Signal Boosting: Lesbian Etiquette Guide for Stealing Farms

As we all know, lesbians stealing farms is a very… er… devastating social issue that the Republican swine party brought to light recently. Apparently intimidated by this incredible insight into the gay agenda, Autostraddle fesses up:

Truthfully, though, this is not what I saw being chosen for The Gay Agenda’s next phase of implementation. I was hoping if anything was going to be vetted by POTUS it was going to be the Lesbian Takeover of America’s Got Talent (Article Twelve, Section One of The Gay Agenda) because I think it’s fair to estimate three billion people watch it and quite frankly I’d love to be a judge, but it’s important to remember that rural farms are the heart of America and therefore their destruction is the most strategic, if boring, choice.

All has been revealed.

-Shiv

Transition Reactions p8: You made those words up

No contest: The most asinine, frustratingly incomplete train of thought I have ever encountered is when someone responds to trans feminist lingo by saying something so unfathomably thick like “You just made those words up.”

Far be it from ayoudontsay clever “gotcha,” this argument literally wakes babies up in the middle of the night and starts a chorus of endless howling. Locusts drop from the sky, lightning carves out scenes of terror into the country side, crops world wide wilt and decay, paintings bleed, mirrors crack. It is an argument so broken in every conceivable sense that the Earth itself splits open to swallow you whole.

“You just made those words up.”

NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. JESUS CHRIST.

I don’t dispute that the word “transgender” is made up. That’s because it was made up, just like every other word in the entirety of all language ever. If you’re going to start becoming “language critical,” then do us all a favour and stop speaking, because every word of this sentence was, at one point, made up. Spare me your brain-cell killing argument and fuck off.

Words do not form spontaneously out of physical phenomenon. They’re not written into the code of reality itself. It’s not a crop you can harvest. They occur because a bunch of carbon-based lifeforms came together needed to start collaborating on how to communicate “food over there.” And after a few million years, those same carbon based lifeforms started being able to construct more and more sophisticated thoughts from their collaborations, all of which were built on words that were “made up” and all of which were inspired by the need to tell someone else about something.

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Snark of the Month: August edition

Ha! Joke’s on you. It’s Snark of the Mostly Arbitrary Time Limit Until I Have Enough Traffic To Do This Every Month.

In an effort to encourage engagement, I’m going to start doling out awards for good snark.

Your award is… praise! And confetti. You can’t see it, but I’m popping a confetti popper.

So, for August:

 

Snark of the Month: EigenSprocketUK

Over on Trump Youth: Totally not Hitler Youth, commentator fakeemailaddress shared a story about an idea they had for a joke:

fakeemailaddress says

(Edit)

For the past few months, I’ve been joking that if I had a bunch of spare cash and a hundred or so friends who were interested in performance art, I’d make a bunch of snazzy pseudo-military uniforms, get everyone dressed up, and march around in formation at Trump rallies. All questions would be referred to “The Don”. If Trump want to act like he’s one uniformed paramilitary short of a 1930s fascist, I’d give him his uniformed paramilitary.

Alas, I have neither the friends, the organizational skills, nor the spare cash to pull this off. It sounds like this person is trying to do something similar, except not as a joke.

To which our Snark of the Month winner, EigenSprocketUK, wrote:

#6 FakeAddress – well, it would start as a joke.

Oh, authoritarians.

Runner Up: militantagnostic

The obvious solution is to deport the economically marginalized. If any terrorist attacks occur after deporting the bottom 10%, deport the bottom 10% of the remaining population and so on. Success is guaranteed. You lefties have no common sense.

 

 

Keep snarking in September, fine readers, there were many excellent comments to choose from and I hope for many more.

-Shiv

Now that’s a bit more compelling

I’ve always given the side-eye to proponents of Brain Sex theory (“neurosexism”), the idea that brains can not only be sexed but that those sex states are binary, on the grounds that their methods for measuring brain sex aren’t particularly good: MRIs. I haven’t found a brain scan study that had made me rethink this opinion. They’re still extremely weak for making any argument, even if I appreciate that most Brain Sex proponents tend to be affirmative of trans lives vis-a-vis “born this way” rhetoric.

It’s still a theory ripe for exploitation by sexists, and I still don’t find interpretation from brain scans convincing. There’s too much space between the observation and the interpretation thereof, space filled with magical thinking and after-the-fact justification.

What I have found–and for some reason, didn’t think to look for–is something a fair bit more compelling as evidence for the “gender variance as biological event” hypothesis. It’s a twin study Franksteined together from other twin studies.

Often the difficulty of trans twin studies is a lack of data. So the researchers just sewed together hundreds of twin studies, many of which reported at least one twin in at least one twin pair who was transgender and thus transitioned. Most of these studies weren’t investigating gender variance so it didn’t factor into the analysis, though they were obviously mentioned in the observations.

The findings have interesting implications: (Content Notice–like most cis researchers, the interpretation of results can be belittling or riddled with problems discussed in trans feminist discourse. Emphasis mine.)

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“No way under heaven,” says Baptist school after being told to respect Queer youth

Two Baptist schools which are financed by public money have decided they are not going to draft a Queer-inclusive policy for their students, despite it being required by Bill 7, Bill 10, and the Education Minister: (emphasis mine)

A Spruce Grove pastor who oversees two Christian private schools has accused Alberta’s education minister of wielding “dictatorial power” on the issue of LGBTQ rights, and says his board has no intention of complying with the government’s new policy.

“I have a duty as a pastor to protect the flock of God,” said pastor Brian Coldwell, chair of the Independent Baptist Christian Education Society, which runs two schools in rural Parkland County with a total of 200 students. “And there is no way under heaven I’m going to allow gay activists to come in here and basically undermine our ministries and our religious freedoms or confuse and corrupt our children.”

Okay, so, essentially he’s complaining because the government, which pays his salary, is saying he has to treat Queer students with respect, as mandated by law, because his “flock” needs to be “protected” from “gay activists” who “confuse and corrupt” children. That’s a funny story coming from the same institution that routinely protects pedophiles and brainwashes them into thinking Queer people are broken, perverted, or otherwise dangerous.

Here’s an unsettling revelation: The St. Albert Catholic School Board has in writing that its “guiding policy” for Queer youth is to preach “chastity.”

(6) Imposes no special requirements/additional constraints  Calls students with same-sex attractions to a life of prayer, self-control, and chastity.  Procedure explicitly requires a staff advisor of any student group to impose the “Church’s definition of chastity as a basis for advising students within their work” (Procedure 4.6 & 4.7).  Requires any student group (such as a GSA or QSA) the additional burden to follow the “CCSSA Life Framework” (See Procedure 3 and Appendix 1).

These abusive mother fuckers are receiving my tax money to install god damn fucking conversion therapy-lite in god damn fucking public school. This religious indoctrination is precisely why the suicide rate is so high for Queer youth. And this shit is being taught in publicly funded schools!

David Swann, the leader of the Alberta Liberal Party (yes, they still exist) has also called on David Eggen to not only dismantle antagonistic school boards, but to ban conversion therapy.

“The legislation, supported by every provincial party, and the policies set forth by the government, were created to provide kids with the right to be who they are,” said Swann. “No organization, especially a school, should have the ability to take those rights away.”

…

“This is precisely the situation where LGBTQ protections are most needed,” Swann said in a statement. “There is an antagonistic school board and a strong bias against the LGBTQ community.”

Swann also called on Eggen to ban the practice of conversion therapy throughout the education system, after Coldwell said Christian counseling would be used to help LGBTQ students.

“This type of ‘therapy’ is widely opposed by experts in psychology, psychiatry and social work,” said Swann. “There is no place for it in Alberta’s schools.”

A petition has been started to lobby for the pulling of these school’s public funding. Please sign it here.

If schools that receive Albertan education funding dollars do not want to follow the law – they should not continue to be funded by the taxpayer, obviously. Tax money is not meant to subsidize spaces that make LGBTQ2+ students unsafe. Every student has a right to attend school in a safespace, Brian Coldwell has repeatedly demonstrated in public he is incapable of providing that – including during a bizarre interview on Ryan Jespersen’s radio show a few weeks ago where he discussed ex-gay “Pray the Gay away” conversion techniques which can cause irreversible psychological damage and amounts to child abuse.

Your signature and signal boosting are hugely appreciated. Call on the NDP to take action instead of grandstanding. I am sick to my stomach just thinking about “Christian counselling” and “chastity” advice.

-Shiv

 

August 30: Earlier version of this article said the two schools were Catholic. I’ll own up to it–I just assume every time religious dickheads do dickhead things in Alberta, it’s the god damn Catholics. In fairness, St. Albert’s Queer policy is still rancid.

Priorities

A football athlete stands up against institutionalized racism and his fans burn jerseys, he loses his job, and white people everywhere freak out.

A football athlete is caught on film assaulting his wife or raping teenage girls, and…

-Shiv

In which Miri accidentally writes my life story

Miri (Brute Reason formerly of FTB) over on The Orbit wrote a piece that has nothing to do with me directly, except that she described my abuse situation in basically 100% detail (pronoun of the abuser notwithstanding, emphasis mine):

The idea that a “real” sexual predator will inevitably prey on every single person they are involved with comes from the idea that people who harass, assault, and abuse are unable to control themselves, that they are rapid beasts who lunge at every available target. As knowledgeable folks have already pointed out many, many, many times, that’s not how the overwhelming majority of sexual violence works. At all.

I’m not inside any sexual predator’s mind, so I can’t tell you how any particular individual decides who to try to harass, assault, or abuse and who to pretend to be a good person to. But I’ve watched quite a few of these situations unfold and what they all had in common was that the accuser was young, relatively unknown in the community, queer, non-white, and/or marginalized in other ways, whereas the current and former partners stepping up to defend the accused were well-known, well-respected, often older members of the community it happened in.

What’s going on with that?

What’s going on is that people who want to hurt people pick people that they doubt will feel empowered to speak up, and who will be much less likely to be believed if they do.

…

Just like abusers aren’t uniformly awful to the people they’re abusing–if they were, it’d be much easier to leave–they aren’t uniformly awful to everyone else. They’re often charming, beloved by their friends, and professionally successful. And yes, in a polyamorous context, that can even include other partners.

Geez, Miri. I don’t know if you read my column or not, but you are rapidly becoming a very enlightening resource when it comes to understanding my own abuse–how difficult it was to speak from the back foot as a queer trans woman in the BDSM community, and how my abuser was a charismatic and charming volunteer who had a habit of making herself useful everywhere she went.

It went about as well as you’d expect. #NeedNewFriends

-Shiv

Zeus cancelled Christmas

A lightning bolt in Norway killed 300 reindeer, which will no doubt result in a labour shortage this upcoming Christmas when Santa is tasked with a worldwide delivery of toys:

More than 300 wild reindeer have been killed by lighting in central Norway in what wildlife officials are calling an unusually large natural disaster.

The Norwegian Environment Agency has released eerie images showing a jumble of reindeer carcasses scattered across a small area on the Hardangervidda mountain plateau. The agency says 323 animals were killed, including 70 calves, in the lightning storm Friday.

Agency spokesman Kjartan Knutsen told the AP it’s not uncommon for reindeer or other wildlife to be killed by lightning strikes, “but we have not heard about such numbers before.”

I guess you could say this news is…

shocking.

-Shiv