International Women’s Day 2022
woman: an adult female human being
Let’s be honest on International Women’s Day – we have gone backwards, not forwards
We need to face up to what is happening to women everywhere, from caring to household chores to domestic violence
From The Telegraph (UK)
By Suzanne Moore
March 8, 2022
As an International Woman of Mystery, today is my lucky day. Apparently, it’s International Women’s Day, and so obviously there is a hashtag and a meaningless gesture, which these days counts for activism.
The official theme is #breakthebias, which is as innocuous as it is futile. People – not women, because the word ‘women’ is now controversial – are asked to pose, hands crossed upwards, to share as a selfie on social media. This is supposed to be part of imagining a “gender-equal world”, one free of “bias, stereotypes and discrimination”.
Except the Gender Recognition Reform Bill tabled in Scotland last week would mean that a man could identify as a woman and receive a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) within months, and without requiring any medical report, rather than by providing evidence that they have lived in their gender for at least two years.
It renders the term ‘woman’ somewhat pointless, as this is essentially self-ID. That’s a pose.
Still, what is a real woman? I have always been the wrong kind myself: too stroppy, too outspoken, too graceless. But now, though, I am strangely convinced that because I have female biology, I am an actual woman. (The gender rules of femininity that I have considered innately dumb my entire life make me neither a wannabe man, or non-binary, or anything special.)
As a feminist, though, I would indeed like the world to be a better place for women – and by the world, I don’t mean north London or a campus in California; I mean Herat, Tigray, Guatemala. For all the arguments about equality for women amount to nothing if we lose an international perspective. Feminism is global, or it is simply an exercise in consumer power dressed up as politics. That is exactly what happened to Western feminism in the 1990s, when everything from brunching to boob jobs was “empowering”.
If International Women’s Day means anything, it means facing up to what is happening to women everywhere. We have gone backwards, not forwards. The pandemic is part of this, but not the only factor. The UN estimates that women are doing more caring and household chores than ever. Women the world over do this unpaid work in the name of “family”. … read full article (paywall)
Wendy Murphy: Lia Thomas swimming debate lacks one thing: common sense
From Boston Herald (USA)
By Wendy Murphy (@WMurphyLaw)
March 8, 2022
Lia Thomas is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. Lia identifies as female but has male body parts. Lia swam on the men’s team for the first three years, then declared himself to be female and started competing on the women’s team this year.
As a male swimmer, Lia was ranked 462 and was not very good. As a female swimmer, Lia is ranked No. 1 in the country and has been breaking records. In fact, Lia’s slowest time is faster than all the women’s fastest times. In a recent 500 freestyle race, Lia finished ahead of the second-place female swimmer by more than 14 seconds.
Lia is nearly 6-feet, 4-inches tall and is stronger than all of her female teammates. Her chest span is comparatively enormous. Although Lia has been taking testosterone blockers and complying with NCAA rules that allow Lia to compete against women, most agree that Lia has significant physical advantages over her competition.
The women Lia competes against are supporters of trans people, but they are furious that Lia is allowed to compete against them because Lia grew up male, went through puberty as a male and developed into an adult male with all the physical advantages of maleness. The women are not upset that Lia is better than them, they are upset that Lia is better in ways that have nothing to do with training or hard work.
Making female swimmers compete against Lia is like making men without implants compete against women in breast-size competitions. The contest will never be fair. Vegas won’t even take bets.
This problem of male bodies in women’s spaces isn’t limited to sports. Men also insist that if they identify as women, even fraudulently, they have the right to expose their genitals to women in bathrooms, prisons, and locker rooms, even though men who do not identify as women could be arrested for doing the same thing.
Nobody should be exposing private body parts to anyone without their consent. It’s not that genitals are scary — but an awful lot of women and girls have been sexually assaulted by men. One in three girls is sexually assaulted before age 18.
Telling millions of traumatized women and girls that they have no choice but to endure the trauma of forced exposure to male body parts in order to accommodate men who feel like women is asking a lot. Why are the feelings of men who say they identify as women more important than the feelings of rape victims? … read full article
Let's Not Allow Men to Hijack International Women's Day Anymore
It is high time women took back this day.
From 4W (USA)
By Andreia Nobre
March 8, 2022
For times immemorial, any female uprising against their oppression has seen attempts to crush them. Some of these attempts were more visible, like arresting the Suffragettes for pamphleting. Others, more subtle, such as legislating to stop women gathering or deny them political representation. In socialist circles, when people talk about revolution, it’s common for women to hear from their male comrades that, when we win against the ruling classes, we will be able to fight for women’s rights. Or, even more naively, that women’s rights will come “automatically.”
Since its creation, International Women’s Day could be considered a ruse. In the 1990s Brazil, when I was a young adult, March 8 was a day when women would walk down the streets, and shop staff would be on the pavements, distributing little pink bags with goodies: make up, vouchers for waxing or a hairdo, bookmarks, flowers and a “happy women’s day” message of some sort. It was barely to celebrate women’s achievements, and mostly to keep imposing impossible beauty standards by placing our worth in our looks. There hadn’t been a structured women’s rights movement in Brazil up to that point, which could also be said about the next decades.
At some point, 20-odd years ago, this changed. Women started saying that International Women’s Day was a day for fighting. This baffled me, because I grew up under the impression that women had already achieved equality. We could vote, wear trousers, divorce… However, other women saw it differently. They said that they didn’t want just flowers. They asked for equal opportunities, the end of male violence against them, political and economical independence, and bodily autonomy. This caught the attention of the country's political parties, where women’s groups were created to plan IWD gatherings and marches. After the MeToo movement, Brazilian women even started raising their voices with their own slogan: “My First Sexual Abuse.” … read full article
Scottish Film World Erases Women on International Women's Day
2022 is turning out to be the year of our audio-visual and legislative erasure.
From 4W (USA)
By Bryndís Blackadder
March 8, 2022
Men - the last thing we should be talking about on International Women’s Day. Unfortunately, 2022 is turning out to be the year of our audio-visual and legislative erasure and the phenomenon needs to be documented.
Following the dreaded publication of the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill on the 3rd of March, which allows any male to “self-identify” as a female from as young as 16 years old with no diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” or medical professional involvement (the only qualification needed being a 3 month stint of using some new pronouns), our senses are heightened to female-erasure in Scotland.
The whole UK (and the world) is being subject to this wave of men pretending to be women, and this International Women’s day is an opportunity for “The Arts” to pointedly tell us our era of existence is coming to an end.
In February, The Tate Modern in London showed a notoriously misogynistic film called “What is a Woman? ‘Hva er en kvinne?,’” which was protested by a group of female activists and was accompanied by the trending twitter hashtag #ArtNotPropaganda. The Film, part of Tate Lates program celebrating “woman artists” featured a man in a women’s changing room with the antagonist actresses performing a series of comments gleaned from the internet to illustrate the seemingly horrid behavior of phobic women, painting the male invader in to women’s spaces as the passive victim of archaic attitudes of rather base women.
North of the border, International Women’s Day (IWD) is also being celebrated by cinemas which are also endeavoring to remind us that we are a mere concept to be debated or commandeered. … read full article (and DONATE to 4W!)
How Ukrainian women will suffer
It's not just Russian men waiting to exploit them
From UnHerd (UK)
By Julie Bindel
March 8, 2022
Suddenly, images of Ukrainian women are all over the internet. Most of them are mothers, fleeing Russian convoys, carrying their children across borders. Many of them are leaving husbands and brothers behind to fight. But these heart-wrenching photographs, published by the mainstream media, are only part of the story. Ukrainian women will suffer in myriad ways before this war is over.
Pornhub has a new category: “Ukrainian girls and war rape videos”; it is dominated by Russian soldiers documenting disgustingly brutal crimes. Domestic violence and street harassment have already spiked. Female refugees are falling victim to pimps and traffickers; official channels — the police, hospitals, legal systems — won’t help them.
Where women are concerned, “the foreign coverage of the war is concentrated mostly on women fleeing with children”, Maria Dmytrieva tells me. The Ukrainian feminist activist — a key member of the Global Network of Women Peacekeepers — believes this coverage misrepresents the reality of war for women, and the ways in which women specifically become targets for attack.
We speak via Zoom, and as night falls, she sits in darkness, so as not to be spotted by saboteurs. Although the Russians had not yet arrived in her small town, a few miles outside Kyiv, like everybody else in Ukraine she is in a perilous position.
Maria has been involved in the campaign to end male violence in Ukraine for more than two decades. I have visited her in Ukraine on several occasions and have seen her make powerful men in senior government positions quake when she rails against injustices towards women and girls. … read full article
Our fears around the Scottish gender bill have nothing to do with transgender women
It’s about male abusers – who, as a former specialist sex crimes prosecutor, I know can trick and cajole women.
From The New Statesman (UK)
By Joanna Cherry (SNP MP for Edinburgh South West)
March 8, 2022
Last year’s SNP manifesto promised to “work with trans people, women, equality groups, legal and human rights experts to identify the best and most effective way to improve and simplify the process by which a trans person can obtain legal recognition, so that the trauma associated with that process is reduced”, but also to “ensure that these changes do not affect the rights or protections that women currently have under the Equality Act”.
Unfortunately the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, published last week, does not live up this promise. This is why social media has been awash with arguments over the bill – not least from JK Rowling who has, for example, said it “will harm the most vulnerable women in society: those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women”.
Rowling is right. If this bill becomes law, the right to a gender recognition certificate (GRC) will be granted not just to trans people, but to any man who wants to self-identify his way into women’s services, spaces and sports, based on nothing more than his say-so. Anyone above the age of 16 will be able to change their sex in law, three short months after applying to do so, with no medical diagnosis – based simply on their declaration that they have “lived in the acquired gender” for three months and intend to continue to do so permanently. What that means is not defined. Nor is the word “gender”. The word “sex” does not appear at all in the bill.
It is telling that a recent freedom of information request revealed that the Scottish government gives sex its ordinary meaning, but does not have an official definition of gender. Scotland’s Supreme Court recently reminded the Scottish government that under the Equality Act, the protected characteristic of sex is a reference to a biological man or woman. Yet the effect of the bill will be to conflate gender with sex, because, despite the failure to mention sex on the face of the bill, anyone will be able to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate based solely on their self-declared gender. … read full article
Ukraine’s surrogate mothers are being used and abandoned
From The Times (UK)
By Martha Gill
March 7, 2022
hose who support commercial surrogacy — the business of hiring a woman to gestate your child — make two types of argument in its favour. The first is that a woman should have the right to use her body as a workplace if she needs to: it is work like any other. And the second is that the experience can be a positive one for the surrogate: helping an infertile couple have a child can be fulfilling, even heroic.
That is all very well in theory, and often, too, in practice. The trouble is when something goes wrong, at which point it becomes obvious exactly in which direction power flows, and exactly which party is left feeling exploited. When something puts the interests of the surrogate and the commissioning parents in conflict, niceties are stripped away and we see just how badly a commercial process maps on to a biological one. … read full article (share token)
French Feminists ASSAULTED At Anti-Sex Trade Demonstration
From REDUXX (USA)
By Genevieve Gluck
March 8, 2022
A feminist collective comprised of sex industry survivors were attacked by pro-sex trade activists on International Women’s Day while demonstrating against pornography and prostitution.
On March 8, Marguerite Stern, a feminist activist known for raising awareness of femicides in France, shared a video depicting a feminist demonstrator being slapped in the face by a pro-sex trade activist. After the attack, the women begin chanting "agresseur," which roughly translates to "bully" or "aggressors."
In her tweet, Stern highlighted that this has been an ongoing pattern in recent years, saying that International Women’s Day has become the most dangerous time of year for feminists who oppose sex trafficking.
“It's becoming a tradition in France: March 8th is THE most dangerous day of the year for feminists demonstrating against prostitution. Are you going to hit us every year?” tweeted Stern, referencing an attack made last year against abolitionist activists on Women’s Day.
In another angle of the attack posted by Résistance Lesbienne, multiple women are seen being brutally attacked by an individual wearing black, with one woman's hair appearing to be pulled at the scalp by him. One assailant also appears to bite a woman on the face.
One of the women at the shocking event was Pauline Makoveitchoux, a feminist activist and photographer. In a video posted to her Twitter, Makoveitchoux and another woman describe the violence that took place. … read full article (and SUPPORT REDUXX!)
Beware of Sending Your Smart Kids to College
From Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) (USA)
March 8, 2022
Here is our story…
In August 2021 we cheerfully prepared for our youngest son to head off to college. His first real time away, just 17 years old, and heading to a great big state university. We bought everything we thought he needed, some things he didn’t, and moved him to his new college and dorm room. We were thrilled for him— crazy brilliant, a bit of a loner, and dead set on studying highly specialized Engineering—college was going to be a great experience for him and we were excited and nervous. We thought: here is his big chance—he’s going to be with his own tribe—the geeky, engineering, goofy, Minecraft-playing, and space-loving kids! Unfortunately, he found, and joined another tribe, one we never anticipated.
Fast forward six weeks, in early October: I was notified of a health center charge incurred two days before his 18th birthday. I questioned him, because he hadn’t mentioned any injuries or illnesses. To my shock, he texted that the charge was for bloodwork because he “figured out he is trans” and is “seeking hormone replacement therapy to become more feminine”. Later that night, during a FaceTime call he told me “He always felt this”, for “as long as he can remember”, and when I reminded him that we love him, his response was that “a lot of parents SAY they love them”. I was devastated, sad, furious, and confused. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to PITT!)
Just one request* for International Women's Day
*OK, I probably have more than one request.
From Writing Behavior
By Eliza Mondegreen
March 8, 2022
For #InternationalWomensDay, I'd love the "all women" crowd to specify just what it is "all women" share that no women share with men or transmen. I admit I'm stumped.
It's not that we share some inner sense of being a woman: a male person's claim to such a thing doesn't have anything to do with a female person's experience of embodiment. Personally, I've yet to get a hard-on from putting on panties, so it's not that… what is it?
As I've said before, when I first waded into this issue years and years ago, I did think "transwomen" were in some sense meaningfully different from other men (while not being in any sense women). I don't think this anymore.
Now I think they’re just men having a uniquely and inescapably male experience that involves projecting male ideas about what it would feel like to be a woman on women, and then relating to those projections (and insisting that we must relate to those projections, too). … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to Writing Behavior!)
Comment: Predatory men have always pretended to be something else to abuse women
From Holyrood (Scotland)
By Mandy Rhodes
March 7, 2022
On the eve of International Women’s Day, in the year 2022, with pestilence and war having been visited upon us, and with women, as always, disproportionately affected by both, we are bizarrely, locked in a debate about what we even mean by the word ‘woman’.
And the phrase ‘Women won’t wheesht’ is a uniquely Scottish response to attempts to put women back in their box, to tell them their concerns aren’t valid, that they are on the wrong side of history, to accuse them of being radicalized, to label them as hateful, to shoot them down as ‘bigots’, and transphobes, and yet we have fallen so far down this particular rabbit hole that it is women that are then being blamed for the divisive debate that is whirling around the reform of the Gender Recognition Act.
Women are losing their jobs, being suspended from political parties, potentially turned away from services designed to protect them, and running the risk of breaking the law, for simply daring to speak up about something that feels so fundamental to them - who they are and how they keep safe. … read full article
Top 6 Myths About Trans Kids
Join us as we bust six of the biggest myths about trans kids. Number 5 will surprise you!
From Pseudonymous Reporting (Mystery)
By Sue Donym
March 7, 2022
There are a lot of myths about trans kids on the internet these days! Here’s 6 of the BIGGEST myths you’ll see about trans kids on the internet, and why they’re wrong!
1. Trans kids know who they are at a young age, and they become trans adults.
This isn’t true! A 2021 study recently replicated older findings that very few kids who say they’re trans grow up to be trans - no matter how insistent they are. This study found that only 12% of the young men it studied persisted in identifying as trans in adulthood - something many studies have found across both sexes, as the rate of ‘desistance’ ranges from 61-89% depending on study! Even then, some may still detransition as adults - and detransition is on the rise! This isn’t a choice a child can make, because like, they’re kids, you know? Why would you ask a ten-year old to make fertility decisions? Some people are just, like, totally wacked out, right?
The vast majority of ‘trans kids’ don’t grow up to be trans. They’re way more likely to grow up to be lesbian or gay! Which leads us into our next myth…
2. Trans kids and sexuality have nothing to do with each other!
A lot of people these days will tell you that gender identity and sexuality are separate! You can be trans and gay, for example! But that’s just not true! Particularly for trans kids. Studies on trans kids show that the vast majority are attracted to the sex they were born as. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to Pseudonymous Reporting!)
Lauren Black's speech
A young lesbian talks about the importance of women-only spaces
From The Glinner Update (UK)
By Lauren Black
March 8, 2022 (text of a speech originally given on March 5, 2022)
Thank you everybody for coming out today. It takes courage to show your face in this debate. I know some of you have made long journeys to do it. Thank you to the WRN for putting this together today as well.
Ok, here goes.
I’m a lesbian, who lives with gender dysphoria. I’m here to talk about women’s spaces, and lesbian spaces, and what their loss means for women like me.
By the age of ten, I had heard the word “gay.” People in the 80s and even the 90s were still mentioning homosexuality like it was a disease. I’ve heard it called sinful and disgusting. If school peers thought you were gay, you were talked about and bullied.
I knew that I did not feel like my friends did about boys back then. But I also could not imagine a future with a woman. I could not imagine the kind of woman I wanted, would want me back. I couldn’t imagine having my own children, or a home. I was ashamed. I was confused. And to make it worse, I felt stuck in my girl’s body. So I made a decision. I might be a girl, but I was going to be strong. I took part in all the sports, I cycled, I lifted weights.
I wish that there was somebody, even just one person, back then who could have explained to me what a lesbian was. I needed somebody who understood, to tell me it was ok to be who I am. I needed women in my life who loved other women, and were unafraid. I wish there had been lesbian spaces for me to find. But there were none.
I was alone, carrying a secret, and that made me vulnerable.
The young women looking for lesbian spaces on this island are back in the same position I was twenty years ago.
If I had arrived at that travesty of a lesbian conference in Cork on Friday, to meet men, and males claiming to be lesbians, I would have thought to myself, “if that is a lesbian, then I am no lesbian”. I would have denied my own existence. I would have become even more lonely, lost and confused. … read full text (and SUBSCRIBE to The Glinner Update!)