Sunday, August 28, 2022
"Trans-identified persons are entitled to the same human and civil rights as others.... [That] does not mean that we must accept that hormones and surgery transform men into women and women into men."
This day in Herstory: Quvenzhané Wallis, born August 28, 2003, is an American actress and author. In 2012, she starred as Hushpuppy in the drama film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the youngest actress ever to be nominated in the category, as well as the first person born in the 21st century nominated for an Oscar. She also starred as Annie Bennett in the 2014 adaptation of Annie, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical. (more)
UK - RAYMOND: Transgenderism and its Doublethink
From Reduxx (USA)
By Janice Raymond
August 28, 2022
No one—women, men, children, or trans-identified persons—should be subjected to any form of exploitation or targeted for discrimination.
Trans-identified persons are entitled to the same human and civil rights as others. Recognizing these rights, however, does not mean that we must accept that hormones and surgery transform men into women and women into men; or that persons who self-declare as members of the opposite sex are what they subjectively claim to be; or that hormones and surgery are “life-saving and necessary treatments” for those seeking transition.
Transgender activists champion the “right” to hormones and surgery for every child who presents as “dysphoric,” treatments they define as “emergency medical care.” This rhetoric of dysphoria allows accusers to assert that opponents are depriving children of necessary health care, as if hormones are an issue of life and death comparable to insulin needed by diabetics. … read full article
UK - Police remove lesbians from GAY PRIDE parade in Cardiff: Moment cop tells gender-critical women to leave LGBT march because 'whatever you are, you're causing confrontation' with trans groups and their supporters
Police removed lesbians who crashed Cardiff pride parade after a 'confrontation'
An officer told anti-trans lesbian activist group Get The L Out UK to step aside
Clip showed a lesbian and a transgender woman shouting at each other in a road
Pride Cymru confirmed that the activists had 'interrupted' the LGBTQ+ march
South Wales Police said the group was cooperative and left the area shortly after
From Daily Mail (UK)
By JESSICA WARREN
August 28, 2022
Police told a group of lesbians to leave a gay pride march in Cardiff after an officer was filmed telling the gender-critical women to step aside due to 'confrontation' with a transgender marchers and their supporters.
The activist group ‘Get The L Out UK’, which 'stands against transgenderism', shared footage from yesterday's Cardiff Pride event.
In the clip, two rival marchers can be seen shouting at each other on St Mary Street during the LGBT march. … read full article
UK - Pride Cymru and the rise of woke homophobia
Now police are removing lesbians from Pride marches for the crime of challenging trans ideology.
From Spiked (UK)
By Jo Bartosch
August 28, 2022
There are few sights more joyous than that of bolshy lesbians celebrating how few fucks they have left to give. And such scenes were in abundance on Saturday at Pride Cymru in Cardiff, Wales’ biggest LGBT parade, which was joined by the lesbians of the ‘Get the L Out’ (GTLO) campaign. The GTLO banners might have seemed baffling to the uninitiated – with slogans such as ‘lesbians don’t like penises’, ‘trans activism erases lesbians’ and ‘lesbian not queer’ – but they speak to a profound rift that has emerged in the so-called LGBT movement.
GTLO’s aim is to organise lesbians independently of the LGBT umbrella. At Pride, the GTLO women were met with jeers from onlookers and parade participants. But they marched and danced on for as long as they were allowed to.
As hostilities began to rise, the GTLO marchers were told by the police that they would have to be ‘removed’ from the march ‘for their own safety’. Some GTLO members say they were also threatened with arrest, although this was ultimately avoided. Presumably, the police were aware of the poor optics of throwing lesbians into a van at a Pride parade. … read full article
UK - Why are lesbians no longer welcome at Pride?
From The Spectator (UK)
By Julie Bindel
August 28, 2022
The lesbian group Get The L Out UK, founded to protest gender ideology and the pressure on same-sex attracted women to date trans women, joined Pride Cymru yesterday to make their voices heard amidst a sea of hostility. Ever since the trans movement decided that lesbians who reject sleeping with trans women are somehow morally deficient, same-sex attracted women have been harassed, defamed and abused in the name of trans equality. Get the L Out represent those old-fashioned lesbians that reject the penis and all that is attached to it.
As a lesbian that came out in the Life on Mars days of the 1970s, when I was told, on a regular basis, that all I needed was a ‘good f––’ to ‘straighten’ me out, I have watched with horror at the vilification of lesbians for firmly rejecting men that claim to be women from their dating pool. … read full article
UK - The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle: skewering the culture wars
A sober but devastating attack on the social justice activists who behave like religious fundamentalists
From The Sunday Times (UK)
By Tomiwa Owolade
August 28, 2022
Andrew Doyle’s book The New Puritans starts with an absolutely shocking scene. Out of nowhere, a friend of Doyle and the father of his godson calls him a “f***ing Nazi c***” in a bar in Soho, London.
Doyle is gay, socially liberal and fiercely opposed to racism and authoritarian politics. Why the abuse? Doyle had voted for Brexit.
JK Rowling, the most popular living writer in Britain, has distinguished herself over the past 25 years for her philanthropic generosity and progressive beliefs. Yet in the past few years she has been denounced as a bigot for her view that there is some conflict between the rights of natal women and transgender women. Dave Chappelle, the African-American comedian, has likewise been castigated because he has made jokes about trans people in his Netflix comedy shows. These two, both previously darlings of the left, have been demonised. … read full article
UK - The Fall of ‘Nature’
A once-respected journal has announced that it will be subordinating science to ideology.
From Quillette (Australia)
By Bo Winegard
August 28, 2022
And science, we should insist, better than any other discipline, can hold up to its students and followers an ideal of patient devotion to the search for objective truth, with vision unclouded by personal or political motive. ~Sir Henry Hallett Dale
Although the modern prestige bestowed upon science is laudable, it is not without peril. For as the ideological value of science increases, so too does the threat to its objectivity. Slogans and hashtags can quickly politicize science, and scientists can be tempted to subordinate the pursuit of the truth to moral or political ends as they become aware of their own prodigious social importance. Inconvenient data can be suppressed or hidden and inconvenient research can be quashed. This is especially true when one political tribe or faction enjoys disproportionate influence in academia—its members can disfigure science (often unconsciously) to support their own ideological preferences. This is how science becomes more like propaganda than empiricism, and academia becomes more like a partisan media organization than an impartial institution.
An editorial in Nature Human Behavior provides the most recent indication of just how bad things are becoming. It begins, like so many essays of its kind, by announcing that, “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” When the invocation of a fundamental freedom in one clause is immediately undermined in the next, we should be skeptical of whatever follows. But in this case, the authors are taking issue with a view very few people actually hold. At minimum, most academics will readily accept that scientific curiosity should be constrained by ethical concerns about research participants. … read full article
UK - JK Rowling’s novel hits back at her hateful trolls
Her latest crime novel The Ink Black Heart is a riposte to those who fantasise about killing her
From The Sunday Times (UK)
By Joan Smith
August 28, 2022
Two years ago, when JK Rowling published a new novel under her crime-writing pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, she found herself in the midst of an unexpected furore. Rumours swirled online, wrongly claiming that the book featured a transgender serial killer, and she was deluged with rape and death threats. The killer wasn’t trans, although he certainly hated women; he wasn’t one of the principal characters and he adopted a variety of disguises, including a woman’s coat, to trick his victims into trusting him. Yet Rowling’s remarks a few months previously about the erasure of the word “woman” had been enough to draw the attention of online trolls, who rushed to condemn the novel before it had even been published. In the face of this outpouring of misogyny, I was one of several critics who pointed out that Troubled Blood, the most accomplished volume in the series to date, was itself a superb novel about woman-hating. … read full article
US - Illinois sex ed law puts school districts in center of latest battleground in education culture wars
From Chicago Tribune (USA)
By Karen Ann Cullotta
August 28, 2022
As the mother of five children, Barrington resident Marsha McClary approved of her hometown school district teaching students about the birds and the bees with what she described as a traditional, biology-based sex education program.
So when McClary heard Illinois lawmakers had passed legislation mandating that school districts teaching comprehensive sex education follow new standards created by a New York City-based nonprofit, McClary decided to do her homework.
“I read through the whole thing and in general, I thought, a lot of these things in the standards are wonderful, but then I got to page 21, and for me, that’s where the rubber meets the road,” said McClary, whose children are enrolled in Barrington School District 220. … read full article
US - YMCA Accused of Expelling Family for Objecting to Child Porn and Sexual Misconduct Against Women and Girls
From Port Townsend Free Press (USA)
By Jim Scarantino
August 27, 2022
A Port Angeles man claims he and his wife were banned from the Port Angeles YMCA because he objected to the sharing of child porn in the weight room and young men sexually harassing women and girls. He offered to pay to upgrade the Y’s security system so they could capture the conduct and was ridiculed by staff.
On the day the youths made sexually vulgar humping actions behind his pregnant wife, threatened to kill his newborn baby and vandalize his car, he was banished from the Y. His wife was also banished. They say the Y has never explained to them what it is they did to have their memberships cancelled.
Olympic Peninsula YMCA manages and owns the Port Angeles YMCA. It also manages Port Townsend’s municipal Mountain View pool where Julie Jaman, who had been swimming there for 35 years, was banished for objecting to a male Y employee in the women’s shower area. … read full article
US - Catholic university criticized for new 'gender inclusive' guide 'fundamental' to school's mission: ‘Shameful'
'Remind yourself and others that gender inclusivity is fundamental to Villanova’s mission,' the guidance says
From Fox News (USA)
By Emma Colton
August 28, 2022
Villanova University, a Roman Catholic college in Pennsylvania, rolled out a new guideline for faculty and staff on creating a more "gender inclusive" campus, which the school says is "fundamental" to its mission.
"This guide introduces Villanova faculty and staff to best practices for being gender inclusive in our work spaces, laboratories, and classrooms—especially for those who identify within transgender, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and/or gender questioning communities," Villanova’s Gender Inclusive Practices Guide states.
Suggestions noted in the guide, which was developed by programs such as the school’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Gender & Women’s Studies department and published this month, include: "Remind yourself and others that gender inclusivity is fundamental to Villanova’s mission;" "Add a Gender Inclusion statement to your syllabus or new employee orientation materials;" "Carefully review your course rosters and employee records for name and pronoun designations." … read full article
US - Critics slam MPS’ transgender guidelines
From East Valley Tribune (USA)
By Scott Shumaker
August 28, 2022
Mesa Public Schools issued new guidelines for accommodating transgender and gender-noncomforming students in schools July 14, triggering critics who say the district’s diversity and inclusion initiatives are going too far.
Some critics spoke out at the Aug. 23 MPS Governing Board meeting, where they offered strongly worded critiques of some of the protocols, which allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms of the gender they identify with.
Governing board candidate Ed Steele and other local activists have campaigned against “woke ideology” in schools and have been circulating the guidelines online along with harsh critiques. … read full article
US - Editorial: Parents deserve more say in education
From The Detroit News (USA)
By The Detroit News
August 27, 2022
As students head back to school this week and next, Michigan lawmakers should consider a proposal to give parents and students more educational freedom. An initiative that won’t appear on the ballot but is before the Legislature could help break through some long-standing barriers in Michigan to school choice.
The initiative, Let MI Kids Learn, gathered more than 500,000 signatures in support, but not by the June filing deadline, so voters don't get to weigh in on the idea. That's too bad. Many parents are looking for an option other than the traditional public school system, especially since the pandemic.
Lawmakers passed nearly the exact same bills last fall, but Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed them. … read full article
US - Twitter locks ‘Libs of TikTok’ account for ‘hateful conduct’: report
Twitter warned that Libs of TikTok could face a permanent ban in the future
From Fox News (USA)
By Anders Hagstrom
August 28, 2022
Twitter locked the popular "Libs of TikTok" account late Saturday, blocking its owner from sending tweets or even signing in, according to a report.
Libs of TikTok has gained a massive following on Twitter for re-sharing posts from far-left circles on TikTok, a video-sharing app. The account's posts often ridicule left-wing stances on transgenderism, education and other topics.
"Hi Libs of TikTok, your account, @libsoftiktok has been locked for violating the Twitter rules," reads an email reportedly sent to the account's owner. The email goes on to allege that the user had violated rules against "hateful conduct." … read full article
Canada - Disconnect between policymakers and public on terminology surrounding gender and race, polls find
Canadians need more guidance from academics and policymakers behind the language changes on what these terms mean and why it is important to understand their use
From National Post (Canada)
By Jessica Mundie
August 27, 2022
The vast majority of Canadians do not add their gender pronouns to emails or share them at meetings, nor do they believe that adding pronouns should be compulsory, says new polling.
The polling, done by the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS), comes at a time when there is considerable sensitivity and discussion around the way people discuss gender and race, and the data suggests there are substantial differences in acceptance for these changes across age groups.
It found, for example, that 84.9 per cent of Canadians don’t add their pronouns to their emails. A separate poll, also by ACS, found that people who are attempting to understand the more modernized language around race are also unsure about social expectations. … read full article
Australia - Cancer charity omits ‘women’ for ‘body with a cervix’ in health information
From The Australian (Australia)
By Rosemary Neill
August 28, 2022
A cancer charity and government-linked websites are using gender-neutral terms such as “every body with a cervix” and “people who have symptoms of cervical cancer” – often omitting the word “women” from health information that overwhelmingly relates to them.
Self-described “radical feminist” and academic Dr Holly Lawford-Smith slammed this trend as “careless”, “ignorant” and as a new sexual double standard, given that the word “man” is still “the default” in health and other fields. “I think it is a form of sexism, like women’s rights have become invisible,’’ she said.
The Australian Cervical Cancer Foundation, a charity that seeks to eliminate this potentially fatal cancer, has posted a large, colourful notice on its website stating: “Self collection (of cervical samples) is available for every body with a cervix.’’ The foundation uses the word “women” elsewhere on its website. … read full article