This day in Herstory: Janet Collins, born March 7, 1917 (died May 28, 2003), was an African American ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher. She performed on Broadway, in films, and appeared frequently on television.[1] She was among the pioneers of black ballet dancing, one of the few classically trained Black dancers of her generation. (more)
Whose day is it today?
We’ve hit on the perfect way of denying women a social and intellectual heritage
From The Critic (UK)
By Victoria Smith (@glosswitch)
March 7, 2022
“The entire history of women’s struggle,” wrote Adrienne Rich in 1980, “has been muffled in silence over and over… each feminist work has tended to be treated as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one us had lived, thought and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.”
It’s 2022, International Women’s Day, the second week of Women’s History Month. I’m reading a second-hand copy of Rich, dead since 2012 and now deemed “problematic” due to her “outdated” views on what a woman was. My own era is feminist in aspiration — we want a heritage of our own! — yet routinely let down by those who inhabited the past. Then again, so was Rich’s. No matter the time or place, you just can’t get the dead women.
Pretending not to know what a woman is has become a mark of sophistication
It’s not that the dead women didn’t do their best, in an era deprived of the wisdom of Judith Butler and Paris Lees. The first International Women’s Day was held in March 1911, following a proposal made by the German theorist and activist Clara Zetkin at the second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen. The focus was on women’s rights to work, vote, access education and hold public office (“the right to sit on our arses afterwards” was hopefully taken as read).
Over a century later, many of the issues Zetkin highlighted remain unresolved. Today, countless business will declare themselves appalled by the invisible female labour on which their profit margins depend. The theme of IWD 2022 is #BreakTheBias, implying that the problem resides in ongoing misapprehensions about what women are as opposed to the intentional exploitation of half the human race. I can’t help thinking this is all very convenient.
It’s not that anyone wants to load us with the majority of the world’s unpaid work while excluding us from majority of decision-making opportunities. It’s just that no one ever objected before. Apart from all the dead women — and they are, you will recall, problematic, not least because they tended to have a stable concept of what a woman was. … read full article
Self-ID law will harm the most vulnerable women, says JK Rowling
JK Rowling said Shona Robison’s claim over predatory men was “astounding”
From The Times (UK)
By Ian Marland
March 7, 2022
JK Rowling has claimed that the Scottish government’s plans to reform gender recognition laws will “harm the most vulnerable women in society”.
The author also criticised Shona Robison, the social justice secretary, over comments she made about predatory and abusive men.
Rowling described the minister’s claim that there was no evidence that sexual predators “have ever had to pretend to be anything else” as “astounding”.
The Gender Recognition Reform Bill was tabled by the Scottish government last week. Ministers say it will simplify the process for a trans person to change their legally recognised gender, while critics say it will undermine the safety of women-only spaces.
Rowling responded on Twitter. She said: “The law Nicola Sturgeon is trying to pass in Scotland will harm the most vulnerable women in society — those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women. … read full article (share token)
Nicola Sturgeon 'fundamentally disagrees' with Harry Potter author JK Rowling over gender bill criticism
The First Minister also hinted her own MSPs would not be given a free vote, after saying they were all elected on a manifesto commitment of change.
From The Daily Record (Scotland)
By Paul Hutcheon
March 7, 2022
Nicola Sturgeon has clashed with Harry Potter author JK Rowling over her Government’s plans to make it easier for people to legally change their gender.
The First Minister said she “fundamentally disagreed” with the writer over claims the draft legislation would harm the most vulnerable women in society.
The SNP /Green Government last week published plans which would simplify the process for trans people to change gender.
If passed, it would reduce the time a trans person would have to live in their acquired gender from two years to three months, followed by another three-month reflection period.
The Bill will also lower the age trans people will have to be to obtain a gender recognition certificate and scrap the requirement for a medical diagnosis.
But critics fear the plans could lead to a loss of women-only spaces – such as refuges, hospital wards, toilets and changing rooms – which could then impact on women’s safety.
JK Rowling yesterday criticised the proposed law in a tweet: “The law @NicolaSturgeon 's trying to pass in Scotland will harm the most vulnerable women in society: those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women.
“Statistics show that imprisoned women are already far more likely to have been previously abused.” … read full article
America’s Biggest Children’s Hospital To Stop ‘Gender-Affirming Therapies’ For Kids
From The Daily Wire (USA)
By Leif Le Mahieu
March 7, 2022
Following Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s directive for the state to investigate whether some transgender procedures on kids constituted child abuse, a pediatric hospital in Texas has announced that it will stop performing “gender-confirming therapies” for children.
Texas Children’s Hospital, America’s biggest pediatric hospital, made the announcement on Friday, saying the move was aimed at protecting health care professionals and families.
“The mission of Texas Children’s Hospital is to create a healthier future for all children, including transgender children, within the bounds of the law,” a statement from the hospital said. “This step was taken to safeguard our health care professionals and impacted families from potential criminal legal ramifications.”
Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general celebrated the move. “Glad to hear that today Texas Children’s Hospital halted their child-abuse procedures,” he tweeted.
The announcement came after Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott said that he was ordering Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate whether “so-called ‘sex change’ procedures” were child abuse. … read full article
Newborn Girl Killed by Father Because He Wanted a Son
From REDUXX (USA)
March 7, 2022
Disturbing news out of Pakistan as police report a 1-week-old girl was murdered by her father because he wanted a son.
After the vile crime was committed, the father fled the home and is currently at large in the Punjab province of Pakistan.
Details on the crime are limited, but the incident has been addressed by the National Commission for the Dignity of Women in Pakistan. Commission chairwoman Nilofar Bakhtiar spoke to local media today and confirmed that the girl had been killed because of her sex.
Police have released information to the public on the father, identifying him as Shahzeb, in hopes of locating him, and Bakhtiar has vowed to ensure that the perpetrator is brought to justice.
Crimes against female children are not uncommon in Pakistan, and are considered part of a wider trend on violence against women in the nation which Human Rights Watch has deemed "endemic." … read full article (and SUPPORT REDUXX!)
How my career was cancelled by the woke warriors who have taken over publishing: Dropped for supporting JK Rowling, this children's author now works as an HGV driver. Here she reveals the dystopian world where writers are obliterated overnight
From The Daily Mail (UK)
By Gillian Philip (@Gillian_Philip)
March 6, 2022
Once upon a time, in a halcyon era that now seems like a distant golden age, writing books was a creative endeavour; a job in which you let your imagination take flight.
Various points of view were allowed to flourish. Stories were peopled by both heroes and villains. The offensive, the reprehensible, even the downright evil, coexisted with the noble and good.
Fiction was as multi-faceted as the world we live in, and writing was a realm of free expression in which authors had licence to provoke thought, illuminate discussion, even — dare I say it — voice unfashionable opinions without fear of being pilloried and 'cancelled'.
White authors such as Alexander McCall Smith could invent black characters, as he did in his wildly successful, Botswana-based The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, without being accused of 'cultural appropriation'.
Thomas Harris could conjure from his fertile mind the grotesque Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs without being accused of celebrating cannibalism. And he could invent the chilling serial killer Buffalo Bill — who murdered and skinned overweight females to make a 'woman suit' out of their skin — without being cancelled for transphobia.
In that not-so-distant past JK Rowling could have freely expressed a belief that a biological male, with a man's body and genitalia, could not become a woman simply because he felt like one.
Today all that has changed. Our freedom to think expansively and creatively, even to express our own views, is being undermined as surely as it would be in a totalitarian state. Books are literally being pulped if their authors refuse to toe the line. It is as if the Communist Red Guard has taken over.
And some of us, myself among them, who have challenged the prevailing orthodoxy on anything from transgender issues to race have been summarily dropped by our publishers. … read full article
Irish self-ID gender laws went ‘under the radar’
From The Times (UK)
By Colin Coyle
March 6, 2022
IGLYO, an international network of 96 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organisations, published a report in 2019 praising Ireland for passing gender recognition legislation “under the radar” by “latching trans rights legislation on to more popular legal reforms (eg marriage equality), rather than taking more combative, public-facing approaches”.
When Ireland introduced the Gender Recognition Act in 2015, it became just the fourth country in the world to allow adults to self-determine their gender on official documentation, including passports and driving licences. In the absence of high-profile critics like JK Rowling, the law passed with none of the rancour that has characterised the debate on transgender rights in the United Kingdom and America. The IGLYO has speculated that conservative voices in Ireland had their minds elsewhere on other hot-button topics such as marriage equality and abortion when the law was being drawn up.
The legislation was prompted by the case of Lydia Foy, a retired dentist who waged a 20-year battle to be recognised as a woman after having sex-reassignment surgery in 1992. She won her case when the Irish High Court ruled the existing law was not compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. … read full article
Gender debate shows the flaws in hate crime law
From The Times (UK)
By Lois McLatchie
March 8, 2022
Last week the Scottish government tabled the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which will make it easier for anyone aged 16 or over to change their legal gender. What used to require a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, a requirement to have committed to the decision through one’s lifestyle for at least two years and an assessment by experts will become a swift application process based on self-identification. It will require only three months of lifestyle commitment and a reflection period of a further three months. While some celebrate the process becoming easier, others have expressed alarm over the reduction of safeguards. Ill-intentioned male actors could exploit the system, gaining access to women-only spaces.
JK Rowling, the author, who is a survivor of domestic abuse, has said that while she “respect[s] every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic”, she also believes there must be adequate protection for biological females at risk of violence by biological males. By making it easy for predatory males to slip through the gender change system, she tweeted, the bill will “harm the most vulnerable women in society”.
As Twitter tensions escalated, debate turned into mud-slinging. One Saturday Night Live comedy writer said having a Harry Potter tattoo was now equivalent to wearing a swastika. Almost 50,000 users “liked” the comment. Such a distortion of language disrespects the victims of historical tragedies. Furthermore, under Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, such an allegation could have criminal consequences. This law, passed a year ago to the week, could punish those whose words are interpreted to have “stirred up hatred” with jail. … read full article
The missionaries in your workplace
From Kathleen Stock (UK)
By Kathleen Stock
March 7, 2022
Humans are susceptible to trends. Even the fiercest individualist doesn’t form her desires and personal goals in a social vacuum. This extends to moral attitudes too. Skirt lengths go up and down with the times, both literally and metaphorically.
The proneness of personal morals to social influence has long encouraged missionary-types to think they should cross the globe to save people’s souls. These days, though, the missionary in your life is as likely to be a manager in your workplace as a Mormon doing speculative house-calls - and certainly, the manager is harder to get rid of. In the last decade in the UK, there’s been an escalation in attempts, both by corporations and public organisations, to alter workers’ moral attitudes. To those who endorse the attitudes in question, the attempts may seem harmless - indeed, they may be practically invisible. But even if you think a given moral agenda is self-evidently correct, I think you should recognise that there are significant problems with your boss trying to push it on you.
It’s the 2010 Equality Act that kick-started the surge in moralisation in workplaces. Among other things, this law says that an employer is to be held accountable for any discrimination and harassment carried out by its employees against people with protected characteristics, unless it can show that it has taken “all reasonable steps” to prevent it. To defend itself, the burden falls on the employer to show that it has introduced adequate internal procedures aimed at prevention. The drafters of the Equality Act apparently conceived this law as a kind of “reflexive” or "smart" regulation: that is, as incentivising organisations to create internal procedures that will meet regulatory standards, where those procedures are to some extent self-initiated and self-driven (treating a sector or organisation, somewhat artificially, as a “self”). With this sort of regulation, then, there is a move away from “command and control” to something more indirect and quasi-autonomous. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to Kathleen Stock!)
Parent Question: Communicating with Questions
Communicating with someone who is indoctrinated.
From prude posting (USA)
By Helena
March 7, 2022
This is a question I received from a parent and responded to on my old Medium account. I think its worth re-sharing here because it begins to unpack how to better communicate with a young person who is indoctrinated into trans ideology, which is something parents are struggling with across the board. This is certainly a complicated and sensitive topic and my thoughts are still evolving, but this article does have some useful tips on how to reframe your approach to conversations with someone who is indoctrinated.
What could be a question that one could present to a teen that firmly believes she was born trans? Even though said child told me at 16.5 she was glad she was born a girl but now when people think she’s a boy she feels more confident. what could be some questions to cause her to pause and think? She is extremely angry at me and moved out after grad. I tried for 2.5 years to keep her from using testosterone. I had her watch your podcasts of pique resilience and she told me that she could not relate. I think she convinced herself of that. She told me that most people that detransition only thought they were trans because of trauma ( due to things I had her watch) and she has never experienced trauma or been sexually abused so therefore she’s the “real deal”.
I think it’s great that you are trying to think of ways to deepen the conversation with her. The fact that you went from an approach of showing her things and trying to reason with her, and noticed that that didn’t work, shows that you are adaptable and willing to work with what you have. That’s good!
When it comes to what kind of questions to ask, I’m sure I could come up with a list of a few that might get the ball rolling. But, that to me risks neglecting some of the most important work at your hands: listening. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to prude posting!)
Up against the limits of language
From Writing Behavior (Canada)
By Eliza Mondegreen
March 7, 2022
Whenever I look at trans activism, I think: For all your theories about the transformative powers of discourse and the mortal dangers posed by those of us who use the wrong words (somehow it’s always women's words that are the wrong words), language is not half as powerful as you’d need it to be to make the things you say true.
With language you can obscure, distort, delude, deride, dissemble or desperately try to change the subject. You can say TRANSWOMEN ARE WOMEN all you want but you won’t make it true. Language can’t make the empty promises of transition real. Words can’t turn a girl into a boy or a man into a woman. Words can make a claim but words can’t make it fair for Lia Thomas to compete against women.
All you have are words. What actually is is something else.
A powerful man can create a climate of fear and use his power to warp reality for everyone around him. He demonstrates his power over others when he compels them to submit to his view of himself. But such a fiction is a fragile creation, an easily broken spell. An abuser can appear to the world a decent man—but only as long as his victims never speak or only as long nobody believes them if they do.
So more important than language—which obscures or clarifies but doesn’t ultimately transform reality—is enforcement: punishing those who refuse to play along. In the presence of fragile all-important narratives, no one must be allowed to speak freely, crack jokes, or make uncomfortable observations. These fictions can only become true in the sense and to the exact extent that the world around you pretends along with you.
A liar or dissembler can fool an audience if the truth never speaks or if people who speak the truth get smeared as bigots before they even open their mouths. You can prop up a fiction by frightening people out of talking—and out of listening.
Language can’t make a monster out of a children’s author, but it can hound her out of publishing. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to Writing Behavior!)