This day in Herstory: Yoko Ono, born February 18, 1933, is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art, which she performs in both English and Japanese, and filmmaking. (more)
SNP loses bid to ‘redefine meaning of women’ to include trans people on public boards
Ministers wanted transgender women to be included in a law designed to increase female representation but were overruled in court
From The Telegraph (UK)
By Daniel Sanderson
Feb 18, 2022
An attempt by SNP ministers to "redefine the meaning of women" to include people born as males has been ruled unlawful by the Scottish courts in a landmark victory for feminist campaigners.
Edinburgh's Court of Session found that the nationalist government went beyond its devolved powers by legislating that transgender women should count as women in a law designed to increase female representation on public boards.
The campaign group For Women Scotland, which crowdfunded almost £200,000 to mount the legal fight, lost a judicial review a year ago but has now succeeded on appeal.
The court said that the Scottish Parliament would have been entitled to legislate to attempt to increase numbers of women and trans people on public boards separately, as both groups are protected under the Equality Act.
However, it did not have the power to have "expanded the definition of women" to include trans women, a ruling delivered by Lady Dorrian, Scotland's second most senior judge, found. … read full article (paywall)
Margaret Atwood on Envy and Friendship in Old Age
The author of The Handmaid’s Tale read my story about losing friends in midlife. She had some thoughts.
From The Atlantic (USA)
By Jennifer Senior
Feb 18, 2022
So this is something you don’t experience every day as a writer: You post a thread about your new story on Twitter, a medium with which you have a love-hate relationship at best (essential to publicity, but also a forum for cruelty, an open pasture for a firing squad), and suddenly, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale appears in your timeline. She has read your story. She has some thoughts.
Wait till you get Really old. It will all change again. :)
This is what Margaret Atwood wrote to me on February 9, about 14 hours after I’d tweeted an essay I’d just completed about the heartache and complexity of friendships in midlife. Weirdly, no one else had made this observation. Atwood is 82.
How? I asked.
How?
How?
Her reply: Your old enemies may become pals because there’s only the two of youse left who can remember the Dark Ages
before there were computers. :D Or pantyhose. :D :D
Or plastic bags. :D :D :D
She added that she liked the part of my story about envy. I know no writers who’ve had some success who have not encountered it.
I wrote her an email: Would she chat with me for a bit about this? About envy in friendship, about friendship in old age?
She would. Margaret Atwood in real time is very much who you would expect the author of her 17 novels, 18 books of poetry, and 11 works of nonfiction to be: game, associative, energetic. (Her latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, publishes on March 1. I drank in the book this past weekend, in two warm slugs.) Also, she speaks in perfect aphorisms, just as she so often does on Twitter. Mythology is everything that happened before you were born, she wrote in our February 9 exchange. When your parents were gods and heroes. Legend is your life until approx age 7. History begins after that. :D
Here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript of our discussion. … read full article
‘Transgender’ Sex Offender Arrested for Violation of Probation
From Women Are Human (USA)
By Diana Shaw
Feb 18, 2022
US — Mingo County, Virginia. A convicted sex offender who was released from prison two years ago has been arrested for violating probation. On February 16, the Mingo County Sheriff’s Office announced that Samuel C Wolford was taken into custody by Sergeant Norman Mines.
The 35-year-old previously served a sentence in FCI Petersburg Medium, a medium security federal correctional institution and detention center in Hopewell, Virginia, after being adjudicated guilty for sexual offenses.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons database, Mr Wolford was last released from FCI Petersburg, which houses male offenders, on January 28 of this year.
A mugshot taken for his most recent arrest shows Mr Wolford, who is male, wearing pigtails and a blouse. … read full article (and DONATE to Women Are Human!)
The Gender Cult Marches On
Public Schools Indoctrinate Even Non-Verbal Special Needs Kids in Gender Confusion
From The Truth Fairy (USA)
By Abigail Shrier
Feb 18, 2022
A reader sent me a trove of materials for “Equity Month” courtesy of the Chicago Public School System, available here. It’s worse than you think.
Things to note:
Preschoolers (age 3-5) are to be taught what “Queer” means, what “Non-binary” means and told: "When someone is not a boy or a girl, maybe they feel both, they are non-binary or queer."
Teachers of preschoolers are told to read from The Story of Harvey Milk, stopping at “Harvey was proud of the flag, and proud of himself.” Are you proud of yourself, little one?
Even Special Needs kids (including the non-verbal and those on the Autism Spectrum, who tend to fixate) are to be instructed to create BLM flags and indoctrinated in the alleged difference between sexuality and gender.
Every single part of the school day becomes a reason to teach children about being transgender, or America’s systemic racism. The lessons are inserted into every part of the day — even P.E., Visual Arts, Drama, Library Lessons and Music. The P.E. materials for grades 4-5 must be seen to be believed:
There is hardly a religious school in America that would insist on pushing dogma on students during Physical Education class. And this isn’t merely incorporating dogma into P.E. The activists have all but replaced P.E. with an ideological struggle session.
The Gender Ideology and Critical Race Theory program pushed on American children is far more ambitious than that of almost any parochial school: The relentlessness is cult-like. The activists see Special Needs kids as pliable recruits. They view any break from indoctrination as wasted opportunity. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to The Truth Fairy!)
The Backlash Against Trans Extremism
It's now happening in schools, and could take gay people down with it.
From The Weekly Dish (USA)
By Andrew Sullivan
Feb 18, 2022
For the first 15 years of my life, I never heard the word “homosexuality” in my home or school. I only knew about sex at all because in my Catholic primary school, we had a class on the immaculate conception, and I was the smart-ass who asked what a maculate one would mean.
In my high school, there were no classes on sex. My Latin teacher — a legend among the boys — talked about it one day, and the morality of gay sex. He was admirably frank about why he thought it was not optimal: “It’s the wrong hole, isn’t it?” The only other explicit encounter I had with the matter in school was when I was sitting in the toilet and noticed a graffito. It read: “My mother made me a homosexual.” And underneath, someone else had scrawled: “If I gave her the wool, would she make me one too?”
I’m old but not that old. The speed of change has been dizzying. So it’s a little surreal to read about a 2020 training workshop at the National Association of Independent Schools conference. Here’s one teacher explaining the modus operandi:
Starting in Pre-K we talk about their bodies, the parts that they were born with, about penises and vaginas and whether they make somebody a boy or girl. But also their feelings, what do they feel like inside, do they feel like a boy or a girl? What does their head say? Do their heart and their body match up?
This is in Pre-K? The NAIS-approved core teaching about sex takes the experience of around 0.3 percent of the population, and bases the entire sex education of the 99.7 percent around an experience they do not have, will never have, and have never been faintly troubled by, and does this even before they’ve started kindergarten. You could, I suppose, call this trans inclusion. You could also call it a reductio ad absurdum.
From the same NAIS workshop, a teacher confesses she once got a bit carried away: “It was my first year so I was like, ‘okay, we’re just super progressive;’ so I went in there guns blazing and I just went for it. And I ended up talking about the vulva and the labia with Pre-K’ers.” … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to The Weekly Dish!)
‘Genderless’ Transhumanist Got Body Bio-Hacked, Implanting 50+ Chips, Antennae, Magnets
From Women Are Human (USA)
By Diana Shaw
Feb 18, 2022
UK — England. A British transhumanist, whose body contains over 50 chips, magnets and antennae implanted over a 14-year period, was recently lauded by Business Insider as a genderless, posthuman hybrid of human and machine. The transhumanist, who has experienced at least one medical emergency as a result of the implants, has expressed hopes that more people will try the experiments on their own bodies.
Lepht Anonym, a self-taught underground biohacker who works “with mostly implants, mostly in the field of sensory expansion,” runs the blog Sapiens Anonym, which has amassed over 600,000 followers since its June 2007 launch and become a key reference for aspiring transhumanists and biohackers.
She wrote in her Blogger.com bio: “Lepht Anonym is a faceless, genderless British biohacker. It lacks both gods and money, and likes people, science, and practical transhumanism.” The blog debunks religious beliefs, such as the Christian, Muslim and Jewish view of creationism and aspires to use formal logic and logical systems to bring human bodies past all natural limitations. … read full article (and DONATE to Women Are Human!)
The New York Times takes aim at J.K. Rowling
She Who Must Not Be Named
From The Spectator (UK)
By Cockburn
Feb 18, 2022
It looks like the New York Times is at it again. In recent years, America’s least-reliable news source has developed a strange view of Britain — or at least since the Brexit vote in 2016. In the NYT’s world, the UK is a desolate place, where locals huddle round trash can fires on the streets of London, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps during the summer, ever fearful of the despot prime minister, Boris Johnson. Just last month the paper’s international edition ran a front-page comment piece claiming the country would “sleepwalk into tyranny” thanks to our “ever more spiteful nationalism.'”
Now though it seems the Brit-bashing has a new outlet: attacking the UK’s greatest living writer. In their rush to identify themselves with fashionable elite opinion, the New York Times has decided to take aim at J.K. Rowling, persona non grata in the woketariat for her comments about sex and gender. The paper has launched a new achingly right-on advertising campaign, ostensibly based around one of its subscribers and their passions. … read full article
One-time paper of record unpersons JK Rowling
1984, chapter 62
From Writing Behavior (Canada)
By Eliza Mondegreen
Feb 18, 2022
One-time paper of record unpersons JK Rowling to attract new subscribers among jaded Harry Potter fans who have exceptionally poor reading comprehension skills.
What Rowling actually wrote is worth reading (primary sources >>>>>>> secondary sources). Don't work backwards from the deranged backlash to conclude she must have written something hateful. She didn't. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to Writing Behavior!)