Have you been drinking varnish? A continental comment on the transphobic “restroom panic”

As you may have heard already, trans folks got an early Christmas present in the UK: A transphobic woman lost her employment trial, establishing a trans friendly case law and also paying for the privilege of doing so.

In the wake of it J.K. Rowling dropped all pretence of not being a transphobe and the transphobic “persecution” cries are doing a round again. At the centre of their argument is that People who were AMAB pose a threat to women and girls in female only spaces*. They, including the very nice lady who didn’t get her contract renewed (she wasn’t even sacked as people would want to make you believe) believe that this is true regardless of what steps the person has done to transition** , which is part of why the judge ruled against the transphobe as the view was absolutist and “[t]hat belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

This doesn’t keep transphobes from keeping claiming that trans women are a threat to cis women in changing rooms and I think that one reason why they’re particularly successful in Britain is because of their unusual layout of changing rooms. Whether in France, Spain or Germany, wherever you go shopping, the fitting rooms are unisex. Single stalls with a door or a curtain. It wouldn’t be hard to sneak a peak, and occasionally you can’t help seeing something when there’s a curtain that doesn’t close perfectly and a mirror, but you’re supposed to handle it like a grown up. Going to fitting room the first time in the UK was a culture shock there were separate ones for men and women and the women’s was a large open room with a couple of individual stalls that you could use if you tried on swimwear or something. Everybody else stripped and dressed together much like a gym locker. I guess you can see why that would be the image that flashes before UK people’s eyes when they hear “unisex” toilets or fitting rooms. Our communal swimming pool has always had “unisex” changing rooms: individual stalls that you enter on the “street side” of the pool and leave at the pool side. There’s also “family changing rooms”. No fucking body is forced to share space with somebody else while naked (unless you go to the sauna, but then that’s what you pay extra for).

Of course transphobes are not ignorant. The vocal ones are well educated and have for sure travelled to the continent and further away. They know what unisex toilets and changing rooms look like, but they choose not to correct their audience. Much like all other reactionaries who know better but who selectively present “facts” to mislead people who are probably well intentioned but just not as well read or travelled.

 

 

 

 

*Apparently boys are safe in male only spaces. For reasons. Or they don’t count. I don’t know.

**Now, just to make it clear: All trans women are women. I don’t care about the state of your junk or whether you stuff your bras with tissues or tits. None of them are my business. Unless you’re using live tits. That’s animal cruelty.

Whom Will They Blame Next, Unicorns?

I have never watched Fox News when I was in USA, and of course I have no incentive to watch it now. However the stories that I read about it on the interwebs are truly bizarre.

This one trumps them all: Fox News host: ‘Anti-Semitism from the left’ is the real cause of hateful attacks on Jews

Where exactly does this “virulent anti-Semitism from the left” happen? Where do roam these elusive creatures, these leftist antisemites? Where exactly is the land of “fringe of the progressive side.”?

How come that someone spews such a weapon’s grade bullshit on air and is not immediately challenged for providing evidence for it? Any person who says such inane claptrap should be discredited and mercilessly mocked.

Islamophobia is a made up word !!!!!!!!!!!!!

clipart of woman with a hijab

Source: I-stock

As most of you know, I started a new job a few weeks ago. New school, totally new area, totally new colleagues (who generally rock). One of those, a woman about my age who also freshly started on the job, is a Muslim woman who wears a hijab. This particular woman is ethnic German and converted to Islam via her first husband. She studied English and German and after finishing the second part of the training (we instantly bonded over how horrible that was) went looking for a job.

While I am no fan of hijabs, I am much less a fan of policing women’s bodies. Since her Christian German family would probably be very happy if she ditched her headscarf and she was divorced and a single mum before meeting her second husband, we can be very sure that nobody is forcing her in any way to wear her headscarf so it’s none of my personal business. On a professional basis I’m actually quite happy about teachers like her. She is the best role model our Muslim girls can have, showing them that they can be independent women who go to college and have careers outside of the home and Muslims at the same time. And she’s good for our Muslim boys because she can “teach those little Pashas to respect a woman in a hijab” (her words, not mine). She’s also good for our German kids and their parents, for pretty much the same reasons.

For those of you not intimately acquainted with the German school system: almost all schools are public schools, only very few are private. Almost all hiring of teachers happens on a state level via the ministry of education. Now, with women wearing a hijab, there’s apparently an extra rule: the ministry has to treat them like everybody else, but individual schools can reject them, so when she was looking for a job she was twice rejected by different schools, with some of the most outrageous comments.

At one school she got told that they were an open and tolerant school with many kids from many different backgrounds and with many different religions, and she would disturb the peace. At the other school they told her that “somebody like her couldn’t teach German”, so apparently she changed her ethnicity and origin and complete culture along with her religion.

Those remarks and attacks were made in the name of liberalism, in the name of tolerance. Those attacks on Muslim women (I don’t know, can Muslim men teach German even if they pray five times a day?) come from the middle of society. Their headscarves get seen as a sign of Islamism, the whole discourse is such that a woman with a headscarf is automatically seen as suspect, as having an agenda, a meaning that is imposed on her by actual Islamists and Islamophobes alike. It’s in that same vein that the German women’s organisation Terre des Femmes is asking for a ban on headscarves for girls.*

That they’re only getting support from right wing organisations should tell them something, but I guess it won’t. The further stigmatisation of hijabis isn’t going to do anything for their integration into society, yet should they complain they get told that Islamophobia doesn’t exist anyway and that they’re just hiding behind the word to avoid “legitimate criticism”, in this case the further policing of women’s and girls’ bodies.

*The organisation has been criticised in the past for racist tendencies and sex worker exclusive positions, in short, your run off the mill White Feminist organisation. Their Swiss sister organisation split from them over those issues.

League Of The South Goes Russian.

Michael Hill speaks with a WWLTV reporter at Confederate monuments rally (Image from WWLTV May 17, 2017 broadcast). Source.

Unsurprisingly, League of the South is attempting to mate with Russia, home of, and saviour of white people. There’s a whole lot to the article, just a bit here.

Amid the controversy over President Trump’s recent summit with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, the neo-Confederate League of the South announced this week that it will soon be introducing a Russian language section to its website.“To our Russian friends,” a missive on the League’s website, is signed by Michael Hill, the group’s president. An excerpt:

We understand that the Russian people and Southerners are natural allies in blood, culture, and religion. As fellow Whites of northern European extraction, we come from the same general gene pool. As inheritors of the European cultural tradition, we share similar values, customs, and ways of life. And as Christians, we worship the same Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and our common faith binds us as brothers and sisters.

We Southerners believe in societies based on real, organic factors such as shared blood, culture, and religion, and all that stems naturally from these salient factors in the human experience. As fellow White Christians who are grounded in the sublime traditions of our common European cultural heritage, we believe that the Russian people and the Southern people are natural allies against the destructive and impersonal impulses of globalism.

Religion is organic? Huh. As for these “sublime traditions”, c’mon, let’s hear about some of them. Any of them. Provide some details on all this sublimeness. Interestingly enough, the first definition of ¹Sublime is: to cause to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state and condense back to solid form. If one uses that particular definition, yeah, I can buy the sublime tradition nonsense.

Mr. Hill teaches that the defeat of Nazi Germany was “an unmitigated disaster for Western Christian civilization.” I don’t know who taught Mr. Hill about World War II, but they should be smacked.

Alt-Right leaders and white nationalists adore Russia’s Vladimir Putin, much as American Religious Right leaders do. As Casey Michel noted in a RWW report last year, Richard Spencer has called Russia the “most powerful white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, leader of the now-disbanded white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party, called Putin “the leader of the free world.” Former KKK leader David Duke, who was a speaker at this year’s League of the South conference, has said he believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.”

Putin has supported right-wing nationalist movements across Europe. In 2015, Jared Taylor, the American proponent of “race realism,”  took part in a conference in St. Petersburg that gathered activists from Europe’s far right. There Taylor declared the United States “the greatest enemy of tradition everywhere.” Also in attendance was former KKK lawyer Sam Dickson, who praised Putin’s efforts to preserve “[the white] race and civilization.”

I can’t figure out why all these wannabe nazis don’t just run off to Russia. They’d be happy, and we’d all be better off without them.

RWW has the full story.

I’d Prefer Abe Simpson…

The 72 year old Tiny Tyrant finally went there: “Get offa my lawn!” Just for the record, if there were desperate, frightened people standing on my lawn, I would do whatever I could to help them.

Source. You can see other choice responses at RawStory.

The Chains of Intolerance.

Andrew Ellis Johnson, “The ICEman Cometh” (2018, detail), ink, charcoal, wax, graphite.

Andrew Ellis Johnson, “The ICEman Cometh” (2018, detail), ink, charcoal, wax, graphite.

Art and artists most definitely have a place in answering wrongs, great or small, and everything in between. Andrew Ellis Johnson has a searing piece up at Hyperallergic. It’s well worth seeing and reading.

This Black Cloud Called Trump.

Brenda Goodman, “Impending” (2018), oil on wood, 80 x 72 in (courtesy of the artist). © Brenda Goodman.

Brenda Goodman, “Impending” (2018), oil on wood, 80 x 72 in (courtesy of the artist). © Brenda Goodman.

Fifteen months ago, Trump was just beginning to embrace his new position of power but now he’s well into the dismantling of our democracy. My emotions are whipped around all day long. Mothers are torn away from their babies at the border. Families living good, productive lives here are sent back to “where they came from” — a place some of them hardly know. The reversal of all that Obama put in place to protect our environment. The destruction of an educational system that was once the best in the world. The attack on our press, which is treated like an enemy. Taking away our rights as he edges closer and closer to a dictatorship. And the lies. The constant lies. So that we can hardly find truth anymore. So many gut-wrenching changes.

I have nothing to add here. You can read more at Hyperallergic.

Demonization and Ridicule and Mockery, Oh My!

Detail of Satan from Hans Memling's Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c. 1485).

Detail of Satan from Hans Memling’s Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c. 1485). Source.

This little snippet from Paul “Advanced Luciferian Beings” McGuire caught my eye in his latest screeth, in which he takes issue with people mocking his lunatic nonsense. It’s exactly like what Hitler did to Jewish people, donchaknow? He ends with this:

“Demonization and ridicule and mockery is an essential component in a mind-control brainwashing process that gives you the cultural license to destroy, kill your enemies simply because they may believe in the Constitution and the biblical God,” McGuire warned. “So you are looking for a moral license to kill them and you are looking for an immoral narrative that gives you the fake legality to destroy them and massacre them.”

That’s rather the plan of the religious reich, is it not? You want to force everyone else, regardless of belief, to adhere to your lunatic beliefs and ideals. You want to strip women of their autonomy, make sure only white, male, lunatic christian assholes run everything, and force every single person to conform to christian straightness. You want your hate and fear to rule. The rest of us want acceptance and inclusion, and are not afraid to treat all people as people, with full human rights. We want all people to be taken care of, able to provide a roof and food; a good education for all, and we don’t find diversity all terrifyingly scary. And I have absolutely no interest in tearing children from their parents arms, or stripping them of icons which are meaningful to them. But you’re in favour of all that. When I saw this photo, the first thought was “concentration camps. Now we’re doing concentration camps.” I have zero interest in putting anyone in a camp, let alone killing them. I’d be happy if you’d all just shut the fuck up, and get on with your lives. You and the rest of the religious reich would institute the Inquisition in a heartbeat if you could. Being blinded and driven by hatred and fear is no way to live, Mr. McGuire, and yes, I will keep mocking and ridiculing you, because that is exactly what you have earned. I think I’ll stick to my side, thanks.

The whole screeth is at RWW.

Oooer, A Psy-Op Blender! Wait…

Wow, Coach Dave is on one hell of a trip. His latest lunatic screeth is quite long, and so full of batshit, it’s hard to know where to begin. What’s all the fuss? The latest royal wedding – it’s a major psy-op to enforce the worst of the worst: the blending of white people with :gasp: people of colour!

Daubenmire, who has declared that he is “proud to be white” because “white, heterosexual, Christian” men represent America’s only hope for survival, has fretted about the threat of white genocide, and has fumed that interracial marriage weakened this nation “because multiculturalism is spiritual AIDS [that] has brought an infection into what was once a great Christian American culture,” said that the marriage of Prince Harry to a woman of “mixed blood” is an attempt to corrupt the pure bloodline of House of Windsor.

Yes, Coach Dave is a fully paid up member of the White Patriarchal Assholes™. He’s also astonishingly dense, as we shall see.

“Let me just lay it out there, because most people won’t say it because they don’t want to sound racist,” Daubenmire said while wearing a literal tinfoil hat. “Prince Harry’s wife is half-black. Now, wait a minute. That ain’t that royal bloodline lineage there, is it fellas? Isn’t there a little bit of mixed blood coming in there?”

Pretty much everyone on the planet has a someone in the woodpile who comes as a bit of a surprise. Now royalty everywhere does have a perturbing history of inbreeding in an attempt to keep things within the right class, but I’d happily bet there are some right interestin’ people in those bloodlines. Royalty has also spent a lot of time breeding like out of control bunnies, and there was seldom much concern about all those babes born on the wrong side of the blanket, and there were a fucktonne of them, too. History, Coach Dave. Try learning some.

“Did you see who performed the service?” he said. “Was it the Bishop of Canterbury or some official WASPy guy? Was it? Did I miss something? Or did we see the ultimate—umm, how do I say this?—a blending of the races; one new world order, one-world government, the blending of the [races] in the House of Windsor coming together for the first time.”

Bishop Curry is the ultimate blending of the races? How on earth do you figure that one, Dave? It’s not as if Bishop Curry was getting married to Harry. You might be unaware, Dave, but there have been people of colour in England for a very long time. A really long time. There have even been people of colour at the royal court, going waaaaaaaaaay back. I did hear that Bishop Curry preached about love, and I rather expect that’s what got under your skin. As for the whole new world order blahblahblah blending of races in the House of Windsor, uhhhh, it was one wedding. I don’t think it even qualified as a herald to all that nonsense.

Daubenmire insisted that since Prince Harry is sixth from the throne and very unlikely to ever become King of England, he was allowed to marry Meghan Markle in order to send a message endorsing mixed race relationships.

Oh, all that idiocy has been downgraded to an endorsement now. Gotcha. Who the hell knows who is going to end up on the throne? I can’t be arsed to care. As it stands, Elizabeth might live to be two hundred years old, given her death grip on that throne. People aren’t influenced by this kind of thing as much as you seem to think, Dave. For most people, it’s a matter of falling in love, and skin colour doesn’t enter into it.

“I’m going to tell you something, if there was any chance that Harry was ever going to be King of England, do you think they really would have let him just choose any woman he wanted?” Daubenmire said. “Of course not. So what’s the message that is being sent to us? … Is it a psy op that now, all of a sudden, sixth to the throne, he ain’t never going to be king, now it’s okay for the crown to be diverse?”

Yes, I expect Harry would have been allowed to marry who he wanted to marry. Even royalty has to make concessions to the current reality. If there was an obstacle, Harry could always choose to abdicate, it’s been done before. No, it is not a “psy-op”. Harry is not “all of a sudden” sixth in line. As for the crown being diverse, yeah, it’s just fine. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be.

RWW has the full story and video.

Are You Ready For Alt*Hero Crackdown?

Do you all remember Vox Day’s quest to “rescue” comics from the horrible, evil machinations of SJW thinking? If you don’t, it’s all here. Well, the comic is out:

Goodness me, lookit that stew of crackpot sciency stuff! I’ll just bet you’re all riveted now, right? Right?

Here’s the amazon link to the comic, if your tastes run to idiot. I do believe I’ll pass. Fascists are bad enough in reality, I don’t need them pretending to be entertainment, too.

ETA: Looking at that cover, it’s not awful, but those breasts! I’ll assume Vox Day is at least familiar with them, and they don’t work like that. They aren’t actual balloons.