Seen on Facebook:

How to strangle a woman during sex SAFELY. (Funny how it’s the woman getting strangled, isn’t it.)

Nah, I say forget strangling people SAFELY, don’t strangle them at all.

What is a doula? Ask the Google.

dou·la
/ˈdo͞olə/
noun
a woman, typically without formal obstetric training, who is employed to provide guidance and support to a pregnant woman during labor.
“from admission through delivery, a doula stayed at her assigned patient’s side”
a woman employed to provide guidance and support to the mother of a newborn baby.
“my mother-in-law hired a postpartum doula to help me for a couple of weeks”

So what do we find?

That Doula Guy

That’s not a “taboo,” it’s a fact. Men can’t give birth; just a fact, ma’am.

Tell us about yourself, Mac Brydum.

“That Doula Guy” is Mac Brydum.

Specializing in comprehensive doula support, including labor support, postpartum care, infant sleep consulting, and lactation support.

Mac enthusiastically offers LGBTQ-inclusive, empowering, compassionate care for ALL families.

Also offering consulting for professional organizations on LGBTQ inclusion.

Don’t you want him for your lactation support?

But the last line gives it away a little – really he’s about the LGBTQ inclusion, and really what that means is the T inclusion. What’s best for women in childbirth isn’t his concern.

It’s so irritating, and so male-entitled, this move to have men take over everything women do. I’m making an educated guess that doulas are women because women don’t actually want to hire a man to hold their hand and cheer them on at that particular project. They’ve had to accept male doctors for generations because women doctors were so scarce, but there’s no reason they should have to accept men doing the female support person job too. No doubt some women will sign Mac Brydum that doula guy right up because women are expected to be sweet and accommodating, but a man who knew how to give a shit about anyone other than himself wouldn’t make women feel obliged to make him feel “included.” Women in labor shouldn’t have to be “inclusive” in that way.

Meanwhile Trump is also abusing his power by trying to muscle the Army Corps of Engineers to buy its new border wall from a company he favors because he’s a corrupt mob boss.

The Post reports:

In phone calls, White House meetings and conversations aboard Air Force One during the past several months, Trump has aggressively pushed Dickinson, N.D.-based Fisher Industries to Department of Homeland Security leaders and Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commanding general of the Army Corps, according to the administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal discussions.

It may be a not-very-subtle sign of the frustration in the Army that the news leaked to the Post the same day that Trump called General Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, to the White House and once again pressed him.

Is Fisher good at Wall though? Is it a leading expert when it comes to Wall?

Fisher is a curious choice. The company is already suing the government after being rejected for any Army Corps contract for the border wall. Fisher was one of the companies that participated in a prototype exercise outside of San Diego in 2017, but the company’s wall didn’t meet the specifications laid out by the Department of Homeland Security, which wanted a wall through which agents could see.

Interjection: a wall agents could see through. The “rule” against ending a sentence with a preposition is a bogus rule and it often produces clumsy obscure phrasing like that.

Instead, Fisher pushed a more expensive concrete wall, similar to the one that Trump promised during the 2016 presidential campaign. But the Fisher prototype was late and over budget. CEO Tommy Fisher criticized the steel-bollard design that the government chose. Now, Fisher is promising a steel wall, and it says it can build it cheaper and faster than any other contractor.

Fisher Industries has some assets, though. Tommy Fisher is a major GOP donor. He has North Dakota’s Republican Senator Kevin Cramer in his corner. He’s already working on a private-sector attempt to build a barrier on private land in New Mexico, which is backed by close Trump allies like Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist; Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and Kris Kobach, the former vice chair of Trump’s voter-fraud commission, who was under consideration as his “immigration czar.”

Moreover, Tommy Fisher has wisely made himself a fixture on Fox News, which the president watches obsessively. He’s used those appearances to pitch his company’s plan.

throws up hands in disgust

Oh, really?

Edward Lord is non-binary, except on Freemason meeting days. https://t.co/oiMl5auhEH

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) May 24, 2019

Edward Lord is the boss of the move to take women-only spaces away from women in London. Edward Lord has also blocked every single obstreperous woman on Twitter whether he’s ever interacted with them or not, in other words he uses a sweeping block list. Women who object to having women-only spaces taken away may not tell Edward Lord of their objections; he won’t allow it. Lord indeed.

https://t.co/C5lKQinmFV

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) May 24, 2019

So I’m reading the Telegraph article.

The architect of a gender identity drive who campaigns for transgender rights has been forced to defend their membership of the Freemasons amid accusations of hypocrisy.

Edward Lord chairs the City of London’s establishment committee, which has launched a consultation on ending sex segregation in its women-only spaces such as public lavatories and changing facilities at well-known landmarks including Hampstead Heath ponds, the Barbican arts centre, Tower Bridge and the Museum of London.

Man who claims to be “non-binary” takes right to privacy from pervy men away from women.

A Twitter row erupted yesterday as it emerged that Lord, who identifies as non-binary and asks to be described by the pronoun “they,” is a Freemason, an institution that has famously refuses to allow women to join its men-only lodges.

Oh well that’s easy to explain. Men have a right to privacy, including men who call themselves “non-binary.” Women have no such right. Clear?

Quinta Jurecic on why Trump has to be impeached:

Here are the facts: The president is unsuited to his office. That should have been obvious well before the release of the special counsel’s report, but the text of the report, even with a smattering of redactions, makes his unfitness brutally clear. He shows no understanding of the responsibilities of the presidency. He delights in the abuse of his power. As Memorial Day approaches, he is reportedly planning to celebrate the holiday by pardoning, among other service members accused of war crimes, a Navy SEAL scheduled to stand trial for the murder of multiple unarmed Iraqi civilians.

Because hooray for murdering unarmed civilians in foreign countries; that’s what we stand for now. My Lai? Our finest hour.

Jurecic notes that Pelosi opposes impeachment for pragmatic reasons: because it will energize his base.

This is a very practical argument. But there is value to an impeachment inquiry—and to impeachment—as an act in itself, regardless of whether the Senate will convict or what the president’s supporters will think.

Pelosi and the more hardheaded Democratic strategists regard this position as overly idealistic. That’s the point.

Trump is absurd in the colloquial sense, she goes on, but also in the philosophical sense.

What better to emphasize the gap between the desire for the Constitution to mean something and the reality of the document as some words on paper than the scene of Donald J. Trump swearing an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”?

The Constitution is what Camus would call a “closed universe”—a space of “coherence and unity” in an incoherent world, in which words carry weight and actions have consequences. Trump’s disrespect for the law is a reminder of how fragile that structure of meaning can be. For that reason, there is a real service in using impeachment proceedings to push back against the notion that, in the parlance of the internet, “lol nothing matters.”

Susan Hennessey and I have argued that the House of Representatives has a duty to begin an impeachment inquiry insofar as representatives swear an oath to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “well and faithfully” execute the duties of their office. Another way of saying this is that an impeachment inquiry depends on an insistence that this oath really means something—and that the president’s oath means something as well. Keith Whittington, likewise, has written that impeachment is partially a matter of “norm creation and norm reinforcement.” And Yoni Appelbaum argued that the impeachment of Andrew Johnson “drew the United States closer to living up to its ideals.”

Let’s have a little norm reinforcement around here.

Hmmm.

WATCH: Is biological sex binary?@JoanMcAlpine MSP says women are discriminated against because of their biological sex. @MaggieChapman argues that the issue of reforming the Gender Recognition Act, is about identity not sex. See the full #scotnight debate at 10.40pm tonight. pic.twitter.com/NEgOU0mHhh

— ScotlandTonight (@ScotlandTonight) May 23, 2019

JM: Women are discriminated against because of their biological sex, and we can’t erase that because if we erase that we’re erasing women.

MC: But we know that biological sex is not binary…Biological sex is not binary. We are talking about identity here Joan…

What is identity then? What are people using it to mean? It’s become a magic word that means whatever you need it to mean in the moment and then its opposite a few seconds later. An “identity” that flatly contradicts the identity-haver’s biology is…what? I don’t know what to call it. An item of magical thinking; a fantasy dressed up as something more respectable and adult.  We can, I suppose, decide that our “identity” is that we are ten feet tall and slender as an aspen, but can we, reasonably, try to impose that “identity” on other people? Can we demand, with menaces, that the rest of the world believe in our “identity”? We can in the sense that it’s physically possible, but can we in the sense that it’s a reasonable, workable, justifiable thing to do? Not that I can see.

Oh, Pakistan tells WordPress to block Jesus and Mo, does it?

Pakistan authorities ask WordPress to block posts showing J&M strips, and WordPress says "sure" https://t.co/9uZOAgCfTA

— AuthorJ&M (@JandMo) May 23, 2019

Okay then.

The purge begins.

….during the 2016 Presidential election. The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2019

….Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions.” @PressSec

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2019

Show trials. Executions at dawn. Reprisals.

Whoa. So Barr has the sole authority to declassify info related to the Trump investigation over the objections of the original classifying authority – CIA, NSA, etc. A huge accumulation of power and discretion to the AG that I believe is unprecedented. https://t.co/xDTiurMyff

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) May 24, 2019

Oy.

Trump is unbelievably egotistical pic.twitter.com/eKm38oyjRZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 23, 2019

Oyy.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1131672516622209024

Also

Hi Emma, thanks for your tweet saying you'd like to throw a milkshake at me and 2 other journalists. A fascinating take, but, from an editing perspective, you shd screenshot the tweet I was replying to. It doesn't make sense currently and as a journalist I'm sure you'd hate that

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) May 23, 2019

An associate editor of @VICE wants to milkshake me, @HadleyFreeman and @helenlewis, women journalists who disagree with her views on gender. Right. I’d quite like to see the rules on who deserves physical assault and why. Seems only fair. https://t.co/7oososR3ud

— Janice Turner (@VictoriaPeckham) May 23, 2019

Is Emma Garland embarrassed? Hahaha don’t be silly.

shan't be indulging the tragic patter from certain writers who did not take kindly to my tweet with 16 likes (lmao), but if you're going to spend any time on the T*RF wars today make it engaging with trans voices & learning how to be supportive instead <3

— union egg (@emmaggarland) May 23, 2019

The Guardian reports a policy change:

Transgender women have had their right to use Hampstead Heath ponds formalised in a new policy.

The City of London Corporation (CoLC), which manages Hampstead Heath and its ponds, announced that it had adopted a new gender identity policy to make sure services in the area “are fully compliant with the Equality Act 2010, and do not discriminate against trans people”.

In January, the City of London, confirmed that the ladies’ pond – which counts people such as the actor Helena Bonham Carter and novelist Esther Freud among its swimmers – was open to transgender women. That was formalised in an announcement on Thursday that the new rules would “ensure a robust and consistent approach to gender identity”.

But what is “gender identity”? And why does the City of London need to have a robust and consistent approach to it? And, most to the point, what about the other rights? Why is the supposed right of transgender women to use the ladies’ pond more important than the right of women to use it? Why is it bad to discriminate against trans people but fine to discriminate against women? What is the point of having a pond for women and then ruling that men can use it too while bragging about rights?

Edward Lord, the chair of the establishment committee, which leads on the CoLC’s workforce and inclusion policies, said: “All communities should be fully respected, and equality and basic human rights upheld.”

Except those of women.

I could see it if the City of London had decided that sex segregation at the Hampstead ponds was an anachronism and a bad idea in light of moves to segregate Muslim women at university events and the like, but that’s not what this is. This is keeping the sex segregation but saying a particular subset of men have the “right” to creep on women while pretending it’s a matter of respect and equality and basic human rights.

A statement on the CoLC website said the new approach would “minimise potential issues of exclusion and discrimination”.

Will it? How can they know that? How can they know there won’t be women who wonder how anyone one will know that all the trans women are genuinely trans women, with not a single opportunistic dude among them?

The announcement comes after a consultation on attitudes to gender identity held last year received nearly 40,000 responses, of which 21,191 were deemed valid. CoLC said 65% of those valid respondents favoured ensuring trans people did not suffer discrimination.

In other words they threw out nearly half the responses in advance. Well that’s one way to get the desired result.

Hmmmm, really?

Morning @Womans_Place_UK . Being transgender is an innate part of the human condition. The only debate to be had about that is how best to deliver trans rights and healthcare.

You can have a thousand sweaty meetings in secret locations, and that will never change.

— Aidan Comerford (@AidanCTweets) May 23, 2019

Being transgender is an innate part of the human condition? So everybody is trans – which is pretty much the same as saying nobody is trans. If everybody is trans we just carry on as before.

But if that is true, why were we never told it before? Why in all this time, when humans were inventing agriculture and trade and alphabets and yoga and the Mars Rover, did no one tell us that being transgender is an innate part of the human condition?

Men who have nothing but contempt for women have a gold mine in trans activism.

Oh wow @NewStatesman went full TERF. This article is one of the most bad faith hateful pieces of writing I've read in a while.https://t.co/ApphkebBf3 pic.twitter.com/1VjUx7f7SP

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) May 22, 2019

He must not read anything at all, then, because it isn’t.

But never mind. He knows how to put women in their place.

the only upside to being astroturfed by radicalized mumsnet users is they think I'm actually capable of growing a beard https://t.co/phStWFAC0U

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) May 22, 2019

Ooooooh radicalized mumsnet users – a tactful way of saying “stupid bitches.” Stupid women with their “babies” and “children,” what can they possibly know about anything, they should leave writing and thinking and talking to the men.

Meanwhile…

Remember the planned redesign of the $20 bill that was going to include the first African American woman to appear on U.S. currency?

Well, don’t expect to see Harriett Tubman on your $20 any time soon.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed Wednesday what had been apparent for some time: The currency redesign pursued by his Obama administration predecessor Jacob Lew not is going to happen during the Trump administration.

Well of course it’s not. Trump has a plan to put war criminals on your $20 so Harriett Tubman will just have to go back to Mexico where she belongs.

Mnuchin said a new design for the $20 bill will not come out until 2028. The $10 and the $50 will come out with new features before that.

In 2016, Lew announced with great fanfare that Tubman, a freed slave who became a 19th century abolitionist, would replace Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, as the face of the $20, and that portraits of suffragists including Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony would be on the back of the $10 note.

But Trump and his enforcers obviously weren’t going to stand for that.

The new designs were to be revealed next year, which is the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.

But President Trump derided the new currency as “pure political correctness” before being elected and suggested Tubman be put on the rarely used $2 bill instead.

Trump is also known to be a fan of Jackson.

The Trail of Tears guy. Of course Trump is a fan.

Currency is for white guys.

Hey kids, let’s play Pretend Feminist for ten seconds before we go back to cheering for forced birth.

After Trump abruptly left legislative leaders meeting today, Kellyanne Conway asked Pelosi if she wanted to respond to what Trump had said. "I'll respond to the president, not staff," Pelosi said. "Wow, that's really pro-woman of you," Kellyanne Conway said back, per aides.

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) May 22, 2019

Ursual Le Guin on abortion:

My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke….

What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […]

It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child.

But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children.

The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents….

But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear.

H/t J.A.

The Telegraph introduces the UK to Meghan Murphy:

As one of the lone voices unequivocally arguing that identifying as a different gender does not change one’s chromosomal sex (and, ergo, that trans-women are not actually women) Murphy was swiftly labelled a ‘radical’ feminist, as well as a bigot and a transphobe by her detractors, many of whom also accuse her of being Right-wing.

To Murphy, a once proud socialist with a Marxist father, it’s a laughable claim. But she feels betrayed by the Left. ‘The NDP [Canada’s equivalent to Labour] has fully vilified women who speak out about this,’ she says. ‘They won’t even have a conversation.’

On Monday evening she spoke at a sold-out event on women’s rights in Bloomsbury, where she received something of a rock star’s welcome, with extended applause and whoops of appreciation as she walked onto the podium. It makes our meeting at one of Camden’s most rock ‘n’ roll pubs the following afternoon feel quite appropriate.

The reason for Murphy’s visit is because a similar ideological battle is taking place on this side of the Atlantic. Last year the Government launched a public consultation on ‘gender self-ID’, a policy which would require little more than signing a statement – and no medical oversight – for anyone to obtain a legal gender change. The debate in the UK has been equally fraught, with accusations of transphobia liberally hurled at those who dare raise the potential practical impact of such sweeping legislative reforms.

Liberally in one sense but very illiberally in another.

Murphy has genuine sympathy for those suffering from gender dysphoria (the belief they have been born the wrong sex) but it is outweighed by her concern that trans activists’ increasingly rapacious demands, particularly in the name of trans-women, many of whom, it is believed, opt to retain their male anatomy, will have potentially devastating consequences for women and children in a plethora of areas from professional sports to domestic violence provision.

In Vancouver, she points out, a women’s rape shelter which denied services to trans-women was deemed ‘transphobic’ by local politicians, who subsequently voted to cut its government subsidies. ‘Women who are escaping male violence need somewhere to go,’ Murphy says. ‘And these places are going to lose funding unless they cave [to the demands of trans activists].’ It is for erstwhile uncontroversial statements such as these that Murphy has attracted such opprobrium.

Despite her public aura of bravado, Murphy admits the incessant harassment has taken its toll. In Canada she has lost friends who are afraid to associate with her for fear of damaging their ‘woke’ credentials, received obscene telephone calls, and even been reported to the police for alleged transphobia. ‘They obviously thought it was silly,’ she says, but nevertheless a policeman warned her to ‘be careful’.

‘I’m scared for my safety,’ Murphy confesses. ‘Lots of women are. I know people who’ve lost their jobs over this. Women are being silenced.’

Yes but pronouns. Pronouns, I tell you.