We have never in American history seen an administration with such contempt for the Constitution, from Trump's launch with blatant violations like emoluments & the first Muslim Ban, to this continuing assault on @acosta & @cnn — and so the First Amendment. https://t.co/7TNdfpVirH
A GOOD MOVE, shouts Peter Tatchell about a move that takes a women-only pool away from women, because Peter Tatchell doesn’t think women should have any right to get away from men in public places.
Peter, this is so sad. Do you not see that women's rights to protection on the basis of their sex is important? You have been a campaigner all your life, you live for it & are respected for how you devote yourself to it. You have not & can NEVER lived the fenced life of a woman.
— AquatintDeliberatelyDefiantandDistasteful (@Aquatint) May 28, 2019
Huh. Jon Ronson’s squalid betrayal of Graham Linehan to the trans army yesterday wasn’t his first rodeo.
In case you were in any doubt about Jon ronson here he is yucking it up with transphobes underneath the women's march defending inclusivity pic.twitter.com/YUjXZgRis9
What does the poster communicate? “A person of a type claimed to be a potential threat was here at this toilet and nothing bad happened.” What does McKinnon want us to think it communicates? “A person of a type claimed to be a potential threat was here at this toilet and nothing bad happened, therefore nothing bad ever will happen when any person of that type is at any toilet anywhere.” I think that makes the problem reasonably clear? You can’t get from “this one incident involving one person at one place” to “all incidents involving all similar people at all places.”
It’s the so far so good fallacy – no that’s not a real fallacy, I just made it up. It’s not a good way to do risk assessment, or indeed prediction of any kind. It’s cloudy at the moment, so it will always be cloudy? No. The stock market didn’t crash today, so it never will? No. Banks didn’t fail today, so they never will? No.
The claim is not that all trans women will assault women in toilets every time there is a woman present to assault. The claim is that some men assault women when the conditions are right, and shared restrooms could present such conditions. The fact that one trans person used a toilet without harming anyone does nothing to address that claim. Nothing.
None of the literal, physical, natal women were good enough. They never are, are they.
I think I can now announce that I have accepted the position of Director of Women's Studies at Rutgers University – Newark. Relatedly, we can finally answer the age-old question "how do I know when my transition is over?"
Early last year, Anna, then 19, was sitting on the sofa in her student house when a stream of explicit messages began popping up on her friend’s laptop.
As more came through, she asked him what they were about, and he laughed.
“He said: ‘Well, if you think that’s bad you might want to see our lads’ chat’,” Anna says. “That’s when he took me through a year and a half’s worth of rape threats.”
As she sat there, she saw in the Facebook chat that he and his friends had changed their names to those of notorious serial killers and serial rapists.
“They were talking about a fellow student. They were talking about abducting her, chaining her to the bed, making her urinate on herself, and then sleep in it.”
I wonder if anyone is shouting at the BBC for kink shaming yet. Isn’t abduction and chaining to the bed and piss play just innocent harmless kink? Isn’t talking about it even more innocent harmless kink?
At first, Anna says her male friend dismissed the chat’s contents as “how boys talk”, saying it was a joke.
She continued scrolling, taking screenshots as she went.
“I just told him that it was for my own peace of mind,” Anna says. “He could see me getting more upset and more upset. And I think that’s when it started to dawn on him that this was probably a lot more serious than he thought it was.”
So then he started to pretend he found it unacceptable too, but she wasn’t buying.
But as she flicked back through reams of messages about gang rape and genital mutilation, her instincts told her otherwise.
“I didn’t know what to do because these people [in the chat] were a huge part of my life,” she says.
She got panic attacks when she started preparing to go back, and at that point she decided to make a complaint. She and a friend did so and were told they would be interviewed. By? The university’s press officer – you know, the guy (yes, guy) in charge of protecting the university’s reputation.
As head of the press office, Peter Dunn was responsible for dealing with the media and protecting Warwick’s reputation as one of the top universities in the UK.
As investigating officer, he was responsible for examining misconduct allegations and recommending which punishments – if any – the men should face.
Mr Dunn held both of these roles, despite the case gaining national media attention after it was reported by the student paper The Boar.
In February 2019, the university admitted “the potential for conflict” between Mr Dunn’s two roles, but insisted relevant press duties were “delegated” during the investigation.
It’s downright Trumpian. “Certainly, we will hear your complaint, here is our PR person to ask you the questions.”
A month after the women were interviewed, five of the men involved in the chat were banned from the university. Two were banned for 10 years, two were banned for one year, and one was given a lifetime campus ban.
Anna and her friend said they were not kept informed of the outcome and instead found out in the press, meaning they didn’t know which punishments corresponded to which men.
But her case wasn’t closed – the two men who had been banned for 10 years appealed against the decision.
After a four-month wait – which the university put down in part to a staff member taking a late summer holiday – they had their bans reduced from 10 years to just one.
Anna and her friend were told there was “new information” but not what it was, or anything else that would justify that decision, a decision that meant they would have to be around these two men a year later. They protested but the vice chancellor told them the case was closed.
I can’t help it, it made me laugh. I tried to scowl but I couldn’t sustain it – his solemnity, his toddler-careful word-saying, his little across-the-abdomen gesture, his use of the word “happy” – I crumbled and laughed helplessly.
To anyone unsure if Donald Trump was the dumbest human being alive…
Mr Benjamin appeared with right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been condemned for his remarks on subjects including feminism, paedophilia, trans people, race and religion, and has called for journalists to be shot.
He failed to win a seat in South West England, where Ukip won just 3 per cent of votes.
Mountaineers have suggested difficult weather conditions, a lack of experience and the growing commercialization of expeditions as contributing factors to the backlog.
British climber Robin Haynes Fisher was one of those who had warned of the dangers of overcrowding.
“With a single route to the summit, delays caused by overcrowding could prove fatal so I am hopeful my decision to go for the 25th will mean fewer people. Unless of course everyone else plays the same waiting game,” he wrote in a captioned Instagram post on May 19.
He’s one of the eleven; he died on the way down.
During the week beginning May 20, crowds of climbers became stuck in a queue to the summit, above the mountain’s highest camp at 8,000 meters (26,247 feet). The summit of Mount Everest is 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) high.
If there’s any place on the entire planet you don’t want to get stuck in a queue it’s the last few meters of Everest.
Veteran climber David Morton spoke to CNN from base camp on the Tibetan side of Mt. Everest. He had just descended after getting around 100 meters from the summit for a research project.
“The major problem is inexperience, not only of the climbers that are on the mountain but also the operators supporting those climbers,” he explained. “Everest is primarily a very complicated logistical puzzle and I think when you have a lot of inexperienced operators as well inexperienced climbers along with, particularly, the Nepal government not putting some limitations on the numbers of people, you have a prime recipe for these sorts of situations happening.”
I don’t understand why people keep doing this, apart from the narcissistic desire to say you’ve done it. The reason it’s so difficult, the reason so few people have done it, is not because the climbing is ultra-skilled, it’s because it’s too high. It’s about the oxygen, not the climbing. That’s why it’s possible for rich people to climb it with minimal experience, and it’s why so many people die in the attempt. That’s not a test of skill, it’s just a test of how long you can survive at high altitude. Who cares how long anyone can survive at high altitude? It’s like a stunt, but an especially destructive, expensive, wasteful stunt. Everybody just cut it out.
None of the restrictions have gone into effect, either because of delays built into the legislation itself or legal challenges. If they do, they’ll spark an unintentional, vast experiment in public health. Already, states with the most restrictions on access to abortions are also those with the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality. The connection isn’t direct—abortion access can be a kind of proxy for access to all sorts of pre- and postnatal health care, not to mention correlating roughly with better-funded education systems, lower poverty rates, and tighter environmental regulation. But evidence from history does suggest a hypothesis: More women and babies are going to get sick, be poor, and die.
Other countries have already run this experiment.
Take Romania. Abortion was legal there until 1966, when Nicolae Ceausescu became president and outlawed it, along with contraception. He said he wanted to increase the number of native-born Romanians. Women were forced to get pelvic inspections at work. Police informers roamed maternity hospitals. Performing abortions was a crime.
As a result, the birth rate in Romania went up for a couple years, and then in 1970 it went into freefall. Deaths from complications resulting from attempted, illegal abortions increased to 10 times that of the rest of Europe—about 500 women a year, more than 10,000 women over two decades. The maternal mortality rate spiked to 150 women per 100,000 births. That number is insanely high. Today, when the US has the worst maternal mortality in the industrialized world, it’s only a sixth of that (except in Louisiana, where the maternal mortality rate for women over 35 years of age is a 1980s-Romania-adjacent 145.9 per 100,000 births). Also, nearly 200,000 children were put in hellish orphanages.
That could be our future! And, in fact, probably will, because the Court is majority-HandmaidsTale.
In December of 1989 a revolution cleared out Ceausescu’s government. The new leadership instituted an emergency public health measure to legalize abortion and contraception. The maternal mortality rate fell 50 percent in the first year.
Is this bumming you out? Here’s the converse. Amid worries about maternal mortality, Nepal legalized abortion in 2002. Over the next decade or so, 1,200 clinicians learned to provide abortions, and 500,000 women got them. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 360 to 170 per 100,000 live births, and while the number of abortion complications went up—along with total hospital admissions and total live births—the number of serious complications went down.
But we’re busy racing off in the opposite direction.
Payal committed suicide due to alleged casteist abuse in a Mumbai hospital and demanded stringent action against the culprits here on Monday.
The Students Federation of India (SFI) and other student organisations staged vociferous protests against the recent suicide of a post-graduate woman medical student due to alleged casteist abuse in a Mumbai hospital and demanded stringent action against the culprits here on Monday.
“This is the first time in Maharashtra that any post-graduate medico has taken the extreme step of ending her life after alleged harassment on grounds of her caste background,” Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors (MARD) General Secretary Dr. Deepak Mundhe told IANS.
…
Hailing from a Muslim tribal family of Jalgaon, Dr. Tadvi, 25, was a second-year post-graduate student in obstetrics and gynaecology and had earlier served in the tribal areas of Gadchiroli.
She and her family had in the past complained to the hospital authorities of the alleged ragging, taunting on her tribal status, not permitting her inside the operation theatre, posting derogatory messages on social media, and other forms of harassment by the three senior women doctors.
But the 30-year-old’s decision about whether to comply with the law is “an existential question,” according to a recent article by the New York Times.
Maggie Haberman’s piece — entitled “Hope Hicks Left the White House. Now She Must Decide Whether to Talk to Congress.” — has drawn intense scrutiny and raised questions regarding disparities in law enforcement.
The very title is stupid. (Titles are usually the work of editors, not the reporter.) No, it’s not the case that she “must decide”; what she must do is comply.
Of course there are such things as principled decisions to ignore a law. The black students who sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro were breaking a law. No doubt Trump’s criminal gang all have themselves convinced that their crimes are a matter of principle too, but they’re wrong.
What gets me is news breaks that this woman is weighing committing a crime before Congress &it’s getting framed by the NYT as some Lifetime drama called “Hope’s Choice.”
This is a fmr admin official considering participating in a coverup led by the President.
It certainly didn’t help that the Times opted to illustrate Haberman’s puff piece with a glam shot of Hicks. (The same thing happened during the flutter of coverage of her when she resigned, too – the news channels all showed endless clips of her in this or that elegant outfit looking very nicely cleaned up.) Yes, she is indeed very pretty, but what does that have to do with anything?
https://t.co/HiqKGNXsLN When a respected paper such as @nytimes calls this an "existential" question, rather than a question about complying with the law, we have a very serious problem with our democracy. This is what it looks like to become dysfunctional. @brianstelter
Calling it “an existential question” makes it sound deep and thoughtful and significant, when in fact it’s just a corrupt plan to break the law in order to protect a shameless criminal.
Councillor Sarah Field at Leeds Civic Hall yesterday:
Our brilliant panel of academics will be speaking today about the Declaration of Sex Based Rights. But by way of introduction I am going to talk a little bit about Leeds and why I’m here.
So, I just want to start off by thanking the many women on the Mumsnet Feminism boards. You are a constant strength and inspiration.
About three years ago, not long after I was first elected, I was contacted by a woman in Leeds, for advice. Her six year old daughter had been verbally attacked and then subjected to a violent outburst by a 17 year old male who had been allowed to join a local girls group as a helper. This was because he said he identified as a female. What had this child done? She had asked him if he was a boy. And then this six year old girl had been made to stand alone in front of the entire group and apologise to him.
And I couldn’t get my head around this. So I began to do some research. And this was how I found my way to gender critical thinking and radical feminism.
And these are the following statements I’d like to make:
Every single person on the planet is unique. And I don’t care what they wear. And I don’t care who they love or have sex with, as long as they are consenting adults.
There is no such thing as living as a woman. We are women. And it is our female biology which makes us women. It is our sex. And biological sex is observable in every single cell in our bodies: it is a physical, material and biological fact. And our sex is what makes us a class. Our sex which makes us uniquely vulnerable to male violence. Our sex which means we bear the entire burden of reproductive labour. The structural oppression which women face as a class is because of their sex. And that is why all women need legal recourse to separate and sex segregated spaces.
It is simply not ethical to categorise males as females based on their subjective feelings. To do so means the female sex no longer has legal protections or legal meaning and is instead reduced to destructive, regressive gender stereotyping.
If you cannot define women, then you cannot defend them.
Which brings me to Leeds City Council, which famously prevented a meeting here last year to discuss changes to the Gender Recognition Act. When the WPUK meeting was cancelled I read the email from a Labour Councillor and then I read the flurry of replies and actions that not once asked for clarification or any other viewpoints – just this blind acceptance of a hateful narrative – and it became clear to me that it’s become a virtue to dismiss, intimidate and silence women.
That meeting was to discuss proposed changes to legislation and the government’s consultation. Its purpose was not to tell Trans people what is best for them, but to tell politicians and law makers what is best for women.The vast majority of those who ask questions about Self-ID are lifelong left leaning, are lesbians, trade unionists, LGB allies and of all faiths and none. These accusations we face – transphobes, bigots, TERFs, religious fundamentalists, hate preachers – are utter nonsense. And I’ve had enough.And I must say I absolutely refute in the strongest terms any accusations of homophobia against gender critical women. A huge number of them are lesbians. And I stand with my lesbian sisters. Just as I’ve always done for years of solidarity with the LGB community. And since the woke brigade of word salad identity politics seems to love a good cliché, I’ll throw in a mention of my magnificent gay best friend and godfather to both my children.
Leeds City Council has brought in Self-Identification. Anyone can change their sex, or “gender marker” as they call it, across all council services and departments by completing a short online form.
When I asked, under FOI, for the Equality Impact Assessments I was told they didn’t do any. When I asked, under FOI, how this might impact sex segregated services and spaces I was told Leeds City Council does not have any such spaces or services. When I asked, under FOI, for a comprehensive list of women’s and men’s clothes, as cross dressing is specifically defined in council policy as a protected characteristic, I was told no such list exists. When asked to define a woman, they said no such definition exists.
So to be clear: men in this city can access a woman’s changing facility, toilet, leisure facility or support group or service – anywhere they are vulnerable, traumatised, undressed or asleep – because men might at some point feel like they are something which the council says is indefinable, but might mean he once wore something which may or may not be something a woman might also wear.
Well, women fought for those spaces and they are not this council’s to give away.
It is absurd, it is dangerous and millions of women across the country are saying we have had enough. You cannot identify into an oppressed class because you cannot identify out of an oppressed class. And women are uniquely oppressed across the planet: reproductive health and autonomy, Female Genital Mutilation, violence, rape, child marriage, no right to vote, death in childbirth, post-natal illness, denied access to education, lower wages, chemical contraception, sex trafficking, surrogacy, pornography, prostitution and objectification.
I’ve had women in prisons and post-prison services in Leeds who have contacted me in fear and despair because they are confined with men who threaten them with rape, assault them, repeatedly expose their so called female penises and taunt them about playing the system and flushing their hormones down the toilet.
Our statistics will be skewed and we will lose a tool of analysis that provides us with the ability to challenge the very inequalities for which sex based provisions and quotas were created.
And of course there is a wider underbelly of misogyny in Leeds. The so called managed zone of prostituted, emaciated and addicted women is our flagship. In the last few months I’ve visited Holbeck twice, once at night where I observed several men out on the street openly watching pornography in their cars as women stumbled to them to be used and discarded for a fiver. During the day I was approached by punters three times in 10 minutes while simply standing by a car for some fresh air at 2pm. We are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds so men can buy the addicted bodies of the most vulnerable women in the city. Men know what a woman is in Holbeck.
I’m often asked how I would feel if I was born in the wrong body. And I say, I’ve been feeling like that every single day for as long as I can remember. You only have to go into a shop, turn on the TV, open a magazine, click on the internet and women are assaulted with GET A BIKINI BODY, 12 WEEKS UNTIL YOUR CHRISTMAS PARTY BODY, GET THE BODY YOU DREAM OF, THE BODY OF SOMEONE 20 YEARS YOUNGER, THE BODY YOU DESERVE. Botox, surgery, hair removal, Photoshop, permanent makeup, designer vagina. We get it.
I don’t think all men are rapists. I don’t think all men are intrinsically violent, creepy or degenerate. God knows I love my dad and my brother and my dear nine year old son. But 98% of sexual violence is committed by men. And there is no way to tell the good ones from the bad ones. There never will be. That’s why we need our spaces and services and boundaries, for our privacy, our dignity and our safety. It’s why we need to preserve the social norms which generally prevent men from entering our spaces and preserve our confidence to challenge men who do so. Bad men will do anything to gain access to women and girls. That’s why every institution in the world attracts those who will use power and access to abuse us. If they do it in schools, the care system, churches and families then they will sure as hell do it in prisons, toilets, refuges and changing rooms. They already are.
In terms of protecting females from a significant minority of dangerous males, these reasons don’t cease to operate when males self-identify as women. And self-identification removes any gatekeeping, safeguarding or requirement for any man to do anything other than complete a cursory administrative process via an online form.
I’m truly sorry for any man who feels imprisoned and tortured by masculinity. But that is something for men to deconstruct, to dismantle and to overthrow. And there are men doing it. There are transsexuals and cross dressers and allies against the male stereotypes which damage everyone. But it is not the moral duty of women to facilitate that. If your feminism prioritises the internal identifications of men over the material conditions of women then you are not a feminist. In a world of structural and systematic oppression, and an epidemic of male violence, we owe it to women and to the legacy of every feminist who has fought before us, to stand for ourselves.
"I've never claimed to be a very stable genius. But I know enough not to trust Kim Jong Un to keep a promise – and if I ever meet him, I won't leave him smiling at me or anybody else"
(Yes, I’m clearly going to be beating this to death today. It’s that astounding.)
It’s not just knowing enough not to trust Kim Jong Un to keep a promise – it’s another level of stupid even from that. It’s knowing enough not to be bounced into trusting Kim Jong Un because he flatters me.
How dumb and incompetent and undeveloped and practically fetus-level immature do you have to be to 1. take the flattery of a known murderous tyrant seriously and 2. allow that flattery to motivate you to slobber publicly on a known murderous tyrant? Seriously. This sack of shit in a gilt wig would see the whole world nuked to an ash pile for the sake of compliments from Kim Jong fucking Un.
It is time, yet again, to imagine how utterly insensate with rage Republicans would be if a Dem president were gleeful at an enemy dictator attacking one of his opponents. They would be calling not just for impeachment, but for invoking the 25th amendment. /1
These are the same Republicans – my former tribe – who pointed to every slip of the tongue by Hillary Clinton as evidence of fatal illness. Who took a dumb hot mic aside from Obama to Medvedev as treason. Who parsed every word from every Democrat for signs of betrayal. /2
Now, the President shows us horrifying evidence of, as @Peter_Wehner once put it, a “disordered personality,” and the GOP and their voter base applaud because it’s evidence to them that Trump is just a Regular Guy Who Talks Like Them. This is not only immoral, but stupid. /3
It’s stupid because, on a fundamental level, it’s false. No one “talks like Trump.” Trump-cultists in the heartland claim he’s just like them, when in fact if someone spoke to them – or their loved ones – as Trump speaks to others, they’d punch them right in the face. /4
And no one really “talks like Trump” about things like war, or about what a swell guy Kim Jong Un is. With the exception of some morons sitting around diners in red hats, no one really talks this way. No one says “I’m glad the dictator of North Korea is insulting Joe Biden.” /5
But because we fear resentment and status envy and intellectual insecurity, we all have to pretend that it’s not a massive failure of character that an entire political party is too cowardly and un-patriotic to stand up to this man even when he’s applauding Kim Jong Un. /6
If you can’t bring yourself to criticize Trump for what he just said – and for how he’s been conducting himself for two years – you are either an idiot or a morally deficient coward. And either way, you’re harming your country. /7
Happy Memorial Day and thank you for coming to my TED talk. /8x
Another thing about Trump’s bottom of the sewer tweet – a thing that’s obvious but needs underlining anyway.
It’s the “promise TO ME” bit. It’s the radiant, glowing conceit that burns out of those two words. You peasants just don’t understand, it’s between the two of us: he promised ME, and it’s intrusive and blasphemous for you to try to get between us.
It’s that and it’s also the conceit of thinking a promise to him is magically unbreakable because it’s to him. It’s the radioactive conceit and confidence of this bloated nitwit that is so astonishing, along with our helplessness to stop him. It’s as if Daffy Duck or Yosemite Sam were pirouetting in front of the cameras with Kim Jong Un.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Sunday said President Trump and Kim Jong Un “agree in their assessment” of former vice president Joe Biden, after Trump prompted an outcry by leveraging his friendship with the North Korean dictator against Biden in a tweet.
Well now who ya gonna trust, a Democrat or Kim Jong Un?
Members of both parties sharply criticized Trump’s handling of North Korea on Sunday.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said she “certainly wouldn’t trust” Kim. She described herself as disturbed by both North Korea’s recent missile test as well as Trump’s reaction.
And on the other hand there are the packets of slime who will do anything for the crook.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump ally, said that he was “glad the president is engaging” Kim and that the president was “trying to give North Korea some space to come back to the table and end this.”
“Like every other president, he’s trying hard to stop the advance of nuclear armament in North Korea,” Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added: “I’ll give Trump the space he needs to deal with Kim, but I’ll remind the president, you have to deliver on this. This is one of the signature issues of your administration.”
But he already has delivered – he and Kim are in total agreement about how stupid Joe Biden is.
Appearing on NBC News’ Meet the Press on Sunday morning, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders doubled down on her boss’s endorsement of a totalitarian dictator’s attacks on one of his political opponents—an opponent who also happens to be a former American vice-president.
While overseas during a four-day trip to Japan, President Trump tweeted that he wasn’t bothered by North Korea firing off “some small weapons” because the nation’s brutal leader made him smile “when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual.”
“Go ahead, nuke Japan, nuke Hawaii, nuke the west coast of the US, as long as you keep joking about how dumb Joe Biden is.” That’s the actual literal president and his actual literal official press secretary.
After Sanders said that Trump “still feels comfortable and confident in his relationship” with Kim despite recent missile tests and that the North Korean dictator will “stay true to the commitment” of denuclearization, host Chuck Todd asked her about the president’s words.
“Can you explain why Americans should not be concerned that the president of the United States is essentially siding with a murderous authoritarian dictator over a former vice president in the United States?” Todd wondered.
“Chuck, the president’s not siding with that,” the press secretary asserted before adding, “but I think they agree in their assessment of former Vice President Joe Biden.”
She went on to say that Trump’s focus right now “is the relationship he has” with Kim and that he hopes that relationship will “move us further down the path” of denuclearization.
“The president of the United States takes the North Korean dictator’s word about Joe Biden?” Todd exclaimed. “What happened to speaking with one voice in American foreign policy? Is the president not setting up trying to have world leaders sort of pick which political party they should side with? I don’t understand what message the president is sending here.”
