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So true. My parents are from Northern Ireland and I have relatives from Derry. Life during the Troubles was unexpected. My mum went out to a pub to celebrate uni exam results with her friends in Belfast and she had to leave early as my dad was taking her out for dinner. Soon after, the pub was bombed by the Provos and she lost friends that night. As I grew up in the US, I rarely saw the Troubles (in the ‘80s I saw tanks in Belfast while visiting my grandmother) until I was in Bangor in August ‘98. We were evacuated from the shopping centre because the police were worried that the RIRA had left bombs in town centres after Omagh happened (there was a history of the PIRA doing that, as the Provos left bombs in multiple places in Belfast on Bloody Friday which my mother survived). I returned to Minnesota to my friends hugging me in relief because they had no way of getting in touch with me.

My mum still has a hard time reading about the troubles, even watching Derry Girls brings back the awful memories.

I finished Derry Girls yesterday. I know the whole show's about a serious topic and all, but it's done in such a funny way that you don't expect it to go so dark at times. Which is why this show is genius. You see everything through the eyes of a bunch of naive teenagers who honestly have other things to worry about than the Troubles. They think about boys (and girls), and school and the fact that their mums are gonna kill them if they don't pass their final exams, and you get invested and forget what's happening out there. And every time an episode ends with a reminder it's brutal and random and it's so real. Because that's how it is in real life: you never expect to get a call telling you your granddad is dead. Or for your TV program to be interrupted to tell you terrorists crashed a plane into a bunch of towers and killed over 3000 people. Things like that always come unexpected and Derry Girls understood that. Beautiful show.

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That’s a lot of words for outing yourself as a misogynist.

Bye.

What is your Hogwarts house?

Actually I've already processed all five stages of grief in regards to a beloved author from my childhood very publicly making the jump from "milquetoast liberal with unexamined biases" to "actively dangerous bigot who will double down into perpetuity" and will no longer be basing any part of my identity on her intellectual property! Thanks for asking!

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Elizabeth (the woman in front) and Hazel (the woman yelling at Elizabeth) are now friends. There’s a book by David Margolik on them.

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A doll that can be casually tossed through a female human’s pelvis will get stuck if you attempt the same with a similarly sized male human.

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Reading the Wikipedia discussion page for KF is interesting. They're really pushing the 'poor targeted trans people' line and not the 'had evidence of pedophilia'. And a lot of people saying they should be centering KF's attacks on trans people. TRAs have to keep making it about themselves, right?

transphobia has become the one true oppression to these people. i saw a post praising steven moffat for telling jk rowling to "just be nice" and how using preferred pronouns is "basic courtesy" and just completely ignoring the fact hes a raging misogynist who admitted he didnt want a female doctor because it would be "too progressive" and cost him views from other woman hating idiots. or how women who are huge trans supporters like jameela jamil or margaret atwood make one little mistep and are suddenly branded as transphobes and flooded with all sorts of hate messages and angry articles detailing how awful and transphobic they are. nevermind anyone being racist or misogynistic or doing all sorts of illegal shit to sell bootleg hormones to children online, transphobia is the only thing that matters.

you can get these people to do ANYTHING if you label it a crusade against transphobia.

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Me too

discovering radical feminism has made me fall in love with being a woman again. a common smear campaign against the movement is that we only "trauma bond" and believe womanhood is only suffering etc etc but literally no other group of people has made me feel comfortable with my body, proud of my natural skin and unashamed of being a woman.

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I’ve been there, absolutely beautiful.

Sunny Port Isaac in Cornwall, near England's western tip

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Being the first girl at school to get breasts is not all it’s cracked up to be. To be nine, ten years old, suddenly propelled from child to consumable product, can be deeply distressing. The patriarchal marketplace leaves you with two choices: gloss your lips, smile your smile and brazen it out, or resist by declaring war on your own flesh.

For a while, I hovered between the two, unsure which way to jump. This was the mid-eighties, Samantha Fox and Mandy Smith served up as examples of just where, if you were lucky, your tits could get you. I decided this wasn’t for me and stopped eating. I didn’t bleed or need a bra again until 1996.  In the changing rooms for PE, I’d look down on the other girls, the ones allowing themselves to become woman-shaped. Hips, breasts, blood, surrender; I was better than that. These girls, I’d tell myself, had made a choice. If they weren’t exactly what they looked like — female, normative, inferior — they’d have been like me and said no.

Back then, no one offered you shortcuts to puberty avoidance. You did it old-style, slowly, like a starving saint. It wasn’t like today, when we are far more progressive.

It’s not that we don’t continue to put precociously pubescent girls on a one-way ticket to sexual exploitation. It’s that we offer a select few — those who do not consider themselves tits and ass and are willing to suffer to prove it —  a medicalised exit strategy.

The recent rise in adolescent females wearing binders and requesting puberty blockers has been well-documented. What also needs exploring is how this reinforces our prejudices about the girls who continue to grow. What about their needs? Are we interested in changing the experience of female adolescence for them? Or is the fact that they’ve stayed the course evidence enough that they’re happy with their lot?

Female puberty, we are increasingly being told, is only for those who identify with it. A 2019 medical ethics paper explores “the ethics of ongoing puberty suppression for non-binary adults”, proposing that there be such a thing as a body remaining forever in “a “genderless’ state”. Finn MacKay, a self-identified radical feminist, likens encouraging “normal” puberty in those who don’t identify with femaleness to encouraging lesbians to have heterosexual relationships. A recent article on stopping “the puberty apocalypse” compares puberty itself to a life-altering medical procedure.

The narrow assumptions I made as an anorexia sufferer — that female puberty is optional and reveals something about a female person’s acceptance of patriarchal gender norms — are slowly being recast as serious feminist insights.

By positioning puberty as something to which one should “consent’, misguided feminists and LGBTQ+ activists repackage the same lies predatory men have always told about the pubescent girl. If she wasn’t happy with slowly morphing from child to sex object to Stepford wife, she wouldn’t have agreed to go through the ultimate human-to-object rite of passage. If she didn’t see herself as a prime cut on the patriarchal meat market, she’d have stayed small forever. If she didn’t want her tits grabbed, she wouldn’t have grown them.

The conflation of a healthy, developed female body with, at best, surrendered heterosexuality, at worst, fetishised non-personhood, is a form of victim blaming. It repositions adolescent girls as volunteers rather than conscripts in a battle against their own subjectivity. Those opting out, with their binders and blockers, can disdain the normies the same way I used to in the PE changing rooms, allowing their assumptions about “mere” females, those apparent ignoramuses when it comes to challenging “the gender binary system”, to run riot.

Post-anorexia, I went through several years of promiscuity, believing this was the only way to inhabit the “wrong” body, to justify its space on this planet. It’s nonsense, of course — I have the body of an adult female, but I can write and think and assert my own boundaries. I am not a walking stereotype; none of us are.

Conversations about gender identity and puberty suppression revolve around the inner lives of trans-identified individuals. That we’re not so interested in the girls who stick with their female bodies, braving the patriarchal storm, is testimony to the very belittlement that others flee. The ascription of “cisness” (that imaginary state of identifying with the sex role stereotypes imposed on one because of one’s sex) sanitises the idea that adolescent girls don’t care what the world throws at them. If those basic cis bitches didn’t want to be objectified, they’d have put it away, “it” now being their growth, their health, their entire female presence.

A feminism that cannot even embrace the idea of all girls growing into adult human females — that perceives such growth only through the patriarchal gaze, as a fixing in place as heterosexual sex object/gestational vessel — is in serious trouble. I reject this feminism every bit as much as I once rejected the body that was, is, mine.

In her poem Hearts, Tricia Bauer compares the isolation of anorexics and bulimics — “Holding their bodies back / fulfilling themselves in another time / abbreviating now to no” — to the fully-fledged humanity of the girls who allow themselves to go forward: “We welcomed our bodies thickening / for the size we somehow already knew / we would have to be / just to support our hearts”.

The opt-outs might think, as I did, that their gender non-conformity is more authentic because it is paid for in physical sacrifice. It’s time we realised the real gender non-conformists are the girls — and that’s most girls — who refuse to accept stunted growth as the price of their personhood.

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Yes.

any radfems in Newcastle, uk?

Sound off in the notes, gyns!

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The cast of Wings, 1993.

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So I noticed that there's a TV show on Netflix

It looked similar to CC's The Mortal Instruments, and it was. I was like, "Oh geez, they adapted her books into a series?" So I googled to look at the reviews and one of my favourite websites, Oh No They Didn't, had a review of the series and I really enjoyed the entry and the comments. One of their tags is "this bitch" so I clicked on it. One of the recent blog entries was Cassandra Clare being sued for copyright infringement. I was like, "What??" So I looked up both authors and there are elements in CC's books (which I haven't really read, only the first chapter of her first books) which are eerily similar to Sherrilyn Kenyon's books. So I did a bit of googling to re-read CC's Plagiarism Debacle only to find out that Avocado/White Serpents conclusive history of the Plagiarism debacle was deleted. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine linked by FanLore(?). I also saw that my post on CC's bullying of me was referenced in Fanlore's entry. I'm glad that my post was quoted and I'm glad it's still up on Oh No They Didn't. What I hadn't realised was that three people responded to it- a HP4GU moderator, Heidi, and Aja. I didn't read any of their responses for the following reasons: 1) the HP4GU moderator recounted events that happened in 2006. I was absolutely nowhere near the HP4GU site at the time. I may have commented on Michaela Ecks' WritersU site around the time (pretty much the only place I was in, post-booting). I had recently moved to the UK in 2006 and had loads of things on my mind and HP4GU was the furthest thing from it. So that description torpedoed any chances of me reading it. 2) Heidi having a response was laughable. I literally used her own words, via chat transcripts and public postings, in my hearing at university. CC wasn't the only one quoted by my lawyer at the hearing- Heidi, Ebony, John Walton, Alicia/Sue, and many others were quoted as threatening and harassing me. Even when the HP chat went private, post-Vivienne Stellaluna (I was offered a link by a friend and I declined). My friends sent me transcripts from those chats and they were equally awful. In the end, their own words are what saved me from getting kicked out of university, as the university was shocked and appalled by the treatment I was getting online (it was probably their first taste of seeing what cyberbullying is like). Heidi is an awful person and she wasted her time doing a response. I can imagine what she wrote, so I'm not going to waste my time on that one. Seriously, it was such a frightening time for me and on top of it, I was studying for my final exams. Talk about pressure. 3) Aja having a response to my post really confused me. I never saw her around the time I was kicked out of the fandom. I didn't realise Aja and CC were friends until I read Avocado's post on the plagiarism debacle (maybe I had seen Aja around but I never read her fanfics). I was tempted to read her response but I was like, "Hmm... After seeing the other two examples linked, I'm not sure I want to read her post." Sorry, Aja. Cassandra Cla(i)re has a history, it is well-documented that she is a plagiarist. Even when I met up with British HP fans in January of 2002, we discussed her plagiarism and concluded, rather overwhelmingly, she's a plagiarist. She can't just try to harass websites to shut down blogs that discuss her plagiarism, have her wiki entry locked to prevent any mention of her plagiarism and so on. If Sherrilyn Kenyon wins, and it sounds like she has a pretty good case, will CC's defenders be ashamed? I hope so.

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Haha fuck yes!

OMFG YOU GUYS MY LAPTOP HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR THE LAST WEEK (YES MY NEW LAPTOP, DON’T JUDGE ME MY CAT HEADBUTTED IT OFF THE BED) SO I HAVEN’T BEEN ACTIVE OR CHECKING MESSAGES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS ABOUT CASSANDRA CLARE GETTING SUED I JUST WENT INTO MY ASK BOX AND SAW ALL THE MILLIONS OF MESSAGES AND I’M SCREAMING!!!!! LIKE WHAT!!!!???

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Me too. I'm the author of the "Anti-Bullying YA Queen is a Massive Bully" post and it's like all the birthdays has come at once. I've never read either author but a friend of mine has read Sherrilyn Keynon and she said CC's writing is very very similar to Keynon's.

okay so 99% of the time i could not be paid to give any fucks about anything cassandra clare is up to but this one time i wrote this long ass masterpost on all her fuckery and over the years it goes through phases of being mass reblogged. so today i’ve gotten an unusual amount of notifications on that post, so i googled to see what bullshit was going on now, and it turns out THAT ASSHOLE IS FINALLY GETTING SUED FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!! i just hahahahahahahahahahahhhaaaa

i feel so satisfied right now.

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According to Cassandra Clare, John Green, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan and several other popular YA writers, stating the plain and simple fact that Cassandra Clare is a plagiarist is a “vile” thing to say and makes you a cyber-bully…even though it is an indisputable truth. 

Anyone who criticizes her is condemned as a bully and a liar, meanwhile the endless circle-jerk of writers praising and sucking up to her goes on. Frankly, it’s all a little bit high school. And it’s a lot pathetic. So today I bring you the truth.

The screenshots above are only the tip of the iceberg. Here is the whole account. Make sure you have a few hours to comb through all of this, because it’s lengthy. (It has to be viewed on the wayback machine because she has a tireless regime of having all records of her plagiarism and shady deeds deleted)

A list of authors she’s plagiarized:

Pamela Dean

Terry Pratchett

Bram Stoker

Tanith Lee

Diana Wyne Jones (there’s also a line in City of Bones that’s uncannily similar to a line from Fire and Hemlock by DWJ)

Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

Brian Jacques

Elizabeth Marie Pope

Douglas Adams

Roger Zelazny

Neil Gaiman

Christopher Stasheff

TV shows she’s plagiarized:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Black Adder

Red Dwarf

Babylon 5

Newsradio

Friends

Frasier

Real Genius

Malcolm in the Middle

Veronica Mars

Despite the overwhelming proof, all mentions of it have been purged from her wikipedia page. (You can still see it in the talk page though.)

Keep in mind that she was a grown ass 30-something year old BNF when this plagiarism was going on. She was not a young girl who had not yet learned better. According to my research she was a published journalist at the time–not someone who is usually ignorant of copyright law. 

Her fans claim that there is no plagiarism in her published works, but do we know for sure? When you look at the full extent of the plagiarism account on journalfen and see that she pulled quotes and prose from somewhat obscure books that were no longer in print, can you be 100% sure that she doesn’t still “borrow” from other places, and is just better at hiding it now?

The stolen Black Adder line that Draco says in the screenshots above actually sound similar to this quote from City of Bones © (P.S. ho don’t even try the copyright shit because I am not the one to fuck with, P.P.S. I am not the one)*

“Have you fallen in love with the wrong person yet?’ Jace said, “Unfortunately, Lady of the Haven, my one true love remains myself.”

- City of Bones

It isn’t exactly the same words, but it certainly seems like she stripped it down and changed the structure of the joke but kept the meaning the same so she wouldn’t have to get rid of it. And as we all already know, Jace is clearly supposed to be Draco, just as Clary is Ginny and Simon is Harry.

Even if there wasn’t plagiarism in her published books, she still owes her entire career to the fact that she lied and stole the words that other writers worked hard on and received no recognition for. She has several seven figure book contracts, a movie deal and now a TV show all because she plagiarized better writers.

* Cassandra likes to report people for copyright infringement if they quote passages from her books in order to criticize the problematic parts of them, even if you properly cited her and didn’t violate any copyright laws. * (Those screenshots were from the fallen nastyclare and clarewitchproject blogs r.i.p.) So if my blog disappears after I post this, you know who got me! I can only hope you all will back me up if the time comes. 

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Yes.

Raise your hand if your happy Cassie is finally facing the consequences of all her years of bs and plagiarism!

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