This day in Herstory: Dandara was arrested on February 6, 1694, then committed suicide, refusing to return to a life of slavery.
Dandara was an Afro-Brazilian warrior of the colonial period of Brazil and was part of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who freed themselves from enslavement, in the present-day state of Alagoas.[1] After being arrested on February 6, 1694, she committed suicide, refusing to return to a life of slavery. She is a mysterious figure today, because not much is known about her life. Most of the stories about her are varied and disconnected.[2] She and her husband Zumbi dos Palmares, the last king of the Quilombo dos Palmares, had three children.
Described as a hero, Dandara dominated the techniques of capoeira and fought many battles alongside men and women to defend Palmares, the place where escaped slaves would go to live safely. Palmares was established in the 17th century in the Serra da Barriga, in the state of Alagoas, because it was difficult to access the area due to its dense vegetation.
It is unknown if she was born in Brazil or in Africa. When she was a young girl, she joined a group of Afro-Brazilians to fight against slavery in Brazil. She helped create strategies to protect Palmares. Dandara was known as a fighter, but she also had interests in hunting and agriculture. She planted corn, cassava, beans, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, and bananas.
The people of Palmares, known as Palmarinos, produced tools for agriculture and weapons for war. They also worked with wood, ceramics, and metals. Initially, all of the activities and work of the Palmarinos was to create their self-sustaining community, but some did trades with villages and mills in the region. (more)
Tavistock Gender Clinic Head Supports Ageplay, Furries
From REDUXX (USA)
By Genevieve Gluck
Feb 6, 2022
A prominent psychologist within the Gender Identity Clinic at Tavistock has called for normalizing ageplay, furry fetishes, and a variety of sadomasochistic sexual practices as "sexualities."
Dr. Christina Richards, the Lead Psychologist and Head of Psychology at the heavily criticized London Gender Identity Clinic, is responsible for a number of publications which seek to rebrand extreme fetishes as “further sexualities."
In 2013, Richards, a male who identifies as a woman, co-authored a professional guide on sexuality and gender, in collaboration with Meg John Barker, a senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University. In the writing, Richards places extreme and violent sexual practices on the same spectrum as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
In the guide Richards introduces ageplay, which involves “an adult identifying as a baby or young child, and is also known as adult baby/diaper lover (ABDL) or infantilism. There may be a sexual aspect… associated with humiliation.”
Richards goes on to describe how adults who engage in ‘ageplay’ accumulate various objects and apparel associated with childhood, including children’s clothing. Often one adult will roleplay as being any age from infancy to teenage years, while another adult participates in a dominant sexual role. … read full article
‘It’s time Lord Ahmed was truly shamed’: Survivor speaks out
From The Guardian (UK)
Campaigner and journalist Julie Bindel was the first to report on grooming scandals in the early 2000s. Here she talks exclusively to a survivor of ex-Labour peer Nazir Ahmed’s child sexual abuse
By Julie Bindel
Feb 6, 2022
It was in 2016, that Mr B, a survivor of sexual abuse, heard that a female victim had reported his attacker for attempted rape. “I went mad when I heard that,” he says. “I could just about cope with knowing what he had done to me, but when I heard that I just thought: ‘You dirty bastard, you are not getting away with this any longer.’”
The attacker was Nazir Ahmed, or Lord Ahmed of Rotherham as he prefers to be known, and last Friday he was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for child sex offences, namely the attempted rape of a young girl and sexual assault of a boy, during the 1970s.
Ahmed was a businessman who owned a string of fish and chip shops before becoming a property developer and then entered politics as a Labour councillor in Rotherham in 1990. He served as a magistrate, and in 1998, became a life peer on the recommendation of Tony Blair.
He has has been described to me as “the most powerful Pakistani in the UK” and I was told by one of his victims that within the Pakistani community he was held in the highest esteem and given “the royal treatment, wherever he went.”
Not any longer. In handing down the sentence last week, the judge told Ahmed that his crimes had “had a profound and lifelong effect on his victims”. This weekend Mr B, one of the two survivors who brought the case against Ahmed, told me his story. It is the first time he has spoken at length about what he suffered. “I felt relief when I heard the sentence,” he says, having just left the courtroom. “In court my whole body was shaking.” … read full article
Illinois school district teaches gender and race propaganda to all lower grades
From The Post Millennial (Canada)
The LGBTQ+ lessons both educate students about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender concepts, and appear to encourage them to change their own identities to match those they are learning.
By Libby Emmons
Feb 6, 2022
The slow and steady infiltration of equity based teaching into public school education continues despite the very public pushback from parents across the political spectrum. LGBTQ+ and Black Lives Matter propaganda are becoming so integrated into curriculum as to be indistinguishable from basic mathematics, English language arts, science, and social studies programs. The Democratic stronghold of Evanston, Ill., has gone farther, faster, than has been required by law. Three months of the year are slated to be taken up with the study of identity based oppression lessons.
In 2019, Governor JB Pritzker signed a law requiring Illinois school districts to integrate LGBTQ+ history into curricula by July 2020. In October 2019, Evanston's school district 65 held its first LGBTQ+ Equity Week for grades pre-kindergarten through 8, and their plans for these lessons are expanding in scope.
District 65 has plans for many equity weeks and lessons throughout the year. Latinx Heritage Month in September, which teaches 8th grader students about the harmful effects of immigration laws and delves into the dynamics of power and privilege. Black Lives Matter at school brings with it a "week of action" and "national demands," which teaches 4th graders the song "Brown Skin Girl" by Beyonce, along with the lesson that American society is "patriarchal," where "systems and government are controlled by men." The lesson states as fact that American "systems and government are controlled by [w]hite people," with "racism being the result of it."
"So is it with men controlling systems and government and messages about women being dumb, weak, and inferior being a result," the lesson for 4th graders continues before going on to teach about intersectional oppression. "Because [b]lack women cannot separate being [b]lack from being a woman or their intersectionality, they experience something like a double oppression. The guiding principle of [the lesson] encourages the building of women-centered spaces where women, especially [b]lack women, can have freedom from messages that they are dumb, weak, and inferior." …
In LGBTQ+ Equity Month, to be held in District 65 in April 2022, students will learn that women are not necessarily unique from men, which likely the framers of these lessons do not mean to be disruption to the "Black Women and Unapologetically Black" lesson from back in Black Lives Matter Month. The LGBTQ+ lessons are perhaps some of the most insidious, because the goals for these lessons is not just to educate students about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender concepts, but appears to encourage them to change their own identities to match those they are learning.
In speaking to The Daily Northwestern, one educator recounted in glowing terms about the result of adapting the LGBTQ+ curriculum to the needs of his special education students. The students used the lessons to "draw comparisons to their own experiences and discover more about their identities." Following that, one student changed his name while another donned nail polish. "That was really neat," teacher Brooks Bullock said. "It was cool to see a kid expressing himself in a way that he never realized he could before until we talked about it at school."
Students who studied biology and human anatomy prior to the implementation of LGBTQ+ lessons understood fully and unequivocally that there are differences between men and women in fundamental, scientifically biological, ways. Those lessons are being counteracted by these new lessons that teach students aged 5 and up that biology is not determinative in terms of the differences between males and females. … read full article
Kristina O’Connor: I told the Met detective I had been mugged. His reply? ‘You’re amazingly hot’
The shocking harassment of a crime victim by a senior detective has added to the row over the culture of misogyny at the Met
From The Times (UK)
By Emily Dugan
Feb 5, 2022
A victim of crime who was sexually harassed by a senior detective is taking legal action against the Metropolitan Police for “enabling and normalising” misogyny after he kept his job.
Kristina O’Connor, now 33, called 101 after being attacked by a group of men who tried to steal her phone. When she was interviewed about the mugging by Detective Chief Inspector James Mason, who later became a right-hand man to Cressida Dick, the Met commissioner, he instead turned the conversation towards her love life and asked her out for dinner.
In emails sent from his official account, Mason, 43, then a detective sergeant, told her he was as “determined in my pursuit of criminals as I am of beautiful women”. Describing her as “amazingly hot”, he said that rejection of an officer’s advances was “frowned upon”. … read full article
British Cycling faces a revolt as athletes including Sharron Davies and Daley Thompson blast its trans policy
Olympic stars are leading a rebellion against British Cycling for trying to silence critics who question its transgender policy
Sharron Davies and Daley Thompson have attacked cycling's governing body for stifling the right of women to object to men competing in female events
The free speech row erupted when British Cycling tweeted an updated version of its transgender policy last week
From Daily Mail (UK)
By Sanchez Manning
Feb 5, 2022
Olympic stars are leading a rebellion against British Cycling for trying to silence critics who question its transgender policy.
Sharron Davies and Daley Thompson have attacked cycling's governing body for stifling the right of women to object to men competing in female events.
The free speech row erupted when British Cycling tweeted an updated version of its transgender policy last week and warned: 'We take a zero-tolerance approach to instances of hate being targeted at individuals because of their views of gender identity.' … read full article
Male, female, feline... Bristol University guide lectures staff about neopronouns
From The Telegraph (UK)
Lecturers at the university are being given guidance on the category or pronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender
By Ewan Somerville
Feb 6, 2022
Lecturers at a leading university are being given guidance on neopronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender, where someone identifies as a feline.
The University of Bristol has provided guidance for its staff on "using pronouns at work", urging them to declare in verbal introductions and email signatures whether they use he/him, she/her or they/them, to support transgender students.
But unlike myriad pronoun manuals on other campuses, Bristol lecturers are also directed to neopronouns which include “emojiself pronouns”, where colourful digital icons - commonplace on social media - are used to represent gender in written and spoken conversation.
It comes as the Russell Group university begins a landmark court battle on Monday with a feminist PhD student, Raquel Rosario Sanchez, who is suing for sex discrimination after an alleged two-year campaign of bullying by transgender activists on campus.
Ms Sanchez, from the Dominican Republic, has raised £75,000 for her week-long trial and fears women’s rights at Bristol are being undermined by policies “promoting niche gender theories as an institutional dogma”.
'Some people use neopronouns such as Ze/Zir/Zirs'
Bristol’s guide explains that some people use "neopronouns such as Ze/Zir/Zirs". A website linked to by Bristol's guide, explains that neopronouns are third-person pronouns that are not officially recognised in the language they are used in.
This directs to a webpage by LGBTA Wiki, which says these are used by those who feel their gender is beyond the male or female binary, and lists "emoji pronouns" as an example.
Staff are told on the website: "Emojiself pronouns are a subcategory of nounself pronouns, which are pronouns that, instead of using letters, utilize emojis.
"These pronouns are not intended to be pronounced out loud and are only intended for online communication. In spoken conversation one may or may not use pronouns that are based on the emoji." … read full article
Arizona lawmakers work to limit gender option on state forms
From Tucson.com (USA)
By Howard Fischer Capitol Media Services
Feb 6, 2022
PHOENIX — Arizona lawmakers are moving to block state agencies from giving a third option for those who identify as neither male nor female.
HB 2294 would put in statute that any document issued by a state agency, board, commission or department that now is required to indicate an individual's sex may only show that person as male or female.
The measure was approved this past week by the House Committee on Government and Elections, with only Republicans in favor, despite pleas from multiple parents who said those choices do not define who their children are. It now awaits a vote of the full House.
Rep. John Fillmore, R-Apache Junction, said he believes there currently are no forms that provide an alternative. Instead, he called it "kind of a precautionary thing," given that other states, including California, do allow that option.
"Historically, what happens in California is like a tidal wave," Fillmore said. "It just kind of rolls our way."
But unbeknownst to Fillmore, that already is happening: The Arizona Department of Transportation does provide an option for driver licenses to have an X instead of M or F where "sex" is listed.
That, however requires an applicant to present a government document — presumably from another state — showing their gender as non-binary. It is not an option for an Arizonan simply seeking a change in designation. … read full article
A New Type of Screening for Entry into American Seminaries
From FSSPX.NEWS (France)
Feb 6, 2022
Since the discovery of some transgendered persons in several seminaries in the United States, canonists, doctors, and priests have been implementing new tools to assess candidates for the priesthood. A new problem, unimaginable until recently, is emerging.
The alarm bell was sounded at the end of September 2021, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Archbishop Jerome Listecki alerted his colleagues to certain collateral damage caused by the trivialization of so-called “gender reassignment” procedure which is understood as the process of a female person transforming into a man, and vice versa.
The Archbishop of Milwaukee revealed the existence “of cases where women, living under a usurped male identity, had been admitted to seminaries.” He urged his confreres in the episcopate to take measures so that such situations could not happen again.
Over the months, a process is being developed. In California, Dr. Anthony Lilles, Academic Dean at St. Patrick’s seminary, tried out, at the beginning of the year 2022, a process of “separate screening procedures,” at the seminary and at the diocese of origin of each candidate for the priesthood. … read full article
Parents’ fury as Beaver Scouts as young as six are asked to define their gender
From The Sun (UK)
By Isaac Crowson and Paul Sims
Feb 6, 2022
SCOUTS as young as six are being asked to define their gender.
Parents are questioned in the annual census of Beaver Scout members — boys and girls aged six to eight.
Options are “male, female, I self-identify” or “I prefer not to say”.
But angry mums and dads and MPs slammed the move as inappropriate.
One parent said: “It frustrated me that children can’t be free from this. It’s simply wrong. They need to have their childhood and just enjoy it.”
Another said: “It’s bonkers, they’re just kids. They’re not interested in gender — they just want to build campfires. It’s being forced upon them.”
And Tory MP Nigel Mills branded it “unacceptable”. … read full article