Feminism

More change came in 2001, when a landmark Institute of Medicine (IOM) report emphasized the important role that “sex” played in the basic biology that underpins health care. It concluded that “every cell has a
sex.”

Plays merry hell with some of the trans claims, doesn’t it?

And so we turn to fairness. And above all the touchingly simplistic idea that there is this mythical level playing field delineated solely by biological sex and – this part is important – nothing else. Structural, systematic, irreversible advantage is the very stuff of sport. Socio-economics, geography, opportunity, family support, big countries playing small countries, left-handers in fencing and cricket. None of these disparities is deemed intolerable or beyond the pale. Nor do any of them seem to overly exercise American neo-Nazis.

So, why do we have that binary split into male and female sports in the first place? Because the difference matters in sport you damn fool fucking idiot.

The US is a terrible place to be a poor woman: exceptional among nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in having zero national entitlement to maternity pay, it has no universal healthcare, the highest rates of maternal mortality of any wealthy nation and barely any support with the costs of childcare.

Which way does the migration flow go? Do people walk from Texas to Guatemala for a better life? Float on inner tubes to Cuba? Flee Manhattan for Mogadishu?

No, they don’t? Then the assertion is full of shit, isn’t it?

Eunuchs are men who have had their bollocks chopped off because they don’t like them, an act of genital mutilation that we are these days somehow, mystifyingly, expected to condone.

Fairly frank statement there Rod.

Or at least there wasn’t.

Merry widows? How attitudes to bereaved women have changed
Societies around the world have always had a problem with a wife who no longer has a husband. But what does the W word mean in the modern era?

Widowhood – and widowerhood – were such common events that there was a routine and social structure for what happened next. Wait some decent enough period – 6 months to a year perhaps – then remarry. Job done.

There wasn’t a problem with this in the slightest. So it’s not actually a past problem at all, at least not in English society. It’s this past century and a bit that is the unusual part, where death tends to end marriages much later than it used to.

BBC staff have been told there are more than 150 genders, and to develop their “trans brand” by declaring their pronouns on email signoffs.

Are we sure that’s enough for every snowflake to be able to claim to be unique in their gender?

There’s a really nice piece in National Geographic about historians documenting the lives of trans people,

OK.

Other cultures acknowledged a third gender, including two-spirit people within Indigenous communities and Hijra, nonbinary people who inhabit ritual roles in South Asia.

The two points are in conflict with each other. A third gender does rather mean that folk aren’t crossing from one to t’other…..

Umm:

Anguish of young man who had sex organs removed on NHS then regretted it the same day… as he SUES NHS over gender reassignment surgery

Effectively? I think he was, wasn’t he?

Still, this elevation of payroll from a cost to a potential profit generator naturally raised its status inside organisations and began to attract higher-status workers, especially among women, who make up three quarters of the HR workforce.

It’s a way for the skirts “to gain” higher status.

“The level of insidious rule making to further oppress women almost knows no end,” Clinton says in her interview with Financial Times. “You look at this and how could you not but think that Margaret Atwood was a prophet? She’s not just a brilliant writer, she was a prophet.”

As many know, Atwood is the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, the source material for Hulu’s adaptation staring Elisabeth Moss which centers on a not too hard to imagine Republic of Gilead in which women are stripped of all rights and shuffled around as servants and breeding vessels.

Gilead works as it does because female fertility is a very rare thing in that world. It’s therefore very valuable.

Quite how making fertility more common, thus less rarity value to it, creates that same world is, umm, odd.

The debate over why so few girls take maths-based A-levels descended into “tsar wars” on Friday after the children’s commissioner for England hit out at suggestions that girls found the subject too difficult.

Rachel de Souza told a conference of school leaders in Birmingham that girls were more likely to be put off taking science, technology and maths (Stem) subjects by male-dominated classes and a lack of female role models.

De Souza’s comments come after Katharine Birbalsingh, the government’s social mobility tsar, caused controversy when she told MPs that girls avoided taking physics A-levels because “they don’t like it, there’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think they would rather not do”.

So, the general preponderance, the probability, is that more blokes like hard maths than birds. To which the response is “But some birds like hard maths!”

Which is true but it’s also the same statement, not a response to it.

Anyone get the impression that we’re arguing with a bird here?

How climate change could trigger surge in domestic violence

World burns down, women hardest hit.

Or, perhaps, the clash of cultures within globalisation:

A senior TikTok executive has been replaced after telling staff he did not believe that companies should offer maternity leave.

Joshua Ma, who leads a Europe division at ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the social media platform, will “take some time off”, a leaked email suggested.

The email came after an investigation by the Financial Times disclosed a culture clash between TikTok’s Chinese owners and some staff based in London. It reported a staff exodus from a “toxic” company culture.

The economic bit of the buying and selling is easy as compared to that cultural bit.

Want to have kids? Great, but why am I paying for that? Brits might not be willing to say that any more but apparently Chinee are.

Writing honestly about motherhood still provokes anger, but we must tell our stories
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

The problems and worries are perennial, but each generation experiences them differently

This is the reason why I’m retreading subjects that have been written about for centuries so Nyah, Nyah.

Wonder how long The Guardian will let her continue?

Adm. Linda Fagan was sworn in Wednesday by President Biden as the 27th commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, becoming the first woman to lead the service.

With her appointment, Fagan also becomes the first female service chief in American history.

But, but, the department of health’s officer corps (or whatever it is) is led by a 4* bloke in a frock making xe the first female service chief, surely?

Two first female service chiefs? Is this like a bad burrito, something that keeps repeating on us?

A former Miss France has been charged in connection with a €1 million flat that she was given by an African ruler suspected of amassing a fortune through corruption.

Sonia Rolland, 41, is accused of benefiting from the ill-gotten gains of Omar Bongo, the late president of Gabon, who is alleged to have siphoned off hundreds of millions of euros as part of deals to sell his country’s raw materials, notably oil.

Rolland, who won the Miss France title in 2000, six years after her family fled genocide in Rwanda, admitted that she was “naive” to have accepted the flat in Paris from Bongo but denied wrongdoing. French media reported that prosecutors have begun proceedings to seize the property.

Not sure that naive is quite the right word there. I would describe it as rather knowing myself.

The strange, illogical, and unjust ruling has the effect of sanctioning Depp’s alleged abuse of Heard, and of punishing Heard for speaking about it. It will have a devastating effect on survivors, who will be silenced, now, with the knowledge that they cannot speak about their violent experiences at men’s hands without the threat of a ruinous libel suit. In that sense, women’s speech just became a lot less free.

Claims which a jury believes to be true remain just fine. It’s claims that a jury doesn’t believe to be true which have problems. Which is as it should be, no?

It’s blindingly obvious:

There are sensitive issues at stake. Some female-attracted trans women talk openly about the issues with finding a partner after transition: how it can remove you from the dating pool of many straight women, but it doesn’t mean that same-sex attracted women start finding you attractive.

It’s at the heart of the very definitions of heteroesexuality and lesbianity. Much of the correct reaction to trans issues is just to be polite – folk are as folk are. But sexual attraction is to sex, not gender. So that’s an area where there are clearly going to be problems.

Simples.

Stella Creasy: ‘JK Rowling is wrong – a woman can have a penis’

You know, just possibly?

The House of Lords could shortly welcome its first trans peer and only female hereditary member.

Matilda Simon was this week given permission to contest the next by-election for one of the upper chamber’s remaining 92 hereditary seats.

If she wins, she will doubtless become the envy of peers’ daughters across the country, because the vast majority of titles may only be passed to a male heir.

Absolutely and completely a woman in every way and sense – disregarding primogeniture because that would be inconvenient.

Which is rather female, really, isn’t it?

The Gender Recognition Act 2014 includes a provision stating that a person changing gender “does not affect the descent of any peerage or dignity or title of honour”.