Category Archives: Feminism

We’ve spent a long time trying to tell each other that skin colour, sex (or gender) don’t matter in vast areas of life. Including who governs. Apparently this is incorrect:

Sanders is the most progressive and revolutionary candidate on the merits, these folks argue, so the fact that Warren is a woman – and similarly progressive – can’t matter. The insistence that an elderly white man’s socialist revolution will better address my 21st-century black feminist gender concerns is textbook white liberal paternalism. How will Sanders white masculinity affect and inform how he governs? This is a question that we should get to ask. Being progressive doesn’t mean that one’s race or gender ceases to matter in one’s leadership style and prerogatives, especially not in a world where gender and race are always presumed to matter for how women and people of color will govern.

Oh, so gender (or sex) and skin colour do matter when governing. Therefore we should be taking both into account when we elect someone.

So, far I’ve just repeated what she’s said. Not changed it at all.

But what’s the implication of that? That the way birds and melanies* will govern is different precisely because they are birds and melanies. Which does mean that we’re all now allowed to not vote for them, to deliberately vote against them even, on the grounds that we don;t want to be governed the way that birds and melanies would.

Which isn’t what she wants to say at all, I’m sure, even as she is saying don;t vote for Bernie ‘cuz he’s white and a man.

*Those endowed with the superpower of extra melanin

Free bus travel for Waspi women ‘discriminates against men’

How can this not be true?

Women living in County Durham who have been affected by the rise in their state pension age will be entitled to free bus passes, in a controversial project that has been criticised by experts.

Durham County Council’s cabinet approved a scheme yesterday to give free bus passes to around 3,000 women who could be facing financial troubles due to the equalisation of retirement ages between men and women.

Female prisoners are made to shower with transgender women offenders who are still “anatomically male” in at least one Scottish prison, an MSP has said.

Kenneth Gibson, the SNP politician for Cunninghame North, made the revelation to Scottish Parliament today after calling for a ban on transgender offenders who are physically male being admitted to female prisons.

Not the showering together, that’s only fun when it’s voluntary. But the can of worms being opened here. Checking grollies to decide between male and female seems sensible, logical, and in terms of prisons and enclosed environments, just plain right.

Then we’ve the currently fashionable insistence that grollies don’t matter and aren’t what defines.

Who to believe, eh?

We’ve now got tribunals deciding what is work of equal value.

Samira Ahmed has won her equal pay claim against the BBC in a landmark case that lawyers say could leave the broadcaster facing a bill running into the millions for similar claims by other female staff.

Ahmed, the presenter of viewer feedback programme Newswatch, claimed she was owed almost £700,000 in back pay because of the difference between her £440-an-episode rate and the £3,000 an episode Jeremy Vine received for hosting the similar Points of View programme.

As Adam Smith pointed out all jobs pay the same in the end. But even excluding that idea this is still something of a can of worms. For there are undoubtedly popsies out there being paid sums to be toothsome when their male counterparts aren’t. Be interesting to see that before a tribunal, eh?

And when will we see sex discrimination cases about the sexy movies? The women always do get more than the men after all.

Cheap shots aside, I wouldn’t call Lord Sugar “Alan” to his face any more than I’d call my doctor “David” or refuse to address anybody else using their professional title: it’s inappropriate and profoundly disrespectful.

When working for an Earl I called him William. A Baron was Malcolm. And the Viscount I interact with is Matt.

Why wouldn’t I call them what they were baptised as?

Ah, yes, silly me, I see Carrie’s problem…..

Whether it’s professor, lord, lady, baron, he, she or they, calling people what they prefer to be called isn’t difficult. It’s just basic politeness. If you choose not to do it for particular groups of people, that says much more about you than it does about them.

At which point we all agree, it is indeed politeness. It’s just that politesse enforced by the law isn’t such, is it?

In an open letter published just 22 days after their World Cup triumph, USSF President Carlos Cordeiro outlined the women’s pay structure as compared to the men’s. In a poorly veiled attempt to get the public onside, he hid behind numbers

Tsk eh, I mean tsk.

Anyone care to give us the 100% pronouncement? I’ve seen it claimed both ways, either side getting paid more. So, who?

All the pics of that bird in Cyprus. They’re anonymised. To the point that her family are too.

Why?

Yes, anonymity of rape victims and claimants, sure. But she’s not a victim of rape. She’s a very naughty girl who has just been found guilty of an offence in a court of law. In a jurisdiction that, as a result of the existence of the European Arrest Warrant, we officially agree is a good as our own legal system.

When our own court system has declared that someone was not raped but falsely claimed to have been so then the piccies do indeed go up. Why not now?

BTW, no, I’m not saying that we all ought to publish either her name nor her picture. Perfectly happy to never know who she is myself. It’s just, well, why the difference?

A British teenager who was convicted of lying about being gang raped

OK

“I have decided to give her a second chance,” the judge, Michalis Papathanasiou, told the packed courtroom, citing her age,

OK

The woman hugged her family

Eh?

Which is it? A teenager who needs protecting both from the world and her own actions. Because, you know, she’s not an adult who really knows how to deal with things.

Or a woman, strong and independent, who gets to vote on what all the rest of us can do, join the army, drink, abort a child and all that other stuff?

It’s extraordinarily difficult to be both at the same time, isn’t it?

Reynhard Sinaga named as Britain’s worst rapist as police fear he may have attacked up to 200 men

At which point we’ll get the “but this is an exception” thing. And yet by some reasonable methods of measurement there’s more male on male rape in the US than there is of any other kind. That prison system….

Could I go a year without buying any new clothes?

After all, trans men really are men in all manners and forms. Thus transitioning should mean the clothing budget drops to being a once in a decade clear out of the moth eaten, no?

Ever so slightly more seriously, wonder if shopping habits do change with declared gender? Be difficult to work out because perhaps the inability to shop for 8 hours and find nothing to buy is a signal that one should transition?

The selection of Donald Trump’s daughter and top adviser exposes the vast electronics expo to charges that when, finally, it invites a female keynote speaker, it invites one with limited experience in technology.

“This is a terrible choice on so many levels but also – what an insult to the YEARS AND YEARS of protesting how few women were invited to keynote & being told it was a pipeline problem while similarly-situated men were elevated,” tech commentator Rachel Sklar tweeted. “There are so many great, qualified women. Shame.”

I think we can guess which gig Rachel Sklar has her eye upon.

But here’s the fun thing. IOt used to be that there weren’t enough people with ovaries doing this sort of thing. Now there is. So, the protest changes to it should be people who actually know something. But that’s what the system used to be, isn’t it? Peeps who knew something was exactly why the ovaries weren’t up there on stage?

While some elements in this shocking case are particular to Cyprus, it highlights a culture of disbelief towards victims that is almost universal. That distrust expresses itself in different ways, depending on the jurisdiction, and it appears that the investigation in Ayia Napa was flawed from the outset. In the UK, victims often complain about the length of time a rape inquiry takes, but the Cypriot investigation was over in just 12 days. How can a thorough investigation into an alleged rape with multiple perpetrators be carried out in such a short space of time?

Lengthy investigations are bad. Swift ones are bad.

Could we be seeing a personality type emerging here?

A passage from employment judge James Tayler’s ruling explained it perfectly: “The claimant is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.” Forstater, in her witness statement, more or less confirmed this: It “may be polite,” she acknowledged, to use a person’s preferred pronouns, “but there is no fundamental right to compel people to be polite or kind in every situation.”

After all, a gentleman – or, I presume, a gentlewoman – is only one who never unintentionally insults.

Forstater’s claim about protected belief was just a smokescreen for her underlying bigotry, and Tayler saw through it. “It is also a slight of hand to suggest that the Claimant merely does not hold the belief that transwomen are women,” he wrote in his judgment. “She positively believes that they are men; and will say so whenever she wishes.” The case, then, wasn’t so much about belief as it was about actions.

So that’s freedom of speech chucked out then, isn’t it?

Van Badham

Bridie Jabour

Bird, black frame glasses, ff’d hair. This the way the intellectuals distinguish themselves from the Shirleens over there?

Bit like avoiding a Croydon Facelift over here as a distinguishing mark?

Man boobs aren’t caused by plants, nuts, seeds or soy.

Not true.

Even if the claim was true, which it isn’t, if you’re eating four fast food burgers a day it’s not cleavage you need to worry about.

As ever, it’s the dose which is the poison.

Because of the normal findings from the imaging evaluation, the patient was interviewed again, and he described a daily intake of 3 quarts of soy milk. After he discontinued drinking soy milk, his breast tenderness resolved and his estradiol concentration slowly returned to normal.

CONCLUSIONS:
This is a very unusual case of gynecomastia related to ingestion of soy products.

Is four nutburgers equal to 3 quarts of soy milk? Dunno. But that is the issue here, not flat out statements that soy doesn’t cause gynecomastia – a statement which is wrong.

The Daily Caller ran no fewer than 16 stories on what it termed the “UVA rape hoax”.

Because, you know, they’re righties, and only righties won’t believe a woman.

Except, in the same damn piece, The Guardian tells us that:

it would later be revealed her source had fabricated virtually the entire thing.

It was a hoax, about rape, at UVA. What should people call it?

Ms Steinfeld, 38, said: “The difference between marriage and civil partnership is that civil partnership is a modern social institution that is, except for this aspect, free of all of this old school patriarchal baggage.

“There is no place for something like this within civil partnerships.

“It stigmatises children based on their parents’ relationship status – and that just seems so anachronistic.”

The problem being that kiddies born before a marriage/civil partnership are regarded as illegitimate – for all he difference that makes these days – and those born after one are not.

At which point Ms Steinfeld might want to ponder on the logical and linguistic connections between legally recognised relationship and legitimate……

A transgender man has given birth to a baby after being impregnated by a transgender doctor using the sperm of a transgender woman.

As we might actually put this more simply. A woman – possessor of ovaries, womb etc – has been impregnated by a man – possessor of testes and thus producing sperm.

How the various people involved dress, shave or regard themselves doesn’t really change that biological base set of facts there, does it?

Nevertheless, given that transsexuals tend to have hypothalamuses that match their identified gender not their biological sex,

So we can test all those who claim then, eh?

Three trans members of the committee complained that she had moved “into hate speech” as the T-shirt “denies non-binary identities and asserts the binary view of the world where male is synonymous with man and female is inextricably linked to womanhood”.

If we’re to say that men can become women and vice versa then we are rather insisting that there is something called male which is linked with man, something female linked with woman. Otherwise we’d not be saying that people can become female, insisting that they are women, would we?