While we’re at it, the Daily Fail can fuck off too

I apparently have to start a series like this.

The Daily Mail, July 30 2017:

Daily Mail seeks out opinion of an artist (?) expressing the opinion that puberty blockers are bad “because sterilisation.”

 

The Daily Mail, October 1 2017:

Preserving fertility of trans teenagers is bad because it’s “too expensive.”

This is why I don’t play optics with avowed trans-antagonists. There is no way for me to please the Daily Fail except to fucking die so they can sell magazines about why I should be locked up with men in prison.

Fuck off you poncy fascist sockpuppets.

-Shiv

 

 

Arresting the press is only bad when Russia does it

Considering the stakes of the J20 prosecution, I find it odd that more corporate media outlets aren’t covering it. In addition to the prosecutor’s arguments taking a sledgehammer to American civil rights, there are still two journalists among the accused. For a press circuit that warned of Trump’s threats against the press, why isn’t the issue getting more coverage?

For over two years, many in corporate media have been trumpeting the looming threat to a free press posed by Donald Trump. “Would President Trump Kill Freedom of the Press?” Slate (3/14/16) wondered in the midst of the primaries; after the election, the New York Times (1/13/17) warned of “Donald Trump’s Dangerous Attacks on the Press,” and the Atlantic (2/20/17) declared it “ A Dangerous Time for the Press and the Presidency.”

It’s strange, then, that the attack on the press that kicked off the Trump administration—the arrest and subsequent threatening of two journalists with 70 years in prison—has been met with total silence from most of these same outlets. Aaron Cantú, Santa Fe Reporter staff writer and editor at the New Inquiry (and a contributor to FAIR.org), and professional photographer Alexei Wood are both facing decades in prison for the act of covering the January 20 unrest in DC—charged with felony rioting for little more than being in the proximity of window-breaking and brick-throwing. (Prosecutors initially brought and then dropped felony charges against six other reporters, though how their cases differ from Cantú and Wood’s is unclear.)

ACLU lawyer Scott Michelman insists that these arrests “punish journalists for being near the action” and will “inevitably chill freedom of the press and, with it, First Amendment rights not only of the journalists themselves, but of all of us.”

Read more here.

-Shiv

Our bodies are not ours

The premise of pro-discrimination laws is that not only can another person unilaterally dictate where you can be with your body and what you can do with it, but that they should do so. North Carolina’s House Bill 2 is one such example:

Although House Bill 2 (HB2), or “The Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act,” is known as “The Bathroom Bill,” it is about so much more than bathrooms. In February 2016, thanks to the efforts of local queer and trans community organizers, the city council of Charlotte, North Carolina passed a nondiscrimination ordinance extending legal protections to LGBTQ people. By law, Charlotte businesses could no longer deny someone service or a job because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. The ordinance also granted transgender people the right to use public bathrooms marked for the gender of their choice. While the new law itself did not include any protections against many of the systemic barriers trans women of color face – like discriminatory access to housing and medical care – conservative rich white state officials clapped back.

Almost overnight, North Carolina then-governor Pat McCrory and his cronies in his legislature began drafting a state bill to shut down the nondiscrimination ordinance in Charlotte, and prevent future anti-discrimination bills from arising on the local level across the state. HB2 had five points:

(1) Transgender people must use the bathroom that matches their gender assigned at birth, regardless of their gender identity.
(2) City governments cannot pass laws protecting LGBTQ people from job discrimination or from being denied service because they are queer or trans.
(3) City governments cannot pass laws protecting working people under 18.
(4) All pre-existing laws passed by city governments protecting LGBTQ people, as well as local laws about worker wages and benefits no longer exist.
(5) People can no longer sue for any type of discrimination on the state level.

Through these five points, HB2 attacked LGBTQ people and annihilated all workers’ and marginalized people’s rights. With one law, North Carolina’s state government granted businesses and employees the right to discriminate against people. Most people in our cities had no idea. To most, it was simply “The Bathroom Bill” because Governor McCrory, as well as local, state, and national news sources built traction for HB2 by marketing it on their hatred of (and fascination with) trans people, in particular trans women of color.

Read more here.

-Shiv

 

Please don’t treat Trump like an outlier

Remember that even after the Trump days are over that he is a symptom, not the disease.

It’s not just that Trump often participated in this culture before he was a politician, but that memes showing violence against women have in many ways been synonymous with social media since its inception. Directing hate towards women is one of the primary ways in which a lot of men use social networks everyday. This anti-women culture online is by no means the result of Trump’s tweets; rather, his election directly reflects the fact that misogyny was and is the status quo in this country — online and off.

So while there should be outrage about the president encouraging the dehumanization of women online, something he has done consistently throughout his short political career, it’s worth wondering why many men insist on viewing Trump’s need for dominance as an outlier, as something special, rather than asking why these memes are so prominent on Twitter in the first place. Years after #GamerGate made national headlines, after countlesswomen have told their stories of social media abuse, why do so many men still struggle to admit this is a ubiquitous problem?

The truth is Trump is not normalizing misogyny online —we already did that for him.

Read more by Imran Siddiquee here.

-Shiv

BREAKING NEWS: Millennials are broke

Sarcasm aside, I’m serious.

A survey of 4,000 people aged 18-30 shows that 51% of young women and 45% of young men regularly use credit to stretch their finances until payday. The report also found that a quarter of young people in the UK are constantly in debt.

When asked how young people made their cash last to the end of the month, one in five said they used their overdraft and a similar number borrowed from family. The next most popular form of borrowing by people in the age group was using a credit card.

One in 10 said they had used a payday loan company, although for parents aged under 30, this number increased to one in four.

The Young Women’s Trust, which commissioned the representative sample of young people, said many of those questioned in the survey also worked extra hours or skipped meals to make their cash stretch to the end of the month.

And guess who is to blame?

“Young women are more likely to be stuck on low pay and on zero-hours contracts, which mean they don’t know how many hours they will work each month and whether they will earn enough to pay their bills.

Eat.

The.

Rich.

-Shiv

Catholic bishop writes policy for public school

Patricia Grell, well known on this blag for being basically the only Catholic with a conscience in the whole of Edmonton, dropped a piping hot revelation before Edmonton’s municipal elections take off: Catholic bishops have been pressuring elected school boards to adhere to church policy, rather than public law.

Not only is it an occupational hazard for Boards to be overrun by their administrators but with Catholic boards, the problem is compounded by the role of the church hierarchy.   Canon Law 803 states that “A catholic school is understood to be one which is under the control of the competent ecclesiastical authority…No school, even if it is in fact catholic, may bear the title ‘catholic school’ except by the consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority”. Instead of working collaboratively with the ECSD Board, Archbishop Richard Smith chose to use this Canon to put undue pressure on it.

In December 2014 Archbishop Richard Smith used Canon Law to threaten to remove the catholic designation of the ECSD Board when Trustee Bergstra was intending to bring forward a motion to encourage the establishment of GSAs in our Catholic schools.  All the administrators and trustees who were present at this meeting at the Pastoral Centre – about 10 of us — would have to lie under oath to deny that this happened. I am embarrassed to admit that in those early days of my term, I was influenced by the archbishop’s threat and asked Trustee Bergstra not to bring forward her motion.  She didn’t and in the end didn’t have to because the provincial government soon passed Bill 10.

Not only did the archbishop threaten the Board but he meddled in our Board’s policy making.[2]   When Trustee Acheson and I were working on developing an LGBTQ policy, Archbishop Smith wrote a letter to Trustee Acheson to wait for and follow what the Catholic Superintendents were developing (cf. Letter from Smith 20.08.15.)  Neither Catholic Superintendents nor the archbishop is elected and their job is not to write policy for school districts.  This is the role of duly elected trustees.  Yet here is an example of administrators and the hierarchy working together to try to undermine the role of elected Boards.

Burn it all to the ground. Plough the whole damn thing with salt. Why we still funnel funds to a brazenly corrupt and criminal organization is beyond me.

-Shiv

Did you need a “safe file”?

When I’m hosting a seminar on gender questioning, gender variant, and transgender youth, probably the one item met with the greatest degree of shock is the concept of the “safe file.” Parents supporting their children–that is, not subjecting them to discipline or psychological torture–in their gender questioning process are often met with specious accusations of abuse. The “logic” is that gender variance doesn’t exist, so any child exhibiting it (or even thinking about it) must be, by definition, an abused child. The safe file is the parents’ one stop shop for all their documents proving the child’s health and, if relevant, their gender dysphoria diagnosis, and it’s necessary to argue to the State that you are, in fact, doing what the medical consensus says supports your child best. It’s only necessary because the bigots take their “won’t anybody think of the children” shriek to meatspace, and report these families to children’s services.

Now, it would be bad enough to report someone for not torturing their kid, but the scary part is that family court has occasionally concurred. An Alberta family judge ruled that a parent’s custody was contingent on ruthlessly policing what their child wore, and this ruling was not overturned for half a year, and only came after the mother was unjustly stripped of custody. Mermaids UK has also covered British examples where single-mothers following the medical consensus had their custody stripped under arguments as ridiculous as “your child can’t be a trans girl, he likes Spongebob,” and explicitly mandated conversion therapy should the child ever question their gender again.

[Read more…]