#The Feminist Alliance Against Rape

[undergroundrockpress]

Women against violence against women / Poster by The Feminist Alliance Against Rape - 1975.

[f1ghtsoftly]

All The Women’s News You Missed This Week

10/7/24-10/14/24

A South Korean Novelist takes home the Nobel Prize in Literature, Trump, and Harris vie for women voters. Women around the world continue to organize and fight male violence most notably this week accross South Africa, in Kolkata, and rural France. 

Want this sent to your email? Subscribe here

US Election:

Trump to join Fox News town hall with only women in audience

Obama’s callout to Black men touches a nerve among Democrats. Is election-year misogyny at play?

Abortion has passed inflation as the top election issue for women under 30, survey finds

Women’s Health and Reproductive Rights:

‘I found out I had cervical cancer while I was pregnant’

‘The View’ abortion ad signals wider effort to use an FCC regulation to spread a message

Moreno’s abortion comment rattles debate in expensive Senate race in Republican-leaning Ohio

Texas man drops case against 3 women for helping his ex-wife get abortion pills

Transgender/Gender Critical:

A kitchen staffed by trans women is a refuge for Mexico City’s LGBTQ+ community

‘Saboteurs’ release thousands of crickets at gender-critical group LGB Alliance's London event

Colorado court ducks deciding if baker could refuse to make LGBTQ-themed cake

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs and vetoes LGBTQ+ legislation

Florida mom of trans student sues school district, claiming retaliation and violation of rights

Women In The News:

The stats and shoes behind Chepngetich's amazing marathon world record

New Zealand ship didn’t sink because its captain was a woman, the ‘appalled’ defense minister says

American equal pay icon Lilly Ledbetter dies aged 86

Lupita Nyong'o speaks of family ordeal and condemns 'chilling' Kenya crackdown

'My employers locked me in the house and left when the bombings started'

How South Korea's 'real-life mermaids' made Malala want to learn to swim

Marine Le Pen hits back in EU funds misuse trial

Ukrainian journalist, 27, who chronicled Russian occupation dies in prison

Mothers seek justice for minors detained in Venezuelan election aftermath

Male Violence Against Women:

NY prosecutors want to combine Harvey Weinstein’s criminal cases into a single trial

Jury finds ex-member of rock band Mr. Bungle guilty of killing his girlfriend

Dad told police he killed Sara Sharif, court hears

Chris Brown concert shines spotlight on violence against women in South Africa

YouTuber Yung Filly charged with raping woman in Australia

Interpol asks public to help crack murdered women cold cases

Accused men confronted with abuse videos in French mass rape trial

Madeleine McCann suspect cleared of rape charges in separate trial

Sean 'Diddy' Combs' sex trafficking trial set for May

OnlyFans user pleads guilty in child pornography case

Arts and Culture:

South Korea's Han Kang wins Nobel Literature Prize

Art becomes outrage: Kolkata festival confronts crime against female doctor

K-pop star to testify on music industry bullying

Muni Long believes ‘Revenge’ is a dish best served with success

Riley Keough felt a duty to finish Lisa Marie Presley’s book on Elvis, grief, addiction and love

Music Review: Charli XCX’s ‘Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat’ remixes, ranked

Music Review: ‘Sex Education’ star Dua Saleh’s debut, ‘I Should Call Them’ is arty, experimental pop

Rekha at 70: Bollywood's timeless icon

Tributes paid to author's 'empathy and respect'

Experience artist Es Devlin's powerful new work

Disclaimer review: Cate Blanchett gives an 'increasingly frenzied' performance in this 'engrossing' revenge thriller

'I was told Mr Loverman was too niche for TV'

As always, this is global and domestic news from a US perspective covering feminist issues and women in the news more generally. As of right now, I do not cover Women’s Sports. Published each Monday afternoon.

[coochiequeens]

This guy is in the news again........

By Eva Kurilova. December 21, 2023

Canadian women are expressing outrage after a trans-identified male who campaigned to defund a rape crisis shelter was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal from the Governor General of Canada. Morgane Oger, a trans activist from Vancouver, was honored at a ceremony in Ottawa last week.

On December 16, Oger took to X (formerly Twitter) to boast of his receipt of the award, claiming he had been selected because of his work with “2SLGBTQ+ persons” and trans rights.

“Feeling so grateful, recieving [sic] the Meritorious Service Medal from Governor General of Canada Mary Simon last week for supporting 2SLGBTQ+ persons and furthering the legal protections of Transgender Canadians.”

In Canada, the Governor General is the federal representative of the monarch, currently King Charles III. According to the website for the Governor General of Canada, the Meritorious Service Medal is a civil award that recognizes “great Canadians for exceptional deeds” such as tackling poverty or improving educational opportunities for children.

In the list of recipients for the awards that were distributed on December 7, Oger is described as a “champion of diversity who has changed perceptions around 2SLGBTQI+ rights and has worked tirelessly to see those rights enshrined in law.”

Continuing, the office of the Governor General states that Oger has “forged alliances across party lines that propelled changes to provincial and federal legislation protecting individuals against discrimination based on gender identity or expression.” The short biography concludes by lauding Oger for his “courage, vision and perseverance have helped redefine the fundamental issue of equality and have advanced inclusiveness for gender-diverse Canadians.”

But the news of Oger’s top-level commendation did not sit well with Canadian women’s rights advocates, who noted that Oger has a long and disturbing history of actively fighting against women’s rights.

Canadian journalist and Feminist Current founder Meghan Murphy called out the Governor General, writing that Oger had once stalked her through her neighborhood in apparent retaliation for her views on gender ideology.

“Morgane Oger, whose career has involved harassing and vilifying feminists who defend women-only spaces, including fighting to defund Canada’s longest-standing rape crisis centre and transition house, @VanRapeRelief, stalked me around my neighborhood one day. Just one more reason I left Vancouver,” Murphy wrote. “Are these the ‘exceptional deeds’ bringing honor to Canada, @GGCanada? Making women feel unsafe and ensuring that when they are targeted by male violence they have nowhere safe to go?”

Murphy, like many others, was calling attention to an incident in 2019 where Oger successfully campaigned to strip Canada’s oldest rape crisis center, Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter, of its city funding due to its female-only policy. In comments made before the city committee meeting, Oger called the shelter “non-compliant with Canadian law.

Prior to losing its city funding, Vancouver Rape Relief had been through a 12-year legal battle where its policies of only serving females and only allowing female peer rape counselors had been tested and held up in court. The Supreme Court of British Columbia and the British Columbia Court of Appeal both ruled that the facility was allowed to maintain a female-only space.

But despite the legal precedent, the City of Vancouver agreed with Oger and pulled the funding it had previously provided the shelter for its educational outreach programs despite the fact that the outreach programs were accessible to all, even transgender people.

While in the throes of defending its funding, Vancouver Rape Relief was targeted by a sickening harassment campaign from trans activists. Dead rats were nailed to the door and messages like “KILL TERFS” and “trans women are women” were written on the windows of its charity storefront.

Oger dismissed the abuse the rape shelter was receiving in a blasé statement he gave to press at the time.

“Sometimes, unfortunately, when Vancouver Rape Relief’s policies hit mainstream media and when their discriminatory conduct hits the light of day some people overreact,” he said of the vandalism and threats.

But just prior to the incident with the shelter, Oger had already attracted the ire of Canadian women’s rights advocates for his initial support of vexatious litigant Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv.

Yaniv, a trans-identified male, made international headlines after filing a series of complaints with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal against female aestheticians who refused to perform waxing services on his male genitals. During a lengthy proceeding, it was alleged that Yaniv had deliberately targeted salon workers who were Sikh or Muslim in an effort to force women with religious restrictions on male-female contact to serve him.

On X (then known as Twitter) Oger referred to the women’s refusal to touch genitals on demand as “prohibited discrimination” and said that there was “no entitlement in Canada to refuse the performing of a service” on the basis of gender identity.

“Estheticians should take this up with their training providers. It wasn’t that long ago some service providers ‘weren’t trained’ to work on Black women or serve foreigners, either,” he said. “The law’s changed. Move on, get the training you need.”

When asked directly about his personal involvement with Yaniv, Oger was non-committal in his comments but admitted that he had spoken to Yaniv on the phone and that he had previously encouraged “trans women” to “complain to their human rights tribunal about prohibited discrimination.”

Eventually, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled that estheticians were, in fact, able to refuse services that they were not trained to perform, such as waxing a scrotum.

This is not the first time Oger has received a Meritorious Service Medal. In 2018, he was given the award by then-Governor General Julie Payette for, according to City News, “her [sic] work advocating for LGBTQ rights.”

Speaking to Reduxx, journalist Meghan Murphy condemned the Governor General for providing Oger one of the most respected civilian awards in the country.

“Morgane Oger’s legacy is fighting against women’s rights, safety, and free speech,” she said. “Anyone who focuses so much effort on defunding one of the few rape crisis lines and transition houses in Canada is not someone who deserves to be celebrated.”

Murphy continued by noting that Oger had made her feel “unsafe” in her own home, prompting her to file a police report on him in 2020.

“This is a man who has gone out of his way to ensure that women don’t have safe places to go when escaping male violence. That the Canadian government has supported and celebrated him in these efforts is horrendous and shameful.”

[eretzyisrael]

by Dr. Phyllis Chesler

Hamas has perpetrated a depraved pogrom. There is no other kind. This is what a pogrom looks like and what a pogrom does. The pogromchiki target civilians, the most vulnerable of civilians, and do their worst. They rape Jewish women, torture Jewish men, brutally attack children and the elderly, and then kill them—and anyone who is living with them.

Hamas took a page from ISIS’s Caliphate playbook and video’ed their atrocities in live-time in order to sow further terror (or horribly enough, gladness) in the eyes of viewers. Hamas has also raped and kidnapped women, perhaps into sex slavery, as ISIS also did.

Right away, I started emailing people and saying that this attack was far bigger than 9/11. Here’s why. In terms of demographic equivalence, the Israeli population is a bit more than nine (9) million people; the American population is a bit more than 331 million. Eight hundred (800) Israeli dead and counting is the equivalent of 29,418 American deaths. This is nearly ten times more than the 9/11 number of a little more than 3000. The number of Israeli wounded is, so far, at 2000 and counting. In American terms this is equivalent to 75,503 wounded.

Imagine if America had been told not to respond, not to retaliate, to retaliate but only a little bit to Al-Qaeda’s blow against the Zionist and Crusader entity. Bin Laden said so himself.

A handful of us knew, we knew for a long time, that the pandemic of anti-Israel/anti-Zionist propaganda was inevitably going to lead to what we’ve just seen and what Israel has just endured. Words do harm. Pogroms and genocide have always been the result. This has been the case in the Arab Muslim world and in the European Christian world.

In the early 21st century, I wrote that anti-Zionism was the new anti-semitism and that the alliance between Islamists who hate Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish state for religious reasons far more than for questions of territory—and the western politically correct elites, was the most dangerous kind of alliance. For this, I was denounced as a traitor. Laughed at. Dis-invited. Deemed an Islamophobe and a…Zionist.

Poisoned propaganda has slowly and carefully been sewn into every conceivable fabric of humanity, in every language, round-the-clock. The propaganda is now a tsunami, a cognitive mushroom cloud of death.

The Big Lies are coming at us from the academy, the gliterrati, the United Nations, human rights groups, feminist groups, street activists, government leaders. The hatred for Jews and for the Jewish state is global.

Demonstrations and statements in support of Hamas’s horrific pogrom are taking place world-wide. They have been going on for decades and may not stop anytime soon. Yes, there are also pro-Israel statements and demonstrations going on as well, including the EU, Germany, and Austria’s decision to suspend funding to Palestine. Number 10 Downing Street and the Brandenburg Gate was draped in the colors of the Israeli flag.

But really, there is no comparison, no moral equivalence between the two kinds of statements. Rallying for Israel is rallying for the real victim. Do people know that the head of Hamas, Ismail Haniya’s daughter was treated for free in an Israeli hospital for a month? Doesn’t sound like an apartheid nation state, does it?

Rallying for Hamas is applauding Nazi-like barbarians and the atrocities they commit. I wonder why so many pro-Hamas women are wearing hijab given that Iran, their paymaster, is raping, beating, and murdering Iranian girls and women if their hijab slips or is missing entirely.

Burning questions and difficult solutions remain before us.

I have been monitoring the situation, passing along information to the right people, and have not had the time to sit down and write a long analysis about this War. I will send around a video of a speech I delivered on September 21st via Zoom. I also strongly recommend that you read Liel Leibowitz and separately, Alana Newhouse at Tablet.

I dashed this piece off because a number of people have called and written to me wondering why I’ve been silent. Well—I’ve been covering this shocking, heartbreaking, truly awful War.

[lemonhemlock]

i probably shouldn't even react anymore to this disc horse but i read some "opinion" about aegon's rape of that girl, again, and again was baffled by how it was presented and handled. blacks want some justice by law, but aegon literally owns this dyana like cattle by law, like all people of her social class, she's servant, if he wants her to serve in that way, she has to bow and do what he asks her to do. if anything, in realistic setting she would be punished for disobeying the prince, making a scene in front of queen mother and disrupting the peace in the palace. she has to thank alicent being anachronistic feminist, or she would get beaten instead of money. if she was noble, her male relatives could ask for justice on her behalf, that justice being aegon marrying her or at least legitimizing the child if she has one, not jail sentence blacks fantasizing about. westeros doesn't have anti-rape laws, if it did have, viserys would be in jail for marital rape and demon for statutory one. but all these clowns are free and continue perform in this circus for our entertainment. but politically powerless alicent somehow should make unprecedented laws out of thin air to punish her own son?

I mostly agree with what you wrote, anon, but I would like to expand and nuance it a bit. I agree that, realistically-speaking Aegon cannot get punished, but, at least in theory, Westeros is not such a lawless land. Nor were the real Middle Ages such dark times. Rape and murder, specifically, were offenses for which weregild was demanded as punishment/form of reparation. Within ASOIAF, we know for a fact that rapists can get sent to the Wall.

Moreover, slavery is forbidden in Westeros and GRRM makes no mention of serfs (if anyone has evidence to the contrary, please point it out). Jorah Mormont is banished by Ned Stark for selling his smallfolk into slavery. Dyanna is an employee in the Red Keep, she gets paid for her services and receives food + board. We know this, because Cersei mentions docking the washerwoman's pay for "shrinking" her dresses. Dyanna does not belong to Aegon, she is free to leave and find another form of employment, should she so wish. That doesn't mean that, in practice, she isn't restricted by the lack of job opportunities, but she is not property and cannot be bought/sold/traded. She is also not legally obligated to sexually service the prince in any way; Aegon is absolutely abusing his power and breaking the law by assaulting her.

The unfortunate truth here is that Dyanna is a nobody, while Aegon is the highest kind of somebody anyone in Westeros can be - the first son of the King. Regardless of whether you think he is the heir or not, he occupies a space of immense privilege, at least until Rhaenyra executes him in order to secure her claim. As a result of this, Aegon can get away with a lot of illegalities. No one is going to care about Dyanna to be willing to go against the institution of the Crown to get justice for her. In that regard, as long as Aegon's offences target vulnerable individuals that cannot fight back as a result of their low socio-economic position, he is free to perpetuate these abuses with impunity. If his offences start amounting to a more systemic, societal issue, he can expect consequences, but not before. For example, Aerys II wanting to burn down the entirety of King's Landing.

Had Dyanna been Someone's (™) daughter/sister/wife, the situation would have been different, because her family would have accrued sufficient importance in order to Be Offended And Act Like It. Similarly, Rhaegar couldn't get away with kidnapping Lyanna, since her father was literally the Warden of the North. The Starks had sufficient power and resources to make a fuss about it, had the means to activate the STAB military alliance and pose a very real threat to the Crown.

On the other hand, where was Ned when Roose was raping Ramsay's mother and perpetrating first night? Of course, you can claim that maybe he didn't know, but say he did. What do you think he would have done about it? Realistically, not a goddamn thing. Roose is too much of a big fish for Ned to actively seek out to punish him on account of a miller's wife. However, had Roose raped Catelyn/Sansa/Arya, you bet your arse that Ned would be calling his banners and asking for Roose's head.

Which is to say that the discussion would have shifted dramatically had Aegon raped a girl coming from an important family. As it stands, what exactly can Alicent do about it? She can't enforce anything drastic like castrating him or sending him to the Wall or exiling him, since for sure Otto would put a stop to that. The greens need Aegon to secure the Crown, so this would effectively be an act of self-sabotage that could cost them their lives. By this point, they have invested too much in Aegon by securing him a marriage with the only Targaryen princess they had available (who is also a dragon-rider, to boot) and by making him sire children of his own. If Aegon is out of the equation, they will be forced to campaign for a child king in Jaehaerys, a less enticing prospect than a fully-grown Valyrian-looking prince with the most beautiful dragon in the world and a fully-formed family of his own already, guaranteeing stability. Sunk-cost fallacy. They could certainly crown Jaehaerys if needs be, don't get me wrong, but it's too much of a bother to go through for a crime committed against a serving girl with no money/power/influence.

Furthermore, Alicent can only rule in Viserys' stead since he is mostly incapacitated. The suggestion to send Aegon to the Wall or imprison him would actually be dire enough they would need to get Viserys involved and, since he's such a non-confrontational person willing to sweep everything under the rug, at most, he is going to give Aegon a chiding while he is half-conscious from milk of the poppy. Viserys is a bad and neglectful father, but he is not about to ruin his son's life for an offence he doesn't even care about and would probably consider a folly of youth/passion. Now, if Aegon had raped Rhaenyra, we'd be having a very different conversation.

Therefore, the only paths open to Alicent are the ones she already takes: makes sure Dyanna isn't saddled with Aegon's bastard by giving her moon tea (a potion v difficult to brew & as a result, most likely expensive, so probably something not easily accessible), removes her from Aegon's geographical reach, pays her weregild AND administers Aegon's punishment herself, both verbally and physically via chastisement / shaming + a slap.

[haggishlyhagging]

Radical feminism rejected both the politico position that socialist revolution would bring about women's liberation and the liberal feminist solution of integrating women into the public sphere. Radical feminists argued that women constituted a sex-class, that relations between women and men needed to be recast in political terms, and that gender rather than class was the primary contradiction. They criticized liberal feminists for pursuing "formal equality within a racist, class-stratified system," and for refusing to acknowledge that women's inequality in the public domain was related to their subordination in the family. Radical feminists articulated the earliest and most provocative critiques of the family, marriage, love, normative heterosexuality, and rape. They fought for safe, effective, accessible contraception; the repeal of all abortion laws; the creation of high-quality, community-controlled child-care centers; and an end to the media's objectification of women. They also developed consciousness-raising—the movement's most effective organizing tool. And in defying the cultural injunction against female self-assertion and subjectivity, radical feminists "dared to be bad." By 1970, there was such enormous interest in radical feminism that some have even argued it was on the verge of becoming a mass movement.

Radical feminists succeeded in pushing liberal feminists to the left and politicos toward feminism. By September 1969 Betty Friedan, founder of the liberal National Organization for Women (NOW), declared that "those people who think NOW is too activist may be less important in the future than the youth." While she criticized the younger women for failing to see that "the gut issues of this revolution involve employment and education and new social institutions and not sexual fantasy," she nonetheless urged NOW to "form a power bloc or alliance" with women's liberation groups "whose style, origins, structure and general ambience may be quite different from ours." NOW did move in this direction. On August 26, 1970, NOW joined with women's liberation groups to stage a national women's strike, the Women's Strike for Equality, and demanded twenty-four-hour child-care centers, abortion on demand, and equal employment and educational opportunities for women.

Similarly, many socialist-feminists, who in their earlier incarnation as "politicos" had repudiated radical feminism, began incorporating elements of radical feminism into their analysis. For instance, in May 1970, in the wake of the American invasion of Cambodia, a ten-woman delegation from Bread and Roses, a Boston-based "socialist women's liberation organization," delivered a speech at a National Student Strike rally at Harvard Stadium. Although the women from Bread and Roses did not entirely jettison the politico analysis, they did speak of male dominance as "the original and basic form of domination from which all others flow," and they did identify themselves as part of an "independent women's movement to destroy male supremacy."

But by the early '70s radical feminism began to flounder, and after 1975 it was eclipsed by cultural feminism—a tendency that grew out of radical feminism, but contravened much that was fundamental to it. With the rise of cultural feminism the movement turned its attention away from opposing male supremacy to creating a female counterculture—what Mary Daly termed "new space"—where "male" values would be exorcized and "female values nurtured." Although this woman-only space was envisioned as a kind of culture of active resistance, it often became instead, as Adrienne Rich has recently pointed out, "a place of emigration, an end in itself" where patriarchy was evaded rather than engaged. Concomitantly, the focus became one of personal rather than social transformation. Feminist activist and writer Meredith Tax recalls that as early as 1971 some feminists seemed to be defining their politics completely in terms of their lifestyle. Tax remembers women boasting, "we worked on our car all weekend," as though it were an act of great political significance. She “worried about what else was going to happen. This wasn't going to be the whole thing, was it?” But as the '70s wore on this was, if not the whole thing, then a large part of it. And by 1975 radical feminism virtually ceased to exist as a movement. Once radical feminism was superseded by cultural feminism, activism became largely the province of liberal feminists. According to Washington, D.C. women's liberationist Frances Chapman, radical feminism was "like a generator that got things going, cut out and left it to the larger reform engine which made a lot of mistakes."

-Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America: 1967-75

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Acts of Hope

Acts of Hope by Rebecca Solnit

“Activism,” Solnit writes, “is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark…. We talk about “what we hope for” in terms of what we hope will come to pass but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it’s a more powerful and more joyful way to live…Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary.

And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences…The world gets better. It also gets worse. The time it will take you to address this is exactly equal to your lifetime, and if you’re lucky you don’t know how long that is. The future is dark. Like night. There are probabilities and likelihoods, but there are no guarantees…

Writers understand that action is seldom direct. You write your books. You scatter your seeds…Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Walter Benjamin and Arthur Rimbaud, like Henry David Thoreau, achieved their greatest impact long after their deaths, long after weeds had grown over the graves of the bestsellers of their times. Gandhi’s Thoreau-influenced nonviolence was as important in the American South as it was in India, and what transpired with Martin Luther King’s sophisticated version of it has influenced civil disobedience movements around the world…

American history is dialectical. What is best about it is called forth by what is worst. The abolitionists and the underground railroad, the feminist movement and the civil rights movement, the environmental and human rights movements were all called into being by threats and atrocities. There’s plenty of what’s worst afoot nowadays. But we need a progressive activism that is not one of reaction but of initiation, one in which people of good will everywhere set the agenda…We need a movement that doesn’t just respond to the evils of the present but calls forth the possibilities of the future. We need a revolution of hope…

This is earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction. There is tremendous devastation now. In the time it takes you to read this, acres of rainforest will vanish, a species will go extinct, women will be raped, men shot, and far too many children will die of easily preventable causes. We cannot eliminate all devastation for all time, but we can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its source and foundation: these are victories…If we could throw out the old definitions, we could recognize where the new alliances lie; and those alliances — of small farmers, of factory workers, of environmentalists, of the poor, of the indigenous, of the just, of the farseeing — could be extraordinarily powerful against the forces of corporate profit and institutional violence…”

—-from the article “Acts of Hope” by Rebecca Solnit.

[alive on all channels]

[head-post]

HP Insight

Phantom hopes of Europe’s freedom of speech vanish

Two identical events that took place last week are being discussed in Britain and Germany. They are not directly related, but they followed an identical pattern.

Last Sunday, at 9:40 a.m. in the English county of Essex, two young police officers showed up at the home of Allison Pearson, a well-known British conservative journalist who works mainly for The Daily Telegraph. They informed the landlady that she was suspected of committing a “hate offence which is not a crime.” The reason for this was a report that Pearson was accused of making a tweet a year ago. And police refused to explain which post was meant and did not name the accuser, as he was named as a victim in the case.

And on Tuesday, at 6:00 in a town in the German state of Bavaria, two young police officers turned up at the house of the previously unknown 64-year-old Stefan Niehoff and his 33-year-old daughter, who suffers from Down syndrome. In this case, the police were not very discreet and immediately handed over a paper stating that the pensioner was guilty of tweeting a picture of German Deputy Prime Minister and Green Party leader Robert Habeck.

In this innocuous meme, Habeck was depicted with the logo of the famous perfume company Schwarzkopf, but with a couple of letters replaced, resulting in the inscription Schwachkopf Professional (professional idiot). The police seized Niehoff’s electronic devices and explained that with his joke he was “trying to defame Robert Habeck, which made his job as a member of the German Federal Government more difficult,” which could lead to a charge of nothing less than “sedition” and a long prison sentence.

“Thinkpol” in action

In both countries, these accusations have caused a flurry of emotions. The press is buzzing, social networks are buzzing, and opposition politicians are speaking out angrily. The main complaint: how can the police be distracted from carrying out their direct duties! Virtually everywhere the “Thought Police” (Thinkpol in Newspeak) from George Orwell’s novel 1984 have been recalled. People are outraged: in the conditions of growth of thefts, rapes, robberies, significant forces of law enforcers are thrown to fight “thought crimes.”

These cases immediately revealed the enormity of the problem. The Sun newspaper reported of the situation in Britain: “You may think it will never happen to you. Think again. After all, according to the Alliance for Free Speech, it has already happened to about 250,000 people since 2014.”

And it turns out that British police are investigating under the same articles the incident with a nine-year-old child who called his peer “retarded” and with two schoolgirls who said that their classmate “stinks of fish.” At the same time, a 73-year-old woman was cautioned by police for posting a picture online of a pole with a sticker that read, “Keep men out of women-only areas.”

Immediately, various public figures confessed that they had been broken into in the same way by police investigating “hate crimes.” For example, prominent British feminist Julie Bindel described the police coming to her home following a complaint by a transgender man from the Netherlands. She wrote:

“The officers left looking a bit confused. I got the feeling that they realised the ridiculousness of the mission they had been sent on. I advised them to make better use of their time by investigating rape and domestic violence. The police don’t have enough time to investigate real crimes, but instead they are tasked with harassing people like me for daring to tweet that ‘transgender women are NOT women.”

This is precisely what strikes European everyday people the most – the fact that so many police officers are being thrown in to fight “thought crimes” against the liberal order. For example, in Essex, where the Pearson incident took place, an elite squad of police is deployed to this task. Which raises logical questions about why it took a year to investigate Pearson’s “red-hot” tweet.

“Moral superiority” and double standards

By the way, the authorities never officially informed the journalist what exactly her post caused such a reaction. But almost everyone agreed that it was a criticism of the London police last November, when Pearson mistook Pakistani protesters in Manchester for a pro-Palestinian rally in London. According to the journalist, she deleted that tweet the next day when she realised her mistake. But who cares anymore?

And everyone picked up on a statement by Boris Johnson, who also spoke out on the Pearson case:

“This whole thing is a real gift to Vladimir Putin and his legions of Russian internet trolls. They can use the hype to accuse us of hypocrisy and double standards – and indeed they do. Any such comparison between the UK and Russia is disgusting and false. And yet inch by inch we are losing our moral superiority.”

It seems odd that Johnson claimed “moral superiority.” He could well be accused of double standards about democracy and free speech. For example, he calls the current Ukrainian government democratic, although Kyiv has long ago banned all opposition parties, television broadcasts only “right” news in telethon mode, and dissenters are either killed or thrown into prisons, yet Johnson and his colleagues turn a blind eye to this.

A typical representative of such a stratum is the Bavarian pensioner Niehoff, who hugging his frightened disabled daughter tells the German press:

“It can’t be that everyone keeps their mouth shut! I think we still have a democracy, don’t you?”

We wish we could be so naive and believe in free speech in a free Europe, but the EU has already established and reinforced a brutal liberal dictatorship. Yes, it equates funny memes about liberal politicians with “sedition” and an attempt to defend the rights of the gender majority with a hate crime.

These two recent cases in Bavaria and Essex are just episodes that confirm the general picture that has already emerged in Europe, where aggressive liberal totalitarianism at its worst has triumphed. “Thoughtcrime” against the established order will not be tolerated there.

THE ARTICLE IS THE AUTHOR’S SPECULATION AND DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE TRUE. ALL INFORMATION IS TAKEN FROM OPEN SOURCES. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT IMPOSE ANY SUBJECTIVE CONCLUSIONS.

Sigmund Huber for Head-Post.com

Send your author content for publication in the INSIGHT section to headpost.social@gmail.com

[givekyungsooasoloalbum]

Is it time for the weekly "well I think if feminists just bothered meeting a trans person irl they'd think differently! I am very clever and original" post?

I live in DC; we have the highest per capita rate of trans identified people in the country. most of the feminists I know personally are based in Baltimore, NYC, San Francisco and Philly- all of which also have extremely high numbers of trans identified people.

I realize that op is young, but I genuinely do not understand this take; it reads like "I am having my first critical thought ever", and seems incredibly arrogant and presumptuous in a way that is completely unearned.

I'm not even going to bother touching on the cases of "trans women" sexually assaulting and raping women because frankly? they're incredibly common. I know women who have had their businesses and livelihoods destroyed by witch hunts against them for being openly gender critical and have had to flee their cities/ states because of all of the harrassment and threats. One was left destitute and lost her home. For saying exactly what op is saying; that men do not belong in women's spaces. she never made threats, but guess what she got in return.

Two weeks ago I witnessed multiple "trans activists" straight up physically assault (exclusively middle aged/ older because they never target anyone who could possibly fight back or defend themselves) women at the United States vs Skrmetti trial at the Supreme Court. Let's not forget the LGB Alliance conference either.

It's already been said by multiple women on this post but I'll say it too; knowing/talking with/ befriending "trans" people in real life is exactly how I got here.

but since you know people (mostly fellow high schoolers, by your own admission) in real life who haven't done those things (to your knowledge), then obviously we should just discount these things and ignore the blatantly obvious patterns of male behavior and criminality, I guess.

correct me if i'm wrong because i might be

but the transphobes on this website, especially the terfs (although i don't like using that word, i prefer transphobes) feel like maybe they've never met a trans person in real life.

because they often pull up tweets and posts by supposed trans women that i will say are creepy as fuck and definitely not okay. but as a high schooler, i have met dozens of trans people. trans men and trans women. and none of them have been creepy. some have been bad people, but not because they were trans, just because high schoolers can be dicks. two of my closest friends are generfluid/go by multiple pronouns, and they're like the sweetest people i've ever met. both feminists, definitely not creepy or misogynistic or fetish driven. i've met trans men who became my friends in some of the hardest points in my life who were so so sweet and definitely not women who were victims of the patriarchy and turned to hormones for it. i've met trans girls who were lovely and most definitely not creepy men being perverts or trying to take advantage of women. the trans girls i met still carried some of their male upbringing, yes, but the trans girls i knew were actively making an effort to educate themselves about feminism and womanhood so that they weren't being insensitive.

while i am a trans rights supporter, i do understand the hold up about letting trans women into female only spaces. that's an issue that needs more discussion. but very few-and i mean VERY few- trans women actually take all the steps-the hormones, the surgery, decide to face bigotry, etc etc- to be a woman because they're perverts. cis male perverts would never decide to be viewed as women so they can take advantage of us. they can take advantage of us already, without facing oppression to achieve it.

i just wonder if some of these transphobes have met very many trans people in real life. because, yeah, i am definitely in agreement that i've seen some trans women be weird as shit on the internet, but uh A) lots of people are weird as shit on the internet, and maybe that's not a trans person issue B) a lot of these trans women online are not actually trans. they ARE fetishizers and they ARE creeps, but their online persona is a trans woman. not their real life persona. i don't know. i might be wrong. but i've never met a creepy or misogynistic trans person, and i've met a lot. and i wonder if some of these transphobes and trans exclusionary feminists would still hold their extreme and violent opinions if they talked to a trans person in person, and saw that they're also just people who were born a little different and want to feel comfortable. trans people are not a threat to women. i feel more comfortable with any of my trans friends, acquaintances, or even strangers (including trans women) than i do with almost any cis man.

[undergroundrockpress]

[coochiequeens]

Another "male feminist" trying to mansplain feminism, on behalf of men in dresses.

By Julie Bindel APRIL 29, 2024

I am very familiar with men on the Left telling me I’m doing feminism wrong. The musician and activist Billy Bragg is just one in a long line of males telling me I don’t share their precious values. In an interview published yesterday, the double-denimed demigod was asked about his role in the debate on gender and single-sex spaces:

“My problem with people like [J.K.] Rowling, like Julie Bindel, is really who they are lined up with. [Rowling and Bindel] are people who I agree with about women’s rights. I agree with them about abortion. But we don’t agree on this.”

I can certainly say that Bragg and I will both support access to free and legal abortion, but I would imagine we hold these views for somewhat different reasons.

If there’s anything that benefits men, the likes of Bragg will declare it to be feminist. As my friend and comrade J.K. Rowling has pointed out, male Leftists tend to applaud prostitution and stripping, so long as women are doing it and men are in the driving seat. Surrogacy, lap dancing and slut marching are “empowering” activities — a word never ascribed to anything done by men. It is faux feminism for the boys.

Just like his bro Owen Jones, Bragg insists that trans women are women and, handily, this stance doesn’t seem to have any drawbacks for these men. They get cookies for being such great allies, and not an ounce of danger or inconvenience as a result.

Suggesting that silly women who object to men in women’s changing rooms, hospital wards and prisons have joined forces with the hard-Right is ludicrous. Left-wing feminists, such as myself and Rowling, have led the charge against gender ideology because we campaign against rape and domestic violence. For Bragg to bleat about how abortion rights and equal marriage are at risk as a result of these imagined alliances is a bit rich considering that he, as a straight man, needs neither.

Bragg doesn’t like the powerful, Right-wing men who agree with me and Rowling on the trans issue. The inconvenient truth is that neither Donald Trump nor Viktor Orbán would be au fait with feminist politics, but are each aware that there are only two sexes. If to Bragg that means I agree with those men, so be it.

Feminists — all women — have been deeply and profoundly betrayed by Left-wing men. They have preened and postured about being such good trans allies while we have been attacked, abused, harassed, libelled and shunned for standing up for women’s rights. They turned a blind eye when lesbians were told by transactivists that we are bigots for excluding men from our dating pool. These men clapped along as we were losing our jobs and reputations, agreeing with the zealots that we just needed to be more kind.

Men on the Left rarely prioritise women’s issues, and we are expected to dance to their tune in order to be deemed acceptable. As the late feminist author Andrea Dworkin wrote: “To Right-wing men, we are private property. To Left-wing men, we are public property.”

This problem spans many decades and continents. In 1964 Stokely Carmichael, a prominent Black Power activist, was asked about the role of women in the civil rights movement. He replied: “The only position for women in the movement is ‘prone’.”  It is precisely because men on both the Left and the Right displayed such misogyny that the Women’s Liberation movement was founded in the Seventies. Bragg is a modern-day Carmichael, and men like him will always put men first, whether they claim to be women or not.

[radfem-book-club]

"This is not some psychological process of identification with women because women are wonderful; nor is it the insupportable assertion that there are no substantive, treacherous differences among women. This is not a liberal mandate to ignore what is cruel, despicable, or stupid in women, nor is it a mandate to ignore dangerous political ideas or allegiances of women. This does not mean women first, women best, women only. It does mean that the fate of every individual woman -- no matter what her politics, character, values, qualities -- is tied to the fate of all women whether she likes it or not. On one level, it means that every woman's fate is tied to the fate of women she dislikes personally. On another level, it means that every woman's fate is tied to the fate of women whom she politically and morally abhors. For instance, it means rape jeopardizes communist and fascist women, liberal, conservative, Democratic, or Republican women, racist women and black women, Nazi women and Jewish women, homophobic women and homosexual women. The crimes committed against women because they are women articulate the condition of women. The eradication of these crimes, the transformation of the condition of women, is the purpose of feminism. . . To be a feminist means recognizing that one is associated with all women not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact. The sex-class system creates the fact. When the system is broken, there will be no such fact. Feminists do not create this common condition by making alliances: feminists recognize this common condition because it exists as an intrinsic part of sex oppression. The fundamental knowledge that women are a class having a common condition -- that the fate of one woman is tied substantively to the fate of all women -- toughens feminist theory and practice. That fundamental knowledge is an almost unbearable test of seriousness. There is no real feminism that does not have at its heart the tempering discipline of sex-class consciousness: knowing that women share a common condition as a class, like it or not."

Andrea Dworkin Right-Wing Women (1983) Chapter 6: Antifeminism

[gatheringbones]

[“By 1974, hundreds of community-based antirape projects were in operation, and questions of “co-optation” and “professionalization” already loomed large. Many activists worried that the requirements and expectations imposed on feminist antiviolence programs as conditions for the receipt of public funds pushed them toward a more hierarchical organization directed by credentialed staff and toward a more exclusive focus on direct service provision rather than advocacy. The most readily available government funding source for RCCs was the sprawling and deep-pocketed federal LEAA agency, the linchpin in the dramatic expansion of the state’s capacity to surveil, police, and imprison across the 1970s. Perspectives on criminal justice sponsorship and partnership increasingly diverged, stimulating heated debates in feminist conferences, newsletters, and anthologies. The self-defense cases of women of color offered activist critics of a criminalization-centered antirape movement a “moral and ideological discourse” that emphasized the capacity of the criminal legal system to facilitate rather than stem violence against women of color and advocated an intersectional, rather than an everywoman, analysis of rape.

[….] In 1974, a small collective of primarily white and working-class women inaugurated the Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter (FAAR News). Its editors envisioned a forum for dialogue and strategizing among feminist activists who were concerned that “the rape issue was being co-opted” by government funders and law-and-order politicians, as well as by “non-feminist professionals.”

In 1978, FAAR merged with the battered women’s movement’s National Communications Network and the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion to become Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women. FAAR News and Aegis played a central role in bringing the cases of Little, García, Wanrow, and Woods to bear on feminist antiviolence discourses in the mid-to-late 1970s. This counterpublic space provided readers with consistent coverage and analysis of these cases and a forum for debate about criminalization, imprisonment, and state cooptation into the mid-1980s, when Aegis ceased publication.

FAAR founders dedicated their second issue to the theme of incarceration, in which they contended that “encouraging women to prosecute a rape [helps] to reinforce the legitimacy of the criminal justice system…. We should begin to actively seek alternatives.” An article on García’s unfolding trial followed one written by the founders of Prisoners Against Rape, a self- and peer-education program organized by a group of black men convicted of rape and incarcerated in Lorton, Virginia.

The decision to problematize criminal justice interventions provoked a critical response from SFWAR, published in the next issue, wondering whether FAAR News was “feminist in name only” since it advocated “male rapists’ needs and rights.” Clarifying their stance, the editors responded: “What we are saying is that we don’t believe increasing the conviction rate will lead to the elimination of rape. Therefore, we question whether we as feminists should devote our energy to winning individual convictions, or whether we should examine alternatives which may have a greater influence on society as a whole.”]

emily l. thuma, from all our trials: prisons, policing, and the feminist fight to end violence, 2019

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * * Acts of Hope by Rebecca Solnit

“Activism,” Solnit writes, “is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark…. We talk about “what we hope for” in terms of what we hope will come to pass but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it’s a more powerful and more joyful way to live…

Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary.And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences…

The world gets better. It also gets worse. The time it will take you to address this is exactly equal to your lifetime, and if you’re lucky you don’t know how long that is. The future is dark. Like night. There are probabilities and likelihoods, but there are no guarantees…

Writers understand that action is seldom direct. You write your books. You scatter your seeds…Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Walter Benjamin and Arthur Rimbaud, like Henry David Thoreau, achieved their greatest impact long after their deaths, long after weeds had grown over the graves of the bestsellers of their times. 

Gandhi’s Thoreau-influenced nonviolence was as important in the American South as it was in India, and what transpired with Martin Luther King’s sophisticated version of it has influenced civil disobedience movements around the world…

American history is dialectical. What is best about it is called forth by what is worst. The abolitionists and the underground railroad, the feminist movement and the civil rights movement, the environmental and human rights movements were all called into being by threats and atrocities. There’s plenty of what’s worst afoot nowadays. But we need a progressive activism that is not one of reaction but of initiation, one in which people of good will everywhere set the agenda…

We need a movement that doesn’t just respond to the evils of the present but calls forth the possibilities of the future. We need a revolution of hope…

This is earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction. There is tremendous devastation now. In the time it takes you to read this, acres of rainforest will vanish, a species will go extinct, women will be raped, men shot, and far too many children will die of easily preventable causes. We cannot eliminate all devastation for all time, but we can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its source and foundation: these are victories…

If we could throw out the old definitions, we could recognize where the new alliances lie; and those alliances — of small farmers, of factory workers, of environmentalists, of the poor, of the indigenous, of the just, of the farseeing — could be extraordinarily powerful against the forces of corporate profit and institutional violence…”

—-from the article “Acts of Hope” by Rebecca Solnit.

[alive on all channels]

[wyvern-of-the-evening]

JKR isn’t a radical feminist, she’s gender critical but that’s not what inherently makes one a radfem. The same thing can be said about LBGA, and an added point that men cannot be radfems, so the gay men can’t be radfems. Neither of them are funded by heritage foundation. That would, however, be WoLF, which most radical feminists don’t support, for that very reason. The right wouldn’t fund LGB alliance because they’d be funding a gay rights group, which isn’t, as the chronically online would like to believe (not talking about you btw just general) an anti-trans group, it’s for protecting LGB rights. When it comes to JKR we’re talking about a woman they condemned for “spreading witchcraft” and “turning children to the devil”. They agree with her on a singular issue, not for the same reasons, but agreeing on a singular issue doesn’t make her funded by conservatives. She runs charities meant for women’s well being and protecting children, things conservatives don’t care about.

Are trans politics somehow not also backed by political groups? Are we pretending that they haven’t gotten as far as allowing males in female prisons. The things being demanded of people are not rights. Males don’t have a right to go to the women’s bathroom. It isn’t a right that they be called a particular set of pronouns or a specific name. If they were fighting against employment/housing/medical discrimination, that’d be admirable. I could get behind that, but telling me I have to harass other LGBs for not wanting to date them, being told I have to share a changing room with a male and that if I leave because said male is there that I’m transphobic, etc. why would I support any of that? When they threaten to rape and kill women they don’t like.

There is no difference between racists. A racist is a racist and has government backing because racism is just one of the heads on the hydra. We at least actively call out racism within our community. I can’t say as much for TIMs because anytime they’re outed for wrong doing, the person revealing their actions is told they’re making the community look bad. That’s not always the case I’m sure, but that’s what I’ve seen now, and from my own time back when I was in your position.

I’ve never heard of a conservative preferring a gay child over what could potentially be seen as a “straight” child. Radical feminists wanting gay children to know it’s okay to be gay isn’t the same, and it’s dishonest to portray it as such. Saying “you shouldn’t have to feel distressed or ashamed for being same sex attracted, you don’t have to be straight because homosexuality is normal” isn’t the same as conservatives saying “my child is a sinner who needs to be fixed because their attraction makes them an abomination in the eyes of the lord”. I do agree with your last statement to an extent. Their rights aren’t being wiped out unless they’re experiencing the discrimination I’ve already mentioned above, they aren’t being arbitrarily arrested for being trans, they aren’t tortured in prisons (especially when put in the same housing as the very people they harmed to get put there), they aren’t being enslaved.

People are disagreeing with the medical malpractice happening to those people. The amount of uninformed “consent” and life long medicalization, and rampant misogyny and misogynoir is what’s turning the leftists like myself. The right really didn’t need much convincing. Moderates are feeling that way because the ever-changing rules are exhausting to keep up with and grow more and more ridiculous by the day. The dysphoria discourse is a good example of that. If people don’t need dysphoria to be trans, what distress are they experiencing from any of this? Self ID instantly makes being trans a choice (something being SSA is not), and what’s to stop me from just identifying as trans and telling you not to speak over me on this issue? That is why the trans community is losing support. Conservatives base it off religion. My disagreement is based off what I’ve seen them do to women’s rights and gay rights, as well as the life long medicalization of humans who weren’t fully informed by greedy doctors.

Radfems are often told to make our own spaces by TRAs. And yet when we do, they TRAs and TIMs throw massive fits about it, and try to invade it. Unfortunately this time they’re doing it. Giggle was supposed to be a female only platform, now being invaded by TIMs and their handmaidens, for being a female only platform. Posting pictures of someone spreading their asshole, literally. Funny how you don’t see this in male only spaces. Why is that I wonder

[antiterf]

you are, and always will be, a self-hating woman. radical feminists gave you the right to your own body, the right to have a bank account, the right to own a house, have a credit card, not be sexually harassed at work, made marital rape illegal. and here you are, sixty years later, pretending like you're better than the women who gave you every right you have. you should be ashamed of yourself.

Anon I hate to break it to you but my self love is actually quite high.

Radical feminists gave me every right I have sure because Janice Raymond definitely helped me and other trans people by helping to remove all federal funding towards trans healthcare. What right to my own body is that?

Listen, I never said that what they worked towards or the issues they focused on were wrong I don't have enough knowledge on sex work though. But honestly, saying that they gave me everything I have shows the exact shit I pointed out with intersectionality. I'm a bi disabled trans man who's currently in an interracial relationship, you didn't give me marriage (x2), the ADA, sex education, the right to dress as I please (anti cross dressing laws), trans healthcare, or honestly, the right to housing because it's still harder to get due to being disabled and queer.

Maybe if you weren't working against my rights with your shitty ideology I'd be able to only appreciate radical feminism. But guess what? It has flaws. Flaws that you apparently can't listen to and flaws that hurt people.

Besides, the 20 year olds preaching about radical feminism today weren't there for those times either. And what are they doing? Helping to fund the LGB alliance and sending anon hate?