Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Cut a deal

    Trump tried to use the documents he’d stolen to get the documents he’d failed to steal.

    Late last year, as the National Archives ratcheted up the pressure on former President Donald J. Trump to return boxes of records he had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago club, he came up with an idea to resolve the looming showdown: cut a deal.

    Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.

    In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.

    But they were all government documents, that belonged and still belong to the government, not to Donald Crime Boss Trump. You don’t get to use stolen documents as a bribe to acquire more stolen documents. Haberman and Schmidt of the Times say Trump took the documents, but it would be clearer to admit that he stole them. They weren’t his, and he’d been told they weren’t his, so his taking them was theft.

    Mr. Trump’s aides never pursued the idea. But the episode is one in a series that demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken [stolen], interviews and documents show.

    In other words he spent a year and a half lying, making his people lie, and attempting extortion.

    In the closing weeks of his presidency, the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, flagged the need for Mr. Trump to return documents that had piled up in boxes in the White House residence, according to archives officials.

    “It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be,” Gary M. Stern, the top lawyer for the National Archives, told Mr. Trump’s representatives in a 2021 letter, using an abbreviation for the agency’s name.

    Here’s a startling piece:

    Mr. Cannon told associates that the boxes needed to be shipped back as they were, so the professional archivists could be the ones to sift through the material and set aside what they believed belonged to Mr. Trump. What is more, Mr. Cannon believed there was the possibility that the boxes could contain classified material, according to two people briefed on the discussions, and none of the staff members in Mr. Trump’s presidential office at Mar-a-Lago had proper security clearances.

    Well yes but also Trump’s presidential office at Mar-a-Lago is just an office in a large resort: it’s not a secure facility. Nobody at Mar-a-Lago had proper security clearances and they all had potential access. Putin could have an agent there mowing the greens for all we know.

    It was around that same time that Mr. Trump floated the idea of offering the deal to return the boxes in exchange for documents he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a “hoax” cooked up by the F.B.I. Mr. Trump did not appear to know specifically what he thought the archives had — only that there were items he wanted.

    Well, you know, they’re in the box marked “Documents That Will Expose the Rushya Investigation As a Hoax.”

    Mr. Trump’s aides — recognizing that such a swap would be a non-starter since the government had a clear right to the material Mr. Trump had taken from the White House and the Russia-related documents held by the archives remained marked as classified — never acted on the idea.

    Aka Trump’s aides recognized the “swap” as attempted extortion via stolen material and decided not to stick their necks out quite that far.

  • Especially unprepared

    Florida. Floods. Insurance.

    Homeowners insurance policies typically don’t cover flood damage, and most people living in Ian’s path across Florida didn’t have a separate flood insurance policy. Inland areas that experienced historic rainfall and catastrophic floodwaters were especially unprepared, according to a CNN analysis of FEMA flood insurance data.

    Because usually the catastrophic flooding happens on the coasts, not inland.

    In Seminole County, northeast of Orlando, more than 5,200 residential buildings have been damaged by the storm, primarily due to flooding, according to a county spokesperson. “We’ve never had anything to this nature,” said Jay Zembower, a Seminole County commissioner, calling the flooding “a 500-plus-year event of quick rainfall in a short window of time.”

    But “a 500-plus-year event” doesn’t mean anything now, because The Climate Is Changing.

    Congress could also pass additional disaster aid – like lawmakers did in the wake of previous major hurricanes, like Katrina, Sandy and Harvey. But it could take months or longer for the funding to be approved and for affected communities to receive it, Wright said.

    Experts like Wright said that the widespread damage from Ian should be a wake-up call that far more homeowners around the US need to purchase flood insurance – even if they don’t own a waterfront property. That’s especially the case as climate change leads to stronger and more frequent storms.

    Yes but at the same time, insurance isn’t magic. It’s not an infinite supply of money that will never disappear and will always be there if you just buy it. At some point the disasters are going to outrun the insurance companies and federal insurance.

  • Alternative education school

    The Daily Mail picked up the University of Southern Maine story.

    A group of students at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine are calling for their professor to be fired after she said in class only two sexes exist. 

    Christy Hammer, a professor of education, allegedly made the statement during a heated debate about gender identity in her  ‘Creating a Positive Learning Environment’ class, causing an uproar among the graduate students.

    Only one student agreed with the educator. The rest maintained both biological sexes and social genders are on a spectrum.

    …

    The class is a requirement to complete the graduate-level Extended Teacher Education Program and become a certified teacher in Maine. 

    So, as we know, the university is offering an alternative section for the class while declining to fire Hammer.

    Ok so wait a second here. These are graduate students in education, and they’re being enabled to say and maintain and insist a fatuous untruth about basic biology. How is that ok? How is that going to work out in the future? Are education schools just going to nod placidly and allow students to go out into the world of school maintaining a fundamental lie about human biology? Might there possibly be any drawbacks to such a move?

    Are grad students in education going to start having their own astronomy next? Their own climate studies? Their own special unique chemistry?

  • Guest post: Pedophilia doesn’t bear a stigma randomly

    Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba replying to the question “Why did a guy who seemingly wanted to diddle kids join an organization that wanted to mutilate them?” on Wearing the mask.

    I’d say it’s because sexuality is inextricable from the transgender package. A transgender person is a sexual being, and so a transgender child is a sexual child. Narcissistic AGPs use the concept of the trans kid to validate their own fantasies by making their fetish an intrinsic, unalterable character trait. Pedophiles, on the other hand, use the sexuality of rainbow subculture to sexualize children.

    Pedophiles get their jollies from this even if they never once meet a trans kid. They get vicarious thrills by setting up children to be abused, as well as the thrill of being in control of a child’s sexual life, after the fashion of a pimp. They get to hear trans kids talking about sexual things and even get to talk with them about sexual things in public. They get to sexualize children in public. And the fact that there’s not a goddamn thing most people can do about it without being labeled some sort of -ist or -phobe gives a rush of power.

    Why wouldn’t a pedophile support transing kids?

    And seriously, anyone who falls for the idea that destigmatizing pedophilia would help in any way to reduce instances of child abuse needs to be slapped. Pedophilia doesn’t bear a stigma randomly and spontaneously. We revile pedophilia because it’s the emotional component to something we revile: sexual activity with children. Someone who has the desire or urge to do something is, all else being equal, more likely to do that thing than someone without that desire or urge. Obviously. So we stigmatize that mental state in the interest of child safety. And that’s assuming we restrict pedophilia to meaning only the sexual attraction to or desire for children, which isn’t actually the case. Like with so many of these Critical Theory-derived rhetorics, the strategy is to temporarily deny a meaning, then forget that denial when advantageous. In this case, they deny that pedophilia refers to sexual activity with children, as though the words “engage in” never appear in front of “pedophilia”, “necrophilia”, and the like.

  • Will the real feminist please stand up

    Nicola Sturgeon says JK Rowling isn’t a feminist, she (Sturgeon) is.

    Like hell.

    Nicola Sturgeon has suggested that JK Rowling is not a “real feminist” as she lashed out at the Harry Potter author’s accusation that she is a “destroyer of women’s rights” over her plan to allow people to self-identify their legal gender.

    Lash out all you want but if you take women’s rights away you’re not a feminist.

    In a rebuke to Ms Rowling, Ms Sturgeon said that “real feminists as I consider myself to be” focus on the “real” threats to women posed by abusive men and “lawmakers who want to take away our rights”.

    Trans women are abusive men. What they’re currently doing to women is highly abusive.

    She argued that predatory men that attempted to abuse the process to gain access to women’s safe spaces, such as female changing rooms, would be guilty of a criminal offence.

    Yes and Sturgeon would have smoothed the way for them.

    Plus the fact that it’s a “criminal offence” means pretty much nothing, given that rape itself is almost never prosecuted in the UK. If rape isn’t prosecuted does she think invading women’s toilets will be?

    Dismissing opposition to the Bill, which attracted a huge protest from women’s rights campaigners this week outside the Scottish Parliament, she said scrapping it would be “further stigmatising and discriminating against a tiny group in our society that is already one of the most stigmatised”.

    Is that even true any more? If it is, it’s certainly not the whole truth: the tiny group is also one of the most glorified and pampered and flattered. Women are told to shut up and fuck off and go away while men who call themselves women are wrapped in cotton wool and given ice cream.

    Asked on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme whether she was a “destroyer of women’s rights”, Ms Sturgeon said: “No, I’ve spent my entire life campaigning for women’s rights and am a passionate feminist with lots of evidence behind that.”

    But she’s now setting fire to women’s rights, so I really don’t give the tiniest shit about her biography.

    “Men are the risk to women, not trans women. Any man who seeks to abuse any process to attack women, we should deal with that. We shouldn’t stigmatise further an already stigmatised group of people,” she said.

    Trans women are men. Trans women now are also men who have been enthusiastically encouraged to shout and rage and fume at women who fail to agree that they’re women, so yes, trans women damn well are a risk to women. Repeating the stupid mantras accomplishes nothing.

    Ms Sturgeon said there were “many, many real threats” to women such as physical and sexual attacks and the removal of abortion and reproductive rights in countries such as Iran.

    “There are no shortage of attacks on women that feminists, real feminists as I consider myself to be should be focusing on right now,” she added.

    “The threat to women in our society today is not from trans women. It is from abusive men and from lawmakers who want to take away our rights and that is what we should be focusing on.”

    But she’s one of them – she’s one of those lawmakers taking away our rights. She’s helping abusive men who claim to be women abuse women.

  • Ask what a man is

    Oh good, YET ANOTHER man explaining what a woman is and how wrong we’ve all been to think we knew.

  • Or on the prairies

    Sally Hines as FGEN issued a “statement” (aka a blog post) last March:

    FGEN is an international network of feminist academics and others whose aims are wholly political in that we seek to oppose transphobia wherever it becomes apparent – whether in a university in Central London or on the prairies of the midwestern United States. 

    So, the F shouldn’t be there at all. It’s not a feminist network, it’s an anti-“transphobia” network, i.e. a network dedicated to insisting that men are women if they say they are and no one is allowed to disagree. No feminism in sight.

    We aim to promote the human rights of trans and gender diverse people worldwide to end the exclusion of trans people, and to provide an authoritative voice against the increasing transphobia masquerading as scholarship in academia.

    So why do we call ourselves feminist? To deceive! Mind you, Sally Hines would say it’s to take feminism back from the evil terfs, but that’s the same thing.

  • More like Anti-feminist

    Sally Hines founded a thing called the Feminist Gender Equality Network, aka FGEN.

    Tell us more:

    The Feminist Gender Equality Network (FGEN) is a cross-sector, interdisciplinary international organisation that adopts an intersectional feminist framework in order to:

    1. advance the understanding of gender and sex as fluid categories

    What’s feminist about that though? If gender and sex are fluid categories, how can feminism exist? What does it mean? What is it for?

    2. protect the rights and needs of people of all (or no) gender

    Then why call it feminism? Why not call it peopleism? If it’s for people of all or no gender (what that means is a question for another paragraph, or another day) then why name it after women? Why claim to be both feminist and all-peopleist? Why not just drop the feminism instead of including it and then declaring it meaningless? Why not skip the middle part and just go straight to the no feminism?

    3. counter transphobia and transmisogyny in social life and institutions, legal structures, political movements and media and cultural representation

    Then why call it feminism? Why not call it transism? Why call it feminism and then talk about “transmisogyny” with no mention of misogyny itself? Transmisogyny, weirdly, refers to non-belief that men can become women, which is an abuse of meaning because it has nothing to do with misogyny.

    4. counter sexism and gender-based violence and discrimination

    Finally something recognizable as vaguely feminist, but given the three that precede it it seems very feeble and perfunctory. Anyway you’re queering gender so what is gender-based violence? And which gender do you have in mind?

    5. further intersectional understanding and political mobilisation to stress the relationship between gender marginalisation and other social inequalities

    Or, in your case, probably more like put every other social inequality you can think of ahead of “gender marginalisation” – which is anyway a feeble and deceptive way to talk about abuse of women.

    6. forward self and bodily autonomy and reproductive choice and rights

    And by “bodily autonomy” you mean freedom to try to disguise oneself as the other sex, and you place that ahead of abortion rights, as if it were more urgent and important.

    What a destructive fool Sally Hines is.

  • Wearing the mask

    Reduxx has further detail on the Jacob Breslow question – Jacob Breslow Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, that is.

    The academic who recently resigned from a charity that promotes the medical transitioning of children had for years been writing blog entries related to pro-pedophilia activism and “minor attraction.”

    Activism around sex with children, that is.

    “Activism” forsooth – as if the common understanding that it’s extremely wrong to force sex on children were just another outdated unexamined prejudice like the one that says women are stupid and inferior or the one that says non-white people are stupid and inferior.

    It’s not. Sex is not good for children. Adults forcing or coaxing or tricking them into sex is destructive and loathsome. It’s like a clip I saw yesterday that froze me in horror and pity –

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1O9utFHPSw

    It seems pretty simple. Don’t treat children that way.

    In 2011, Breslow, then a PhD student, spoke at a symposium titled “Pedophilia, Minor-Attracted Persons, and the DSM: Issues and Controversies,” hosted by pedophile advocacy organization B4U-Act. The stated purpose of the symposium was to lobby the American Psychiatric Association for changes to the diagnostic definition of pedophilia in order to “reduce stigma” against “minor-attracted people” (MAPs).

    So that those people could rape children with impunity. That’s Associate Professor Breslow.

    Founded in 2009 by convicted child rapist Michael Melsheimer, B4U-Act had apparently been approved by the founders of infamous pederast activist group, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). After B4U-Act’s creation, Melsheimer had informed other pedophiles that his organization’s approach would be focused around garnering public support for normalizing pedophilia by falsely claiming the intention was to prevent child sexual abuse.

    When in fact the goal was to prevent the prevention of child sexual abuse.

    At their symposium, Breslow read from a paper in which he rejected the understanding of pedophilic attraction to children as being inherently harmful, and supported the concept of pedophilia being classified as a sexual or political orientation.

    By the same token it’s not inherently harmful for adults to put on terror-masks and scream in the faces of sobbing screaming shaking toddlers.

    “Allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars, and clinicians can begin to better understand Minor Attracted Persons”…read Breslow’s abstract.

    Oh joy, an idenniny – an idenniny for the raping adult, that is, not for the sobbing screaming shaking child. We can better understand adults who rape children! As for the children they rape, well they obviously don’t need to be better understood, the little sluts.

    Following news of Breslow’s pedophilia apologism, further damning revelations have come to light, with a feminist Twitter user exposing WordPress blog entries written by Breslow from 2009 to 2017. Twitter user @Scottish_Woman first drew attention to the old blog, providing evidence that Breslow’s sordid history with pedophile sympathizing was far longer than previously thought.

    Many entries by Breslow advocate for reframing pedophilia as a sexual identity comparable to homosexuality.

    But of course it’s not comparable. Molesting children is not a sexual identity, it’s a crime against children.

  • Happy birthday Mister President

    Oops there goes the Kerch bridge:

    Ukraine is exploding with excitement this morning.

    Videos of the damaged Crimean bridge have spread like wildfire on social media; this is already being compared to the sinking of the Russian warship Moskva in April.

    “The guided missile cruiser Moskva and the Kerch bridge – two notorious symbols of Russian power in Ukrainian Crimea – have gone down,” tweeted Ukraine’s ministry of defence.

    “What’s next in line, Russkies?” it went on.

    Ukraine has a brilliant sense of humor.

    Ukraine’s inventive social media activists are gleefully pumping out memes to celebrate the occasion.

    And Ukraine’s second largest bank, Monobank, says it has already issued a new debit card design featuring the collapsed bridge.

    Oleksii Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security Council, wasn’t the only one noting that the attack came just a day after Vladimir Putin’s 70th birthday, tweeting a video of the damaged bridge next to Marilyn Monroe’s famous performance of Happy Birthday, Mr President from 1962.

  • Large gametes, small gametes

    There’s a petition we can sign in support of the University of Southern Maine professor under attack for saying there are only two sexes. I just signed it.

    There’s a conversation about the effort to get her fired at Why Evolution is True.

  • Its vital helpline???

    It hasn’t sunk in yet, has it.

    WHAT “vital helpline”???

    Mermaids isn’t helping, it’s harming. Puberty blockers are harmful. Cutting off breasts or penises is harmful. Telling children they’re in the wrong body and can change that with drugs and surgeries is harmful. Mermaids doesn’t help; instead of helping Mermaids gives children terrible, dangerous advice.

    The brutal recklessness of these ideologues is a sight to behold.

  • The violence of concepts

    Meet “Critical Childhood Studies”:

    Critical Childhood Studies (CCS) is an emerging academic field that has developed over the past two decades. The field belongs in the same ballpark as Critical Race Theory or former Women’s Studies (now Gender or Queer Studies). Established to examine the histories and provide cultural context for people oppressed on the basis of race and sex, these fields have morphed.

    Rather than helping oppressed communities, critical scholars often promote ideological views on race and “gender” that ultimately do the exact opposite: further fuel racism and sexism. Critical Childhood Studies (CCS) has fallen into the same trap — deconstructing childhood to a degree that, if applied outside of an academic setting, would put children in danger.

    “Herm herm. What is childhood really? Who decides? Where does it begin, where does it end? Aren’t we all in a very real sense children? At the same time aren’t children in a very real sense adults? So that means we get to fuck them. Good luck on the exam.”

    In the words of CCS academics, they explore “the history and construction of childhood” and “textual and visual representations of childhood.” Adding a postmodern flair, there’s “childhood as metaphor, and children as agents of cultural production,” as well.

    Some of it is helpful, some of it is the usual pretentious word-mongering, and some of it…

    Third, we arrive at the harmful community of Critical Childhood Studies scholarship: one that seeks to tear down the fundamentals of child safeguarding.

    For example, in his 2020 book, CCS researcher Jacob Breslow agrees with other scholars that there exist “queer children.” They’re defined as ones that “display interest in sex generally… in same-sex erotic attachments, or in cross-generational attachments.”

    Not for the first time I wonder how Breslow goes about his “research.”

    The claims that children wish to be sexually abused by adults form only a minor part of the field. But, the more popular theory that “childhood doesn’t exist,” despite being esoteric nonsense, can also lead to safeguarding issues. One dangerous result of this framework is “the concept of childhood is violence” theory.

    A 2021 online book launch by Jacob Breslow, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, mentioned the “violence of childhood.” Three Critical Childhood scholars gave speeches at the event, hosted by LSE Gender.

    In her contribution, Erica Meiners claimed that the “categorizations- adult, child, youth perform a kind of violence and ontological disqualification.” She added there is “ violence incurred by the ontological register of childhood.”

    Because really children are small adults. The fact that they haven’t gone through puberty yet is neither here nor there.

  • Talking about her dreams of travelling

    Too bad girls in Iran can’t identify their way out of being killed by the security police.

    Reports are emerging of the death of another teenage girl at the hands of security forces in Iran, as protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini looked set to enter their third week.

    Sarina Esmailzadeh, a 16-year-old who posted popular vlogs on YouTube, was killed when the security forces beat her with batons at a protest in Gohardasht in Alborz province on 23 September, according to Amnesty International.

    This isn’t random or chance. A harsh punitive control of women is the core of Islamist theocracy. Islam sees women as nothing but walking temptations to men, who have to be bagged up and muffled for the protection of men.

    Esmailzadeh’s YouTube videos, which have gone viral on social media networks, show her listening to music, dancing and talking about her dreams of travelling.

    No no no. Women can’t have that. Women aren’t people who long to travel and dance, women are machines for the production of men and machinesfortheproductionofmen.

  • Guest post: Simulations of an idea of femininity

    Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Feminism is for everyone except women.

    I fully understand why many feminists say that men can’t be feminists, and I understand why they are suspicious of men who claim to be. It’s because we have a tendency to take over when we get involved, and when it comes to transactivists, they are living up to those expectations. What I don’t understand is how people can make declarations such as “MY feminism will be intersectional” as if people could buy a feminism and paint it any color that works best for them.

    I think that moving Women’s studies over to Gender Studies has had an obvious and negative effect on people’s understanding of feminism, more of that “forced teaming” thing that has done so much damage to LGB activism. People really don’t know what feminism is anymore, and that is more detrimental than all of Rush Limbaugh’s years of making fun of feminazis. Many people don’t know the difference between female and femininity, thinking that femininity is what defines girls and women and that the actual body of a female human being is immaterial. And of course, this not a goal of feminism (in my understanding,) which is to break down the limitations of gender. Saying that a man who is feminine, or desires the feminine role, is actually a woman affirms that femininity is the defining property of a woman.

    Never mind that men who desire this only act out simulations of their idea of femininity, and can have no idea what it actually is to be a woman.

  • London School of Misogyny

    Last year Michael Biggs wrote a piece for The Critic about…it’s simpler to quote.

    Threats of violence against “trans exclusionary” or “gender critical” feminists — who do not believe that people can change sex merely by announcing preferred pronouns or wearing different clothes — have become ubiquitous on social media. It is nevertheless surprising to discover that such threats can now be submitted as academic work for a master’s degree.

    The London School of Economics held a conference in April 2021 for students taking the MSc in Gender (Sexuality). One session was entitled “No Time, No TERFs, No Norms”; the disparaging acronym stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. A paper in the session concluded:

    “If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism… Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”

    Does that sound familiar? It did to me, so I searched and found that I wrote a brief post about it at the time.

    Michael Biggs again:

    The student’s paper was initially exposed by Sex Matters, the organization — founded by Rebecca Bull, Naomi Cunningham, Maya Forstater, and Emma Hilton — campaigning for sex to be recognized in laws and language. (I am one of its Directors.) The volume of criticism ensuing on Twitter forced the LSE to acknowledge that the paper “did not abide by the School’s Code of Practice on Free Speech” and to remove it from the conference website. This response is completely inadequate. For one thing, this student has made explicit sexualized threats of violence against women, and by his own admission poses a danger to students and staff.

    Of greater concern is what this episode reveals about the culture of the Department of Gender Studies. It recently accused “those espousing gender critical perspectives” of making “transphobic, discriminatory, inaccurate, and harmful claims about trans people specifically, and gender more broadly”. In this view, anyone who recognizes the reality of sex is inflicting harm on people who deny that reality: such harm justifies retaliatory violence. It is evident that such hyperbolic accusations have created an environment where a student can boast about butchering feminists who refuse to submit to his ideology.

    You can read the whole paper if you want to.

    Anyway, the punchline is, the paper is by one Matt Thompson, who is a student of Jacob Breslow’s. Of course he is.

  • He watches tv a lot, who knew?

    From an interview with Maggie Haberman about Trump and her book about Trump and reporting on Trump:

    He fixated on the paper and attacked me because of it. There were times when he attacked me over coverage — it was always over a story or something he saw me say on TV. One thing he got very upset about seeing me say on TV was that he watches a lot of TV, and then that became a fixation. He’s incredibly hostile to anyone suggesting he watches a lot of TV because he thinks it’s some knock on his intelligence.

    Of course it’s a knock on his intelligence. It’s also a knock on his intellectual energy, his discipline, his abilities, his curiosity – it’s a knock on many things about him. Of course it is. He’s a profoundly stupid incurious lazy empty man who took on a job he had no intention of doing.

  • Feminism is for everyone except women

    An online course at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is titled Who is Feminism For? The instructor is Sophie Lewis.

    The seemingly uncontroversial idea that feminism is synonymous with “the women’s movement”—i.e., that feminism is “for women”—has in fact never been widely accepted, least of all among feminists. From the beginning, comradely holes have been poked in feminism’s myriad attempts to define itself, not to mention the word “woman.” For centuries, feminists have debated: what does feminism encompass? Who is feminism for?

    No they haven’t. Not for centuries – the word hasn’t been current for that long, let alone the movement.

    In this course, we’ll enter that debate, unpacking questions of feminism’s purpose, scope, and possible limits. Along the way, we will consider conflicting conceptions of feminism: that feminism is for “Woman”; that feminism is for colonized, lesbian and  working women (and children); that feminism is for “everyone”; finally, that feminism is for “no one” (i.e., feminism is for abolishing itself).

    Why will we do that? Because women. Women have to offer to step back, to close down, to yield the floor. Women have to apologize and give way, because that’s what being a woman means. Women are not allowed to put themselves first.

    We will read selections from First- and Second Wave feminist classics—for example, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique—as well as contemporaneous and current Black radical, womanist and transfeminist criticisms and counterexamples.

    We will read transfeminist criticisms, in other words we will pay attention to men playing at being women who tell us to sit down and listen to them.

    Our investigation will move towards accounts of feminism that, while still placing its focus on “women,” define the constituency of feminist struggle as both more specific and much broader: for instance, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, environmental, and family-abolitionist.

    Feminism must be about everything, because women are simply not important enough to keep feminism for themselves.

    We will, equally, engage with articulations of feminism as a movement against structures of oppression that adversely affect everyone: man or woman, able-bodied or disabled, migrant, indigene, citizen, or settler, straight or queer, white, black, trans or cis, etc. Finally, we will consider texts that seek to transcend feminism altogether.

    Then we will sweep what’s left of feminism up and drop it in the bin, and that will be the end of that. You’re welcome.

    H/t Mostly Cloudy

  • Nika Shakarami

    The BBC tells us:

    Relatives of a girl who died during protests in Iran have been forced into making false statements, a source close to the family has told BBC Persian.

    Nika Shakarami, 16, went missing in Tehran on 20 September after telling a friend she was being chased by police. On Wednesday night, a state TV report showed her aunt, Atash, saying: “Nika was killed falling from a building.” Her uncle was also seen on TV speaking against the unrest, as someone seems to whisper to him: “Say it, you scumbag!”

    They apparently smashed every bone in her body.

    Tehran judiciary official Mohammad Shahriari was cited by state media as saying on Wednesday that a post-mortem showed Nika suffered “multiple fractures… in the pelvis, head, upper and lower limbs, arms and legs, which indicate that the person was thrown from a height”.

    Or that the guards were very thorough.

    However, a death certificate issued by a cemetery in the capital, which was obtained by BBC Persian, states that she died after suffering “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object”.

    Nika’s Instagram and Telegram accounts were also deleted after she went missing, according to Atash. Iranian security forces are known to demand that detainees give them access to the social media accounts so that the accounts or certain posts can be deleted.

    Their god really hates women.

    Nika is not the only young female protester to have been killed during the unrest that erupted last month following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was detained by the morality police for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict hijab law.

    The family of Hadis Najafi, 22, have said that she was shot dead by security forces while protesting in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran, on 21 September. Officials allegedly asked her father to say that she died of a heart attack.

    Another 16-year-old girl, Sarina Esmailzadeh, died after being severely beaten on the head with batons by security forces during protests in Karaj on 23 September, Amnesty International cited a source as saying. The source also told the human rights group that security and intelligence agents had harassed the girl’s family to coerce them into silence.

    Woman is the enemy.

  • All the usual seductive shit

    Shambolic Neutral on The Divine Trans/The Trans Divine:

    “Transpeople are sacred. We are the divine”. If that’s not cult-speak then I do not know what is. Some of us have been saying gender ideology is the new religion for over a decade. Finally, it clearly feels secure enough to make it blatant.

    Or at least the branch of it that hangs out at the Globe does.

    In a way of course that makes sense – it’s what drama and acting are all about. You could get up on a stage and say “drama is the divine” and I would see it quite differently. It would be a metaphor as opposed to a lunatic boast. There is something magical (metaphorically of course) about theater, about plays and acting and movies and tv dramas. The best of it can change you.

    But substitute “trans people” for “drama” and we’re in a different country altogether.

    In the fervent, overexcited voice of a cult leader addressing a fresh intake of acolytes, actor Isobel Thom – also non-binary, also using a terrible haircut to indicate that she is super progressive and has liberated herself from the shackles of patriarchy and is no longer a woman yadda yadda yadda because of course nothing says escaping the shackles of patriarchy like thinking womanhood is something to escape to become a real person – talks about how being trans is sacred and divine, full of multiplicity and creativity and all the usual seductive shit designed to make young people desperate to feel special and different and cool feel special and different and cool.

    It always makes me laugh to remember that for a time when I was a young people, 15 or 16, I spent a few weeks being special and cool by being as nerdy as possible to annoy my classmates. What did I do? I wore ankle socks. It worked, too; they remonstrated with me. It’s not Wordsworth and the French Revolution, but it amuses me.

    A year or so later I wore bangs (a fringe in UK-speak) when the fashion was all for long straight hair parted in the middle, no bangs. Divine, yeah?

    The Globe has now deleted their tweets, after getting ratio-ed so hard that it could practically send them back in time to get a bollocking off the very real Jeanne d’Arc. It also deleted this stupendous (and I don’t mean that in a good way) poem, which was written by an actual adult and not a moody 14-year-old who’s just been sent to their room without pudding for being rude to their mum at the dinner table.

    Again, it’s more of the same. Trans is beauty, trans is special, trans is no-one understands me… and then finding someone who will understand you and encourage you to be as transgressive and broken and boundary-less as possible. All of it, all of this shit, is just the sly, seductive, come hither of groomers. That’s all it is.

    And it’s so dangerous. Curry has a YouTube video entitled I Cut My Nipples Off Today. Jesus Christ. That’s not normal, sane or healthy. That’s not what someone who is revelling in their own power, truth and beauty does. That’s not someone who is making others jealous does. That’s not what anyone does! That’s the behaviour of a deeply troubled or deeply depraved or deeply both individual, and either way, they should not be being encouraged to influence young people and encouraged by establishments like The Globe.

    What next, videos titled I Poked My Eyes Out Today? I Got My Feet Amputated Today? I Severed My Spinal Cord Today?

    Thinking you are divine and sacred is not a good thing. And it is not true or possible. You are just a person, same as everyone else. You have a sex, which cannot change. You get one life. This is all there is. Instead of trying to hide from reality by teaching children magical thinking, we need to teach them how to cope.

    So sorry, you are not divine or sacred. No-one is. You’re normal. There is nothing wrong with your body the way it is. Coping comes from accepting reality. Welcome to the adult world, kids.

    Welcome to the adult world and keep your bits, you’re going to need them.