Sincerely inauthentic: zombie Republicanism and violence in France

I’m just back from France, where my direct experience of riots and looting was non-existent, although I had walked past a Montpellier branch of Swarkowski the day before it ceased to be. My indirect experience was quite extensive though, since I watched the talking heads on French TV project their instant analysis onto the unfolding anarchy. Naturally, they discovered that all their existing prejudices were entirely confirmed by events. The act that caused the wave of protests and then wider disorder was the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, 17, one of a succession of such acts of police violence against minorites. Another Arab kid from a poor area. French police kill about three times as many people as the British ones do, though Americans can look away now.

One of the things that makes it difficult for me to write blogs these days is the my growing disgust at the professional opinion-writers who churn out thought about topics they barely understand, coupled with the knowledge that the democratization of that practice, about twenty years ago, merely meant there were more people doing the same. And so it is with opinion writers and micro-bloggers about France, a ritual performance of pre-formed clichés and positions, informed by some half-remembered French history and its literary and filmic representations (Les Misérables, La Haine), and, depending on the flavour you want, some some Huntingtonian clashing or some revolting against structural injustice. Francophone and Anglophone commentators alike, trapped in Herderian fantasies about the nation, see these events as a manifestation of essential Frenchness that tells us something about that Frenchness and where it is heading to next. Rarely, we’ll get a take that makes some comparison to BLM and George Floyd.

I even read some (British) commentator opining that what was happening on French estates was “unimaginable” to British people. Well, not to this one, who remembers the wave of riots in 1981 (wikipedia: “there was also rioting in …. High Wycombe”) and, more recently, the riots in 2011 that followed the police shooting of a young black man, Mark Duggan, and where protest against police violence and racism soon spilled over into country-wide burning and looting, all to be followed by a wave of repression and punitive sentencing, directed by (enter stage left) Keir Starmer. You can almost smell the essential Frenchness of it all.

There is much to despair about in these French evenements. Police racism is real and unaddressed, and the situation people, mostly from minorities, on peripheral sink estates, is desperate. Decades of hand-wringing and theorizing, together with a few well-meaning attempts to do something have led nowhere. Both politicians and people need the police (in its varied French forms) to be the heroic front line of the Republican order against the civilizational enemy, and so invest it with power and prestige – particularly after 2015 when there was some genuine police heroism and fortitude during the Paris attacks – but then are shocked when “rogue elements” employ those powers in arbitrary and racist violence. But, no doubt, the possibility of cracking a few black and Arab heads was precisely what motivated many of them to join up in the first place.

On the other side of things, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise are quite desperate to lay the mantle of Gavroche on teenage rioters excited by the prospect of a violent ruck with the keufs, intoxicated by setting the local Lidl on fire and also keen on that new pair of trainers. (Fun fact: the Les Halles branch of Nike is only yards from the fictional barricade where Hugo had Gavroche die.) There may be something in the riots as inarticulate protest against injustice theory, but the kids themselves were notably ungrateful to people like the LFI deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo whose attempts to ventriloquise their resistance were rewarded with a blow on the head. Meanwhile, over at the Foxisant TV-station C-News, kids looting Apple stores are the vanguard of the Islamist Great Replacement, assisted by the ultragauche. C-News even quote Renaud Camus.

Things seem to be calming down now, notably after a deplorable attack on the home of a French mayor that left his wife with a broken leg after she tried to lead her small children to safety. As a result, the political class have closed ranks in defence of “Republican order” since “democracy itself” is now under threat. I think one of the most tragic aspects of the last few days has been the way in which various protagonists have been completely sincere and utterly inauthentic at the same time. The partisans of “Republican order” and “democracy” perform the rituals of a system whose content has been evacuated, yet they don’t realise this as they drape tricolours across their chests. With political parties gone or reduced to the playthings of a few narcissistic leaders, mass absention in elections, the policy dominance of a super-educated few, and the droits de l’homme at the bottom of the Mediterranean, what we have is a kind of zombie Republicanism. Yet the zombies believe, including that all French people, regardless of religion or race, are true equals in the indivisible republic. At the same time, those cheering on revolt and perhaps some of those actually revolting, sincerly believing in the true Republicanism of their own stand against racism and injustice, even as the kids pay implicit homage to the consumer brands in the Centres Commerciaux. But I don’t want to both-sides this: the actual fighting will die down but there will be war in the Hobbesian sense of a time when the will to contend by violence is sufficiently known, until there is justice for boys like Nahel and until minorities are really given the equality and respect they are falsely promised in France, but also in the UK and the US. Sadly, the immediate prospect is more racism and more punishment as the reaction to injustice is taken as the problem that needs solving.

Crabs are intelligent, sensitive animals — and some scientists wish we didn't boil them alive

The Pride industrial complex ignores threats against women and doubles down on the myth of 2SLGBTQ+ ‘hate’

NYC Pride – 6/25/2023
My name is K. Yang, I’m a former trans rights activist & LGBT non-profit whistleblower. I was just kicked, hit, pushed, mobbed by dozens of people in Washington Square Park. who identify as called me “bitch” & assaulted me. @KnownHeretic @bjportraits pic.twitter.com/4J9AaFXSEf

— Stop Female Erasure / K Yang (@StopXXErasure) June 25, 2023

“Two [men] followed me calling me a “bitch.” They began to explain misogyny to me. I was called a “cis bitch” by a [man] who claims to be a [woman]. Another begins the gang assault by hitting me, yet another kicks me from behind. #CisIsASlur“

Many of you have likely observed the endless stream of fear-mongering propaganda force-fed to us by mainstream media outlets, politicians, and NGOs, insisting “attacks” against the  “2SLGBTQ+ community” are on the rise. In the month leading up to Pride, these claims have been amplified in what has become an ongoing war against reality.

On June 6, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national “state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States… following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.”

What they are referencing is not, in fact, any actual “assault” — legislative or otherwise — but a series of bills passed in various red states preventing youth from being given harmful puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on account of a declared “trans” identity.

What has happened is that states like Oklahoma, Iowa, North Dakota, and Kentucky (among others) have passed laws preventing the medical transition of kids. This legislation protects minors from making adult-influenced decisions that cause irreparable damage, rendering youth sterile before they have even had a chance to explore intimate relationships and their sexualities. The long term effects of these drugs are both known and unknown, leading to bone loss, increased risk of cancer, and all sorts of other obvious and perhaps less obvious problems related to interference in the natural, healthy development of human bodies. We don’t have enough long term research on this kind of experimentation to know the extent of the damage, but we do know there is damage.

The tragic story of Jazz Jennings, whose mother thrust him into the spotlight as a “trans child,” and who has now undergone four “sex reassignment” surgeries, all of which have resulted in painful complications, should have acted as a warning. Today, the 22-year-old struggles with eating disorders and depression, and will likely never experience sexual pleasure or be able to have children.

You cannot simply stop puberty, feed a developing child or teen hormones that increase cancer risk and result in a host of other side-effects in adults, and assume no harmful repercussions for youth. Yet, that’s what these NGOs insist, claiming these treatments are “life-saving” and medically necessary, and that laws limiting these interventions constitute an “assault” on “LGBTQ+ people.”

The response to this legislation has been hyperbolic, to say the least, suggesting that kids feeling confused or troubled by their changing bodies and entry into adulthood flee their hometowns in search of states that will allow these interventions.

An HRC guidebook directs youth in their decision to leave their homes for “friendly states” that allow minors to alter their IDs and bodies, no questions asked, and encourage them to find their “chosen families,” described as “people who are in your life, not because of biological ties, but for love and support, to celebrate you and help you no matter what.”

This kind of rhetoric is common to trans activists, who often recommend youth identifying as trans abandon their “non-supportive” families (labelled “abusive” for failing to encourage transition) for a “chosen family,” who support and validate their transition. “Come talk to me about your secrets — your parents don’t really love or understand you, but I do” should be treated as a red flag of epic proportions, but within trans activism is normalized.

Moreover, the irony of describing a “dizzying patchwork of discriminatory state laws that have created increasingly hostile and dangerous environments for LGBTQ+ people” becomes obviously rich when we look at how women are treated by these groups. In the past five odd years, women and girls have not only lost the right to women-only spaces — including change rooms, shelters, and prisons — and lost the right to compete on fair grounds, among females, in sport, but have lost the right to speak out about this. Women who have challenged gender identity legislation and policy have been fired, assaulted, censored, threatened, blackballed, ostracized, deplatformed, and banned from social media.

And all this has been perpetrated against women with impunity while being gaslit into oblivion by public officials, the media, institutions, corporations, progressives, activists, NGOs, and human rights organizations. We are told over and over again that it is not women, but the “LGBTQ community” who are under attack and in dire need of our support.

Nonetheless, yesterday, GLAAD, a non-profit originally founded to fight for gay rights (recently expanded to advocate the LGBTQ cultural revolution) published an open letter calling on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter to “Stop the flow of anti-trans hate and malicious disinformation about trans healthcare.” Signed by a dizzying number of celebrities such as Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Haley Bieber, Elliot (nee Ellen) Page, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the letter claims “Dangerous posts (both content and ads) created and circulated by high-follower anti-LGBTQ hate accounts targeting transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people are thriving across your platforms, directly resulting in terrifying real-life harm.

The letter labels “misgendering and deadnaming” as “hate speech,” claiming that correctly sexing individuals or daring to acknowledge a name change is “utilized to bully and harass prominent public figures while simultaneously expressing hatred and contempt for trans people and non-binary people in general.”

By framing pushback against and discussion of the harms of transing kids as “disinformation and hate,” and claiming refusal to call men women as “dangerous,” GLAAD is able to demand censorship, insisting these social media companies “urgently take action to protect trans and LGBTQ users on your platforms (including protecting us from over-enforcement and censorship).”

It is all very urgent. An emergency. People are dying because of true statements and free speech. Not any real people, but certainly people in our imaginations. Either way, we are not used to being challenged and it is triggering.

On June 1, Marci Ien, minister for women and gender equality and youth, issued a statement to mark the start of what the Canadian government has rebranded as “Pride Season,” saying:

“While it is important that we take the opportunity to recognize the hard-earned victories of the Pride movement, we must continue pushing back on the sharp rise in anti-trans hate and anti-2SLGBTQI+ legislation, protests at drag events, the banning of educational books in schools, and calls against raising the Pride flag.”

She followed this statement with the announcement that the Liberal government would be “moving forward with the development of a new Action Plan to Combat Hate – that will address hate faced by 2SLGBTQI+ communities and, specifically, hate faced by trans people.”

Where is the Canadian government’s action plan to address the silencing, marginalization, and harassment of women who speak up about their sex-based rights and about biological reality? Where is our “feminist” Prime Minister on women’s rights and the actual assaults perpetrated against female inmates by the violent male criminals he has allowed to be transferred to female prisons?

Nowhere.

Justin Trudeau’s government didn’t stop with an action plan. On June 5, Ien announced that the government would be pledging $1.5million in “emergency funding to ensure Pride festivals stay safe across Canada.”

Safe from what? Where is the emergency?

Half of the population are losing their rights without any genuine public consultation or debate, and the government leaps to action, pouring money into a trend that is already the most well-funded marketing campaign I have seen in my life.

Today, Pride is a corporate-sponsored event that is celebrated as though it is the national religion. Dissent is unacceptable, but even if it were allowed, who is attacking Pride-goers? Nothing of the sort has been reported, nor was anything of the sort even threatened. What I did see was a lone woman mobbed by deranged, violent Pride fanatics, enraged that anyone would dare challenge their faith.

I would, frankly, never attend one of these things out of fear of being assaulted or worse, so clearly Yang is braver than I. We should all be enraged at the lack of support for women and women’s voices from those in power, who dare lie to our faces while we suffer the consequences.

The post The Pride industrial complex ignores threats against women and doubles down on the myth of 2SLGBTQ+ ‘hate’ appeared first on Feminist Current.

World Refugee Day

World Refugee Day was last week (June 20). Ideally I would have written this then, but I haven’t been as good on real-time commenting since Twitter fell apart. I still found it important to say something here, though.

I am not an expert on this issue. I wrote one article on religious repression and forced migration, but my co-author had the subject matter expertise. I’ve written a few letters in support of asylum seeker resettlement in Vermont, using my understanding of the Middle East and Afghanistan to justify asylum claims.

That being said, I’m getting to the point in my career where I want to actually do something, rather than study it. And I felt surprisingly emotional when viewing Timothy P. Schmalz’s “Angels Unaware” sculpture when I was in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The sculpture, unveiled in 2019, depicts individuals from refugee crises across history and is inspired by Hebrews 13:2, which calls for hospitality to strangers.

But again, I’m not an expert, and would rather listen to and amplify experts at this point, rather than coming up with own my own clever takes. So I wanted to draw attention to this new report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, and an accompanying op-ed in the Boston Globe.

The report contains detailed information on refugees and internally displaced people around the world, highlighting the presence of often overlooked crises. It also points to the increasing severity of this crisis.

It is lighter on solutions, although one could argue bringing awareness to these crises is important enough on its own. But other reports from the group provide more concrete steps.

So I’d just encourage Duck readers to look through this report, if they haven’t already. And I’d argue that this is an issue that touches on just about every aspect of international relations: inter- and intra-state war, political repression, religious and ethnic tensions, climate change and resource limitations, international organization and aid (in) effectiveness, etc.

It’s something we will all need to address at some point.

Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?

Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?

A recent opinion piece by George F. Will, “Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice” in the Washington Post made the startling claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022) has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.” One might think exactly the reverse. The Dobbs decision energized voters, especially women and young people, resulting in numerous Republican electoral defeats across the country. However, Will argues that the return of abortion policy to the states gives voters the opportunity of choosing moderate restrictions on abortion. Since most Americans support early abortion while opposing late-gestation abortion, Will thinks that a 15-week ban on abortion would be an acceptable compromise.

Why 15 weeks? Two reasons can be given. Almost all abortions in the US—93%—occur within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For this reason, making abortion illegal after 15 weeks would not, it would seem, impose serious burdens on most people seeking abortions. 

Another reason is that several European countries limit abortion on request to the first trimester, leading some US lawmakers to suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with theirs. This is disingenuous, to say the least. While elective abortion is limited in some European countries, it is not banned afterwards, but is allowed on other grounds, including economic or social reasons, or a threat to the woman’s physical or mental health. Moreover, in most European countries, patients do not have to pay for abortion; it is covered under universal health coverage. The fact is that the trend in Europe has not been to limit abortion, but to expand access to it. Countries in Europe “… have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices.”

Were states to guarantee access to abortion prior to 15 weeks, a 15-week ban might be acceptable. However, even before Dobbs, many women in the US lacked access to abortion, due to a dearth of providers, especially in rural areas. They often had to travel many miles to find an abortion clinic, which meant that they had to arrange childcare if they have other children or take time off work. Delay is also caused by the need to raise money for an abortion, which is not paid for by Medicaid in most states, except in cases of rape, incest, or a life-threatening condition. To be sure, even if there were none of these roadblocks, some women would still not be able to have early abortions because they do not know that they are pregnant, due to youth, being menopausal, chronic obesity, or a lack of pregnancy symptoms. Any time limits will pose hardships for some people. But if access to early abortions were guaranteed, a compromise on a 15-week limit might be worth it.

I suspect that time-limit advocates are not particularly interested in making sure that women who have abortions get them early in pregnancy. They want to place roadblocks in the way of getting abortions, full stop. That these roadblocks increase the numbers of late abortions is of little concern to them, however much they wring their hands over late abortions. Abortion can be reduced by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, something that has been shown to be achieved by access to contraceptives and science-based sex education in the schools. Remember when pro-lifers emphasized those methods? Me neither. 

My second concern is with abortions sought after 15 weeks. The reason for a late abortion may be that the woman has a medical condition that has not developed, or has not been detected, until later in pregnancy. In such cases, the pregnancy is almost always a wanted pregnancy, and the decision to terminate imposes a tragic choice.

It may be responded that all states allow abortions to be performed when this is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, and many allow for abortions to protect her from a serious health risk. The problem is that these exceptions conflict with standard medical care, especially in the case of miscarriage. Once the woman has begun to miscarry, the failure to remove the fetus is likely to cause her sepsis, which can be life-threatening. However, in states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors cannot perform an immediate abortion, which is the standard of care in such situations. They have to wait until her death is imminent and, in some states, they cannot remove the fetus until its heart stops. 

Ireland’s restrictive abortion law was repealed after a woman who was denied an abortion during a miscarriage died from septicemia. To the best of my knowledge, no woman in the US has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An OB-GYN in San Antonio had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.

Conservatives often portray those in the pro-choice camp as advocating abortion until the day of delivery, for trivial reasons. This is deeply unfair. If they want us to compromise on time limits, they should be willing to guarantee access to abortion before 15 weeks. They should be willing to compromise on pregnancy prevention through contraception and sex education. And they should agree to drop all restrictions on late-term abortions that make legislators, rather than doctors, in charge of deciding what is appropriate medical care for their patients.

_{Featured image: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash (public domain)}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

What the Surge in LGBTQ Self-Identity Means

We are now a year removed from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. In the flurry of protests that followed the late June 2022 decision, LGBTQ-identified persons and organizations paid a surprising amount of attention to the Court’s decision. The rainbow flag was a mainstay at Dobbs protests. Even a shallow dive into written backlash against the Court’s decision revealed that LGBT people were concerned about Dobbs at least as much as women in heterosexual relationships were, despite the latter’s lopsided contribution to actual abortion numbers. The most obvious reason for the former’s concern was Justice Clarence Thomas’s reference, in his concurring opinion, to reconsidering other “substantive due process precedents,” like those in the Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas decisions.

But some share of the political angst no doubt comes from the fact that there has been a surge in LGBTQ self-identification among young adults who do not display homosexual behavior. That’s right. New Gallup data analyses put the LGBT figure among Zoomers (i.e., those born between 1997 and 2012) at 20 percent. Data from the General Social Survey—a workhorse biennial survey administered since 1972—reveal that the share of LGBTQ Americans under age 30 exploded from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 16.3 percent in 2021. No matter the data source, it’s clear that in 11 short years, LGBTQ identification among young Americans tripled. And yet under-30 non-heterosexual behavioral experience, while climbing, remains just over half that figure, at 8.6 percent (in 2021).

Sexual behavior once comprised the key distinction to homosexuality. Homosexuality, however, has given way to ideological and political self-identity. In light of this shift away from using behavior to self-identity in defining homosexuality, LGBTQ antagonism to the Dobbs decision starts to make more sense. In fact, we should have seen it coming. In a study published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, my coauthor Brad Vermurlen and I found that the key predictor of adult attitudes about treating adolescent gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery—a topic you might not equate with abortion rights—was not age, political affiliation, education, sexual orientation, or religion. The best predictor was whether the respondent considered themselves pro-choice about abortion.

This surprised us. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have. Opinions about abortion and gender medicine tend to turn on basic differences in how people understand the human person, their own body, others’ bodies, and the very ends for which we exist. Sociologist James Davison Hunter mapped this out in his 1991 book Culture Wars. In what he described then as the “progressive” worldview, bodily autonomy is paramount. We determine who we are, and we should be free to do so through body modification and the control and redirection of bodily processes. In what Hunter called the “orthodox” worldview, on the other hand, bodily integrity trumps autonomy and self-determination. As the Heidelberg Catechism famously opens, we are not our own, but belong—body and soul—to our savior Jesus Christ. Bodies—systems, parts, organs, and processes—have natural purposes and ends toward which they are objectively ordered. They are to be received as a gift. The two are strikingly different perspectives about the self.

The prospect of motherhood can no doubt undermine one’s sense of self-rule over one’s own body. This is particularly the case if you understand your body as “belonging” to you, and that you rule over it by making choices for it. You can permanently alter it, be harmed by it, or be at odds with it. It’s not surprising that a pregnancy can scare people, because—in the progressive worldview—you have the right not to be pregnant, just like you have the right to self-identify as you wish. It’s a cousin to asserting you have the right to body modification in service to your own self-definition. (And why should being a minor prevent such rights?) Dobbs appears to undermine all this; its three dissenting justices claim that “‘there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter’—especially relating to ‘bodily integrity’ and ‘family life.’”

As previous legally effective arguments about fixed, stable sexual orientations give way to malleable sexual and gender self-identities, it’s tempting to wonder whether we’re not simply speaking about different worldviews—as Hunter’s terminology maintained—but alternative religious systems. LGBTQ, after all, is a big-tent system that contains its own rituals, creedal commitments, forms of worship, sacred items and places, a liturgy, a calendar with holy days, appropriate confessions, salvation accounts, martyrs, moral codes, and magisterial representatives. Religious belonging commonly begins with self-identification. Just as not all Christians practice their faith, so too not all self-identified LGBTQ persons demonstrate behaviors long associated with the movement. And just as there are many moral questions that divide Christians, so too is this the case in the LGBTQ world. But the emotional depth of disagreement here suggests core religious belief systems are clashing.

Language and authority structures are no less pivotal in the LGBTQ world than they are in our own faith. British social theorist Anthony Giddens—a leading public intellectual in England and one of the more famous sociologists alive today—articulated the importance of sealing new ideas with new words in his 1992 book The Transformation of Intimacy: “Once there is a new terminology for understanding sexuality, ideas, concepts, and theories couched in these terms seep into social life itself, and help reorder it.” This is why Hunter described culture (in his book To Change the World) as the power of legitimate naming. With regularity we now find ourselves wrestling with our opponents over basic terms. But sometimes even new religious movements get ahead of themselves, bungling their systematic ontology. As one Wall Street Journal columnist noted recently,

Those protesting the (Dobbs) ruling have a particular challenge in that there is now some disagreement among themselves about what exactly they are advocating and for whom. The left has been engaged in a confusing internal debate about what a woman is.

Indeed, this may prove to be a bridge too far. The recent flare-up involving Bud Light and Target Corporation, and the mystifying battle over whether drag queens should read stories to other people’s children, suggest that many people of any and no faith are fed up with the proselytizing. There’s plenty of religious tolerance in libertarian America—including among Christians—but little interest in revolutionary ideas about “queering” the gender binary. Sexual difference is not a problem requiring a solution. The Human Rights Campaign, as close to “headquarters” as it gets, should have seen this coming. Instead, it declared an LGBTQ “state of emergency” in the United States, akin to a plea for religious tolerance. But when parents’ rights are openly undermined by their efforts, the HRC should not be surprised when people of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.

Christians have a distinctive anthropology of the human person and a better, happier long-term vision for human flourishing. Unfortunately, many of us are unable to articulate it. But the time for making explicit what we believe—the true, the good, and the beautiful—is now. While it remains to be seen how our post-Roe society will look and how the present cultural conflict will play out in courts, legislatures, and around kitchen tables, a few things are certain. Subtlety won’t cut it. Gradualism won’t do. Charity—courtesy, kindness, and love—is always in good form. But don’t think that being deferential or nice will evangelize effectively or preserve our longstanding vision of the human person and its design, purposes, and ends from its ideological challengers. To paraphrase one old saint’s remarks about laws concerning marriage and education, it is in these two areas that Christians must stand firm and fight with toughness and fairness, and—if I may add a category—good judgment. A world, and not simply one country, is at stake.

A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto

“There came a point in my life … where I realized that almost every narrative, whatever it came from, that dealt with an African country was pretty much a rewriting of ‘Heart of Darkness.’”

The post A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto appeared first on Public Books.

Jill Ovens resigned from New Zealand’s Labour Party to start the Women’s Rights Party

After women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen was mobbed and assaulted in New Zealand, longtime feminist and socialist Jill Ovens decided she’d had enough. The following week, Jill resigned from the Labour Party and founded the Women’s Rights Party, which states, on their website:

“We want a world that is safe and fair for women and girls

The Women’s Rights Party is a party of women and men who believe in democracy, equality, and biological reality.

Sex is binary

Human beings cannot change sex

Women are adult humans of the female sex”

Jill had been an active member of the Labour Party but had become increasingly angered as women’s voices were not being listened to. Since retiring from the union movement, she has thrown her energy into the Women’s Rights Party, which has set out to recruit 500 members so they can register as a political party and be on the ballot in the New Zealand General Election in October.

The Women’s Rights Party aims to give women an option on the ballot paper who
find themselves politically homeless as mainstream parties have stopped listening to women and their concerns. In addition to contesting Parliamentary and local body elections, they hope to influence cross party policies to promote and uphold the rights and status of women and girls.

In this episode, I speak with Jill about her political history and why she formed the Women’s Rights Party. 

The post Jill Ovens resigned from New Zealand’s Labour Party to start the Women’s Rights Party appeared first on Feminist Current.

The GOP’s Attack on LGBTQ Americans, Revealed Republicans don’t...

The GOP’s Attack on LGBTQ Americans, Revealed 

Republicans don’t seem to care that Ronald Reagan once starred in a film that featured a prominent drag scene or that Rudy Giuliani did a skit in drag with Donald Trump.

Suddenly, they’re trying to ban or restrict drag performances in at least 15 states, with bills so broadly worded that advocates warn they could be used not only to prosecute drag performers, but also transgender people who dare to simply exist in public.

These bans are part of a cynical campaign to demonize the LGBTQ+ community. MAGA politicians are stoking fear over imaginary dangers to distract from how their policies only help themselves and their wealthy donors.

In the first half of 2023 alone, Republicans across the nation introduced a record number of bills to strip away freedoms and civil rights from LGBTQ+ Americans, largely targeting transgender and gender-nonconforming people.

By banning gender affirming care for minors, GOP lawmakers are effectively practicing medicine without a license — overruling the guidance of doctors, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. And they’re lying about what gender affirming care even is.

Genital surgery, for instance, is rarely, if ever, done under the age of 18. It’s not even all that common for adults. Politicians like Ron DeSantis are lying about it to scare people.

And the Republican presidential frontrunner has made it clear that trans people have no place in his vision of America.

MAGA lawmakers and pundits falsely claim trans people and drag performers are a danger to children and the public at large, when there is no evidence at all to support that. None. Trans people are in fact four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime.

These scare tactics are dangerous. Recent analysis found a 70% increase in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ Americans between 2020 and 2021, as the surge of these bills began. And that’s only counting hate crimes that get reported. 2020 and 2021 each set a new record for the number of trans people murdered in America.

The cruelest irony is that these Republican bills pretending to protect children actually put some of the most vulnerable children at greater risk. LGBTQ+ kids are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide, especially transgender children. Gender-affirming care reduces that risk. That is why it is life-saving.

Don’t Say Gay laws strip away potentially life-saving support. A teacher discussing sexual orientation and gender identity won’t turn a straight kid gay. But it will make an LGBTQ+ student 23% less likely to attempt suicide.

The tragic truth is that Don’t Say Gay Laws and health care bans will cause more young lives to be needlessly lost.

If Republicans really cared about protecting kids, they’d focus on gun violence, now the leading cause of death for American children. If they were really worried about children undergoing life-altering medical procedures, they wouldn’t pass abortion bans that force teens to give birth or risk back-alley procedures.

What the GOP’s vendetta against the LGBTQ+ community really is, is a classic authoritarian tactic to vilify already marginalized people. They’re trying to stoke so much paranoia and hatred that we don’t notice how they are consolidating power and wealth into the hands of a ruling few.

We need to see this attack on LGBTQ+ Americans for what it is: a threat to all of our human rights.

Right To Repair, Rising

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Black Sociology:Race and Power Dynamics in Society

If you’re already familiar with my work, then you know I do Black feminist sociology that draws on Black feminist thought as conceptual framework for the mixed methods study of digital society. In this blog post, I want to discuss one of the predecessors of the field: Black sociology.

Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge the gap between academia and the masses. White sociology contradicts its purported tenets of humanism and objectivity through anti-Black scientific racism that manufactures claims of racial inferiority to justify subordination. In contrast, Black sociology argues the social problems Black people experience, such as higher rates of poverty or lower rates of educational attainment, are indicative of the interdependency between racism and capitalism.

This framework seems poignant at a time when state and local governments across the United States aim to eliminate the presence of Black intellectual thought from the halls of academia. For this reason, this blog post explores the historical roots, evolution, key figures, and current state of Black sociology as a field.

The Historical Roots of Black Sociology

From the very beginning, Black scholars have navigated sociological negation characterized by varying patterns of exclusion that can be summed up in three distinct periods: exclusion and segregation (1895-1930), accommodation and assimilationism (1931-1964), and co-optation and containment (1965-Present). These periods also produced three distinct groups of Black sociologists respectively: the Beginning School, the New School, and the New Black Sociologists. Contra to notions of liberalism rife within sociology, the experiences of Black sociologists throughout indicate they have consistently faced persist oppression and racism.

In 1895, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois earned the first Ph.D. awarded to a Black person from Harvard University from the Department of History. Despite this disciplinary background, he is now widely considered a founding father of sociology. Consequently, the awarding of his degree is considered the genesis of Black people’s involvement in sociology. Du Bois used his training to research the lives of Black people in America as did several other early Black sociologists, including George E. Haynes, Richard R. Wright Jr., and Kelly Miller. Anti-Black racism from white sociologists fostered academic segregation within the profession, making it difficult for their contributions to be recognized and acknowledged.

The New School of Black sociologists was initiated by DuBois and developed by E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, and others. Through applied research and social reform orientation, they drew on prevailing sociological methods on the immediate effects of urbanization, integration, rural poverty, and segregation on the Black community. Yet, they still faced racism including having their work labeled propaganda and other discriminatory practices. Their inclusion necessitated adhering to positivism to compete for rewards that were often defined by standards of the white dominant group. Despite this challenge, they performed social science research as a form of protest. Thus, they had to balance advocating for freedom, justice, and Black people while also submitting themselves to standards of merit based on research principles defined according to white norms.

The New Black Sociologists experienced increased professional visibility due to racial integration, which has also drained Black institutions and threatens their existence and that of the Black sociological tradition dependent upon them. In integrated spaces, a caucus structure often constrains Black sociology, leaving little promise of parity while it dismantles the Black sociological tradition. Additionally, predominantly white universities often hire a token number of Black sociologists solely as race relations experts, which negates the diversity of Black intellectual traditions. Into the present day, whiteness defines the substance and epistemology of sociology.

Overall, the historical roots of Black sociology created a framework of social science based on self-definition and self-determination that reinforces Black identity. Still, the dynamics of negation from the broader discipline create a precarious reality for a tradition that rejects its scientific racism.

The Evolution of Black Sociology

The evolution of Black sociology has been shaped by an extension beyond the study of race to incorporate intersectionality; an emphasis on social justice and activism; and an incorporation of diverse perspectives, methodologies, and approaches rooted in the standpoint of Black people. Black sociology continues to amplify marginalized voices and expand our understanding of power, resistance, and liberation

The framework of Black sociology has evolved due to the transformative role of intersectionality, particularly in the field of Black feminist sociology. The paradigm highlights the interconnectedness of race, gender, and other social identities in shaping the social inequalities that affect individuals’ experiences. This concept also expands Black sociology beyond the single-axis framework of racism to explore the complexity of multiple systems of oppression intersecting and mutually reinforcing each other. Black feminist sociology therefore deepens our understanding by providing a more nuanced analysis of power, inequality, and resistance in society.

Black sociology’s evolution also includes a growing emphasis on social justice and activism. By emphasizing the link between theory and praxis, this emphasis fosters transformative research agendas, community engagement, and collective resistance in pursuit of liberation and Black self-determination. Based on this activist-theorist orientation, Black sociologists have also challenged traditional notions of objectivity and neutrality in sociological research, arguing these ideals often serve to perpetuate the status quo. Instead, they advocate for a more applied approach to research that acknowledges how Black social scientists develop interpretations rooted in their experience of oppression. This approach therefore acknowledges the importance of centering the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, rather than relying on dominant sociological interpretations about how race relates to social inequalities.

The field of Black also evolved through the incorporation of perspectives such as critical race theory, which provides nuanced understandings of power relations and racial inequality. Adopting such frameworks enables it to challenge dominant narratives and foster a more comprehensive understanding of social phenomena. Such a liberatory approach to sociology develops new areas of research, such as Black feminist digital sociology, which studies of digital technologies and their impact on Black social life primarily from the perspective of Black women.

Key Figures in the Field of Black Sociology

W.E.B DuBois’s study of race and social inequality in The Souls of Black Folk provides the groundwork of the sociological examination of Black American life as conceptualized by his theory of double consciousness. Double consciousness describes the social psychological experience of Black Americans who must constantly navigate between their own cultural identity and the norms of a white-dominated society. In addition to DuBois, numerous scholars have done work that exemplifies Black sociology, but I will focus on three: Oliver Cromwell Cox, Orlando Patterson, and Patricia Hill Collins.

Oliver Cromwell Cox

I chose Oliver Cromwell Cox because I intend to delve deeper into Black sociology from the Caribbean perspective in my future writing. Cox was born in August 1901 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He moved to the United States during his childhood and later received degrees in economics and sociology from the University of Chicago, including a Ph.D. in Sociology in August 1938. Cox went on to teach at Wiley College, Tuskegee Institute, Wayne State University, and Lincoln University.

Cox’s scholarship primarily challenged dominant theories of race relations from a diasporic perspective that recognized the interrelations of racism and capitalism. He rejected biological determinism, instead arguing that race was a social construction of the power relations of a white supremacist society. His writing also characterized racism as the foundation of the capitalism system and that this system had global implications. Cox’s most influential works include Caste, Class, and Race; Capitalism as a System and Foundations of Capitalism. Overall, Oliver Cromwell Cox’s contributions to sociology have been invaluable in advancing our understanding of race relations both in the United States and globally.

Orlando Patterson

Orlando Patterson, born in Westmoreland, Jamaica, is another Caribbean sociologist whose work has contributed heavily to Black sociology. He studied economics at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica before completing his doctorate in sociology at the London School of Economics, where he graduated in 1962. He has served as faculty at both schools and now works at Harvard University as the John Cowles Professor of Sociology since 1971.

Patterson’s scholarship challenges mainstream sociological theories of racial relations through an emphasis on the impact of slavery on contemporary society. His seminal work published in 1982, Slavery and Social Death, argues slavery was both a social and economic insinuation that profoundly shaped the lives of enslaved people and their descendants. Other publications include Freedom in the Making of Western Culture; Modern Trafficking, Slavery, and Other Forms of Servitude; and The Ordeal of Integration. In addition to his rigorous research and insightful analysis, Patterson co-founded Cultural Survival, which demonstrates his commitment to social justice for all indigenous people of the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

Patricia Hill Collins

Born in May 1948, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Patricia Hill Collins is one of the founders of the field of Black feminist sociology. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandeis University in 1969. Her academic journey continued at Harvard University, where she completed her master’s degree in teaching in 1970. After a career in education, Collins returned to Brandeis where she completed a Ph.D. in 1984. Collins’s career as faculty include the University of Cincinnati and the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is now Distinguished University Professor Emerita.

One of the key contributions of Collins’s work is her exploration of the concept of the matrix of domination. The groundbreaking work Black Feminist Thought uses this concept within sociological research to illuminate the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in an investigation of the unique experiences of Black women. Additionally, Collins’s scholarship has also explored the importance of Black feminist activism and community organizing as tools for social change in movements for justice and liberation.

The Current State of Black Sociology

Currently, the field of Black sociology faces several challenges that affect scholars within the discipline. Despite progression, Black sociologists remain underrepresented in academic spaces and receive less recognition for their contributions to the field. Their careers often encounter barriers such as limited access to resources, scholarly networks, and funding opportunities due to biased evaluation criteria. Moreover, the eurocentric quality of white sociology undervalues the experiences and perspectives of marginalized communities, particularly Black people.

Nevertheless, Black sociology remains a crucial component of the discipline due to how it continues to center the experiences and perspectives of the African diaspora. Centering Black people in sociological analysis enables a more comprehensive understanding of social dynamics and power structures. Furthermore, this approach also cultivates more inclusive and equitable approaches to the social sciences. Should the academic racism Black sociologists navigate ever got resolved, the field of Black sociology can actively contribute to dismantling systemic inequalities and fostering social justice.

Conclusion

By centering the experiences and perspectives of Black people, Black sociology challenges dominant explanations of societal phenomena. It addresses the interrelatedness of racism and capitalism affecting the experiences of Black Americans to emphasize social justice and activism guided by a paradigm of intersectionality.

Key figures in the field, such as W.E.B Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Orlando Patterson, and Patricia Hill Collins, have made significant contributions to our understanding of how social systems such as racism and capitalism affect the experiences of Black people. Still, Black sociology continues to face challenges, including underrepresentation and the undervaluing of marginalized communities’ perspectives. Despite these challenges, Black sociology remains a crucial area of the discipline.

To learn more, check out the hyperlinks in the essay above.

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The Responsibility to Protect Palestinians

By Michael Barnett

A recent headline from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes a familiar event: “West Bank Palestinian Village Residents Flee Amid Ongoing Settler Violence.” In many respects, this is old news. Settlers have been terrorizing Palestinian residents for decades, and 2023 appears to be a particularly horrific year. In response to these criminal acts, the Israeli army and government have tended to look the other way. The military is often slow to react or a no-show when settlers take to the streets and rampage through Palestinian villages or uproot olive trees. The Israeli government rarely attempts to arrest or punish the offenders, often citing a lack of evidence or persuasive identification of suspected perpetrator, but the dominant reasons range from ideological sympathies with the settlers to the indirect benefits of keeping Palestinians in fear.

The international community has developed a moral register and set of possible responses for such situations: a responsibility to protect. The general claim is that when the state fails in its responsibility to protect its citizens and civilians, then the international community inherits this duty. The original formulation applied to situations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, but it has expanded over the years to include less severe events and apartheid. These and other state-sponsored or state-enabled actions now sometimes go by the name atrocity crimes. Additionally, the United Nations and other international bodies have a protection of civilian mandate, as do many humanitarian and human rights agencies.

These various protection discourses and mandates were built for situations like the territories. Israel has routinely violated international law, including that related to refugees, human rights, and occupation. In addition, it has demonstrated an unwillingness to provide protections for Palestinians from the growing number of settlers. But the international community—specifically the West—has failed to act for two major reasons. It tolerated these abuses and arbitrary rules in the name of the peace process. The peace process led Western states to hold their tongues, creating something of a human shield for Israel. Relatedly, the US, for reasons owing to the peace process and domestic politics, played the role of protector of last resort in various international bodies and, most visibly, in the UN Security Council, where it reflexively vetoes any resolution that is critical of Israel. Only in the last days of the Obama administration did it find the “courage” to abstain. The US has been Israel’s “get out of jail free” card.

The peace process has been dead for at least a decade and there is now a “one-state reality” from the river to the sea. In this one-state reality, Palestinians have few rights or protections and Jewish privilege is enshrined in various laws and rules that systematically discriminate against Palestinians, providing strong evidence for claims that Israel is now an apartheid state.

The question is: what is the US and the international community prepared to do to stop these mass violations of human rights? The recent history of efforts by the international community and the UN to protect civilians gives little reason for optimism. Where the international community has intervened, it has usually been in cases of active war, which does not currently apply to Israel. There is much less success with lower levels of violence. Without enforcement mechanisms, human rights law has little effect.  That said, human rights monitors do have a record of compelling better behavior from those in power. Humanitarian agencies attempt to protect civilians through provision of life-saving resources such as food, water, medical care, and shelter, but have little ability to stop combatants that are determined to harm and terrorize civilians. States, meanwhile, often hide behind sovereignty to deny access to those who want to protect populations at risk. Israel has played this card, even though it has control but not sovereignty over these territories.

The best thing the US and others who have protected Israel can do is change their role from an enabler of the oppression of the Palestinians to an erstwhile guardian. The US should stop reaching for the veto every time a resolution on Israel and its violations of international law comes to the Security Council. Israeli actions should cease being called an “obstacle to peace” and instead be labeled as violations of international law. The US should consider suspending or reducing its aid package, and scrupulously ensure that its financial assistance does benefit Israeli hold over the territories. The international community might consider a role for human rights monitors or using drone and satellite technology to monitor Israeli actions in the territories, and make public their observations and findings. There are many American-born settlers, and if they are involved in violence in the territories they should be prosecuted in a court of law alongside other American-born terrorists. The West might consider placing smart sanctions on Israel and leaders that benefit from Israel’s hold over the territories, or introducing trade restrictions. The European Union and other countries that provide fast-track visas for Israeli citizens should remove this highly desired perk.

Sticks like sanctions often do not work in deterring or compelling action. They often do not hurt enough because the targeted state can often escape them by developing other arrangements and alliances.  Alternatively, for states like Israel that might see their cause as integral to the existential identity or security, then they are likely to absorb the pain of the sanctions. But sanctions and other kinds of discursive condemnations can have important symbolic effects. Israel likes to present itself as part of the West and having shared values with the US and other Western countries. Western countries can stop propping up the idea of a “special relationship” built on shared values, now that Israel ceases to share them. It can expel Israel from the Western bloc in the UN and other international bodies.

The international community has developed a range of options for attempting to deter states that trample on the rights of civilians. Few of them have the necessary impact and they often have unintended consequences. But even a serious conversation by the US and the West would be a momentous moment and possibly cause Israel to recognize that its policies have a cost.

Transcript: Why are dangerous men still being housed in women’s prisons?

In recent years, prisons across the Western world have been allowing men who identify as women to be housed alongside female inmates, leading to sexual harassment, sexual assaults, pregnancies, and complaints from women both in prison and among the general public. These complaints have been mostly ignored by governments and those with the power to do something. That said, the policy in the UK was changed in February in response to one high profile case in particular, wherein a rapist name Adam Graham renamed himself “Isla Bryson” and claimed to be a woman in order to be reassigned to a women’s prison in Scotland. The new policy prevents men who “retain male genitalia or have been convicted of a violent or sexual offence” from being moved to women’s prisons.

The US and Canada, though, continue to lag on addressing this issue, and dangerous men remain in women’s prisons across North America.

I spoke with two women who are taking action: Amanda Stulman is the USA director of Keep Prisons Single Sex, and Jennifer Thomas is the founder of Free Speech for Women and runs an action group called “Get Men Out.”

You can listen to this interview on the podcast. This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.

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Meghan: I would love if you could tell our listeners a little bit about the work that you do and how you came to be involved in this issue.

Amanda: Thanks for having us. I became involved in this issue in particular because I have a background in administrative law and policy, and because the issue of prisons is so distinct in so many different jurisdictions. On top of the 50 states, there’s the federal system and there are over 2000 separate municipal jails.. County… city… Each one can have its own, unique policy or law which applies to it. So I thought I could be useful in breaking down what those policies look like and how they end up applying in the real world.

So I worked with Kate Coleman, who is the founder of Keep Prisons Single Sex. She’s based in the UK and we opened a branch of Keep  Prisons Single Sex in the US over two years ago. The goal of Keep Prisons Single Sex is obviously to advocate against mixed sex prisons, and we do that by obtaining data, gathering research, lobbying lawmakers and policymakers, and trying to bring public awareness to the issue.

Meghan: Great. I’m so glad that you’re doing this work. This issue of of men being transferred into women’s prisons is so troubling, and I’ve been extremely frustrated, as I’m sure you both have as well, over the past few years that Governments in North America are really not paying attention to this and really not addressing women’s concerns.

Jennifer, can you tell us a little bit about your work and background and the activism that you are doing?

Jennifer: Well, I’m, I’m sort of an action group. So I focus on all the issues with that affect women, girls, and gender. I love working with Amanda because she’s so knowledgeable with the policies. And this last protest, Get Men Out, that was an action group I started. The first thing I wanted to do was aim at the prison situation because that is so abhorrent, you know, and it’s so obvious that it’s wrong. But I also diirect that towards the bathroom issue and other issues too — Get Men Out, Save Our Spaces… It sort of covers everything. What I like to do is read the temperature of what’s going on and try to anticipate where I will get the most exposure.

So that’s what I do. I don’t solely focus on the prison issue, but as with everything in this issue of the harms of gender ideology, you focus on one and the prison issue will lead you to the ACLU because they’re the ones that  sued for that policy to get in there. So I’ll start there and dig deeper just to try to see where I can get more action and more attention focused on that issue. I’ve worked with Amanda a few times, I’ve worked with Beth Steltzer from Save Women Sports, I’ve worked with a Partners for Ethical Care…

When they have an action that I think will really hit the temperature, of where I think America’s at,  then I go full force. So that’s what happened with this Get Men Out action. We worked with Amanda and Amy Ichikawa and we had a sense that the population was starting to be willing to see this. This issue is such a violation — we’re talking about women in prison, we’re talking about really some of the most vulnerable women in the country.

Meghan: Same thing in Canada. I interviewed Heather Mason a while back, who’s a really brave advocate and an ex inmate herself. She’s been one of the only ones speaking out in Canada about this issue. We’re talking about women who already have almost no rights, have no voice because they’re in prison, and they’re being housed with not just men, but the worst men — violent offenders, rapists, child molesters, and so on.

Jennifer, you mentioned that the ACLU was heavily involved  in pushing for this policy allowing men to be transferred into women’s prisons. Amanda, maybe you can speak to that a little bit — how did that happen?

Amanda: Sure. On top of the usual ire one should feel for the ACLU and their complete betrayal of what their mission is supposed to be and what they’re supposed to stand for, I have some extra ire for it. I, as a young adult in the early 90s, I interned at the ACLU in the exact same program that is now their LGBTQ++AI when it was the Lesbian and Gay Rights and HIV project. And to see them stray so far afield, not just from the substance of this issue in particular in terms of protecting women, but even on some of the ancillary issues. For example, they were the main drivers behind preventing a woman from requesting public records in Washington State. She was trying to learn how many men were in women’s prisons, how recently they’d been moved… People were starting to get wind of the policy change in Washington several years ago, and it was the A C L U who worked with several inmates representing them to fight the disclosure by Washington State Department of Corrections for a public records request.

The enormous irony of this is that this woman learned how to make her public records request from the ACLU’s own website. The ACLU’s  mission is transparency, public awareness, obtaining data from the government, you know, the government works for you, etc. And they actively worked to suppress access to data that would allow the public to learn the impact of these policies, and they were so successful.

That they managed to work with the Washington State legislature and actually passed a law modifying their public records  law to exclude disclosure of issues related to gender identity and prisoners. So unless you get information directly from women housed there, which you know, is incredibly dangerous and risky for them, there’s no way to do it on paper, publicly, directly because of the ACLU.

But getting back to the primary issue of pushing for this policy, the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is kinda a local version of the ACLU, I believe it originated with them. I haven’t been able to track it back any further, but they’re the ones who have developed the model transgender inmate policy that was enacted in California, that legislatures tried to enact in Maryland. They’re actively trying to enact a version of it in New York state right now, which is even more extreme than the version in California. So, they’re not only rhetorically pushing this issue, they are actively developing model laws. They’re actively pushing for those laws and actively working to prevent the public from learning about this issue.

Meghan: This is so appalling. I mean, for these kinds of organizations to be fighting against the rights of incredibly marginalized people. It’s really mindblowing that this is happening.

Jennifer: They’re acting as a legal agent of the gender industry. We have to expose and fight the ACLU because they are basically a legal firm that is pushing their policy.

It’s not just as simple as just saying, ok only men and women’s prisons. You have to dig deeper. I’m planning a protest in August against the ACLU in Washington DC because, you know, we can at least go after their donors — all the people that think the ACLU is so great because they protected the Nazis and Skokie and they believe in free speech and all that.

The whole narrative behind them that they’ve managed to hide—the new narrative—is still believed by a lot of Democrats. And I think if the Democrats knew what the ACLU have been doing with our civil liberties, they would stop donating.

Would that stop the ACLU? No, because the gender industry would just make up for that money. But you could see then a shift with the populace, you know, a shift of awareness.

Meghan: I’m glad that you brought that up, in terms of the donors, because one of the major obstacles to fighting gender identity ideology is that it’s infiltrated almost every single institution. Certainly every single civil rights organization, reproductive rights organization, LG now BTQ etc organizations. I mean, the reason that they’re doing this is because they’re getting all this funding to do it. Alternatively, you could look at it as they risk losing funding if they don’t push this.

Let’s talk about that. Where do we go to advocate against these policies when we’re dealing with these massive organizations and institutions? And clearly this ideology has infiltrated the Democratic Party. It feels so big and I know that people are getting really angry about it thanks to activism, like what you two are doing, but it feels like a big hill to climb. Have you had any successes? Or do you have suggestions in terms of who might be a productive target?

Amanda: I have found that to be among the most depressing part of working in this area, which is that there is not a single legacy civil rights organization or women’s rights group that understands this issue, or at least, pretends to. Every single one of them has been absolutely ideologically captured. So it really does seem as though either these organizations have to be built anew from the ground up — some other version of them. Or it’s going to take what Jennifer does an enormous amount of, which is on the street campaigning to bring awareness to force media to pay attention to the issue and to bring it to the public. We don’t have the numbers in North America of people advocating on this issue. We certainly don’t have the dollars. The reason that the ACLU changed the name of the program that addresses this is because they received a $15 million gift from John Stryker. That is what led to the change of the name and to their absolute commitment to the “T” all the time and none of the LGB. So I don’t think there’s a good answer to how we deal with the established organizations. I think people and especially women like Jennifer are the ones sort of creating a public groundswell.

Meghan: Right. I mean I’m, I’m verging towards thinking all these organizations need to be defunded and taken apart and started over again so that they’re not so tied up with this money that’s corrupted them so deeply.

Jennifer: The only real solution is the public against this, right? When we see thousands of people in the streets, fighting against this, that’s when we’ll see some change. People have to get mad enough to get out on the streets and this complacency that they’re under.

But inevitably I do think we will see a ground swell and that’s when we’ll regain our power. We won’t feel so helpless because we’ll look around and instead of seeing 20 or 30 people standing next to us, it’s thousands.

That’s how we know about Martin Luther King — because he went to the street. So it’s going to take that and it’s going to take an awareness level where we just have to keep plugging along and hitting these stories.

Now there’s this new media that is hungry for these stories. Tucker just got fired. James O’Keefe got fired. They’re looking for stories, right? Because they’re going to build their own thing. So we do have this interesting time right now where there’s new media that we can tap into that will tell our story. It’s getting out more and more, but it’s going to take work.

Meghan: So I wanna talk a bit about the law. I know that Joe Biden’s administration pushed through a policy allowing men to be transferred into women’s prisons. But I also am under the impression that things differ from state to state.

I know that New York lawmakers are pushing or trying to push through this bill called the Gender Identity Respect, Dignity and Safety Act, which would automatically place male prisoners in women’s facilities if they identify as women. I’m curious to know, first, if you know what’s happening with this bill, and second, if this is something that we actually need to be fighting on a state to state basis or that we can fight on a federal level.

Amanda: So the New York State Bill, as you say, presumptively houses people according to their self-declared gender identity. And there is such an insanely high burden and such a quick turnaround time required to deny that to someone that the bill was clearly drafted in New York with the intent to never, ever, ever deny someone. There are also mechanisms built in for the state to be sued if someone is denied, and to have attorney’s fees and damages paid. So it is so unidirectional a law, it’s a little frightening that that came about after all we’ve heard coming out of California and New Jersey and Canada, to the extent that people hear about it, um, the, the answer more broadly is yes, for right now, this is having to be fought on a state by state basis.

When this administration — the Biden administration — came in on its first day in office, it issued an executive order directing federal agencies to interpret the laws and regulations that they have some control over and that they manage in the various agencies to interpret sex to include gender identity. So with one pen stroke on his first day in office, he directed every federal agency to work through that process for the Bureau of Prisons, which is the only direct mechanism the federal government has. There are some indirect ones, which I’ll mention, but it’s the only direct prison system that the federal government controls, putting aside military.

During the Obama administration’s last month in office, they created a transgender offender manual and literally chucked it in the air and walked out the door and left that for the Trump administration to deal with. It was a very aggressive policy. Again, not a federal law, not a regulation, didn’t go through any voting process, didn’t go through any public comment process.

It was merely an in-house manual that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was expected to follow. It took the Trump administration two years to grapple with that policy and try to modify it, which they did, in kind of half-hearted way.

And then following Biden’s executive order and a few other similar executive orders, the Federal Bureau of Prisons again reissued the transgender offender manual and again leaning much more heavily towards a pathway for men to be moved into the women’s prisons based on self declaration. So that’s what covers the federal prison.

The way that the federal government impacts the state prison system is they have money and there’s a federal regulation called the PREA regulations, and it derives from the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The PREA regulations provide — and those did go through a public comment period, but that was so long before this issue was in the public’s line of vision.. You know, it was over a decade ago, nobody was paying attention to this… Well, some rare people were paying attention, but very few people were paying attention… And through the regulatory process, the Obama Department of Justice issued regulations that contemplated cross-sex housing. The act itself did not. And that’s the first time in the federal legal system there was anything speaking to even the concept of developing cross-sex housing. So what those regulations provide is that in order to maintain full federal funding — and every state receives some in order to maintain that —  you get massively dinged until you receive no money. Year after year, you get successively more dinged if you do not adhere to those regulations. So every state has to, at least on paper, consider housing people based on their self-declared trans identity. So for a number of years, most states were like, “okay.” And then went about their business. But some of them took it really seriously.

So now a number of states have either laws or policies that not only implement those regulations of contemplating cross-sex housing, but presumptively housed according to self-declared gender identity.

Jennifer: And this is how the federal government influences states throughout, like the federal government has the right — the president can come in and put out an executive order.

That’s what he did. This crazy executive order that virtually anybody would think was insane, you know, prioritizing gender identity above sex-based rights. They can come in and do that, and then they have this mechanism. The schools are funded federally, so they basically blackmail them into adopting these policies by withholding money.

So you think, well, why would the states go along with this? Well, they wouldn’t get their money. They even threatened the school lunch program at one point with, you know, “if you don’t adopt these policies, your school lunch program is going to be threatened.”

It’s a withholding of money if you don’t do this right. So like the universities that are, there are some laws in there, but they’re just not pursuing them. These executive orders have a lot of control even with Title IX. Amanda could probably speak better to this, but that’s why it’s being messed with, because it’s not, it’s not a law per se?

Amanda: Right. Just to clarify, Title IX is itself a law, but it’s the regulations that they’re kind of messing with right now. And what they’re trying to do is trying to apply what both Jennifer and I have been talking about in terms of the executive orders — redefining sex to mean sex or gender identity. The reason we’ve heard a lot about Title IX is they are going through the formal rulemaking process and putting it out for public comment. They received a record number of comments, which is really heartening, about modifying the language of the regulations, which is where you’ll find all the meaty stuff about what you have to do to get money if you’re a state or a state entity.

Meghan: I want to talk about some specific cases. I believe that there are 27 males currently being housed at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for women? Which was a central focus of the Get Men Out protest in New Jersey last month. Is that normal throughout the states?

Amanda: Well, woohoo, now there’s only about 10. A number of them managed to behave so poorly they got themselves moved out.

About two years ago, we worked with Women’s Declaration International to do a statewide FOIA project of every state prison to try to see what the numbers were in each location. Many were extremely uncooperative and we were not able to get a completely exhaustive list. But there are states that are in that range… admittedly not many two years ago. I think there’s probably more now, if we were to circle back and do it again. But even in states where you wouldn’t necessarily think of it, there’s a handful.

Virginia had one for decades, even before this recent push. But a number of states have several dozen. Obviously California does now. Washington State is getting up there. Illinois’ numbers are growing and they have neither a policy nor a law. A federal judge keeps putting men in women’s prison in Illinois. So it’s everywhere, though the numbers change. But we’re, we’re only seeing them go up. We’re not seeing them go down much. New Jersey went down just because they had a kind of freak out placement of men in there when they reached the settlement with the ACLU that Jennifer referenced, and then they had another panic in the other direction when it went so badly.

Meghan: And what are some of the cases — like what are we hearing about what’s actually going on in these prisons? I know that when I talk about this issue online, people will respond in these very blase ways. People will say like, “Well, you know, women get raped in prison either way.” Or they say, “If they’re in male prisons, then these males who identify as women are going to get raped.” Or they say, “Well prison is really bad.” And I don’t know, maybe they’re just not able to picture the situation and what’s actually going down and what the danger is when you’re putting men in women’s prisons. Can you talk to some specific cases that have happened?

Jennifer: So when a woman gets convicted of a crime and the judge reads out her sentence, he doesn’t say, “Okay, your sentence is possible rape, possible forced childbirth or an abortion, and then possible abandonment of your child.”

We don’t agree. We don’t have agreed upon laws to cover this. The public is not in agreement on this. Otherwise, that would be the sentence. This apathy around it just upsets me to no end. I also think people think it can’t happen to them.

The fastest growing category of inmates is women. When women get convicted, it’s harsher sentences for lesser crimes.

I think this sort of bleeds into that industrial complex. Like in New Jersey they were making $61,000 per person off of their prisoners. And women are easier to manage than men. Actually, prison reform is working for men and not women. So men are getting shorter sentences for worse crimes and getting out. They can add more to that prison population by adding men. Right now, if Bundy applied, he would get into a woman’s prisons. If Richard Speck, who killed eight nurses in Chicago, took hormones and dressed like a woman when he was in jail he would be in there with them. There’s no distinction of how bad the crime is.

Amanda: I think those are really good points, and I think a lot of it speaks to, aside from the sort of disregard for prisoners in general, it’s just treated as a kind of a throwaway population. But aside from that, I think it is largely a misconception. This is a subset of, at best, men they’re imagining are a particular kind of man or worse, they think there’s some sort of version of a subset of women. But I think most people imagine that it’s non-violent criminals, that it’s men who have had genital surgery, that it’s men who are on hormones, that it’s men who are tiny and pretty and vulnerable. All of those assumptions are out there and obviously, even if somebody is those things and not a violent criminal who is tiny and has had genital surgery and is on hormones, if they’re a man, they still don’t belong in a woman’s prison.

But I think that is what most of the public imagines when they hear these stories, which is one reason that it’s so important for the stories and the names and the visuals and the crimes and all of that to be made really right in people’s faces so they can see the criminal history of these men. They can see what they look like, which I know seems really superficial, That page on Keep Prisons’s Single-Sex’s website that has a sample of men and their crimes who are in women’s prisons, I mean, I’ve peaked people in 30 seconds by showing them that page. Just the, the visual of is sometimes what people need. Like, oh, still has a penis and is massive? That’s crazy.

Meghan: Yeah. And I guess, probably a lot of people — I’m gonna give them the benefit of the doubt — are imagining these men who are identifying as women or trans women as being men who “pass.” So men who “look like women,” probably men who’ve gone through all the surgeries and so on and so forth. So I imagine that what’s happening there when you’re showing them that actually these are the men who are in these women’s facilities: they just look like regular dudes. Like not even trying to look like women.

Amanda: Or they look exactly like men who have literally put their hair in pigtails, which is somehow even more alarming. You know, the superficiality of it.

Jennifer: The women said in their letters at the protest that these men dropped that act right when get into the facility then it’s a million dollar baby game, you know, let’s make a baby.

They’re not acting vulnerable when that’s going on. It’s a complete facade.

Meghan: In the UK they’ve actually had some success and have started to change their policies in order to bar violent offenders, as I understand it, from being transferred to women’s prisons. Do I have that right?

Amanda: I believe that’s right. There’s a certain category where the answer is just “no.”

Meghan: Have you had any success in that regard? In terms of advocating for change in the US or have you managed to have an impact when you talk to politicians, for example?

Amanda: Aside from public awareness, which is kind of hard to measure, but in terms of objective successes, a number of organizations and women, including Keep Prisons Single Sex and me, fought very hard in Maryland to keep a proposed law there from getting out of committee, and that was successful.

A year or two ago, New York State’s law sat in committee the last legislative session, um, through a letter writing campaign from Keep Prisons Single Sex, and I like to think we had something to do with it not making it out of committee. No successes in terms of turning things around necessarily, but like putting a hand up to the train that just keeps going faster.

But the public awareness is huge. That some mainstream media in the New York Post did a story about Jennifer’s action  last month…  They’re covering it, as Jennifer mentioned, and alternative media is becoming more interested in it. So in terms of public awareness, I think that’s where we’re seeing success.

I can’t say so much elsewhere.

Jennifer: Yeah. And public awareness is a tricky thing because you have to get ’em mad enough to come out. I think there’s a sense of helplessness that can be overcome with just more people on the ground and you know, the more people rally and organize and get together because we have to rebuild almost all our organizations. So we’re going to be needing to mesh with new people, churches that have retained their organization  and can relay messages without the dictatorship of social media and tech… We’re going have to come up with alternatives, and alternative ways of networking, and different people to network with to really get the ball rolling. Because it’s too scary alone. I think a lot of people are aware, and we’re at the stage of how do we get them to join us? How do we get them to come and let us ease some of that helplessness they’re feeling about this by joining together. And then lawyers mix in, and then we’re cooking with gas, you know, and we can make change.

We’re behind England. We have different laws here. It’s a totally different landscape here. But I do feel like it’s changed over the past couple of years in America. And there are more people interested in fighting this. So we are at the stage of just kind of weaving that blanket together.

We’re going to get better at this. I have hope for the future.

Meghan: I’m glad to hear that. I think that unfortunately, we — and I’m speaking like for myself, I’m not speaking for you two because I don’t know how long you guys have all been involved in this work — but we, a lot of the radical feminists who were worried about this early on, really didn’t understand how big this was and how deep the issue goes, so probably naively thought, “If we can just get the word out, then we can stop it,” not realizing that this was coming top down from these very wealthy funders. Just letting people know about it may have not been enough. Although, of course, the more people that know, the more people will push back, especially at a government level, and hopefully we can have an impact on things like legislation that way.

Amanda: You had asked about politicians, and I think there’s something relevant on that issue, particularly to contrast how it’s gone in the US and Canada vs the UK and that is that our politicians, you know, the Democratic party — liberal politicians, or I should say lefty politicians — are absolutely committed to holding onto the belief that the only people who could object to these policies are religious conservatives.

You know, I write as a constituent to my own representatives, and I’m in New York, so they’re all Democrats. And every time I do, I get back a form letter that says, “We’re excited to learn about your interest in religious freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You must be concerned about this for religious reasons.” And I write back and I say, that is not my concern. My concern is this. And I get another form letter that’s their like letter two in this letter tree, saying, you know, “Thank you for demonstrating your interest in religious freedom. We’re concerned about that too.”

So some of what’s happened and some of the challenge in the US and perhaps to some extent in Canada too, probably to a slightly lesser degree, is there is this artificial reinforced divide about who’s for these policies and who’s against them and why.

It becomes additionally challenging when much of the media who will cover this is either conservative or religious or both, and bless them. I am so thankful that they do. But all of us who need to be interested and concerned about this issue are just allergic to the arguments because they come out of the gate thinking this is tribal and we’re not in that tribe, so we’re not joining hands with you.

Meghan: Yeah. I mean that’s been the media and the political view from the get-go, which is why it was so difficult for feminists to get their perspectives out in the first place.

In Canada the media would only cover this issue as one of the religious right — which is strange because the religious right in Canada is really pretty marginal — as though it was only a debate between the religious right and everybody else.

Clearly they’ve done the same thing to a larger extent in the US which is frustrating because as you say people kind of just shut down and think, “Well, I guess you must be a religious right, Christian, gay hating jerk.”

Jennifer: And throw abortion on top of that, which they have done, and it’s just division everywhere. But there is this new media and there are so many people who are politically homeless who just want good schools for their kids and don’t want them brainwashed. So I think people are converging on almost every issue in gender. We’re all starting to kind of sing the same message. We want to work together, we can set aside whatever differences we have. This is too important. So I think there’s hope. There’s always hope, right?

We’re basically fighting the one percent. And if everyone could come in on even the free speech issue where, you know, if we don’t have it, we are literally slaves — then they can tell us to say anything and do anything..

Even with Covid, it galvanized people. But we’re fighting a big machine. Like even with Tucker, you know, he was the top — the top host of the top show in America, and they showed us he can be taken off the throne. They want to model behavior of defeat with us. And we have to fight that with modeling behavior of not using pronouns and demanding our autonomy. Individually and then together. And I think we are getting there and more and more people are getting pissed about this.

I have sisters and a lot of them were against me. But after Tucker, a couple of them came around, so the temperature has changed. My sisters are full on Democrats raised in Chicago, but they’re coming around because they’re seeing it affect them. And you know, that’s how it goes with issues. It has to affect you. Your kid has to be in peril. So I think we are going to see game momentum and then it’ll kind of rub off on Canada because we’re so close.

That’s what I’m hoping for. I’m so sorry. That’s all I have to say about Canada.

Meghan: I mean, it’s really, really bad. It’s a really bad situation in Canada and nothing’s really changing and there’s a little bit of pushback here and there, but not nearly enough and nothing comparable to what’s going on in the US, but you’re right that Canada does follow America’s lead, so, I think you might be right on that end.

And I’m glad that you made the point about we’re fighting the one percent because this trans rights movement has done so much work very successfully to present itself as just another grassroots civil rights movement. Like this is just about these marginalized people who don’t have rights, fighting for their lives, fighting back for their rights, fighting back for them, their safety. And that is not how any of this happened. This was fully a top down thing. And those of us fighting back are the ones who have very, very, very little power.

Jennifer: They always say, You don’t want us to exist.” And then they erase the word women. Bizarre. You know, when this mass propaganda machine captured all the young people online, basically they internalized this dialogue with everything they’re doing to us.

That’s why there’s no dialogue with them. I think what they don’t want people to hear is how ridiculous their answers are.

Meghan: Of course. It’s always a reversal. It’s always about the trans activists presenting themselves as these downtrodden, silencenced, everyone’s after them, they’re being threatened and harassed all the time, etc. And we know as women who are trying to speak out on this that it’s the total opposite. And I mean, I think anyone who’s really paying attention to this debate can see what happens  to women in particular who speak out and who really has the power in all of this institutionally. And in a lot of cases literally the physical power as well as we’re talking about men.

Before I let you go can you please tell me how to find your work, your organizations, and how to support your work, as well as if you have any upcoming actions that people might be able to support or attend?

Amanda: Sure. So the USA website for Keep Prisons Single Sex is kpssinfo.org. Other than that, we’re most active on Twitter, which is @NoXY_USA. We’re also on Facebook.

Meghan: Awesome. And can people support your work in any way?

Amanda: Yes. Thank you for asking about that. We do have a donate button on our website and just so people are aware, everything gets funded through the UK. So if it is in pounds, don’t be surprised. The UK group will honour requests to direct that towards the USA efforts. That’s what funds all of our work. Everyone is a volunteer. Any expenses we have get paid through fundraisers to the UK Keep Prisons Single Sex.

Jennifer: I’m Jennifer Thomas Rev @RevFemStBeatfem. I run the action group, Get Men Out.

My next event is on June 16th in Pittsburgh at the City Council building at 1PM. I’m aiming to get men out of women’s bathrooms. And of course it’s a Free Speech for Women event, so we’ll invite speakers. The following protest I have on the calendar is for the ACLU and that is Friday, August 11th in Washington, DC on the Supreme Court steps. You can email me at [email protected] for more info and I’ll get back to you. I do fundraising, but I peg it to each protest. So the fundraiser won’t come out for the Pittsburgh event until about a month before. So if you just follow me on Twitter, that’s the best way to find me. Or email me.

Meghan: Okay, perfect. Thank you both so much for speaking with me about this.

I’m really excited about the work that you’re doing, and I’m glad that you both feel hopeful about affecting change and I’m really grateful for your willingness to fight and for all the hard work that you’re doing.

Jennifer: Oh, well thank you Meghan. It’s such a pleasure and you are a woman that I admire, and I thank you so much for the interview.

Amanda: Same. Thank you.

The post Transcript: Why are dangerous men still being housed in women’s prisons? appeared first on Feminist Current.

In Howard Address, Biden Warns of ‘Sinister Forces’ Trying to Reverse Racial Progress

“Fearless progress toward justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces,” President Biden told Howard University’s graduating class.

It’s the funding, stupid

A common galvanizing trope among progressives claims the good and open-minded among us are in a constant battle against the evil right, who wishes to stamp out the struggling and marginalized. This holds true in the trans debate.

Just last night at the Met Gala, actress Gabrielle Union told Variety she and her husband, former Miami Heat basketball player Dwyane Wade, had decided to leave Florida on account of the couple’s “trans child.” She explained that “in 2016, there was a move towards a less inclusive world,” going on to imply that their children would have nowhere to attend school were they to stay in Florida, as schools in the state were not “open to teaching facts and accurate history.”

“Where can they say gay, much less trans?” Union asked, referencing a parental rights bill passed in Florida in March, inaccurately dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. She expressed concern that she and Wade “might get arrested for affirming [their] child’s identity.”

Her commentary was odd, considering that it those who challenge gender identity ideology and the practice of transitioning kids who are under threat, not the other way around. Indeed, a Vancouver father was jailed in 2021 for refusing to go along with his child’s transition. Bill C-6 (which later became Bill C-4) passed in Canada last year, claiming to ban “conversion therapy,” but in fact criminalizing therapists and medical practitioners who do not practice the “affirmative model” — which means confirming a child’s “trans identity” unquestioningly, and placing them on a path towards medicalization.

These reversals aren’t new. Indeed they have been the go-to narrative in the media for many years now.

Last month, The New York Times published a piece entitled, “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives.” In it, Adam Nagourney and Jeremy W. Peters argue that the swift rise of trans rights activism began on account of the right having nothing left to fight against once gay marriage rights were won. They write:

“The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage.”

It was frankly one of the strangest reversals I’ve yet to read on this issue, blaming conservatives for igniting the fight for trans rights rather than the other way around.

It is true that this movement appeared suddenly, as if out of nowhere, leaving many of us searching for an explanation. What other movement in history has taken hold of every institution, media outlet, and political party so quickly?

The answer, though, is not in Republican strategizing. It is much more simple than that: it was about funding.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that same-sex couples had the right to marry. This decision was, as reported by The New York Times, “the culmination of decades of litigation and activism.” This changed things for individual gay people, of course, but it also changed things for the gay rights organizations who had been fighting for this decision for years. The charities and NGOs and civil rights organizations once heavily invested in advocating for same-sex marriage no longer had a raison d’etre, and as such lost a key justification for future funding.

Gluing the “T” to the LGB allowed for an easy transition into a new civil rights movement, using the same language and mantras of “born this way” and “accepting people as they are,” as well as a need to fight for “equal rights” on this basis.

Indeed, it was the Democrats and Democrat-adjacent organizations that were looking for a new way to galvanize their base and solicit funding, and Republicans were frankly the last to catch on.

Trans intrusion on women’s spaces and the women’s rights movement began long ago, but didn’t really take hold until money was involved. While we often hear men on the right demanding to know “Where are all the feminists?!” the feminists were in fact the only ones to notice the advancement of trans ideology and its impending threat to women’s spaces for many years. Second wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Germaine Greer spoke out against the very sexist lie that a man can transform himself into a woman through stereotypes and cosmetic alterations long before this was on the radar of Republicans.

In 1977, Steinem responded to the situation of James Humphrey Morris, a British army officer who transitioned to become Jan Morris, and the transition of tennis player Richard Raskind to Renée Richards, by writing that, “Feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and the uses of transsexualism.” While it was important, she believed, to “protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision [to transition], and to be identified as he or she wishes,” it was also clearly not a “feminist goal.” A preferred solution would be to “transform society” so that men feel comfortable stepping outside traditional masculine roles and women can step outside the rigid limitations of feminine stereotypes, without need to “mutilat[e] our bodies into conformity.” Steinem added that, “In the meantime, we shouldn’t be surprised at the amount of publicity and commercial exploitation conferred on a handful of transsexuals.”

In 1973, Morgan, a founder of Ms. Magazine, was even more forthright, responding to a scheduled performance by Beth Elliott, a “male-to-female transsexual” folk singer at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, by saying in her keynote speech:

“I will not call a male ‘she;’ 32 years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman;’ one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”

Greer, ever outspoken, wrote an article for The Independent magazine in 1989 entitled, “On why sex-change is a lie.” It began:

“On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly-coated with pancake makeup through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem.

I should have said ‘You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.’”

Greer went on to describe how this man would mysteriously turn up outside her hotel, and that while he “certainly considered that he was psychologically a female… he behaved exactly like a predatory man.”

Her article could have been written today, though it likely wouldn’t have been published. Needless to say, we were warned:

“Knee-jerk etiquette demanded that I humour this gross parody of my sex by accepting him as female, even to the point of allowing him to come to the lavatory with me. Bureaucratic moves were afoot to give him and his kind the right to female identity, a female passport even…”

Predicting exactly the future that came a couple of decades later, Greer wrote, “The general populace, despite the evidence of their eyes and ears, will go along with this bluff.”

Where were all the feminists?!

Radical feminists continued this fight for the years leading up to 2015/16, which is when gender identity ideology began to take hold across institutions, followed by the passage of gender identity legislation.

I was interviewed for a 2014 article by Michelle Goldberg published in The New Yorker entitled “What is a woman?” My interview was omitted, but she spoke with a number of other feminists who had organized a conference in Portland in an attempt to discuss the encroaching ideological and institutional takeover. Goldberg documents numerous attempts by such women to speak against this, all of whom were subsequently shut down, no-platformed, threatened, and harassed endlessly — cancelled, as it’s known today. Lierre Keith, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, and Julie Bindel were among these women, as well as many lesser-knowns.

I interviewed Lee Lakeman, a founding member of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Collective (VRR), in 2012, about her battle to defend women-only space at the shelter and transition house, beginning back in the 90s. VRR has been plagued by attacks and accusations of “transphobia” ever since, resulting in the City of Vancouver pulling their funding in 2019.

Great efforts were made to suppress debate surrounding not just the social and cultural phenomenon of transgenderism, but the related legislative changes. Because most of the pushback was coming from women with no financial or political power, that was not hard to do.

I am aware of course, that the modern, mainstream feminist — the kind of “feminist” who did have a voice within Democratic organizations, well-funded institutions, the mainstream media, and academia — went along with the whole thing. This baffled me for a long time. I didn’t understand the funding mechanisms behind the whole operation, and was livid at seeing organizations that should be among the most invested in understanding how the female body works — reproductive rights organizations, for example — suddenly and in unison erasing women from their work and politics.

~~~

On September 2, 2016, Planned Parenthood tweeted that “Menstruators in New York started to #tweetthereceipt celebrating the repealed tampon tax…” A day later, the Planned Parenthood account reported that “Purvi Patel has been released from prison, but people continue to be criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes.”

These tweets might seem innocuous, but were significant. Where once would have been the word “woman,” we saw “menstruators” and “people.” And Planned Parenthood was not alone. The word we had always used to describe adult human females rather suddenly had cooties.

In 2013, Lauren Rankin, an American reproductive rights activist, wrote that “abortion rights activists have overlooked and dismissed a very important reality: Not everyone who has an abortion is a woman,” adding:

“We must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in assuming that only women have abortions. Trans men have abortions. People who do not identify as women have abortions.”

Rankin explained that an organization called the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF) was “leading the way on becoming more gender inclusive around the issue of abortion,” directing a change in language. NYAAF had changed its language a year earlier, in 2012, replacing sexed language in its mission statement with words like “anyone,” “every person,” and “the people who call our hotline.” In 2013, they explained that “embracing gender inclusivity” meant “not assuming the gender pronouns that our callers use and replacing ‘woman’ with ‘people’” on their website, and had taken it upon themselves to “reach out to the LGBTQ communities and inform them that NYAAF helps fund abortions for all people, not just women.”

In 2015, Fund Texas Women, which pays the travel and hotel costs of women who need to get an abortion but don’t have access to a clinic nearby, became Fund Texas Choice. Co-founder Lenzi Scheible wrote:

“With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans* people who needed to get an abortion but were not women. We refuse to deny the existence and humanity of trans* people any longer.”

At the time, longtime feminist and political columnist Katha Pollitt noted that while the idea that the word “woman” was “exclusionary” or “cissexist” might “sound arcane to most people,” this directive had been “quietly effective” in reproductive rights activism.

She was right. But most had not yet caught on to this push to erase women from language.

Why, of all places, is this starting in the reproductive rights movement? A movement that, if nothing else, is centered around about female bodies and autonomy?

The truth is in the funding.

Big name funders and billionaire philanthropists like Jennifer Pritzker, the Arcus Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and Jon Stryker not only fund numerous trans rights and LGBT organizations, but Planned Parenthood. At the same time it was decided the “T” would be added to the “LGB,” the associated New Speak was applied across the board, not just to trans lobby groups and LGBT organizations, but to reproductive rights organizations and clinics across the US.

Journalist Jennifer Bilek has done ample work demonstrating the funding sources behind the trans ideology takeover, pointing out that men like Pritzker also fund the now trans-obsessed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who joined Planned Parenthood as a major player in the institutionalization of “female-erasing language.”

Not only that, but Planned Parenthood has since moved into the trans market, selling kids on puberty blockers and hormone treatments. Today, the organization claims to be America’s “second largest provider of hormone therapy.”

Embracing trans ideology was rendered mandatory for any organization wishing to continue getting funding from these corporations and donors. If you’ve ever wondered why UN Women has continued to insist “transwomen are women” despite endless pushback from women or why the Twitter accounts of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRC) appear to be run by woke teenagers, it’s useful to know that Arcus, founded by Stryker, is a key funder. Of course the Democrats are compromised as well. As Bilek also points out, even Obama’s campaign was deeply connected to and funded by Pritzker.

Needless to say, this was no “grassroots movement.” It has never been “the civil rights issue of our time,” as then Vice-President Joe Biden called it in 2012. Certainly it wasn’t “the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics” in response to “gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender,” as Nagourney and Peters claim in The Times.

From the moment men began attempting to identify their way into womanhood, feminists have been there, saying “no.” Some of those women became compromised, as apparently Steinem did, recanting in 2013, claiming that her words were “taken out of time and context” and that what she “wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.” Others always were — careerist in their intentions and profiting too much from their cowardice to veer towards truth.

The reason, I now realize, that radical feminists could speak up against transgenderism was the same reason they weren’t heard: radical feminists aren’t funded by anyone.

Once mainstream feminists made their activism their careers, they became dependent on the same funding sources pushing trans ideology from the top down. While feminists like me who had always worked independently, free to push back against what I saw as the anti-feminist third wave and the big name women who kept their message neat and tidy and confined to Democrat-stamped messaging, struggled to understand why anyone would fall for this clearly anti-woman nonsense, it actually did all make sense.

When you start putting your paycheck ahead of your integrity, you’ll say anything. Even “menstruator.” Even “transwomen are women.”

It’s fair to say that since this debate has finally exploded into the public realm, the fight against transgender ideology has probably become a grift for some men on the right (and beyond). But this is not where it began. It began with the selling of the “T” to people who needed the money, and continued to the point of practically no return because those pushing back didn’t have a bargaining chip.

The post It’s the funding, stupid appeared first on Feminist Current.

Beyond Victimhood: Women’s Contributions to Criminal Violence

Guest post by María José Méndez

This post is part of a series on illicit economies, organized crime, and extra-legal actors and came out of an IGCC-sponsored conference hosted in October 2022 by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.

In 2019, a 19-year-old woman detonated a grenade on a public bus in an extortion attempt in Guatemala City. Three years later, another woman was arrested for trying to smuggle ammunition and cell phones into a maximum-security prison in Honduras.

Accounts of criminal violence tend to portray women as passive victims. There are good reasons for this. Women are abused daily by criminal groups, especially in Latin America, where they are being killed at record rates. In Central America, women are victimized by gangs when they refuse sexual advances or protect their children from recruitment. In Mexico, they are forced into sex work by drug cartels, and their mutilated bodies are displayed to send messages to rival groups and the state.

Considering this rampant victimization, how important is the role that women play in criminal violence and what drives their participation? My research delves into this question by studying women affiliated with MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

While women have long played an active role in armed conflict, comprising as much as 30 percent of militant movements worldwide, the discussion around women’s involvement in violence tends to ignore contexts of organized crime and why women choose to stay in violent organizations.

In Central America, women are increasingly taking on lethal activities within gangs. This trend is also evident in other countries where women’s engagement in violent crime is also growing and diversifying. In Mexico and Colombia, where the number of female prisoners has more than doubled in the past decade, women have assumed prominent positions in drug trafficking organizations, with some even serving as leaders of their own criminal enterprises.  

Several of the women I spoke with participated in hired killings and attacks against local business owners unable or unwilling to pay extortions. One former gang member said she felt “stronger than men” when given these missions; another spoke about regaining a sense of control, which had been shattered by a traumatic experience of rape. For both, participation in violence was a way of asserting power and earning respect from fellow gang members. For others, it was simply a way of surviving. As one put it to me, “In Honduras [t]here are no jobs for us […] But you must work to survive. We survive from contract killings, extortions, drug sales and kidnappings.”

Women’s contributions to violence also manifest in indirect ways, as revealed in a series of 2018 confiscated letters. In these letters, an imprisoned Honduran gang leader asks his wife to serve as a communication bridge with those outside, and to fulfill his daily needs. Requests for logistical support intermingled with demands for basic items, such as boxers and bars of soap, and reminders to give him and his children physical and emotional warmth.

As with armed conflict, criminal violence is made possible by a gender-based division of labor, where women bear the brunt of logistical and caregiving tasks. Most of these activities revolve around Central American prisons, which have become important nodes of decision-making for extortion schemes.

In a context of “mano dura” policies of mass incarceration and state persecution, which have imposed heavy constraints on gang members’ movements since the early 2000s, women have become pivotal in maintaining the complex operations that coordinate between gang members. The women I spoke with acted as the “eyes and hands” of imprisoned gang members, providing support in the transportation of weapons, transmission of messages, record-keeping, and intelligence gathering.

Some of these activities provided unexpected windows for enhancing their entrepreneurial and leadership skills. For instance, one woman who worked for her husband, a Salvadoran gang leader, spoke about how she leveraged this activity to offer paid courier services for other gang members on her own initiative. This allowed her to better support her children and ailing mother.

Gang-affiliated women also supply the basic services and goods—food, clothing, emotional support, childcare, and so on—necessary to sustain gang members and therefore their capacity to engage in the work of violence. One former gang member, for example, related how she was able to commit fully to the gang’s illicit activities because her aunt cared for her one-year-old son.

Women’s role in criminal violence is more important than we often realize. To acknowledge this role, we need to challenge traditional gender stereotypes that reduce criminal violence to a male phenomenon. We also need to challenge a prevalent assumption in research on women and organized violence: that women’s participation in lethal activities is simply the result of male manipulation or submission to patriarchal authority. This means paying attention to how women are also driven by their own aspirations for status and well-being.

Recognizing women’s complex agency in criminal violence, including the different labors they perform and the gendered factors shaping their involvement, is essential for helping address the unprecedented levels of criminal lethality affecting regions like Latin America. As scholars have argued, a clear understanding of the full range of women’s participation in violence can yield effective policy that gives women access to peace initiatives.

María José Méndez is an assistant professor in the Political Science department at the University of Toronto.

Why Militia Politics Is Preventing Democratization and Stability in Sudan

Guest post by Brandon Bolte

On April 15, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) surprised many Western observers when it launched an assault against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in Khartoum. Led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”), the RSF previously fought for the Sudanese regime against rebels for years. In 2019, it participated in a coup alongside General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF that ousted Sudan’s long-time dictator, Omar al-Bashir. Both generals have since been on a transitionary council meant to shape a new government before popular elections take place. In the 11 days since the violence in Khartoum began, over 400 people have been killed, thousands are trying to flee the capital, and there are signs of the conflict spreading to other parts of the country.

Transitions to democracy are usually rocky, but coups can lead to democratization when coupled with the kind of popular mobilization seen in Sudan. The irony of the current situation is that at one point the RSF was considered by al-Bashir as his “praetorian guard,” meant to deter the SAF from staging a coup. Coup-proofers aren’t usually successful coup-perpetrators. Moreover, the current rupture was caused by a disagreement between the two generals over how the RSF might be integrated into the army’s command structure. Why is the proposed merging of forces so contentious? What do we expect the long-term outcome of this conflict to be?

In a study published in International Studies Quarterly, I unpack the politics of how governments try to manage, regulate, and contain militias like the RSF. I describe how and why states and professed pro-state militias compete for power at one another’s expense. Viewed in this light, the outbreak in Khartoum is part of a predictable, if not inevitable, vicious spiral of poor militia management politics over the course of the last two decades.

Pro-government militias are commonly defined as organized armed groups allied with the state but are not formally part of the official security forces. These groups range from well-equipped paramilitaries designed to supplement the regular army to localized civil defense forces meant to hold territory and extract local information about insurgents. Sometimes they are tasked with carrying out human rights violations like mass killings or genocide, allowing the government to evade accountability. Professionalized militias are also used by certain types of dictators to counterbalance the official military in order to prevent coups d’état.

The challenge for governments employing militias is that militias themselves are perfectly aware the state could eliminate them once they are no longer needed. This is why governments often keep their auxiliaries contained in some way, by actively monitoring them or restricting their capabilities. Otherwise, these militias could switch sides in a conflict, restart a war, be more difficult to disintegrate or integrate, or otherwise undermine the state’s long-term ability to govern.

Weak states facing capable rebellions, however, are usually unable to regulate and contain their militias. Instead, they have to focus on short-term threats from insurgents, allowing militia allies to have free reign. The consequence is that militia groups have incentives to take advantage of these windows of opportunity to “bargain” with the state for resources that they can eventually use to stave off their own future demise.

The RSF is a reorganization of disparate Arab militias called the Janjaweed, which were remobilized from scattered murahileen groups after a coalition of rebel groups shocked Khartoum by seizing an air force base in 2003. The SAF and Janjaweed militias then perpetrated a genocidal campaign in Darfur, leading to over 200,000 deaths.

Over time, the combination of weak state capacity and a significant rebel threat drove al-Bashir’s regime to become dependent on militias for survival. Militia leaders knew this and pursued their own interests unabated. Many leaders profited from looting and extortion during the war, so when the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) was signed in 2006 with a provision to disarm the Janjaweed, many, including Hemeti’s faction, revolted against the state. Eventually, Khartoum weakened Hemeti enough to force him to negotiate. There the government again co-opted Hemeti by providing his militia more weaponry, financial rewards, and eventually legitimacy by reorganizing it into the RSF. Al-Bashir soon brought the RSF out from under the command of the National Intelligence and Security Services, ensuring the group’s independence from the constraints of the state.

In the end, al-Bashir’s failure to contain these militias was part of a vicious cycle of his own doing. His growing dependency on militias like the RSF afforded Hemeti multiple windows of opportunity to increase his own capabilities, which he then used to resist his group’s demobilization. Now, even integration is worth resisting for Hemeti, since it would effectively represent the dissolution of his autonomy and influence.

A durable resolution can only occur if the RSF loses its bargaining power. This may require immediate international commitments by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to stop supplying weapons to the RSF and/or the SAF suppressing Hemeti’s forces to a point where the latter has incentives to negotiate but not retreat to remobilize for large-scale war. Unlike the immediate post-DPA period, however, appeasement cannot come in the form of greater autonomy, resources, and capabilities if the end goal is political stability. Al-Burhan knows this, and given the SAF’s own involvement in repression and mass killing, the military will resist appeasing Hemeti in an effort to signal to the pro-democracy movement a desire to turn a new leaf.

The problem is that the RSF is situated with considerable bargaining leverage and has every incentive to use force to preserve the status quo. “Power is as power does.” Temporary ceasefire efforts notwithstanding, until the RSF is demobilized or neutralized, Sudan’s pro-democracy advocates will be sidelined while military strongmen violently compete to fill the void in Khartoum.

Brandon Bolte is a 2022–23 Peace Scholar Fellow with the US Institute of Peace and a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Penn State University. He will start as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Springfield in the fall. The views expressed in this commentary are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Institute of Peace.

Mehdi Hasan shatters Matt Taibbi's credibility in brutal MSNBC interview

Journalist Matt Taibbi made a name for himself in 2010 with his brutal takedown of the finance companies that orchestrated and profited from the crippling mortgage meltdown, which ran in Rolling Stone. His description of Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," has gone down in the annals of investigative journalism history. — Read the rest

A letter to Judy Rebick, from Lee Lakeman, on changing one’s mind

Attacks against Trans women are attacks against the women’s movement and the fight for better equality and justice.#TransDayOfVisibility #TransRightsAreHumanRights

Read the full story by https://t.co/ZIUBAuI38Q‘s founding publisher, Judy Rebick: https://t.co/G8o62tC3Zo

— rabble.ca (@rabbleca) March 31, 2023

Last week, longtime Canadian feminist and leftist, Judy Rebick, published a piece at rabble.ca, the site she founded, entitled “My feminism is Trans inclusive.” It in, Rebick explains that she has never written on trans issues before, but having been accused of being a “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), she wished to reject the label, and offered an apology of sorts for having testified in support of Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR), who were forced into a human rights case brought against the transition house and rape crisis line by Kimberly Nixon in 1995. Nixon had been rejected from a training group with the collective on account of having been born a man, and on account of the fact the transition house and collective was women-only. Under apparent pressure from her leftist comrades, Rebick explained, in her recent piece, that she “didn’t really understand the issues involved,” that she had “believed that gender was socially constructed,” but was “ignorant,” and has since learned and changed her position. Rebick does not explicitly say she disagrees with the ruling in favour of VRR, and no longer believes VRR should have the right to define their own membership and maintain a women-only space, though she does criticize the organization for “excluding trans women.”

In the following letter, Lee Lakeman, a founding member of the Vancouver Rape Relief collective, responds.

~~~

Dear Jude,

Over the last couple of days, three friends have sent me your statement published at Rabble. Like many, I have not read Rabble in years. The suppression there of any debate about ideas not supported by the party put me off. As it happens, I was reading the work of a young feminist in New Zealand writing about the barriers and difficulties of responding with integrity to the events in our lives. So, with her example, I think it best that I try.

You published your piece, “My Feminist is Trans Inclusive,” at Rabble, so I am submitting to Feminista, Feminist Current, Vancouver Women’s Space and Fairer Disputations, which may not be perfect media, but that’s what I have, just as you have Rabble. Perhaps a friend will forward it to you. If not, then maybe we have no remaining connections. I haven’t yet responded to my other friends who contacted me about your statement, but as you and I have been friends and comrades, my first response is to you:

I’m sorry that you have been pressured to apologize for doing what you thought was your ethical obligation when you provided testimony in the BC Human Rights Court to protect the legislated rights of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter from a wrongful accusation. I was grateful at the time and I remain grateful that you gave of your commitment to women’s liberation. If it is of any consolation to you or if it can satisfy those pressuring you, I don’t think it was your testimony, but rather the BC NDP government’s provision in Human Rights Law, ensuring equality-seeking groups have the right to define their own membership, that convinced the judges. And I’m sure you can argue that you have avoided the many situations since (including those before the various courts now) in which women have asserted this legal right that we confirmed in 2005. I’m sure that this excellent legislation is the real target. They want you to mislead what remains of second wave feminist support for the NDP.

Your explanation that you were ignorant at the time and have been educated since (presumably about whether women get to organize on our own terms) seems unlikely to satisfy those who press you for apology and contrition. It’s obvious that some want to display your contrition, to expose an image of you bowing down in contrite humiliation (perhaps as a cautionary tale before those in debate or confusion) while you still have a Canadian level of fame and importance as the legacy media’s chosen face of second wave feminism.

I must say that such a change of mind and your right to express it is completely understandable given the current state of things and your choice to express a change of mind is something I defend even as I find this change wrongheaded. I hope they are satisfied with this halfway measure and you won’t need further defending.

Those of us who believe the evidence of bodies — especially of our eyes and ears — that sex differences are real and matter, who think and recognize important patterns of oppression based in part on those differences, who still struggle for women’s equality and liberty (and particularly among those of us who struggle against rape, some of whom have chosen to support women’s rights by organizing separately), beg to differ.

Who knows how all this division and disagreement will end, but forcing women or any people to say what they do not perceive, believe, or think; disallowing groups of like-minded women to organize against sexist violence and in our own egalitarian and humanist interests; forcing individuals or groups of the oppressed to stand silent while witnessing the oppression of others; and forcing pathetic examples of insincere contrition or renunciation of women’s genuine efforts does not bode well.

Lee Lakeman

The post A letter to Judy Rebick, from Lee Lakeman, on changing one’s mind appeared first on Feminist Current.

Watermarking ChatGPT, DALL-E and others could help protect against fraud and misinformation