No, Waterstones. That’s not correct.

Not period. Not end of story. Not true. Being a woman isn’t subjective – note that “identifying as” something is entirely subjective and self-reported and thus not something that anyone else can confirm or deny. Being a woman isn’t like that. Vladimir Putin could identify as a woman; it wouldn’t make him one.

And that arrogant bullying claim not only has nothing to do with feminism, it’s an insult to feminism – so what’s it doing on a table with a “Feminism” sign at Waterstones Norwich? Besides insulting women, that is.

A judge has put a hold on Texas’s “investigate the parents” bill.

A Texas judge on Friday issued an injunction against enforcement of the governor’s order to investigate gender-affirming care as child abuse, handing opponents of the policy a temporary victory.

I don’t know what I think about the Texas bill, but I do know that that first paragraph is already on one side as opposed to neutral. It’s a new and questionable idea that there even is such a thing as “gender-affirming care.” If children started saying they were snakes would it be species-confirming care to cut off all four limbs?

The state Legislature last year failed to pass a bill that would have made it a felony alongside physical and sexual abuse to provide gender-affirming care to minors.

There again – what if it’s not care at all, but reckless and irresponsible at best? What if it’s really not a good idea to encourage children to take puberty blockers? What if it’s better to watch and wait?

The American Civil Liberties Union, which was among those that challenged the Feb. 22 directive, hailed Friday’s court ruling.

“The judge recognized the governor and DFPS’ actions for what they were — unauthorized and unconstitutional exercises of power that causes severe, immediate and devastating harms to transgender youth and their families across Texas,” Chase Strangio, deputy director for Trans Justice with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

Yes but Chase Strangio is a deluded fanatic, so that statement is of questionable value.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who in a non-binding opinion said providing gender-affirming medical care to minors was child abuse, immediately vowed to appeal the injunction.

I don’t exactly think it’s child abuse, because the pressure to adopt these warped beliefs is intense, but I don’t think it’s child help, either.

New sexist pig exactly like old sexist pig.

Don’t you “babe” us you patronizing git.

Does the law actually say trans women are women?

No.

This is a relief to me, because really, who gave the law authority to determine ontology? That would just be weird. The law can define categories for the purpose of a law, but it can’t just bang a gavel and say strawberries are luxury automobiles.

Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist spelled it out a couple of years ago:

The Gender Recognition Act 2004 does change some people’s legal sex. Obviously the law can’t change anyone’s biological sex. The fact that the law can’t mess with material reality is the point Canute was making when he forbade the tide to come in. But section 9 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 has the effect that some trans women (i.e. the very small number who hold a GRC – only a few thousand to date) are deemed for most legal purposes to be women, although exceptions apply.

Mind you, seeing how it’s been playing out, I think that’s too much too. I think the Gender Recognition Act was a mistake. At any rate the point is the law doesn’t magically change the ontology.

Keir Starmer throws women overboard.

Asked to define a woman, Starmer replied: “A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law. It has been the law through the combined effects of the 2004 [Gender Recognition] Act and the 2010 [Equality] Act. So that’s my view. It also happens to be the law in the United Kingdom.”

It doesn’t “happen to be” the law, it’s a law because people have lost their fucking minds.

You can’t turn men into women by passing laws. You can change definitions under law, but you can’t change the underlying reality. If you want to pass laws that say whales are goldfish, knock your socks off, but whales and goldfish will still be what they are. Some bad laws have been passed, but men are still not women.

The Labour leader called for reforms of the Gender Recognition Act, under which people diagnosed with gender dysphoria who have lived in their acquired gender for at least two years can apply to be legally recognised.

“The process that people have to go through does need to be looked at,” he told The Times. “If you talk to anybody who’s been through the process there’s a real issue about respect and dignity.”

Noted. Now talk to women who have been raped and gone to a rape crisis center only to find that its CEO is a man. Notice that there’s a real issue about their dignity and respect for them.

He called for a “more considered, respectful, tolerant debate about these issues”. Starmer added: “I don’t think it furthers the interests of anybody to continue the debate in the way that it’s been going on now for some time.”

He wants a more considered, respectful, tolerant debate about this in the same breath in which he tells us that men are women. How about some consideration and respect and tolerance for us? Women? Half the population? The half of the population that keeps the whole population going?

Comments have been turned off. Of course they have.

Rowling is more involved by the day.

We. are. organizing.

Sarah Ditum on Labour’s inability to say what the word “woman” means:

Clearly, asking a Labour MP to define “woman” is a reliable way to get them to look silly. And so interviewers are going to keep on doing it. Which means that Labour should, at some point in the past two years, have come up with a one-line answer, if only to get them through media appearances.

…

Because, despite Cooper’s dismissive attitude, the definition of “woman” does matter. It matters for single-sex spaces. It matters for sport. It matters for the language we use to talk about female health. It matters for measuring the income gap, and for monitoring who’s doing more than their fair share of unpaid work in the home. It matters for understanding violence against women. It matters because the law depends on language, and people who pretend to strategic idiocy about the natural and ordinary meanings of words really have no business being lawmakers.

Especially when the word in question names more than half the population those lawmakers are supposed to be making laws for and about. It’s as if MPs and Members of Congress couldn’t say what “people” are.

The Cass report, published this week, vindicated whistleblowers from the Tavistock clinic in London who believed that NHS gender services were offering treatment dominated by dogma about gender identity, and that this was failing children and young people. Cooper is not a stupid woman. (If, indeed, anyone can say what a woman is.) She cannot have missed these stories in the news. She has surely noticed the monstering her colleague Rosie Duffield received for daring to take a different line from trans activists.

That monstering is probably why Cooper was so evasive, but the thing is, it ought to work the other way around. These monsterings should outrage everyone, and prompt a renewed and fierce determination to defend women’s rights in defiance of all monsterings.

Carol Tavris wrote a few weeks ago about the fad for transing and the failure of much of journalism to report on it fully.

An August 6, 2021 episode of WNYC’s “On the Media” illustrates the problem: the hosts focused on efforts “to block access to medical care for trans kids,” the “politics and propaganda behind the recent wave of anti-trans legislation,” and “what the science tells us about gender affirming care in adolescence.” But “On the Media” did not tell the full story. The usually thorough reporters did not invite a cultural historian to wonder why “gender affirming” clinics have proliferated, from only one in 2010 to more than 400 today, offering puberty blockers and hormones to facilitate the change, including helping teenage girls have “top surgery” to remove offending breasts; or why the sex ratio of transgender claims has changed so dramatically. “On the Media,” of all programs, did not even consider the role of the media in generating and perpetuating social contagion effects.

Maybe because they were doing it themselves.

In its most glaring omission, “On the Media” said not a word about the “desisters,” a term often used for those who make a social transition (changing their names and pronouns) but do not persist in having surgery and hormones or changing their gender identity, and often change back; or about the many (possibly thousands of) “detransitioners” who now regret that they had medical procedures. Many of them are bitter and angry that they have had irreversible voice and hair growth changes, underwent surgical procedures that cannot be corrected, and have become infertile. Elie Vendenbussche, in the Faculty of Society and Economics, Rhine- Waal University of Applied Sciences, Kleve, Germany, did an international on-line survey of 237 male and female detransitioners, who reported “a major lack of support” from the medical and mental-health systems and from the LGBT+ community.

The results were illuminating. Fully 45 percent of them said they had not been fully informed about the “health implications of the accessed treatments and interventions before undergoing them.” (An additional one-third felt “partly informed.”)

So only 22% felt fully informed. That’s not good.

They also suffered serious psychological problems — “gender dysphoria, comorbid conditions, feelings of regret and internalized homophobic and sexist prejudices.”¹ “On the Media” did not contact any of the support and advocacy groups that have proliferated — Detrans Voices, Post Trans, and the Detransition Advocacy Network among them. (I had no idea how many of these groups now exist; our leading news media don’t report on them.) But the available research on the harms of premature life-long medical interventions is why Finland and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have stopped routine hormonal treatment of youth under age 18, and put psychological interventions and social support ahead of medical interventions, particularly for adolescents who have no childhood history of gender dysphoria.

The medical interventions should be called something else, really, because they’re medical in the sense of using medical skills and pharmaceuticals but not in the sense of curing or healing or repairing. They’re more like mutilation. FGM is not a medical procedure in the second sense even if it’s done in a brand new OR with all the best equipment.

The fundamental problem, a sure sign that we are in the midst of a social contagion based on pseudoscience and not the emergence of a science-driven medical advance, is that researchers and professionals who want to raise any questions or concerns have been silenced with vehement and often ugly accusations of transphobia and bigotry, their work shut down, some of them fired. Many gender professionals have marginalized, bullied, and tormented their colleagues who disagree. Politically organized “transactivists” protest that any research on, say, factors contributing to the rise of cases of gender transition, the potentially negative consequences of transitioning, or the importance of counseling and treatment before transitioning are indications of the unacceptable idea that gender transition is a pathological problem or disorder. Their second silencing tactic is to conflate psychological interventions with “conversion therapy,” a long-discredited effort to “cure” gay people and turn them straight. Conversion therapy for gay people is cruel and it doesn’t work, which is why it is illegal in many states. But providing psychological counseling before providing irreversible medical procedures for adolescents who are questioning their gender identity is not remotely comparable, especially when the vulnerable young person is also suffering from comorbid conditions, as the vast majority are, including depression, anxiety, and, evidence is now suggesting, autism.

That’s all heresy though.

Julie Burchill holds Laurie Penny’s whiny self-indulgence up for laughter:

Penny also squeals about Western sexism while giving Islamism a hall pass. They once wore a hijab and gushed about how great it felt, while Their opinion on the 2015 Paris massacre was, ‘Racist trolling is not heroism. Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie.’

You’d think the war in Ukraine might have given such alleged empaths a moment’s pause in their navel-gazing and belly-aching, but it’s business as usual. I’ve been suspended from Twitter after saying that unarmed Ukrainians facing down Russian tanks are braver than men who dress up as women. However, I will scatter my pearls before the whiny non-binary and warn Them that the reviews can only get worse.

You would think that, wouldn’t you. If only from motives of self-protection you’d think she’d put the self-drama on hold for a few weeks.

Last year, Penny caused revulsion among actual feminists when commenting on an incident in a California spa, when a woman complained that her young daughter shouldn’t have to share the female-only section of the spa with naked men who identified as women. Penny said that the child should not ‘stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude’. So that’s my advice to Them, on how to deal with negative critical reaction to Their ever-deteriorating work: ‘If you don’t like it, don’t look.’

That’ll be an episode of Even More Complex PTSD.

James Kirkup at the Spectator says it’s a difficult time to be a girl:

In 2019, the Lancet published research showing girls’ rates of self-harm had tripled since 2000. Other studies show girls are much more likely to be depressed or anxious than boys.

I would hate to be a girl in this climate. Porn, “sex work,” giant testosterone-filled “girls” taking all the good parts – no thank you.

On the surface things look pretty encouraging.

They’re more likely than boys to go to university. They have better economic prospects than any generation of females that went before them. Empowered female role models are more visible than ever before, in culture, sport, media, science, business, even politics.

Yet at the same time, girls are growing up in the digital age, where images of what women and girls can (or perhaps should, depending on your view) be are everywhere. From the earliest age, many of those images are strongly sex-based, assigning roles and characteristics to girls because they are girls. You can tell a story here that starts with pink unicorns for toddlers and ends with Instagram and YouTube influencers who can make millions selling an image of apparently perfect, glossy femininity.

Not to mention an image of apparently perfect glossy fucakbility.

Across western societies, the last decade or so has seen a sharp rise in the number of girls presenting with gender-related conditions, sometimes receiving treatment from gender clinics.

Or not so much treatment as “treatment” – interventions that can’t be fully reversed if the girl changes her mind a year or two down the road.

The use of such treatments is controversial and contested. As a result, NHS England in 2019 launched an independent review of those treatments for children and young people, a review later expanded to take in the services that deal with children and gender, mainly GIDS. That independent review is led by Hilary Cass, a retired consultant and former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

An interim report came out this week.

To me, the truly disturbing message that emerges from the interim report is confirmation of just how little is known about the female-born children who are now most of the gender-clinic caseload, and about their treatment and its consequences.

And that is because most of the patchy evidence base on gender issues and treatment is based on people who were born male. And to state a fact that shouldn’t need to be stated, male humans and female humans are different, physically and developmentally. The interim report notes:

Much of the existing literature about natural history and treatment outcomes for gender dysphoria in childhood is based on a case-mix of predominantly birth-registered males presenting in early childhood. There is much less data on the more recent case-mix of predominantly birth-registered females presenting in early teens, particularly in relation to treatment and outcomes.

What could go wrong?

Oh my god Raif is out of prison.

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi – jailed and sentenced to 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam online” – has been freed, his wife says.

“Raif called me. He is free,” Ensaf Haidar told AFP news agency from Canada, where she fled with the couple’s three children.

The blogger’s first 50 lashes caused a global outcry and he became an emblem of rights abuses in the country.

There has been no official Saudi comment on his release.

Mr Badawi’s son Terad also tweeted: “My father is free.”

But he’s still under a travel ban.

The NGO Reporters Without Borders said it would work to ensure he can join his family in Canada despite the ban.

Just let him go you miserable fiends.

W. H. Auden wrote a poem titled August 1968 in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring.

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Cody Walker wrote at Kenyon Review in September 2016:

We depend on poets for this kind of expression, of course. A totalitarian regime communicates through jargon and claptrap; a poet (or a poet like Auden, anyway) fires back with rhyme and tetrameter. At the time, the fight doesn’t feel fair—but history has a way of declaring surprising victors. Jump forward to 1989: the occupation ends. As Christopher Hitchens remembers it, “Not a shot was fired, and not a skull was broken, but the system farcically evaporated in the face of a wave of literate and humorous and ironic and defiant words, uttered by novelists like Milan Kundera, playwrights like Vaclav Havel, and singers like the Plastic People of the Universe. Velvet has always struck me as a vapid word for this cultural revolution. If we must have a V, then verbal would be preferable.”

Poets, novelists, playwrights, singers…and comedians.

Anna asked in a comment:

Have you seen the pro-Nazi Azov battalion?

I hope this doesn’t turn out like when we helped the Afghanistans against the Russians in the 1980s and then some of them turned out to be terrorists.

Snopes on the Azov Battalion:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing military violence and instability have mobilized far-right extremists, playing into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about “neo-Nazis” running the country as justification for invading Ukraine.

In a speech given just before Russia launched its ongoing attack on Ukraine, Putin justified what he described as a “special military operation.” He stated:

Its goal is to protect people who have been abused by the genocide of the Kyiv regime for eight years. And to this end, we will strive for the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.

Putin’s comments were misleading on more than one front. Besides falsely equating Ukraine’s national government with “Nazis,” Russia’s “special military operation” has turned out to be an all-out assault on Ukraine, including its civilians. 

As the Ukrainian military and ordinary citizens fought for their lives and the sovereignty of their homeland against the invading Russian force, various social media users shared posts about a group called the Azov Battalion.

The Azov Battalion is a real extremist group that became (and still is) a faction in Ukraine’s national guard, but to equate them with the “Kyiv regime” is to vastly overstate their size and influence.

To say that the Azov group is representative of Ukraine’s overall defense or government is false, because it makes up a small percentage of Ukraine’s total military defense, and Ukraine’s national government system is a democracy.

Like many European countries, Ukraine has political parties that range the spectrum from socialist to far right. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish and associated with centrist politics.

The US also has political parties all over the spectrum, very much including neo-Nazi and other far-right ones.

For comparison, Azov membership was estimated to be anywhere from 900 to 2,500 prior to the Russian invasion, while the Ukrainian standing military in total was composed of about 200,000 troops. It’s important to note here that these numbers are outdated, given that as of this writing, every facet of Ukraine’s defenses have recruited new volunteers in the ongoing effort to fend off the invasion.

But in 2020, journalist  Oleksiy Kuzmenko, writing for the Atlantic Council, presciently noted the potential problems the group posed for Ukraine domestically and on the international stage:

The Azov movement has long been a symbol of the far-right in Ukraine. It has risen to prominence over the past six years due to its role in the ongoing war against Russia, and has achieved levels of mainstream media exposure far in excess of the group’s minimal electoral support. This is not only a domestic issue for Ukraine. The far-right in general, and their apparent impunity, have significantly damaged Ukraine’s international reputation and left the country vulnerable to hostile narratives exaggerating the role of extremist groups in Ukraine. With awareness of right-wing terrorism now growing globally, the potential threat posed by the Ukrainian far-right beyond the borders of the country is attracting increasing attention.

The Ukrainian National Guard’s decision to tweet a brief video showing an Azov fighter coating bullets intended for Chechen Russian soldiers, who are Muslim, in pig fat, helped thrust the group into the global eye as the broader war unfolded.

Ukraine’s version of Lauren Boebert.

The Azov Battalion, sometimes referred to as the Azov regiment or Azov movement, grew out of the conflict with Russian-sponsored separatists in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas that began in 2014. As Radio Free Europe reports, it was initially composed of volunteers known in Eastern Europe as “ultras,” or “hard-core, far-right soccer fans, including many violent hooligans.”

Like the ones who bashed their way into the US Capitol a year ago.

But they were effective against their pro-Russian enemies, earning Azov praise from Ukrainian officials, including former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. In November 2014 they became part of the National Guard of Ukraine. 

This has hardly been without controversy, because the group is widely viewed as consisting of violent extremists and white supremacists.

“The unit has denied it adheres to Nazi ideology as a whole, but Nazi symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia are rife on the uniforms and bodies of Azov members,” Al Jazeera reported in a March 2022 profile of the group. Its insignia strongly resembles a Wolfsangel, an ancient rune appropriated by Nazi Germany.

Former U.S. Rep. Max Rose, D-N.Y., tried unsuccessfully to get the group classified by the U.S. State Department as a foreign terror organization. The group has been accused of human rights abuses, while the violence in the region has been a magnet for foreign extremists to join Azov and learn combat skills.

Speaking to The New York Times, Ali Soufan, who heads the global intelligence and security firm Soufan Group, said, “Instability in Ukraine offers white supremacy extremists the same training opportunities that instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has offered jihadist militants for years.”

For sources see the Snopes article. Author is Bethania Palma.

I saw this –

– so I stared a bit, trying to recall ever seeing any ads for “kill the racist” or “kill the homophobe” shirts, and then I Googled “official kill the terf shirt” and found, depressingly, that it’s not just the one company.

Then I Googled “official kill the racist shirt” and found…no match.

Masha Gessen tells us that Russians don’t know what’s happening, because they don’t have access to truthful reporting.

A majority of Russians get their news from broadcast television, which is fully controlled by the state. “This is largely a country of older people and poor people,” Lev Gudkov told me. Gudkov is the director of the Levada Center, which was once Russia’s leading public-opinion-research organization and which the state has now branded a “foreign agent.” There are more Russians over the age of forty-five than there are between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Even those who get their news online are still unlikely to encounter a narrative that differs from what broadcast television offers. The state continues to ratchet up pressure on the few surviving independent media outlets, blocking access to their Web sites, requiring them to preface their content with a disclaimer that it was created by a “foreign agent,” and, ultimately, forcing them to close. On Thursday, the radio station Echo of Moscow and the Web-based television channel TV Rain, both of which had had their sites blocked earlier in the week, decided to stop operations. What the vast majority of Russians see, Gudkov said, are “lies and hatred on a fantastical scale.”

State television varies little, aesthetically and narratively, from channel to channel. Aside from President Vladimir Putin interrupting regular programming in the early hours of February 24th to announce a “special military operation” in Ukraine, the picture has changed little since before the war. There is no ongoing live coverage, no acknowledgment that what’s happening is extraordinary, even as Russian bombs fall on Ukraine’s residential areas and the Russian economy enters a tailspin. The news lineup, too, changes little day to day. On Thursday, the 7 a.m. newscast on Channel One lasted six minutes and contained six stories: a new round of Russian-Ukrainian peace talks in which Russia was eager to seek “common ground”; the “shelling of the Donetsk People’s Republic by the Ukrainian armed forces,” from which “twenty-five civilians have died.” …The next scheduled program is ‘Good Morning.’ ” There was no mention of Kharkiv or Kyiv, which had been bombed the day before….

Gudkov summed up the world view shaped by Russian television: “Russia is a victim, as it has been ever since the Second World War. The West aims to establish world domination. Its ultimate goal is to humiliate Russia and take possession of its natural resources. Russia is forced to defend itself.” Days before the full-scale invasion began, the Levada Center asked Russians who they thought was responsible for the mounting tensions in Ukraine. Three per cent blamed Russia, fourteen per cent blamed Ukraine, and sixty per cent blamed the United States.

The government has banned the words “war,” “aggression,” and “invasion” in reporting on its aggressive invasion of and war against Ukraine, with fines and closure for disobedience.

Most of Russia’s propaganda language is plainly Orwellian. After a few days, newscasts were consistently referring to the war as an “operation to restore peace.” On Tuesday night, when the TV Rain Web site was blocked, the channel was broadcasting a story about how the government, working through ad agencies, was offering to pay bloggers and TikTokers to post talking points about the war. “All posts should be accompanied by #LetsGoPeace and #DontAbandonOurOwn,” the offer began. Among the talking points: “We are calling for peace, and it’s unfortunate that these are the means we must use to achieve it.”

We had to destroy the village to save it.

Another ACLU ad on Facebook.

An anonymous donor has pledged to match all donations up to $200,000. Every dollar you donate right now will be doubled and immediately put towards our legal, advocacy, and organizing work that supports trans kids and their families.

“Supports” how though? What do they mean by support?

They’re “supporting” what they call “trans kids” by working to make sure they can get drastic, irreversible surgery or drugs or both. It’s not as clear-cut as they think that that equals “support.” It could be that the reality is that some or all such “kids” are caught up in a trend, and will regret this medical tampering with their path to physical adulthood. In addition to everything else wrong with this campaign, the ACLU is being shockingly reckless with the futures of a whole lot of teenagers.

Culture war:

Culture has long been a proxy in the assertion of power by one people over another. Recent egregious examples include the Chinese government’s attempt to suppress Uyghur religion, literature, music, even food, and Islamic State’s destruction of ancient monuments. In war, culture is a second front. At their most extreme, wars are about eradicating a people’s cultural memory altogether, wiping them from the slate as if they had never been.

…

In some ways, intentions are less important than effects, amid war’s messy reality. A missile strike in Kyiv that reportedly killed five people was seemingly directed at the television tower, but it lies close to Babyn Yar, the site of the massacre of 150,000 people during the second world war, including 30,000 Jews – a great irony given Mr Putin’s stated ambition to “denazify” Ukraine. An attack on the town of Ivankiv, 50 miles north-west of Kyiv, set afire the town’s Historical and Local History Museum, destroying precious works by the 20th-century folk artist Maria Prymachenko. The artist is an important symbol of Ukrainian art – and Ukrainian hope.

Three decades ago, war in the former Yugoslavia saw sacred and beautiful places such as Dubrovnik or the Mostar bridge and old town targeted, sometimes with the intention of erasing the evidence that people of another religion or ethnicity had once lived there. Whether or not sites like Babyn Yar and Ivankiv’s museum have been collateral damage rather than actual targets, the cultural front in war is never trivial. This is a conflict, like so many others, that’s not just about controlling territory – but owning narrative.

And trying to smash all evidence of a culture often backfires, as with the manuscripts from Mali. I’m betting Maria Prymachenko is now known to a lot more people outside Ukraine than she was before. The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed but their fame was amplified in the process. Trying to dominate a narrative is hampered by the fact that narratives can’t be bombed or torched out of existence.

One good thing:

A virtual gallery to showcase Mali’s cultural history has been launched, featuring tens of thousands of Timbuktu’s ancient manuscripts.

The manuscripts were smuggled to safety from Timbuktu after Islamist militant groups took control of the city in northern Mali in 2012.

They contain centuries of African knowledge and scholarship on topics ranging from maths to astrological charts.

“Central to the heritage of Mali, they represent the long legacy of written knowledge and academic excellence in Africa,” said Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian known for smuggling the manuscripts out of Timbuktu, who was also involved in the project.

The site is called Mali Magic and from a quick look it is pretty damn magic. It’s music and art and dance as well as manuscripts.

Joke on the Islamist groups: they succeeded in spreading the culture of Mali more widely instead of shutting it down. Oopsie.

Chip chip chip chip away.

It’s not young people. Boys don’t miss school because of period poverty.

Say the word. The word is “girls.” It’s not blasphemy or porn; we can say it. Girls.

To be fair, they do know how to say it.

But they should say it every time they talk about girls – they should never veil the word “girls” behind “young people.”