They don’t usually say it quite so bluntly.

Books deemed ‘harmful to staff and students’ are being removed from region’s public school libraries

And…”harmful” how? Oh you know…just not the kind of thing the reader would have written. Which reader? Any reader, obviously. If someone says “I don’t like this,” out it goes.

The Waterloo Region District School Board is undertaking a multi-year review of its library collections to identify and remove any texts deemed “harmful to staff and students.”

Graham Shantz, coordinating superintendent in human resources and equity services outlined the ongoing work during Tuesday’s board meeting as part of an overview of the board’s 2021-2022 strategic and operational plan.

“We recognize as our consciousness around equity, oppression work and anti-racist work has grown, we recognize some of the texts in some of the collections that we have are not appropriate at this point,” Shantz said. He explained how the board developed a framework last year for reviewing its collections in elementary and secondary school libraries.

“We’ve done a great job over the years of adding collections that promote the diversity both of our workforce and our students and our community as a broader point, but we haven’t spent the concentrated effort that we need to spend on ensuring that we’re removing inappropriate or texts that are questionable and don’t have the pedagogical frameworks that we need,” Shantz said.

School libraries can’t have all the books there are, of course, so they have to be selective, but I’m not sure screening out every book someone considers “inappropriate” is the right filter to use.

Shantz said the process to edit school libraries will involve educating teachers about the board’s framework so they can consider removing texts from their classroom collections.

In the new and better tomorrow they will have removed all of them, and peace will settle over the land.

Earlier this year, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board removed William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies from its curriculum after its advisory committee on equity agreed with a student who said the book’s themes were outdated and too focused on white, male power structures.

Well now almost all books are outdated, aren’t they, because that’s time for you. It just keeps passing, and so books keep getting older. Maybe we should class them with apples and eggs and other things that go bad over time? Give them a shelf-life stamp?

Other books recently removed from Canadian school libraries and/or curriculums in response to complaints about racist, homophobic, or misogynistic language and themes, include Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Er…I think somebody somewhere missed the point.

GOOD NEWS FOR A CHANGE!

More Ash. (She’s like a splinter that you can’t…quite…dig…out.)

One, but it’s not all we do. Obviously. It’s not all anyone does. It’s something we talk about when it comes up, and the rest of the time we do other things.

Second, we don’t generally say it’s disgusting…unless she means we say the coercion is morally disgusting. That is something I say, and it’s quite possible I’ve said it about this subject. I do think it’s morally disgusting – worse than bad, worse than wrong, actively repellent and horrifying. Could Ash be confused about that? No, because what she says is “about who you find disgusting,” meaning “too disgusting to have sex with.” She’s translating the absence of sexual attraction into “disgusting,” which is a cheap trick, and in fact kind of homophobic, if you ask me.

Third, and most glaring, it’s not “lesbians don’t want to have sex with trans women because of their minority status” now is it. Of course it’s not. Lesbians don’t want to have sex with trans women because they have male bodies. Having a male body is very far from being a minority status, especially a downtrodden or exploited minority.

Any accusation she can think of in order to justify calling women bigoted, it seems.

Trump has written a letter to the Wall Street Journal. It’s about a brand new and exciting subject.

In your editorial “The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court” (Oct. 25), you state the fact that a court wrongly said mail-in ballots could be counted after Election Day. “This didn’t matter,” you add, “because Mr. Biden won the state by 80,555, but the country is lucky the election wasn’t closer. If the election had hung on a few thousand Pennsylvanians, the next President might have been picked by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out.

He’s still got it! The old elegance, the wit, the learning, the flare. I think it’s the “which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out” that impresses me the most. Person, man, woman, camera, tv.

He then does bullet points. Many many many bullet points.

• Attorney General Bill Barr ordered U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain to stand down and not investigate election irregularities.

Whoosh there’s Bill Barr overboard!

• Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook poured over $17 million to interfere in the Pennsylvania election, including $5.5 million on “ballot processing equipment” in Philadelphia and $552,000 for drop boxes where the voting pattern was not possible.

Mark Zuckerberg too? Jeez it will be Lindsey Graham next. They’ll be out there pouring money to interfere until your eyes bleed.

Hilarious, in its own way.

Well, you can surely order a sandwich without any pronouns other than first person, but Gad Saad later explained that his wife had wanted to say “he’ll get the hang of it” to another server (server # 1 is new to the job) but felt nervous about the “he.” But what’s funny, in a frustrating way, is all the explaining that you don’t have to use third person pronouns at all.

WE KNOW!!

We know, we know, we know. We’ve been saying that for years. It doesn’t matter – we still get the pronoun dramatizing.

Originally a comment by Laurent on 8 years.

When I advertised a project at work to plant fruit trees and thus asked people to bring us back seeds or plantlets from their garden, out of 250 people, 1 gave 3 seeds and another one gave 6 young trees. That’s how people commit to a very easy task that would have sucked up tonnes of carbon over 20 years.

Eventually I did and do contribute to planting trees at work, currently possibly worth a commercial value exceeding several thousand bucks (and I don’t count my time).

I’m really amazed, because everywhere there is room for tree planting, even if we avoid places where trees falling are a potential risk. (Though when people argue about the cost of lumberjacks I ask them about the cost of climate change).

There is room for mitigation, quite room, and actually quite mitigation. We won’t avoid the disaster, but we certainly can attenuate its strength. Now.

There isn’t even the need for trees to grow up huge, even if we cut them down after a few years and maintain dense cover and use the wood even for composting it will still displace carbon from the atmosphere.

Saying it and saying you didn’t say it.

Bad Ash. Dishonest Ash. Ash is pretending to think Berrelli’s tweet contained quotation marks, as in: Ash, you said “lesbians were” etc. But there are no quotation marks. Berrelli summarized what Ash said, and she summarized it accurately. Saying “it’d be fair to ask if racism plays a part” is more than close enough to “equivalent to racists.” Accurate summarizing is not “making shit up.”

Bad bad bad Ash.

Another version of the X on passports news:

The US has issued its first passport with an “X” gender designation – a milestone in the recognition of the rights of people who don’t identify as male or female – and expects to be able to offer the option more broadly next year, the state department said on Wednesday.

What rights? What are the “rights” of people who don’t identify as male or female that are different from the rights of anyone else? Spell them out and explain why only people who don’t identify as male or female have them. Is there a “right” to be called neither male nor female? What kind of right would that be? What would it be based on?

And even if it is a right (which I obviously don’t think it is, at least not without further explanation), how is the right squared with the need for passports to do what passports exist to do? How is the right squared with the need for accuracy on official documents?

It’s funny how seldom any of this is even mentioned, let alone discussed. It seems quite obvious that passports with meaningless fake details about ID are less useful than passports that are accurate (because why else do we have to go to all that trouble to get them?), yet we mostly politely don’t mention it in the news accounts.

The US special diplomatic envoy for LGBTQ rights, Jessica Stern, called the moves historic and celebratory, saying they brought the government documents in line with the “lived reality” that there is a wider spectrum of human sex characteristics than is reflected in the previous two designations.

No there isn’t. She means gender characteristics, and passports don’t record those. Passports aren’t about personality or clothes, they’re about a very short list of documented facts. Which of two sexes one is is one of those facts.

“When a person obtains identity documents that reflect their true identity, they live with greater dignity and respect,” Stern said.

Except that in the real world it’s their false identity, however much they feel it reflects the True Ineffable They. Again, for those in the back, passports don’t exist to reflect people’s “true” (i.e. fictional) identities, they exist to record their plain factual ones, for the inspection of officials at airports and border crossings. This is the real world, it’s not fucking high school.

So stupid it burns.

The State Department announced Wednesday that the U.S. has issued its first “X” gender marker on passports, marking a step toward making passports available for non-binary, intersex and gender non-conforming people throughout the country.

Then what is the point of having sex markers on passports at all? If they’re going to have some that are meaningless why have any?

Passports don’t exist to give people tingly validation feelings. Passports have not until now been unavailable to non-binary, intersex and gender non-conforming people. Passports are official documents and they’re supposed to tell the truth about the people who have them; that’s pretty much their whole point.

“The Department of State is committed to promoting the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people – including LGBTQI+ persons,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement announcing the move earlier this year.

So it’s issuing fake passports? How does that promote the freedom, dignity, and equality of anyone?

But also…how childish that sounds. How can a branch of government allow itself to sound like a fatuous teenager that way? It’s embarrassing.

The milestone is part of President Joe Biden’s plan to “advance LGBTQ+ equality in America and around the world.” 

How does this nonsense advance equality?

When laydeez are a little dangerous…

A convicted murderer and sex offender from British Columbia, Canada has been denied parole after seeking release from prison shortly after identifying as transgender.

Roger Dale Badour, 73, is currently serving a life sentence for the fatal shooting of a woman in 2011. Badour had been living on the property of Gisele Duckham, 56, at the time of the murder. Following an argument, he fatally shot her, hid her body, and then fled.

At the time, Badour was out on parole and supposed to be living in a halfway house in Victoria, British Columbia on conditions of ceasing contact with women. This condition came after Badour was released into the community from a 7-year prison term for the brutal sexual assault of a pregnant woman.

I guess they weren’t enforcing the “no contact with women” part very well. Or the “live in this halfway house” thing either.

Since identifying as a woman, Badour has already claimed his newfound gender identity has led to him being mistreated on his living unit in a male penetentiary. The question many are asking is whether Badour could potentially be transferred to a women’s prison due to Canadian self-identification laws.

I wonder if Badour self-identifies as not a murderer of women now.

There’s an open letter. Of course there is.

It’s a barely literate open letter, I must say.

An open letter to the BBC regarding an article published by Catherine Lowbridge

Dear BBC Upper Management and Editorial Staff,

The day this open letter is being written (26th October 2022), you published an article on the BBC News website by Caroline Lowbridge titled ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’¹.

Wait. Is it Catherine or Caroline?

You’d think they would at least get that straight before starting to type.

The article headline may use the word “some”, but the clear implication of the article and its headline is that transgender women as a minority group pose a threat to cisgender lesbians, and should therefor have their rights restricted in the UK.

Which rights? There is no “right” for men to try to bully lesbians into having sex with them. Which “rights” would have to be restricted to keep men from bullying lesbians for sex?

Do you mean the entirely fictitious “right” to lie about what you are and be believed? Not a right, pal.

The implications proposed by this article suggest that transgender women generally pose a risk to cisgender lesbians in great enough numbers that it is newsworthy, and something the general public should consider as a common occurence rather than a matter of incredibly rare, isolated experiences.

Define “incredibly.” Also, implications aren’t “proposed.”

Additionally, the article itself acknowledges that outside of this small sample size self selected study there is basically no evidence for the claim that this is happening in any sort of numbers that would justify generalising this as a widespread experience.

In other words “we claim that this happens only a little bit, therefore nobody should pay any attention to it at all.”

The article itself routinely implies that transgender women are not women, uncritically quoting people who call transgender women men without at any point clarifying that this is ignoring their legal status as women in the UK.

Even the law can’t actually make a man a woman. The law can declare a man a trans woman, but declarations don’t change anyone’s sex.

Also, there’s an ever-growing number of men who call themselves women who don’t fit the legal criteria, but we’re ordered to call them women regardless.

The fact that the people cited in this article largely do not acknowledge that transgender women are women, by refering to them as men, should make it clear that they are not representative of the wider community of cisgender lesbians.

When men bully women for sex, the women tend to see those men as men. It’s a hard habit to break, and many of us have no fucking intention of breaking it.

After that there’s a lot of JUST BECAUSE SHE HAS A DEEP VOICE AND IS TWICE AS BIG AS YOU DOESN’T MEAN SHE’S A MAN.

A transgender woman with a deep voice, a square jaw, and a penis that you do not want to have sex with is not a man. She is a woman that you don’t find attractive.

It’s sheer poetry.

The above cited woman also notes she would feel the same if the transgender woman in question had lower surgery. So, she would still feel that a transgender woman is a man, even if said woman had a vagina rather than a penis.

No, sport, because an inverted penis is not a vagina. She would still feel that the trans-identified guy is a guy.

There’s a lot more. It’s a very diffuse, wordy, pompous, boring letter. Trans dogma not good for the verbal skills, I guess.

Stonewall is losing friends.

In case your memory of it has faded that’s from the BBC report on the coercion of lesbians to have sex with men who call themselves lesbians.

Stonewall is the largest LGBT organisation in the UK and Europe. I asked the charity about these issues but it was unable to provide anyone for interview. However, in a statement, chief executive Nancy Kelley likened not wanting to date trans people to not wanting to date people of colour, fat people, or disabled people.

In other words ugly cruel bigotry. In other words Nancy Kelley of Stonewall is saying sexual orientation is ugly cruel bigotry. What do the L and the G stand for again?

She said: “Sexuality is personal and something which is unique to each of us. There is no ‘right’ way to be a lesbian, and only we can know who we’re attracted to.

“Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren’t attracted to. But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.

“We know that prejudice is still common in the LGBT+ community, and it’s important that we can talk about that openly and honestly.”

In other words if you’re a lesbian and you don’t want to have sex with men, you’re a bad person and you should feel bad. Says Stonewall in the person of its CEO.

Oh yes?

Let’s look up Morgan Page cotton ceiling then.

Let’s read My Trans Youth Group Experience with Morgan Page.

Morgan Page was the creator of the Planned Parenthood Toronto workshop “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women” in 2012. And although I had never heard about this until after leaving the trans community, years later, those of us in Morgan’s youth group definitely identified as members of our chosen sex class, which is the cornerstone of the Cotton Ceiling movement: that sex-based attraction can be reclassified as gender-based attraction.

The only context in which lesbians were ever discussed was in regards to “trans lesbians”. Most of the MTFs & male NBs there would lecture the few FTMs and female NBs about our “masculine/male privilege,” explaining to us that they experienced “transmisogyny” and therefore we needed to know when to be quiet and listen. These beliefs and attitudes were essential in the aforementioned relationships between FTMs and older MTFs in the group. I remember one time I was discussing how I didn’t pass somewhere and was treated like a woman and called “dyke”, but they insisted it was just transphobia, and that I could no longer experience misogyny now that I identified as male. The idea that I might be a lesbian or that I might have experienced lesbophobia never came up. Isn’t this the perfect group mindset to facilitate abuse? Is this really the right dynamic for teens trying to discuss their trans issues, family, school, and mental health problems?

Yes and yes, and it’s also the core reversal that is so infuriating about the whole thing – the insistence that men who call themselves women are the most marginalized and persecuted of all, while women are the sneering dominant aristocrats who kick the poor cowering trans women up and down the stairs. This is not correct. Men are bigger and stronger than women and women cannot be the dominant sex.

What I’m saying. They’re not going to do it. They probably literally can’t – in the sense that if they tried they would instantly lose the power to continue.

National plans to cut carbon fall far short of what’s needed to avert dangerous climate change, according to the UN Environment Programme.

Their Emissions Gap report says country pledges will fail to keep the global temperature under 1.5C this century.

The Unep analysis suggests the world is on course to warm around 2.7C with hugely destructive impacts.

But that’s in the future. We don’t do future.

The report finds that when added together, the plans cut greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 by around 7.5% compared to the previous pledges made five years ago.

This is nowhere near enough to keep the 1.5C temperature threshold within sight, say the scientists who compiled the study.

To keep 1.5C alive would require 55% cuts by the same 2030 date. That means the current plans would need to have seven times the level of ambition to remain under that limit.

“To stand a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C, we have eight years to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions: eight years to make the plans, put in place the policies, implement them and ultimately deliver the cuts,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of Unep.

Do you see that happening? I don’t. If people won’t even stop sitting in their parked cars with the engines running for hours, what’s going to stop them getting on planes and cruise ships? What’s going to stop them commuting to work by car? What’s going to stop them moving to Phoenix or Miami?

Ash Sarkar is also furious.

Not comparable. Race is not basic to sex. Sex, on the other hand, is basic to sex. What sex you are and what sex the other is are basic to whether both of you want to have sex or not. What sex you are is basic to sexual attraction. Race is beside the point.

In ordinary life I’m sure Sarkar knows this, but she’s pretending not to so that she can crap on the LGB Alliance, because that’s the done thing.

Pink News is furious.

Dunno, but the PN fume makes me want to read it, so I went looking. This seems like the likely culprit:

Trans women bullying lesbians into sex

Is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women? Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners – then shunned and even threatened for speaking out. Several have spoken to the BBC, along with trans women who are concerned about the issue too.

Let’s start with the question. Izza lesbian transphobic if. Here’s the thing: sex has to be voluntary. That’s it, that’s the tweet. Nobody has to have sex with anybody. Men who are told no don’t get to pretend they are victims of the women who tell them no. Men who know a particular woman is a lesbian and demands sex anyway is doing all kinds of things wrong; the woman is doing nothing wrong in saying no. Men who claim to be women need to leave lesbians the fuck alone.

“I’ve had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler,” says 24-year-old Jennie*.

“They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent, just because I won’t have sex with trans women.”

Bizarrely but typically. We see it all the time. It’s hovering in the background of the stupid Pink News tweet.

One of the lesbian women I spoke to, 24-year-old Amy*, told me she experienced verbal abuse from her own girlfriend, a bisexual woman who wanted them to have a threesome with a trans woman.

They broke up shortly after that.

“I remember she was extremely shocked and angry, and claimed my views were extremist propaganda and inciting violence towards the trans community, as well as comparing me to far-right groups,” she said.

Because she doesn’t want to have sex with a man, what with being a lesbian and all.

Another woman gave in to the pressure.

“I felt very bad for hating every moment, because the idea is we are attracted to gender rather than sex, and I did not feel that, and I felt bad for feeling like that,” she said.

Ashamed and embarrassed, she decided not to tell anyone.

“The language at the time was very much ‘trans women are women, they are always women, lesbians should date them’. And I was like, that’s the reason I rejected this person. Does that make me bad? Am I not going to be allowed to be in the LGBT community anymore? Am I going to face repercussions for that instead?’ So I didn’t actually tell anyone.”

Pink News is jumping up and down shouting “Yes! Yes! That makes you bad! You’re a terrible person!”

By the way does this happen to men?

Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.

“[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them],” she wrote. “I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me.”

Wait what? What’s with all the brackets? Why all the they and them and they were and their? Did the BBC actually “correct” he and his to they and their? Undermining their own article? Why would they do that? (The other explanation would be that they “corrected” she and her, but that would make even less sense.)

Trans YouTuber Rose of Dawn has discussed the issue on her channel in a video called “Is Not Dating Trans People ‘Transphobic’?”

His channel, that is. He’s a trans woman.

Rose made the video in response to a series of tweets by trans athlete Veronica Ivy, then known as Rachel McKinnon, who wrote about hypothetical scenarios where trans people are rejected, and argued that “genital preferences” are transphobic.

I asked Veronica Ivy if she would speak to me but she did not want to.

He. He did not want to. Of course he didn’t. He’s a vehement noisy angry bully who steals athletic medals from women.

The BBC includes a photo of McKinnon on his bike…but alone, not next to women, which would make it obvious how very much bigger he is.

Stonewall is the largest LGBT organisation in the UK and Europe. I asked the charity about these issues but it was unable to provide anyone for interview. However, in a statement, chief executive Nancy Kelley likened not wanting to date trans people to not wanting to date people of colour, fat people, or disabled people.

Of course she did. She couldn’t be the chief executive of Stonewall if she refused to tell whoppers like that. She explained:

“Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren’t attracted to. But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.”

So if straight people write off the entire group of people who are the same sex, they should have a good hard think about how societal prejudices may have shaped their attractions?

Also, does Stonewall say this to gay men? Does Nancy Kelley tell gay men to think about how societal prejudices may have shaped their attractions? Does she tell Benjamin Cohen that? Owen Jones? Peter Tatchell?

Why would gender critical feminists in the UK be associated with the Republicans in any way? They’re two different countries. The Republican party is of little interest to most people in the UK, just as the Tory party is of little interest to most people here. We don’t decide what we think based on how “associated” our thinking may be with a political party in another country; that would be stupid and futile and time-consuming. Maybe there’s a political party in Uruguay that we shouldn’t be associated with? Or maybe Thailand? Kenya? Better check, right? No. Different countries are different countries. We have enough to do to keep track locally.

It’s very parochial of Julia Wong to think women in the UK have to check with the US before they’re allowed to think and say something.

Cornel West and Jeremy Tate in the Post last April:

Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.

Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.

Don’t cancel the discussion, join it, expand it, add to it, improve it.

Owen Jones is so important that even Oxfam explains itself to him.

“Senior management agreed that it would be unethical to sell the product, and it was therefore pulled.”

I’m not sure I believe the story, but even if it is true, why would it be “unethical” to sell (or give away) the product?

It wouldn’t. It’s only because there’s this exaggerated wild-eyed panic about the Specialness of being trans that lets people get away with that kind of absurdity. Page is a woman, who now “identifies as” a man, but the fact that Page now claims to be a man doesn’t mean everything relating to Page has to be brought up to date. Are they going to tweak Juno so that it’s about a trans guy who gets pregnant and decides not to get an abortion because the fetus has fingernails? No, and they’re not going to withdraw it from circulation, either, so why is it “unethical” to sell or donate a game that was accurate at the time it was created?

That’s not Owen’s point though, of course; Owen’s point is to remind us how much he hates feminist women who don’t do what he tells us.

The Times reports that Oxfam refuses to clarify that threadbare Twitter “explanation” of its decision to erase women.

Oxfam has removed a children’s game celebrating “inspirational women” such as Marie Curie, Rosa Parks and Emmeline Pankhurst from its shops because transgender and non-binary staff complained that it did not “respect people of all genders”.

No Rosa Parks for you, bitches!

Wonder Women, a bingo game, features 48 women “who have made a mark on the world, from scientists and artists to writers, activists and beyond”.

Then it quotes Rob’s explanation on Twitter, which I think does not come across as official enough to be Oxfam’s only explanation, but it seems Oxfam doesn’t agree. We don’t even know who “Rob” is but pfffft, we should go away and play with our gender-respectful dolls.

The charity declined to clarify what was concerning about a children’s game celebrating the achievements of women also including Malala Yousafzai, Ada Lovelace, Jane Austen and Amelia Earhart.

It also refused to explain whether staff were upset by the inclusion of the authors JK Rowling and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, both of whom have been accused of transphobia for challenging trans rights campaigners’ views, or whether it was linked to the inclusion of the actor Elliot Page.

Because the game came out before Page did blah blah so it has the wrong name blah blah besides she’s not a woman after all anyway blah blah blah all of which is an excellent reason for dumping women in the nearest trash bin.

Oxfam’s decision prompted anger and dismay from some women who work for the charity, with at least one bookshop volunteer saying that she would resign in protest.

Ulrike Bullerby, 50, a mother of two with 25 years’ experience as a bookseller, said she had handed in her notice at the Oxfam shop where she had volunteered for ten years. She told The Times that the decision to ditch the game was “an affront” to all the women who fund-raise and donate to the charity.

And to all women. Good, well done Ulrike Bullerby.