Feminism

New Zealand has announced it is banning new prescriptions of puberty-blocking drugs for young transgender people, in a move that critics warned could worsen the mental health of those affected.

If you start from one extreme, that there’s no such thing as gender dysphoria in teens, then obviously this is good. If you move one step to a slightly milder position – about my own – which is that humans can believe qll sorts of things which are not, in fact true, and that this one generally clears up with puberty itself, then this is also good news. Let us attempt the most effective cure we know of before anything else.

Other views don’t matter here of course.

Celebrity crib sheet: Sydney Sweeney is everywhere – here are nine things you need to know about her

The tits are so impressive even The G has to write about them?

And Tsk, eh?

Sweeney’s art, however, is increasingly at risk of being overshadowed by her controversies. In July, an ad for the denim company American Eagle, showing Sweeney decked out in denim with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” sparked instant controversy, seen by some as catering to the “male gaze” and subtly promoting whiteness.

Why shouldn’t an attractive white bird glam up a bit for the male gaze? And sure, being an attracti e white bird can be sen as promoting whiteness – she usually gins the sort of reaction that would lead to more little white babies if carried to conclusion – but, you know, so what?

No doubt it’s part of the ongoing internal battle on the wider subject.

It wasn’t until she was 36, after years of “performing as a man”, that she found out that she has partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS). Essentially, that meant that although she had the XY chromosomes characteristic of a male, her body didn’t fully respond to testosterone, and would never look fully “masculine”. After doctors advised her that keeping her male genitalia would greatly increase her risk of cancer, Luk agreed to have surgery to remove them and started living legally as a woman. Now, alongside her work as a doctor of Chinese medicine, she is an ardent activist for intersex rights across the globe – calling for an end to genital reconstruction surgeries on children before they are old enough to consent themselves. “I really don’t want them to experience the same suffering,” she says.

All part of that trans stuff. For there are indeed those few intersex. And it’s possible to have the argument over surgery on children using intersex instead of trans. You know, to avoid getting mobbed by shrieking nonsense from the likes of Freddie. You know, Freddie, the bird who took testosterone then stopped in order to get pregnant – twice I think – and also insisted that they feared for their very life because someone in The Guardian newsroom said something not fully supportive. Can’t recall what that was, maybe rainbow zebra crossings or something.

This week marks a turning point in the UK’s approach to violent porn. The government has announced it will make publishing or possessing pornographic depictions of strangulation or suffocation – often known as “choking” – illegal. This bold move could transform the porn that appears on porn sites and social media platforms.

Strangulation in porn was once niche. Indeed, studies investigating the content of porn 20 years ago found hardly any instances of it. Yet an independent review of pornography released this year found that it was rife on the most popular porn sites. This summer the children’s commissioner released a report revealing that 58% of young people had seen strangulation in pornography, even though only 6% had searched for it. As renowned porn producer Erika Lust puts it, strangulation has become the “alpha and omega” of “any porn scene”.

So, ban anyone seeing it and it will go away.

And yet…..when people actually study varied turn ons – academically you understand, not directly and personally – it seems to be a larger subgroup of women turned on by it than subgroup of men. The kink is more about do it to me than do it to someone.

Which is interesting, no?

There is the comforting news that many boys report being happy to continue showing their vulnerability as they head into the adult world, feel at ease comforting friends and are happy to talk openly about their problems.

Why is this comforting? Why is it comforting that men adopt feminine behavioural patterns?

Could this in itself be a problem, this rigid focus on a masculine solution to the rigid masculinity problem? It perpetuates the foregrounding of masculinity and says something salient about how important everyone thinks it is for men to teach boys how to be men. Why?

Blimey, we’re getting to the up own colon stage of argumentation here, no?

So what does it mean to be a boy/man? Ultimately it means the same thing that it means to be a girl/woman, or anyone on the gender spectrum. That you are no better or worse than anyone else regardless of your biology. That you have the distinct ability to reflect on and laugh at your existence. That you should be free and safe to be whoever you want to be. It’s what it means to be human.

And is that stupid? Why is there, therefore, this differentiation into male and female if, in fact, we’re all the same? Even, if we’re all the same then how can we differentiate?

Now there’s a blueprint for a successful divorce, drawn up by countless others who came before us. Instead of both parties going all guns blazing, War of the Roses style, damage control is the default these days, because we know we have to be grown up to cause the least stress possible for any children involved. Not only that, but we don’t want our friends taking sides, we don’t want to cause ripples in the neighbourhood, we don’t want to be seen as bitter and we want to be invited to dinner parties and BBQs still — yes, even if our ex is there!

It’s as if there is an unspoken PR strategy for separating by which we’ve unanimously started living. A divorce code, if you will.

Social codes exist, do they? Templates for how to exist around other people?

Gosh.

“We had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be blatant. There had to be payment, it had to be with strangers,” sings Lily Allen in her surprisingly candid and detailed album thought to be about her open relationship with her ex-husband.

The album has catapulted the concept of non-monogamous relationships into the spotlight, and couples therapists report that an increasing number of their clients are choosing to go down this route.

But as Allen’s album makes clear, while open marriages, or consensual non-monogamy, may work for some, they can also go very wrong – and there are a number of common pitfalls to avoid.

That’s the popette star whose marriage just burst asunder in a spurting puss of bitterness and recrimination, right?

Odd how often Granny’s right ’bout sex ‘n’ stuff, innit?

A prolific unregulated donor is still attempting to sell his sperm despite warnings from two family court judges, a Guardian investigation has found.

Just because the shrieking harpies disapprove?

Unregulated donations are not subject to the same legal protections as those organised by an accredited clinic,

This is true.

In three family court cases involving four children with different mothers in England and Wales, Albon has sought a number of different court orders allowing him access to the children – including gaining custody of one and changing another’s name.

He can do that. Just as any of the mothers can sue him for child support. That’s what “unregulated donation” means. That everyone’s in exactly the same position is if they’d had a one night shag, or been living together for years and had a child.

Do we really expect five-year-olds to sit at desks? I want a school that understands play is learning
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Back a number of years I made a prediction about Ms. Cosslett’s career arc. She leapt to pominence running a fiercely feminist website as I recall it. Got hired at The G. Had a babbie.

At which point we got columns on how hard it is to get a pushbuggy up and down two front steps, and what’s with small halls and all that?

Which led to my prediction. Ms. Coslett’s career was going to be milking being a Mum – in a fiercely feminist manner of course – for decades. Then there will be the columns on the unwelcome appearance of grey hair – if daring, two such dependent upon locations – and then how to be a Granny and so on. Effectively, the sort of thing the Daily Mail used to run from a female agony aunt type updated for today’s fiercely feminist woman. We will, in fact, be able to time the columns with a calendar. “What’s this with the 11 plus?” is due in 6 years, how to speak to teenagers about sex in 8 to 10 and so on.

Utterly predictable. Unless the Guardian editor works this out of course.

The long term aim being to get the gardening column in the Independent, just like Germaine Greer.

I’ll not be around to see that apotheosis but that is my prediction.

Whether or not she ever writes anything interesting is the only uncertainty left.

Thanks to a couple of arrests and threats of perpetrators being banned from games, dildo-flinging has now died down. However, women’s basketball is still attracting a lot of toxic attention. The latest indignity professional players are being forced to put up with? Period betting: gamblers are trying to figure out where a player is in her menstrual cycle and are predicting her athletic performance accordingly.

Does the menstrual cycle make a difference to female athletes. Yep. So, people will exploit that to try to make money.

We can even run this the other way around. Does betting on cycles make money? Therefore the cycle makes a difference to female athletes.

Which is the value of money’s unsentimentality. Even, absence of manners. Because we find out whatever people might think about the thing we’re finding out…..

A new peer-reviewed study of the Cass Review, the UK project that was used to stop trans teens’ healthcare, has been published.

The shrieking about this is because those who have made the decision as adults – and good luck to ’em, wholly free to do so – require their decision to be validated by the next generation containing more people taking the same decision.

For, if people look at the decisions taken by the generation ahead then say “Naaah, Mate” then and therefore those decisions taken by that earlier generation are called into question. Sure, sure, this happens to everyone and every generation. What in buggery were beehive hairdos, Cadbury’s Smash or Oasis ever about, eh? But when it comes to hacking your own genitals off there’s a little less willingness to go ah, well, mistakes and a little more insistence upon being confirmed in that choice by those following.

“Why aren’t women having babies?” It’s the question on everyone’s lips as the fertility rate plummets to a record low in England, Scotland and Wales. A range of answers are always trotted out, from the entirely reasonable (childcare and housing costs; the motherhood career penalty) to the ludicrous (being so dim about our own fertility that we wake up one day realising we’ve left it too late). Yet perhaps it’s time we ask not only “why aren’t women having babies?”, but also “why aren’t men?”

Men are largely invisible in the birthrate debate. It’s ironic that amid all the pontificating and the policy ideas for encouraging more women to have babies – a conversation often being had by men – the other half of humanity is strikingly underexamined. Part of the problem is an absence of data: like many European countries, we don’t really have any on male fertility. Without data, we only have half the picture.

For the past 50 years the insistence has been that it’s always, only, the woman’s choice.

Now you’re wondering?

“Our women, our daughters are scared to walk the streets,” Tommy Robinson told tens of thousands of cheering supporters at last Saturday’s “unite the kingdom” rally. “Their safety has been taken from them,” he said, his voice croaking from the strain of shouting into his microphone. Communities were crumbling, he added, “at the hands of open border, mass uncontrolled immigration”.

The need to protect women and children from the threat posed by illegal immigration has this summer become an increasingly frequent rallying cry used by politicians on the right to justify a hardening anti-immigrant rhetoric.

That all and any immigrant is a danger to each and every woman is too strong of course. But large numbers of young men from less than feminist societies, well, could be, could be….

In the US, the notion that male politicians need to protect women and children comes packed together with a shift towards a new strand of patriarchy, where the “tradwives” movement is fashionable, where masculine energy in the workplace is praised by Mark Zuckerberg, where a pro-natalist vision is promoted by Elon Musk

This being the Guardian of course the actual concnern spirals off into not whether the claims are true or not but their effect on gender politics.

Sigh.

Caroline Hayes is a researcher and narrative strategist, specializing in the intersection of tech, culture and gender; Carolina Hidalgo-McCabe is an organizer, researcher and the host of The Masking Tapes, a podcast that explores 21st century masculinity and the gender divide; Alice Lassman is a policy expert, with her forthcoming book exploring how AI’s influence on gender and emotions are reshaping economic life.

Do we actually care what such people pretend to think? Especially as they’re tryinng to analyse the Battle of the Sexes through Sabrina Carpenter song lyrics.

Carpenter bottles the palpable exasperation of young women’s experiences with emotionally unprepared partners. And her feelings show up in the data. Women are more likely than men to say dating is harder than it was 10 years ago and they are twice as likely to cite physical and emotional risk as the reason why. The disproportionate emotional labor placed on women in relationships, paired with rising economic insecurity, does not compute.

Sigh.

There is “no evidence” that women have a problem sharing female-only spaces with transgender women, lawyers representing an NHS board have argued.

When the entire case is about Sandie Peggie, who does object.

“By and large most women don’t mind very much” could be supportable. Mebbe. “We’re here in a court case about someone objecting but there is no evidence any women care at all” is not.

But that’s not everyone, not even close to the whole generation. Instead, millennials are weighing up the cost of childcare, the overburdened NHS, decades of cuts to the infrastructure that allowed Brits to become parents comfortably, or at least manageably. I know some who’ve moved to cheaper cities in the UK specifically to have a child, or to be closer to grandparent daycare. But I also know that I’m not alone in my position, of hoping that easier days are coming, and that I’ll find a way to have a child when they do.

Today’s pampered little darlings simply aren’t grasping how much their parents – and even more, their grandparents – gave up when they had children.

There never has been a time “comfortably” when measured against today’s living standards. It’s a delusion.

If people actually knew what living standards were like in the 60s and 70s perhaps there’d be less whingeing?

As a child June Wilkinson knew that she wanted to go on stage and dreamt of becoming a ballerina until, as she later recalled, “my breasts got too big”. Disappointed as she was that she was never going to dance with the Royal Ballet, she asked her dance teacher if she had other options. An audition was organised for her at London’s Windmill Theatre and by the age of 15, in 1955, she was appearing topless in the venue’s celebrated revue.

It was the start of a career path that may have been considered orthodox at the time but which now seems unenlightened, to say the least.

It would be on OnlyFans now so the location has changed. Other than that, not a lot different.

Does James Bond have to be played by a man? Helen Mirren seems to think so
Zoe Williams

Bond is masculine. No doubt about it, male.

Anyone unaware of that will have trouble working out how to breed.

Remember when having women in power was supposed to change everything?
Gaby Hinsliff

But not for the better…..

Yrs, Tufton Bufton Bt.

An Edinburgh Fringe venue has apologised for letting the gender-critical Deputy First Minister of Scotland appear at one of its events.

Summerhall Arts issued an apology to other performers at the venue for its “oversight” in allowing Kate Forbes, who backs single-sex spaces for women, to be interviewed on stage last week as part of The Herald newspaper’s Unspun Live series.

Several artists at the venue were performing in shows with gay or transgender themes, and some set up a “safe room” because they claimed they were “terrified” while Ms Forbes was in the building, the Daily Mail reported.

There’s no point in deriding them as effeminate pansies really now, is there? But it is very wet indeed.