Purple Sage has a post on a new “Safer Sex” guide for trans people. Read it all; I want to share a couple of her points here.

The guide begins by defining some terms:

“We, as trans people, use a variety of words to describe our gender and our body parts, and these words can be very unique and personal. There’s no one right way to refer to our bodies, but to keep things consistent in this guide, we’ve decided to use the following words in the following ways.

…

PARTS: We use this word when we’re talking about genitals or sexual anatomy of any kind.

DICK: We use this word to describe external genitals. Dicks come in all shapes and sizes and can belong to people of all genders.

FRONT HOLE: We use this word to talk about internal genitals, sometimes referred to as a vagina. A front hole may self-lubricate, depending on age and hormones.

STRAPLESS: We use this word to describe the genitals of trans women who have not had genital reconstruction (or “bottom surgery”), sometimes referred to as a penis.

VAGINA: We use this word to talk about the genitals of trans women who have had bottom surgery.

See what they did there? Women have “front holes” but trans women have vaginas.

Is that, finally, obvious enough misogyny that people will get it?

Then there’s some very creepy shit about “transactional sex” which is what they call prostitution.

This guide talks about consent, which is good, but look how they throw in a sentence about “transactional sex.”

“Consent is the enthusiastic, mutual and voluntary agreement to do whatever activity you’re discussing. Giving consent is an ongoing process: You always have the right to say “yes” or “no” to any sexual activity regardless of whether you’ve done it before, whether you know your partner really likes it or whether you’re in the middle of doing it. We also recognize that transactional sex complicates consent. If at any point you change your mind about doing something, you should say so and your partner needs to stop.”

And johns always stop when the sex worker changes her mind, as is well known. There is no violence in the “transactional sex” industry, however much transactional sex complicates consent. And I’m Marie of Rumania.

In their section on communication, they talk about “transactional sex” again:

“We recognize that communication can be complicated with transactional sex partners. In some cases, the recognition of the sex transaction can actually help frame sexual negotiation, but power and control dynamics can also make this more challenging. Hopefully, ongoing communication can help us have sexual experiences where we all feel safe and respected.”

Hopefully! Yeah! Let’s hope so! Let’s just keep hoping so forever, while the johns beat up the sex workers and nobody gives a damn. Hopefully all that will stop one of these days.

And then there’s the BDSM part, but I’ll let Purple Sage tell you about the knives and blades and what she thinks the correct advice is. (Spoiler: don’t use them.)

Yes! The FDA has banned anti-bacterial soaps.

Antibacterial soaps were banned from the US market on Friday in a final ruling by the Food and Drug Administration, which said that manufacturers had failed to prove the cleansers were safe or more effective than normal products.

Dr Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s center for evaluation and research, said that certain antimicrobial soaps may not actually serve any health benefits at all.

“Consumers may think antibacterial washes are more effective at preventing the spread of germs, but we have no scientific evidence that they are any better than plain soap and water,” she said in a statement. “In fact, some data suggests that antibacterial ingredients may do more harm than good over the long term.”

Let me guess – they may do more harm over the long term for the same reason overuse of antibiotics does: the bacteria evolve to withstand the soaps, so then they’re that much harder to get rid of.

The FDA first proposed a rule about the chemicals in 2013, following research that they might affect human hormones or change natural resistance to bacteria. The agency requested research from the producers to back up their health claims, but in the three years since has found that data lacking or their requests ignored.

Triclosan has been proven effective at killing bacteria if used at sustained length – far longer than the few seconds most people spend washing their hands – and was once only found in healthcare settings.

Recent studies have linked triclosan to a series of disruptions in human and animal health. A University of Chicago study released in July found that triclosan changed the microbiome inside human guts, and its researchers suggested that exposure could damage developing fetuses. A study from earlier this year found that overuse could also be contributing to antibiotic resistance, and a 2015 studyfound that antibacterial formulas were not more effective than soap and water.

So if they’re not more effective, it’s a really bad idea to use then when they could be contributing to antibiotic resistance, eh?

Professor Patrick McNamara, who has published research on antimicrobial soaps, called the ruling “logical” because research shows “there is no added benefit to having these antimicrobial chemicals in soaps”.

He added that triclosan could play a part in driving antibiotic resistance, saying, “after these chemicals are used in our homes they go down the drain to wastewater treatment plants and eventually to the environment where they can select for antibiotic resistance genes”.

“In short, triclosan and triclocarbon present a risk towards propagation of antibiotic resistance,” he said. “Since they do not offer added benefits when washing hands, their use is not worth their environmental risk.”

Thank you FDA.

A new horror in the murder of Samia Shahid: she was raped before being murdered.

A British woman who died in Pakistan in a so-called honour killing was raped before her death, the officer in charge of the investigation has said.

Samia Shahid, 28, from Bradford, died in July in northern Punjab.

The Pakistani chief investigator also told the BBC Ms Shahid’s father and former husband carried out her murder.

He added he was seeking to have her mother and sister returned to Pakistan to be questioned about their role in the murder.

She never wanted to marry him in the first place. She was forced to marry him. She left him, and divorced, and married someone she did want to marry. For that he first raped her and then killed her.

The depth of hatred just never ceases to amaze me.

A friend went to the Science Museum – you know, the prototype one, the original one, the one in South Kensington. The friend took pictures of an exhibit. I got permission to share them. They’re from a Wellcome Trust exhibition, Who Am I?

“Who am I?” is a somewhat odd question for a science museum. Science can tell us what we are but not really who. Who questions are conceptual rather than scientific.

“Gender identity” isn’t a scientific term. It’s political. It’s maybe literary, maybe philosophical; it’s conceptual…but it’s not scientific.

“Identity” too is not scientific. “Feeling” male or female is not scientific.

Not science.

A press release from Maryam and One Law for All:

Dear Mona Siddqui

RE: Independent Review into Sharia Law

Thank you for your invitation to give evidence to  the Sharia review.

We will not be able to accept your invitation. We are boycotting the review because of its limited terms of reference; the panel makeup (including yourself – a theologian – as chair and a former Judge who is a member of the Christian Lawyers Fellowship); imams as ‘advisors’; and your labelling the legitimate concerns of women’s rights campaigners and organisations as ‘arrogant’. The above confirm our fears that the review will be nothing but a whitewash aimed at further legitimising parallel legal systems at the expense of women’s rights.

Our concerns have been clearly laid out in an open letter to the then Home Secretary signed by nearly 200 prominent women’s rights campaigners and organisations to which we have yet to receive a response.

As mentioned in the open letter, minority women deserve an independent, impartial, judge-led inquiry centred on human rights and not theology. Theologians and those invested in augmenting religion’s role in the law cannot impartially investigate a system from which they benefit. As testimonies gathered from women reveals, religion in the law is discriminatory particularly against women. Any review that does not look into the full extent of rights violations of Sharia bodies from a human rights perspective cannot be considered a legitimate review nor taken seriously.

Sincerely

Maryam Namazie, Spokesperson, One Law for All

Gina Khan, Spokesperson, One Law for All

BM Box 2387, London WC1N 3XX, UK

tel: +44 (0) 7719166731

email: onelawforall@gmail.com

web: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/

It’s horrifying that this is going ahead.

Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Approaching a woman in a confident, easy going way.

As Samantha says, listen to women.

Do you go up to men reading and demand that they talk to you, that they flirt with you even? Do you go up to men out jogging and demand that they converse with you on the basis of no known common interest? Do you get all het up and defensive when you try to start a conversation and the man walks away? Probably not but the way you are addressing this issue suggests that you might just be daft enough.

When women are interested in making new friends and acquaintances they put themselves into social situations where casual conversation is easy – a bar, a hobby club, something like that – but no-one is under any obligation to begin or to continue any particular conversation, to stay while the other person bores them to death or to agree to see them privately.

You, though, seem to be trying to put some random woman into a position where she is obliged to put your sexual curiosity ahead of all other considerations. It’s not on!

As for “faint heart never won fair lady” do you even know where that notion comes from? Think France in the fourteen century and the cultural aberration which produced the troubadours. Sure, that produced some middling poetry and some slightly better songs but it was a game played by the elite and was almost entirely played in people’s heads. It involved men getting or pretending to get a crush on a woman of high social status and drooling poetically all over her, knowing that she had the clout to get him beaten up, locked up or disappeared if he went too far. It was a game of “how far dare I go” and does not translate to the New York subway or wherever in the twenty-first century.

There is another way of going about this if you’d be interested. Imagine that women are people. They are on the way to, say, an interview or having a last read of their brief before they appear in court. Or they might just be trying to pick up the bread and milk on the way home to feed the kids. It doesn’t matter. No matter how superficially you may be attracted to someone at first glance she owes you nothing. Stop trying to remake the world so that she does. Stop trying to convince us? yourself? that women like it. We don’t. And look out for all those signals which say, before you open your mouth, I do not wish to speak to you.

If you can understand a clenched fist coming towards you then you can understand earbuds or hunched shoulders, a refusal to make eye contact. If you try.

A bad thing didn’t happen:

A deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive parts of a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The court was divided 4 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members voting to revive parts of the law.

That includes Clarence Thomas, of course – voting to weaken the Voting Rights Act.

North Carolina’s law, which imposed an array of voting restrictions, including new voter identification requirements, was enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2013. It was part of a wave of voting restrictions enacted after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively struck down a central part of the federal Voting Rights Act, weakening federal oversight of voting rights.

So that states could claw back a little racism in their voting laws.

Civil rights groups joined with the Obama administration in filing suit against the law, arguing that, several parts of the law violated the Constitution and what remained of the Voting Rights Act. A trial judge rejected those claims in April, but in July a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., disagreed.

The appeals court ruling struck down five parts of the law: its voter ID requirements, a rollback of early voting to 10 days from 17, an elimination of same-day registration and of preregistration of some teenagers, and its ban on counting votes cast in the wrong precinct.

The court found that all five restrictions “disproportionately affected African Americans.” The law’s voter identification provision, for instance, “retained only those types of photo ID disproportionately held by whites and excluded those disproportionately held by African Americans.”

This was so, the court said, even though the state had “failed to identify even a single individual who has ever been charged with committing in-person voter fraud in North Carolina.” But it did find that there is evidence of fraud in absentee voting by mail, a method used disproportionately by white voters. But the Legislature exempted absentee voting from the photo ID requirement.

But we were assured it was all about preventing voter fraud. Assured.

More good advice for men who want to intrude on women:

THE cold vastness of space is a surprisingly good place to pull because female astronauts get very lonely and horny.

Here’s how to approach a lady spaceman as she is orbiting the Earth:

– When you meet a female astronaut out in the Earth’s orbit, the first thing you should do is casually knock on the helmet and introduce yourself.

– Their first response may be to tell you “Fuck off” but that’s just them being coy and maybe a little shy. We all know what women are like.

– Persistence is key. So, just casually knock on the helmet again and gesture for them to remove the helmet so you can ask their name.

Read the whole thing; it’s funny. Martin Bishop wrote it.

It’s not just the Olympics. Even when a woman is murdered, she’s reported as Relative of Famous Athlete Man. Being murdered is a lot worse than being disappeared in the reporting of your murder, but still – it’s an extra indignity, and it’s not great for the murdered woman’s loved ones, either.

Reuters last Sunday:

The headline: Two Chicago brothers on parole charged in murder of NBA star’s cousin

That’s an appalling headline.

First para:

Chicago police on Sunday said they have arrested two brothers and charged them with the fatal shooting of basketball star Dwyane Wade’s cousin as she pushed a baby in a stroller, a murder that has stunned a city plagued by a surge in gang-related violence.

Still bad. Puts the basketball star first, and leaves the murdered woman as just a nameless “cousin.”

The story doesn’t get to her until the second paragraph:

In a case that has emerged as a talking point in the U.S. presidential race, Darwin Sorrells Jr., 26, and Derren Sorrells, 22, are facing charges of first-degree murder and attempted murder in the death of Nykea Aldridge, a 32-year-old mother of four, police said.

I get that more people will read it if there’s a famous person hook, but then more people will read a story on climate change if you put a photo of Kim Kardashian at the top, too, and that’s not a reason to do it.

The European Commission ruled yesterday that Ireland’s deal with Apple was a good deal too sweet for Apple (and thus sour for Ireland and the Irish people).

Ireland should recover up to €13bn (£11bn) from Apple in back taxes, the European Commission has ruled.

After a three-year investigation, it has concluded that the US firm’s Irish tax benefits are illegal.

The Commission said Ireland enabled the company to pay substantially less than other businesses, in effect paying a corporate tax rate of no more than 1%.

“Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules,” said Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

“The Commission’s investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years,” she added.

The standard rate of Irish corporate tax is 12.5%. The Commissions’s investigation concluded that Apple had effectively paid 1% tax on its European profits in 2003 and about 0.005% in 2014.

I wonder why Ireland did that. Hoping it would contribute to Ireland’s status as a tech hub?

Dominic O’Connell explains:

Individual governments appear impotent in their attempts to apply their tax laws to multinationals like Apple. They have systems designed to deal with the movement and sale of physical goods, systems that are useless when companies derive their profits from the sale of services and the exploitation of intellectual property.

In Apple’s case, 90% of its foreign profits are legally channelled to Ireland, and then to subsidiaries which have no tax residence. At the same time, countries can scarcely afford not to co-operate when Apple comes calling; it has a stock market value of $600bn, and the attraction of the jobs it can create and the extra inward investment its favours can bring are too much for most politicians to resist.

But 13 billion euros? I would think politicians would find that hard to resist too.

There is an echo here of the tycoons of the early 20th Century who bestrode America. Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Rockefeller were judged so powerful that they were almost above the law, something that successive US administrations sought to curb.

The European Commission’s attempt to bring Apple to heel is on the surface about tax, but in the end about the power of the multinational and the power of the state. There is more to come; Margrethe Vestager, the Danish commissioner who is leading the charge against Apple, is warming up to take on Google.

Europe versus the giants of corporate America will be a battle royale, and one that will run and run.

Colonialism rides again, disguised as a hipster.

This is several years old, but it makes the point neatly.

Look, if posing naked were empowering, then the rich men who run the world would be lining up for it. We would be awash in naked dick shots of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and Barack Obama; magazines would be filled with male politicians and financiers and moguls with their bits hanging out. Softly lit, perhaps; head coyly tilted, bunny tail on the ass. Power.

But we’re not awash with those, are we. No Trump, no Putin, no Erdoğan – no generals, no CEOs, no bankers. No one telling men that selfies are empowering. Hmm.

A UK charity called the Children’s Society does an annual report, and this year’s report shows a rise in misery among girls.

Among 10 to 15-year-old girls, the charity’s report says 14% are unhappy with their lives as a whole, and 34% with their appearance.

Researchers were told of girls feeling ugly or worthless.

The figures for England, Wales and Scotland for 2013-14 represent a sharp rise in unhappiness on five years before.

By contrast the study found that boys’ sense of happiness remained stable.

What explanation came to mind before I read more? Twitter. Twitter, Facebook, selfies, Redditt – and how they all enable and amplify abuse.

It follows research recently published by the Department for Education which showed the mental well-being of teenage girls in England has worsened, compared with their counterparts in 2005.

The study highlighted the growing pressure of social media and suggested that a tough economic climate had created a more “serious” generation of young people.

…

The proportion of girls reporting being worried about their looks rose from 30% for the period as a whole, to 34% in the year 2013-14 – while the proportion of boys unhappy with their appearance remained unchanged at 20%.

Social media have made it so much more obvious than it used to be that female people are constantly and ruthlessly judged on their appearance.

In another study, childcare professionals have published evidence that children could be worrying about being fat or ugly at a younger age, with girls particularly affected.

The Professional Association of Childcare and Early Years says staff have noticed children as young as three being worried about their appearance.

That sucks.

Martha Mills at the Guardian has thoughts on Dan Bacon’s how to intrude on women advice:

Here’s Dan’s interpretation of how the conversation goes once a man has used his infallible five-point Jedi mind trick to bludgeon a woman from her blissful state of aural security:

You: [Smile in a friendly, confident manner] Hey – I know it’s not normal for people to talk to someone with headphones in, but I was walking along and saw you and thought – wow, she’s a cutie, I have to say hi. I’m Dan, what’s your name?

Woman: [Usually flattered by the compliment and impressed by your confidence to approach her like that] Jessica.

You: [Add in some humor] Cool…nice to meet you Jessica. I don’t normally talk to girls with headphones, but your big green headphones were just calling out to me.

Woman: [Most likely laughing, smiling and enjoying the interaction].

You: [Let her know that you have something to do/somewhere to go, so she understands that you’re not going to stand there talking to her for 30 minutes] Anyway, so I’m just out doing a bit of shopping at the moment. I’m on my way to a store up the street. How’s your day going so far?

In his scenario, Jessica has just been waiting her whole life to be blessed with the attention of a complete stranger who mistakes hunched shoulders, darting eyes and rictus for laughing and smiling.

Here’s how it plays out in real life. Trust me, I’ve been it, seen it and spoken to the survivors:

Him: I see you don’t want to be talked to but I find you physically attractive and I’m making that your problem.

Her: Please leave me alone.

Him: FUCK YOU, YOU STUCK UP BITCH, I DIDN’T FANCY YOU ANYWAY.

Then she explains how threatening and insulting all this really is:

I appreciate the world of mating is hard but please, for the love of humanity, learn this: just because you want, doesn’t mean you can have. Women are not commodities to be hunted and won, and if you have no luck finding someone to bump pink bits with, that’s your problem, not our fault for not adhering to the playbook rules. It’s a playbook we never signed up for and it’s only a game if both teams actually know they’re playing.

Nowhere in his advice does Dan tell his frustrated man-babies how to handle rejection with grace, because the advice is simply not to accept it. This attitude is why I and countless other women have been been chased down the street, followed home, physically restrained, spat at, verbally abused and generally made to feel like garbage, merely for trying to exist.

So when, I hear the whiny pissbabies ask, when am I allowed to approach hot single women? Simple.

If a woman has her headphones in, the answer is never – and before you bleat on about “ooh, what if there’s a fire?”, she’ll smell it, even through all your bullshit. If you’re in a bar or party, her flirtatious smile may be the come-on you’re looking for, but be prepared to accept that you read it wrong, politely wish her a good evening and toddle back off out of her life without 20 minutes of awkward pawing, insisting she let you buy her a rohypnoltini. But how about this; take up a hobby, ask your friends if they know of someone looking to date or (brace yourself for a whopper of a revelation) if you’re looking for a horde of single, eligible women all looking for friendship-maybe-more in one convenient place, try a dating site.

Here’s a tip from me: don’t assume you have a “sense of humor” in the sense of being amusing to other people. It’s not something you can just assume and it doesn’t included along with the testicles.