Jeannie who said she was attracted only to biological females. As a result, she had been labelled transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert and a ‘terf’ – a trans exclusionary radical feminist – for expressing this preference.

…

The piece repeated the claim, a contentious one of course, that lesbians are being pressured to ‘accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ’.

Thousands of people contacted the BBC to say they were glad to read about this difficult issue.

Yet I’m told the journalists behind the story had to ‘fight like hell’ to get it published. And that it was held up for several months because of internal opposition, with the campaign to censor it going all the way up to the BBC director-general.

…

Another investigation, about the influence of pro-trans lobby group Stonewall on publicly funded institutions, was also broadcast. Yet the journalist, Stephen Nolan, says he had been warned the subject of Stonewall was ‘untouchable’.

But he touched it.

Bossy little shits at another university order everyone to be more twanz-incloosivv more of the time.

Students and staff at Leeds University have called on their vice-chancellor and senior employees to include gender pronouns when introducing themselves in meetings.

I call on those students and staff to sit down and shut up.

They also said that the vice-chancellor, Simone Buitendijk, should state her preferred gender pronouns in her email signature. Both measures are designed to show support for the transgender community.

The university was accused of having “a deeply entrenched culture of transphobia” in a letter signed by LGBT staff and student groups, as well as by the Leeds branch of the University and College Union (UCU).

Because people don’t “state” “their” pronouns. The stupidity is becoming overpowering.

I remember when fervent social justice students talked about farm workers, strikes, wars, the CIA, nuclear weapons, ecology, capitalism, women’s rights, lesbian and gay rights, prisoners, voting rights, city planning – real issues. Now their children are throwing endless tantrums over fucking pronouns. It’s beyond pathetic.

Among the other demands, the letter called for “an effective and fit-for-purpose pronouns policy to be enacted, to include our VC showing her support for the trans community by using pronouns in her email signature, and a culture which encourages the sharing of pronouns when, for example, in meetings and seminars”.

The world is cooking like a dinner, despots are swallowing country after country, the number of homeless people keeps rising – and we’re being lectured on fucking pronouns.

A number of universities have introduced training and guidance on transgender issues. Edinburgh University lecturers have been given a list of “micro-insults” to avoid, such as “I wanted to be a boy when I was a child”, it was reported last week.

So we’re not even allowed to talk about our own childhood fantasies about being the other sex. How does that work? How do these young Stalinists know we’re not just as gendery as they are? Why does their kind count while our kind doesn’t?

Girl Guides? Really? Really?

What does this have to do with Girl Guides? (In the US called Girl Scouts.) Nothing nothing nothing nothing.

I suppose this nonsense is Stonewall yet again.

Yes that sounds like Stonewall all right. What does having no interest in sex have to do with making everyone feel welcome? What does having no interest in sex have to do with making everyone feel free to be themselves? What does having no interest in sex have to do with making everyone feel an equal sense of belonging? In the Girl Guides specifically?

The Beeb has a moronic article about it from last May. Has to be Stonewall.

Why are so many adults asleep at the fucking wheel?

Updating to add:

Just horrific.

Plotting the coup:

On 4 January, the conservative lawyer John Eastman was summoned to the Oval Office to meet Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. Within 48 hours, Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election would formally be certified by Congress, sealing Trump’s fate and removing him from the White House.

And Trump was hell-bent on stopping the certification, as if he had every right in the world to do that.

Eastman, who had a decades-long reputation as a prominent conservative law professor, had already prepared a two-page memo in which he had outlined an incendiary scenario under which Pence, presiding over the joint session of Congress that was to be convened on 6 January, effectively overrides the votes of millions of Americans in seven states that Biden had won, then “gavels President Trump as re-elected”.

Prominent law professor tells criminal in White House how to carry out a coup.

The Eastman memo, first revealed by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril, goes on to predict “howls” of protest from Democrats. The theory was that Pence, acting as the “ultimate arbiter” of the process, would then send the matter to the House of Representatives which, following an arcane rule that says that where no candidate has reached the necessary majority each state will have one vote, also decides to turn the world upside down and hand the election to the losing candidate, Donald Trump.

Aka steal the election.

Eastman told the Guardian that he told Trump and the gang that that wasn’t his favorite option for stealing the election.

Instead, Eastman pointed to one of the scenarios in the longer six-page memo that he had prepared – “war-gaming” alternatives. His favorite was that the vice-president could adjourn the joint session of Congress on 6 January and send the electoral college votes back to states that Trump claimed he had lost unfairly so their legislatures could have another go at rooting out the fraud and illegality the president had been railing about since election day.

Hmm yes and just keep doing that for the next four years, with Trump still squatting in the presidency until it all gets figured out. Cunning plan.

Eastman insisted to the Guardian that he had only been presenting scenarios to the vice-president, not advice. He said that since news of his memos broke he had become the victim of a “false narrative put out there to make it look as though Pence had been asked to do something egregiously unconstitutional, so he was made to look like a white knight coming in to stop this authoritarian Trump”.

Ah yes, Eastman is clearly the victim here.

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a leading authority on US election issues, sees Eastman’s set of alternative scenarios as nothing less than a “fairly detailed roadmap for a constitutional coup d’état. That memo was a plan for a series of tricks to steal the presidency for Trump.”

…

Since the violent incidents of 6 January when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, resulting in the deaths of five people, information has begun to amass about Trump’s extensive ploy to undo American democracy. Congressional investigations by the US House and Senate have added granular detail that has astonished even seasoned election-watchers in terms of the scale and complexity of the endeavour.

…

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who has written a report on 2020 election subversion, said that as time has passed the scope of Trump’s ambition has become clear. “There was much more behind the scenes than we knew about. We came much closer to a political and constitutional crisis than we realized,” he said.

Now they have three more years to plan the next one.

In the past few weeks, as congressional investigations have deepened, it has become clear that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election result were much more extensive and multi-layered than his Twitter rages. “This wasn’t just some crazy tweets,” Waldman said. “There was a concerted effort to push at every level to find ways to cling to power, even though he had lost.”

You know, this is the downside to making a crooked real estate tycoon president. Trump is marinated in all the wrong skills for the job. He’s a cheat and liar and fraud, and that’s what he knows. He’s a conceited noisy self-promoter, and that’s what he knows. He knows nothing about democracy or norms or the law or history or government. He doesn’t give the tiniest fuck that he blew up all the norms surrounding how to govern and how to conduct elections. He’s a corrupt money-grubbing thief and bully and publicity hound, and that’s all there is to him.

Now here’s a guy who spells it all the way out, which they mostly avoid doing, probably because it shows too clearly how stupid the whole thing is.

Man tells woman that men who call themselves women are “far less powerful as a group” than women and men.

One, it’s a sly move to say “than you or I” as if women and men were on a level when it comes to power. Women and men are not in the same group when it comes to evaluating power, status, rights, freedoms, fairness, basic respect. Women don’t have the same power and status and rights and freedoms as men have.

Two, and most obviously, no of course men are not “far less powerful” than women. Even if they put on woman face and a skirt, they’re still not far less powerful than women.

Three, he cheats by making trans women one group and women and men another group. That’s connected to One but not exactly the same.

Four, it’s hard to think of a minority group lower down the pecking order? Really? Try African migrants trying to escape violence or poverty or drought or all three by piling into a tiny boat and heading for Spain. Try working class migrants in general. Try women in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan. Try Uighurs in China. Try schoolgirls held captive by Boko Haram. Try severely disabled people. Try people who combine two or more disadvantages of that kind. There are literally billions of people lower down the pecking order than trans people.

How do people get as soft in the head as this guy?

They had a plan.

On the night before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Washington Post reporter Robert Costa walked through the streets of D.C., surrounded by a throng of Trump supporters. He says he remembers a particular energy in the crowd that night.

…

Costa’s new book Peril, which he co-wrote with journalist Bob Woodward, centers on President Trump’s final days in office — specifically the events leading up to and following the Capitol siege.

As the crowd agitated outside, Costa says, inside a “war room” at the nearby Willard hotel, Trump lawyers and allies, including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Jason Miller, were laying out a strategy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In other words to carry out a coup.

According to Costa, Trump attorney John Eastman drafted a memo suggesting that an alternate slate of electors be used as a tactic to stop the certification of the election results.

“They were trying to get [Vice President] Pence and others to move the election to the House of Representatives to block Biden from taking office,” Costa explains.

Costa says that Pence declined to go along with the plan — mostly because there were no alternate slates of electors on hand. But, Costa adds, “Imagine if in January 2025, Republicans are much more organized and they have alternate slates of electors ready in many states. What happens then?”

I vote we don’t find out. I vote we prevent that.

The campaign released a statement on January 5th saying Pence agreed with their cunning plan.

It was a campaign statement on Trump campaign letterhead saying, in Donald Trump’s words, that Mike Pence fully agrees with me. The quote that stunned the Pence people was “Mike Pence is in total agreement that on Jan. 6, the election should be overturned and he should move it to the House.” It was issued on a formal statement.

This is where you start to see the crack in the American democratic system — when the vice president and president are not in sync, and the president starts to speak for other constitutional officers. This is where Pence and his team really go into a bunker mode and they don’t even share the letter Pence ultimately releases on Jan. 6, explaining his decision to not try to do anything crazy on Jan. 6. They don’t even share it with the White House counsel or with Trump. That was the level of tension between the president and the vice president.

So it may be that it was only Mike Pence who stood between those thieves and a successful coup. Next time there won’t be any Mike Pence.

I have left this question unasked for too long.

Why does Zuckerberg wear his hair like that?

Not ok.

Via Ex-Muslims of North America, who captioned it “Queer eye for the Islamic guy.”

On the other hand, Justin Weinberg of Daily Nous also reports on Kathleen’s resignation, and to my surprise the comments are mostly not “she had it coming.” Quite the reverse. And the approval rate for the comments is high too.

The warmest comment:

Kathleen will no doubt thrive outside of academia. Any serious philosopher, however, should feel deep embarrassment and shame at how Kathleen has been treated by the profession, if I may speak with such generality. Her decision comes after many years of personal abuse, ostracisation, attempted blacklisting, wilful misrepresentation, and defamation, and that is just from philosophers, never mind the ‘protesters’.

Three factors stand out. First, a good deal of male philosophers appear to have outsourced their morals and good sense to what the local feminist philosopher thinks. She, so the male thinks, claims that being a woman is something to do with self-identity; she won’t tell you what that means, but if you question it, you are a bigot who is literally killing people. Little wonder most stay quiet.

Secondly, there have been many public denouncements from philosophers and others for all the foul things Kathleen has said. I can’t discover what these things are, although I am sure she has regrets. She is, at any rate, free to call people idiots and trample over sensitivities. Don’t invite her to your next party, but you don’t need to organise against her.

Thirdly, the whole background to this sorry saga is the thought that philosophy needs to be more inclusive. Unfortunately, that does not extend to class. Kathleen has consistently put underprivileged women and girls at the forefront of her thinking, to which the relevant sections of the Equality Act, pertaining to sex-based exemptions, relate (for US readers, the UK has complex legislature concerning sex and gender; Kathleen has always defended the legal status quo, which protects ‘gender reassignment’). It is no surprise that the painfully middle-class academics who have hounded Kathleen have been so puddled. They can’t see beyond their class privilege even when a woman is being stamped on in front of them. If I may be excused a joke: a liberal feminist philosopher once saved Kathleen’s life. She came across her in a ca[r] park being set upon. She shouted out: ‘I think she has had enough boys’.

Daily Nous did better than the Guardian at least.

The Guardian reports on Kathleen Stock’s resignation from Sussex, and gives the copious last word to…Pink News. Yes really.

The philosophy professor was awarded an OBE in the 2021 new year honours list for services to higher education.

But hundreds of academics criticised the decision, signing an open letter that criticised Stock’s comments on transgender and gender non-conforming people.

The link is to Pink News.

The letter claimed her “harmful rhetoric” about transgender and gender non-conforming people reinforced “the patriarchal status quo”.

“Academic freedom comes with responsibility; we should not use that freedom to harm people, particularly the more vulnerable members of our community,” the letter added.

“Conflating concern about the harms of Stock’s work with threats to academic freedom obfuscates important issues.”

And that’s the last sentence in the piece. Jury dismissed.

Julie Bindel underlines that the bullying of Kathleen Stock is intended as a warning to all of us.

Claims that Stock is a ‘transphobe’ are not only unfounded but wilfully misguided. Stock is being punished not for her views on transgender issues, but for standing her ground in the face of persistent and sadistic bullying over sex-based rights, and a belief in the immutability of biology.

In other words she was supposed to take it all back, and she refused, so she had to be made an example.

Women are supposed to cave in. Patriarchy works not by all men holding a gun to the heads of all women, but by public displays of male power, such as the treatment of Stock over the past three years. What has happened to her and others in the public eye is so terrible it serves as a lesson to others. For every Kathleen Stock there are hundreds, or even thousands of women, that will be terrified to raise their heads above the parapet on trans issues.

And then there are the students.

I hear from countless young women who tell me they want to be taught about feminism in university, and all they get is an endless sop of ‘sex work is work’ and ‘trans women are women’.

The Greta Christina version of feminism – not feminism at all but neo-liberal individualistic choosy-choice horseshit.

Owen Jones is providing the mirth for today.

The world totters on its axis – the top dog in the Labour party has unfollowed the great Owen Jones!

Updating to add:

What a loathsome prick.

He wrote the Pink News story. The title is as stupid as his tweet.

Anti-trans professor Kathleen Stock quits Sussex university in ‘massive win for LGBT+ students’

She’s not “anti-trans.” How is it a win for L students to bully an L professor out? How is it a win for LGB students to bully an L professor out? How is the win “massive”? More likely James Barry is right that Sussex University has sustained a damaging injury.

Sadistic Vic Parsons gloats.

LGBT+ students at the University of Sussex have welcomed news that professor Kathleen Stock is to leave the institution.

Yeah sure lesbian students are thrilled to see a lesbian professor bullied until she can’t stand to be there any more.

She has also argued that self-ID “threatens a secure understanding of the concept ‘lesbian’”, rooting her rhetoric in a belief of immutable biological sex.

Stupid little toad. It’s not “rhetoric,” it’s argument; she’s a philosopher. Vic Parsons, by the way, is not. And guess what, sex is immutable, it’s gender that’s not.

Vic Parsons should change his gender to stupid misogynist flea.

More book-sniffing:

A Republican state lawmaker has launched an investigation into Texas school districts over the type of books they have, particularly if they pertain to race or sexuality or “make students feel discomfort.”

State Rep. Matt Krause, in his role as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating, notified the Texas Education Agency that he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” according to an Oct. 25 letter obtained by The Texas Tribune.

Krause’s letter provides a 16-page list of about 850 book titles and asks the districts if they have these books, how many copies they have and how much money they spent on the books.

I don’t think state legislators are supposed to micromanage schools’ book choices that way.

His list of titles includes bestsellers and award winners alike, from the 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron and “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates to last year’s book club favorites: “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot” by Mikki Kendall and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

But race is not the only thing on the committee chair’s list. Other listed books Krause wants school districts to account for are about teen pregnancy, abortion and homosexuality, including “LGBT Families” by Leanne K. Currie-McGhee, “The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to their Younger Selves” edited by Sarah Moon, and Michael J. Basso’s “The Underground Guide to Teenage Sexuality: An Essential Handbook for Today’s Teens and Parents.”

It seems he’s doing all this under the umbrella of the No Critical Race Theory law.

Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law”designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools. Critical race theory, the idea that racism is embedded in legal systems and not limited to individuals, is an academic discipline taught at the university level. But it has become a common phrase used by conservatives to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools.

Unless what’s taught is that there were a few hiccups but now everything is fabulous and anyone who says otherwise is a far-left wild-eyed anarchist demon.

State Rep. Victoria Neave, D-Dallas, who is vice chair of the committee, said she had no idea Krause was launching the investigation but believes it’s a campaign tactic. She found out about the letter after a school in her district notified her.

“His letter is reflective of the Republican Party’s attempt to dilute the voice of people of color,” she said.

Neave said she doesn’t know what Krause is trying to do but will investigate the motive and next steps.

Meanwhile schools are trying to figure out how the hell to comply when they’re already busy dealing with the effects of the pandemic. Is our children learning?

Meanwhile Peter Tatchell steps up.

Notice that “a significant number of” isn’t the same as “all” yet he leaps from the first to the second for his stupid analogy. Also notice how glibly he simply shrugs off the part about men pressuring lesbians for sex. Not a problem for Peter so he’s not going to take it seriously or even discuss it honestly, in fact he’s going to try to shut down discussion of it. Male privilege much?

Updating to add:

That clip is revolting.

Joan Smith on Sussex’s failure to hang on to Kathleen Stock:

The Vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, has written to all staff at Sussex, insisting that the university ‘has vigorously and unequivocally defended [Stock’s] right to exercise her academic freedom and lawful freedom of speech, free from bullying and harassment of any kind’.

Stock has responded by saying that the university leadership’s approach ‘more recently has been admirable and decent’, leaving open the question of what it did when she was first targeted. Because Stock and other gender critical academics, such as Professor Jo Phoenix of the Open University, have faced slurs and bullying for at least two years — so much so that Phoenix is raising funds to take the OU to an employment tribunal.

Selina Todd is another who springs to mind.

For too long, other academics have looked the other way, afraid of being targeted themselves, or in some cases even joined in the harassment. Who could forget the posters around Sussex demanding that Stock should be fired? Yet those of us who denounced the gender extremists behind the bullying of feminists, after our meetings to defend women’s rights were picketed by screaming trans activists, have been primly told that the issue is ‘toxic on both sides’.

It is hard to sustain this nonsense when you have seen the venom with your own eyes. Earlier this month, when women from all over the country gathered in Portsmouth to discuss violence against women, we had to walk past trans activists bearing posters that threatened us with sexual violence in the most obscene language imaginable.

On the ‘other side’ are lesbians like Stock and Phoenix, who simply ask to do their jobs — to ask awkward questions in a polite manner — without threats. On the ‘other side’ are women who highlight the conflict between the rights of vulnerable women in prisons and men who demand the right to be housed with them.

And who do so without obscene bullying and threats.

Aw yeah, direct action, comrades – bully those pesky women out of their jobs.

Scum of the earth.

Behold: an asexual-themed “lingerie” campaign. (Side note: what even is that stupid word? I’ve never had any “lingerie” in my life, I have underwear. Just one more way women are treated as the Designated Sex Toys.)

That’s asexual-themed??? Boy you coulda fooled me. It looks entirely sexual. The posing is sexual and the “lingerie” is sexual, as are the gloves. (Gloves???) The open mouth is not sexual? Come on. The cocked leg, the boots, the weird straps, the hair, the shooting from below, the thrown back head? There’s not one thing about it that’s not sexual.

But hey, #ThisIsWhatAsexualLooksLike! Who am I to argue?