Thursday, November 3, 2022
"In one video, two students are seen laying on the ground together, with one grinding on or humping the other in the middle of a class lecture ... while Hoard was present in the room ... "
This day in Herstory: Jeanette Jo Epps, born November 3, 1970, is an American aerospace engineer and NASA astronaut. Epps received both her M. S. and Ph.D degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, where she was part of the rotor-craft research group and was a NASA GSRP Fellow. She was chosen for the 20th class of NASA astronauts in 2009, graduating in 2011. Epps currently serves as a member of the ISS Operations Branch and has completed analog astronaut missions, including NEEMO 18 and CAVES 19. She is the second woman and first African-American woman to have participated in CAVES. (more)
US - Trans Teacher Placed on Indefinite Leave After Disturbing Videos Surface
From Reduxx (USA)
By Yuliah Alma
November 2, 2022
A trans-identified male high school teacher in Anne Arundel County, Maryland has been placed on indefinite leave after troubling information surfaced regarding his conduct with students.
Willa Hoard, also known as “Billie” was a social studies teacher at Chesapeake High School and ran the school’s GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) Organization. On October 3, he was placed on indefinite leave by the school, with few details provided to parents at the time.
But on November 2, disturbing video footage began circulating on Twitter from inside Hoard’s classroom. The videos originated on Facebook, first posted by a concerned mother.
In one video, two students are seen laying on the ground together, with one grinding on or humping the other in the middle of a class lecture. Another clip shows one student sucking at the stomach of another student. Both clips took place while Hoard was present in the room, apparently unconcerned by the behavior. … read full article
Scotland - Gender clinic staff tried to blow whistle over safety
From The Times (UK)
By Helen Puttick
November 3, 2022
Staff at Scotland’s only gender clinic for children have tried to blow the whistle on the service using official patient safety procedures.
Red flags have formally been raised by members of the clinical team based at the Sandyford sexual health hub in Glasgow over the past five years, newly released documents have shown.
The clinic operates on a similar model to the Tavistock Gender Identity Service for young people which is being shut down by NHS England after doctors reported fears children were taking puberty blockers and transitioning too quickly. … read full article
US - Why School Board Seats May Be the Hottest Races on Your Midterm Ballot
From Time (USA)
By Katie Reilly
November 3, 2022
On paper, Sarah Stiegler and Katherine Rice have a lot in common. They’re both nurses who cared for patients in Michigan hospitals during the pandemic. They’re both parents who started paying attention to school-board meetings after schools shut down in 2020. And they both worry about falling test scores that highlight the progress students lost during the last few years.
But as candidates running for school board in Romeo, Mich., their visions are vastly different. … read full article
US - ‘There Are Some Hills That Are Worth Dying on,’ Says Teacher Fired Over ‘Preferred’ Pronouns
From The Daily Signal (USA)
By Virginia Allen
November 03, 2022
Peter Vlaming believes words have power, a conviction that cost him his job.
Vlaming was fired from his position teaching French at West Point High School in Virginia in 2018 for refusing to call a female student by male pronouns.
Vlaming said he was essentially given the option to either “deny” his own “Christian belief, in order to stay in the school system,” or stand and fight.
“Sooner or later, you have to say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that,’” he said, a decision that cost him his teaching career. … read full article
Spain - Spanish Psychologists Targeted by Death, Bomb Threats Over Critique of Gender Ideology
From Reduxx (Canada)
By Nuria Muíña García
November 3, 2022
Two Spanish psychologists are under siege by violent trans activists at one of Spain’s top universities following the release of their book critiquing gender ideology.
In February of this year, Drs. José Errasti and Marino Pérez Álvarez published a book titled Nobody is Born in the Wrong Body: The Success and Misery of Gender Identity. The book was intended to provide an academic critique of queer theory, and refutes current transgender trends in medicine and psychology as a byproduct of postmodernism.
Immediately after the release of the book, Errasti and Álvarez began receive disturbing threats from trans activists across Spain. … read full article
UK - Daniel Radcliffe talks a load of old Hogwarts about JK Rowling
From The Times (UK)
By Libby Purves
November 2, 2022
Expelliarmus! Avada Kedavra! That thespian dementor Daniel Radcliffe, plucked from nowhere as a child actor to be Harry Potter, has doubled down on his view that the woman who wrote it is a baddie.
With her mild and anxious views on women’s privacy, recognition and safety, JK Rowling is “hurting” countless troubled young fans struggling with gender identity. Radcliffe soupily wants them to know that “not everybody in the franchise” thinks like its creator, who would hurtfully “invalidate their identities”. … read full article
UK - Daniel Radcliffe is surely the world’s most ungrateful man
The actor has once again sought to cancel his creator JK Rowling for believing that women are women and trans women are trans women
From The Telegraph (UK)
By Judith Woods
November 2, 2022
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child. But at least King Lear had a genetic link to the treachery. How much more painful to be denigrated and dismissed by a nobody you made into a somebody? A nobody, in fact, whose life of wealth and fame was built upon your genius.
I sincerely hope that J K Rowling, who has enraptured generations since she conjured up the magical, immersive world of Harry Potter back in 1997, isn’t losing any sleep over Daniel Radcliffe’s ongoing ingratitude. She will surely have lost all patience with the petulant pup of a performer, but in this regard she keeps her own counsel – because that’s what grown-ups do.
Radcliffe, on the other hand, is a 33-year-old man child who most probably (definitely) wouldn’t have a stellar career had he not been first cast as the boy wizard aged 12. This week, in his typically ungrateful manner, Radcliffe has once again sought to cancel his creator. Her crime is to believe that women are women and trans women are trans women – the clue being in the name. … read full article
Analysis - Girl Power
A thread - republished with the kind permission of the author
From Twitter (USA)
By Eliza Mondegreen
November 3, 2022
It's just stunning to me, when I go to campus or go to parties, how many young women have cut their breasts off. Even compared to going to those same places a year ago, it's striking. We're talking women in their late 20s into their 30s here -- women who are just a little too old for the cohort most severely affected by this belief system.
It's been so normalized, so fast. Women my age weren't bottle-fed this bullshit. How did we fall for it? If you buy into this belief system about 'cisgender' and 'transgender,' no woman with any self-respect is going to maintain a 'cisgender' identity for very long. She's inevitably going to come to a deep, personal revelation about her gender identity.
There's a ticking clock. Even if you start out as the most self-effacing 'cis' ally, you're not going to be able to continue to demean yourself like that. Eventually, you'll balk at the sexism even as you buy into the sexism. You'll change your pronouns. You'll exempt yourself.
Like, if I genuinely believed Andrea fucking Long Chu was the authority on what women are (expectant asshole/blank blank eyes), I wouldn't identify as a woman either. You can't take nutjobs like Chu half-seriously and continue to identify as a woman. It turns out women are not as masochistic as Chu/Lavery/et al think, after all. They'll take Chu and Lavery at their word about what women are but ultimately they can't accept the insult. They'll nope out.
In a way, my generation fell into a gap. We missed out on Gen-X's looser gender roles. We were told feminism's work was over and that older women had nothing of value to say to us. We got girl power everything. But it was empty, a heavily painted mask with nothing behind it. Often, the constant bubble-gum pink invocations of "girl power" felt more like negging: "Girls can do math! Girls can rock at science! Girls can code!" Whoever suggested we couldn't?
It wasn't lost on me that nobody celebrated 'boy power,' that no one reassured boys—before they'd encountered a single hurdle or expressed the slightest hesitation!—that they could do math or science or anything else. Persist in your independence, your serious-mindedness, your love of math and science, and you get treated as an exceptional girl. An honorary boy, in other words. Adults will praise you for being "not like other girls." By which they mean: for not cutting off your own head.
"Not like other girls" becomes the highest possible compliment, a mark of distinction, worn proudly. Until puberty arrives and your body turns on you, making a mockery of your pretensions. Then it turns out you're just like other girls. And you're not prepared for it. Any solidarity between girls had been dissolved in acid. We weren't meant to face any hurdles as girls. Our bodies weren't meant to mean anything. For our whole lives, our bodies could be managed -- with birth control, antidepressants, stimulants.
Is that part of it? I wonder. Are we still seeking that highest form of praise: not like other girls? Do we still refuse to become our mothers, with their compromises? Is the female body still just a problem to be fixed, not our only way of being in the world?
Analysis - Why are so many girls deciding they’d rather be boys?
A thread - republished with the kind permission of the author
Also available as a zine from Reality Girl Zine
From Twitter (USA)
By Reality Girl
November 1, 2022
Analysis - Gender Peace Talks #1
Four detransitioners walk into a Zoom with gender-affirming clinicians
From BROADVIEW with Lisa Selin Davis (USA)
By Lisa Selin Davis
November 3, 2022
It was an experiment. After a difficult conversation with a gender-affirming clinician a few weeks ago, I asked if he would be willing to assemble some of his colleagues for what he eventually called a “gender listening session” with detransitioners. I wondered if witnessing their stories might inform their practice, and I was curious if they would be affected, hearing directly from these people who’d been deeply hurt—physically and emotionally—by the treatments they provide.
We agreed beforehand not to identify the clinic or share information about the event on social media, and the detransitioners acknowledged beforehand and at the beginning of the meeting that they had not been treated by these clinicians. I carved out a caveat that I could write about it after, with the agreement that I’d let my contact see a draft first. We also agreed that there would be no questions during the presentation, and that if any of the doctors had follow-up questions, they would send them to me and I’d pass them on. … read full article
Analysis - Appeasing the invisible audience
From gender:hacked by Eliza Mondegreen (Canada)
By Eliza Mondegreen
November 3, 2022
About a year ago, I posted the letter I wrote to an old friend after a disagreement over gender identity—specifically, my refusal to say I believe transwomen are in any sense women—busted up our long friendship.
I still think about her response. Not every day. But often.
Eliza,
It is clear to me from this email that you do not miss me or our friendship, so much as you feel judged or misunderstood. Let me clear things up: I understand your position perfectly, and I think I’ve judged it accurately as hateful, ignorant and dangerous. It’s actually not complicated for me at all, as a queer woman and as a feminist—trans women are women, trans men are men—full stop, regardless what you think or how many essays you send.
… read full article
Analysis - Why I will never use female pronouns for Eddie Izzard
You cannot compel me to say something I do not believe.
From spiked (UK)
By Brendan O’Neill
November 3, 2022
How long will it be before only men are allowed to call themselves women? That might sound preposterous but all the signs for such insanity are already here. Women are frequently referred to as ‘birthing bodies’ or even ‘bleeding bodies’, in the words of a notice at the University of Calgary that went viral last week. They’re ‘people who menstruate’, ‘people with cervixes’, anything but women. Female-identifying blokes, on the other hand, like Eddie Izzard, are definitely women, and woe betide the filthy transphobe who says they aren’t. ‘I’ve been promoted to she, and it’s a great honour’, said Izzard in an interview with the Guardian last year. So Eddie’s promoted to womanhood while actual women are demoted to people who bleed from a certain orifice. The misogyny of it all blows the mind. … read full article