there-are-4-lights

[there-are-4-lights]

Out of touch Spock Thursday 

[there-are-4-lights]

Copenhagen Pride has this pro-surrogacy event this year. The organisation "DARE" is run by the same guy who is the Danish country contact for Tammuz, one of the main surrogacy agencies and the one that Swedish feminists protested against at Stockholm pride a few years ago (they're there every year).

("Graviditetsværter" = "pregnancy hosts".)

[there-are-4-lights]

Out of touch Spock Thursday 

[there-are-4-lights]

Out of touch Spock Thursday 

[there-are-4-lights]

Tom Lehrer was found dead in his home this morning. He was 97 years old, so it's hard to say he was taken from us too soon, but anything short of immortality would've felt too soon for the mathematician, writer of pointed satiric songs during the early Cold War era, and writer of less pointed but no less genius songs to teach kids phonics on the 1970s PBS show "The Electric Company."

He never lost his sense of humor. In 2012, 2 Chainz asked if he could sample Lehrer's song "The Old Dope Peddler" for an upcoming track. Lehrer responded, "I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?"

His works are all in the public domain, something which he did in 2020.

[there-are-4-lights]

the event this is talking about was 6 years ago today. i'm struck by how calm and clear it is, and especially in the way they respond to audience members who disagree:

"Gathering myself together, repairing the damage with a breath mint and lipstick, I wonder at this situation. How have we, members of a liberal democracy, reached a point where the threat of violence is being used to discourage women from having meetings to talk about our rights? All kinds of misogyny become freshly permissible if you call the woman in question a TERF.

I know a number of women booked to attend this event, and I know quite a few women planning to protest it too. There's not a world of difference between their politics. All of us believe women and trans-identifying people deserve to live full, free lives, safe from men's violence. We all want to live in a society where the trajectory of a baby's life isn't largely determined by whether they have a vagina or a penis. And we all want an end to the inequalities propping up patriarchy.

There's a lot of common ground, whether or not either 'side' wants to walk on it. And I think it's the defining tragedy of contemporary feminism that any chance of coalition, of a collaborative approach to doing feminist politics, gets trampled when there are differences in how women conceptualise gender.

If the people protesting outside had come in and listened to what we said, I don't believe there's anything they could class as hateful. Julie Bindel speaks about ending male violence against women. Rosa Freedman talks about meeting the human rights of women and trans people. Lucy Hunter Blackburn considers the problems with androcentric policy making. Louise Moody reflects on the complicated relationship between post-modernism and material reality. And I speak from the heart about how painful this schism over gender has become for everyone involved.

I also question why violence against women is being conflated with liberation politics. Women of colour don't bring baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire to anti-racist marches and talk about fucking up white supremacist women. Disabled women don't send images of guns and nooses captioned 'shut the fuck up' to enabled women. Working-class women don't send messages to middle-class women saying they hope we get raped or better yet killed, which is exactly what one self-proclaimed trans rights activist said to me when I defined lesbianism as same-sex attraction between women. But all of this behaviour has become standard practice in gender discourse".

Claire Heuchan, in The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht

[there-are-4-lights]

Out of touch Spock Thursday 

[there-are-4-lights]

had a shit day so im rewatching pride (2014) I love homosexuality and unionism

[there-are-4-lights]

Out of touch Spock Thursday 

[there-are-4-lights]

Headline for the report on Sex-based violence against women and girls: new frontiers and emerging issues

A released report in May 2025 calls for women to be recognised by biological sex, not self-ID.

This change comes via the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, an independent advisor to the UN Human Rights Council. Her latest report explicitly acknowledges that sex based violence and discrimination remain underexplored and unaddressed, and urges states to return to a biological understanding of “woman” in both policy and legal frameworks.

In 2023, UN women had posted on twitter that trans lesbians are lesbians. Now, they appear to be waking up on the harms of gender identity and self identification.

The post UN women tweeted on their X page (formerly twitter) in 2023 for international lesbian day

For years, women’s rights advocates have been sidelined, censored, and smeared for stating the obvious: women are female. Now, even major global institutions are waking up to the harm caused by gender identity ideology and the erasure of sex.

A section of text from the official report

See the full pdf report here [downloaded PDF]

[there-are-4-lights]

fields of wild garlic doing their thing | munkängarna, kinnekulle, sweden | june, 2025

[there-are-4-lights]

Out of touch Spock Thursday 

[there-are-4-lights]

Back in 2003, little me was absolutely fucking learning Romanian to sing this song. The power of O-Zone got all of the world to sing fucking Romanian. Damn right.

[there-are-4-lights]

I think the thing that bothers me most about “terfs don’t understand biology” is that even if it’s true that sex is more complicated than sperm-producers and egg-producers, that division is still the basis of patriarchy. The ones with the penises decided to oppress and abuse the ones with vaginas and uteruses, whatever you want to call those two categories (though historically they have been called “men” and “women” respectively).Crying when radical feminists say so is just shooting the messenger.