Shabe Yalda, or why I paid $12 for Nancy Pelosi to read about women’s rights

  San Francisco, Shabe Yalda, Dec. 2023 

It’s that time of the year again. Shabe Yalda is the Persian celebration for winter solstice, when families gather and stay up through the longest night of the year eating fruit and reading poetry. In its Zoroastrian roots, Shabe Yalda is about celebrating the return of the light, the victory of light over darkness. Like many Iranians, I only grew up celebrating the spring equinox (Norooz or Persian New Year), but Shabe Yalda has been somewhat rediscovered recently. I, too, have been putting together small celebrations or rituals to mark the return of the light for some years now. 

A couple years ago, I was given the opportunity for a perfect ritual and real-world action. In November 2021, I received an email from Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI USA) titled Deck the Halls of Congress with Feminism. They aimed to raise enough money to mail a copy of the book, The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, to each US Senator and Representative. They asked that people sponsor their respective representatives with a twelve-dollar gift that covered the purchase, packing and postage of one book. From their email:

‘Dear U.S. Signatories, As the winter solstice approaches, many cultures celebrate the return of the light after the darkest season. For feminists, the last several years have felt bleak indeed, as most of the media has pursued a blackout policy on covering our objections to “gender identity” in law and society. As a result, many legislators remain entirely unaware of the depth, breadth, and strength of our commitment to the rights of women and girls as a sex class. WHRC USA thinks it’s time to shed some light!

This winter, we will deck the halls of Congress with a feminist critique of “gender identity.” Our volunteers will send one copy of Board President Kara Dansky’s important new book, The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, to each United States Senator and Representative, along with a personalized cover letter quoting their constituents and other supporters who understand that recognition and protection of biological sex in law is crucial.’

I liked that they linked their campaign to the winter solstice and to the idea of bringing light into darkness, because the majority of Americans have been completely in the dark as to what’s going on. Even those who are staunch supporters of “trans rights” – maybe especially those who are staunch supporters – very often have no idea of what they’re supporting. So I donated, and I threw in an extra $24 to get copies to Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla as well. To Pelosi, Feinstein and Padilla, I wrote:

“By replacing sex with gender identity in law and policy, California is stripping away the human rights of its most vulnerable women, like those who are homeless or in prison. In San Francisco, our public library hosted an exposition calling for violence against feminists and lesbians, the tech companies we host are censuring feminists worldwide, and I can no longer enjoy an evening out and expect that my local restaurants will have a female-only bathroom I can use. As a woman, California native and San Francisco resident, it greatly saddens me to see the erosion of women’s rights and the increased normalization of misogyny and lesbophobia in a city that was once a global leader in progressive causes. It is time for California political leaders to put women’s rights above woke points.”

WDI USA reached their funding goal, and most of the donations came from first-time donors. Women are sick of the erosion of our rights, the sidelining and censorship of our voices, the vilification of anyone who states basic facts and wants to protect the rights that were won these past decades. People in power have made it clear that they don’t care about women, but it helps to show that some of the public does care and is watching.

We certainly haven’t won yet. Notably of course, in the past two years Roe v. Wade was overturned (which, in my opinion, was not the sole doing of the right). But feminists have been pushing forward. Our concerns and our arguments are making their way into public consciousness. We don’t have a fraction of the funding of the astroturfed gender identity movement, but we are showing that grassroots activism is still possible, that in the face of heavy propaganda, censorship and deeply ingrained bias, speaking the truth can still make a difference.

While I am not personally very active, my inbox is full of calls to action, meet-ups, and local and global news of campaigns, lawsuits and even some wins (I did participate in an action for incarcerated women – and against Scott Wiener’s SB 132 – that I wrote about here). Since my little ritual in 2021, Kara Dansky has written a new book, and WDI USA has held two annual conventions: Reigniting the Women’s Liberation Movement and Accelerating the Women’s Liberation Movement, the latter in San Francisco.

San Francisco has been coasting on its gay-friendly reputation, but the only gays to which it is friendly now are of the male variety. A few years ago, a group of actual lesbians (i.e., of the female and exclusively same-sex attracted variety) was gay-bashed at the San Francisco Dyke March by other marchers. At some point in the 2010s, SF stopped being the city it is reputed to be. 

But activism is still in our DNA, and to bring a convention aimed at reviving the women’s liberation movement to a city once progressive and now so captured, is powerful. I couldn’t attend, but it seems to have gone… very well? As expected, the convention drew protests from the anti-feminist pink and blue crew (one delightful protester calling for mass femicide). But unlike other venues reserved by feminists in the past, the hotel did not bow to pressure to cancel the event, and it seems that more than anything, the protesters helped bring visibility to the true nature of our conflict with them (watch Kara Dansky’s account). The women concluded the weekend in front of San Francisco City Hall with a non-violent action for lesbian rights. The same crew arrived to hurl insults at them. We keep ending up back at square 1, having to fight the same fights, but women will simply show up as long as necessary.

It’s going to take a while for the liberals and leftists who are self-righteously entrenched in gender ideology to recognize that theirs is a regressive position, and many will never take personal responsibility. But most of the public – even those who go along with pronouns and mixed-sex bathrooms without a complaint – is not entrenched at all. If we continue to speak up on the harms of gender ideology, and continue to show that there is a resistance, including one that is not rooted in conservatism, and we continue to provide opportunities to transactivists to bring public awareness to their politics and misogyny, we will get through.  

Feminists are fighting back in SF: Our protest against SB 132, the bill that allows male inmates to “self identify” into women’s prisons

I am one of the women who protested against SB 132 at the Golden Gate Bridge in early February.

My time got monopolized by two idiotic and antagonistic men.

I’m not going to make a list of every non-sequitur, strawman and ignorant take, but I’ll note a few things:

– These guys wanted to talk AT us. They had no interest in listening to our responses, even when they asked us questions.

– One of them has a TIF (trans-identified female, or “transman”) daughter, yet he thinks that there is no problem with men in women’s spaces, and that TIFs should be in men’s spaces. It is scary how little men acknowledge male violence against women. (Of course, if the notion of male violence is ridiculous pearl-clutching, why are they clutching their pearls about violence against TIMs, or transwomen? From what are TIMs escaping by using female prisons, bathrooms and other spaces?)

– To that point, the other dude said that he owns a homeless shelter in SF(!!!). And yet he compared us – women defending what tiny amount of protection and dignity female inmates have – to people 50 years ago “fighting against people dancing” and said that the world “would advance regardless”. I feel terrible for the homeless women who end up in his shelter. Homeless women are horribly vulnerable and have a dire need for their own spaces.

Of course, the world doesn’t just “advance”, all linear and effortless. I wish it did. The reason that women stood out in the cold that day, some of them risking their incomes, to re-demand the sex-based rights and protections that were fought for by feminists before us, is because progress and liberation, especially women’s, are usually met with a conservative backlash. Scott Wiener, California senator and author of SB 132, is that backlash.

These men at Golden Gate Bridge, ranting and sneering at women speaking up for the women being assaulted and raped in prison, shouting at an elderly woman that she has no compassion, telling me that I am the reason trans youth are killing themselves…. are no different than the men who intimidated, mocked and called manhaters the previous generations of protesting feminists. Because while those women made incredible strides, not enough awareness was raised and maintained in broader society about the extent of the sexism we face every day. Likewise, little has changed in the attitudes of men towards women. And so, as I’ve said before, we are back at square 1, having to argue for our rights all over again. It’s sad, it’s scary, it’s depressing.

– In discussing the hypothetical situation of a transwoman being housed in a female prison, the father of the TIF twice used the pronoun “he”. I had to remind him that he should be using the pronoun “she” if he believes that this person is a woman. One of them also commented that it “wasn’t fair” to punish all transwomen for the doings of a few, in the sense that if a few of them raped female inmates after being transferred, the others should not be “punished” by being excluded from female prisons. The assumption is that, by default, men have a right to women’s spaces. That only the proven rapist can, perhaps, justifiably be excluded. In other words, the assumption is that women do not have an inherent right to our own spaces. A space in which we don’t have to shower, sleep, or use the toilet in front of any man. If I am forced to shower in front of a man, nothing more needs to happen for it to be a violation.

My exchanges with these white knights highlighted what has been made obvious these past years: This was always about men’s rights–or rather, men’s privileges. They can say “transwomen are women” until they’re blue, but there is not a single category of woman for whom they agitate this much and in this way.

In the past three years, every time that I have read about a woman in prison being raped, assaulted or harassed by a male inmate, and every time that I have read about a convicted rapist or other violent male being housed in a woman’s prison, I have thought about Hope, the editor who dropped me from her book at the request of her publisher because of my gender critical writing. Hope didn’t care about female inmates and others harmed by gender ideology; she only cared about doing what was convenient for her.

When Hope questioned me about my views, she scoffed and laughed, acted incredulous and as though I were ridiculously uninformed. This was in 2020. I had been following the “gender wars” for about 4 years, but Hope was convinced that she knew more than I did, and she would not give me even the benefit of doubt. Hope is a California resident who did not believe that Self ID (which is the basis of SB 132, introduced a year earlier, and a number of local policies) is real. She was “sure” that there were “protocols” to determine who is trans. Feminists have spent years writing and talking about Self ID, yet most people still believe that “transwomen” are all men who have had surgery and take hormones. Our claims can be verified with minimal research, but instead we get dismissed as crackpots.

Hope and I were both active in the animal rights movement, and long before our conversation on gender identity, I had mused that she had the sort of overconfidence and entitlement that, in the US, is associated with white men. And now, attending my very first feminist protest, I ended up the captive audience of two such men.

To be a woman in the world is to suffer fools, to be a female activist is to suffer them doubly.

White guy #1, father of the TIF, kept snickering, walking away, and coming back when he thought he had a good “gotcha”. He said he was an “expert” in “sexual orientation”. I asked him what sexual orientation had to do with it, since trans identity is about gender identity, and trans people can be of any orientation. He didn’t answer. He asked us with a smirk ‘so you think that a transman in a men’s prison would be in “mortal danger?”’ Silly women, thinking men are dangerous! But somehow it’s not silly to pass a bill based on that very premise (Scott Wiener has repeatedly framed it as protecting transwomen from rape) if the bill is about protecting males from male violence. (Of course, the same hypothetical male inmate who would rape transwomen can now also identify his way into a female prison…)

The vast majority of the public does not want this. If women were not systematically ignored, silenced and dismissed, we would not be where we are today.

Women’s concerns about male violence have long been dismissed as hysteria, bigotry, or prudishness, and proponents of Self ID laws and policies followed the playbook from day 1. SB 132 grants inmates the right to be recognized as the “gender” that they identify as at that point in time (indeed, they can identify differently later), which entails being referred to with the pronouns of their choice and being searched by a prison guard of their “same gender” (the rights of female prison guards are of course completely overlooked, and they can now be forced to perform these procedures on male inmates). In regards to where they are to be housed, trans-identified inmates can choose men’s or women’s facilities based on where they feel “safest”.

After SB 132 was passed in the California Senate in May 2019, the co-sponsors “converted it to a two-year bill so that the co-sponsors and Senator Wiener could meaningfully integrate feedback collected from a survey of the ~1,200 trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex people currently in CDCR custody.”

Not only did Wiener not consult with incarcerated women, WOLF reported that during a virtual town hall, “in his four-and-half minute response on SB 132, Wiener did not once address the concerns of these women. Instead, the state senator resorted to smearing the women bravely speaking up on this issue.” He handwaved women’s concerns with vague and lazy misrepresentations: “Unfortunately there’s been a right-wing backlash against this law and we have right-wing publications that are publishing a lot of just inaccurate information, frankly fake news, about this law and trying to demonize and scapegoat trans people including, unfortunately, there’s a term called ‘TERF,’ trans-exclusive radical feminist people who believe that trans women are not actually women and advocate in that way.” “These are the same arguments we heard in North Carolina restroom law, that trans women are just trying to scam their way into a women’s restroom to victimize cisgender women.”

In other words, and I am going to use words to which we can all agree, when a person who was born with a penis says that they are in danger, they are to be believed, no questions asked, and they are to decide which facilities they will live in, no questions asked. But when a person who was born with a vagina says that they are in danger, they are to be dismissed as bigots, liars and connivers.

Amie Ichikawa, ED of Woman II Woman, said “The terror, abuse, and cruelty incarcerated women are experiencing because of Scott Wiener’s bill is not ‘fake news.’ I speak to these women every single day. They are devastated. They don’t understand how their elected officials, especially those who claim to care about justice reform and protecting women of color, could turn a blind eye to what is happening here.” Amie and others also point out, in this discussion about a trans-identified female inmate who was retaliated against for speaking out against sexual harrassment committed by a male inmate, that those behind SB 132 have zero concern for trans-identified females; their efforts are solely for the benefit of trans-identified males.

This is basic, age-old sexism. And it’s infuriating.

But– Amie sent photos of our protest to incarcerated women who were “shocked” and “very moved that anyone would do this for them”. They asked, “Who are these women? Why would they stand up for us?” And Amie replied, “They are women who give a shit and are doing something about it.”

So, the action was very much worth it, but we need to find ways to reach larger audiences with more effective messaging. We should try to ask questions of those who think they are on the other side: Let the Socratic method reveal to them how little they know and how illogical and sexist their thought process is. In our communications overall, it’s important to undo the notion that removing women’s spaces is in any way a progressive development. Women’s human rights are being violated. It is not more complicated than that. We, as women and as advocates, have been harmed by the narrative pushed by both transactivists and the traditional conservatives (I explained here how these are simply two flavors of conservative) that the only people opposing this are conservatives. They both benefit from this framing and from distorting or making invisible the work and arguments of feminists.

It is noteworthy that most of the people who expressed support for us that day were women, but they didn’t engage much, and the very first people to approach us were an enthusiastic family visiting from the UK – or “Terf Island” as they said. These actions build community and give people comfort and strength in knowing they are not alone. There need to be more.

It’s ironic that white guy #2 compared us to the stuffy adults in Footloose, because I am partly from a country that imprisons people for dancing–now, in 2023. It is precisely this fact, and the killing of women who refuse to cover their hair, and the killing of youth who protest the tyranny, that strengthens my resolve to face my minor discomforts and put myself out there. Defending the human rights of female prisoners in California is part of the struggle for women everywhere. Here like in Iran, women are oppressed on the basis of being born in a female body. The woke love to masquerade as allies to “women of color”, but by denying the reality of sex-based oppression, and by systematically opposing women’s efforts to have a social movement focused on the dismantlement of that oppression, they support societal and institutional sexism everywhere.

For women who aren’t incarcerated, who aren’t homeless, who aren’t lesbian, who aren’t hedging our careers on a female-only scholarship, it’s easy to ignore the whole thing (while secretly trusting that other women will – as always – do the thankless work of defending the rights you enjoy) so that you can keep your good standing. If solidarity is too much to ask for, at least know that at some point, it will cost you too.

It’s time for more courage, and a lot more protests.

 

Learn more about the impacts of SB 132 on women:

 

 

 

Dispatch from the feminist animal rights closet

Woke culture has overtaken the vegan and animal rights movements and the effects have been as harmful as elsewhere. I’ve spoken before about how, ironically, this has gone hand in hand with the sidelining of vegan radicals and the trend towards corporatization and pro-neoliberal discourse and activism. Indeed, “intersectional veganism” and the pro-corporate vegan movement are two sides of the same coin.(1)

What I’ve not yet spoken about is the specific issue of sexism and anti-feminism in the AR movement–a topic that would have already been worthy of discussion before the adoption of gender ideology by much of the movement. I don’t know if animal rights/vegan circles and organizations are particularly bad for women in relation to other social movements (it’s not like non-vegan leftist men have a good track record either, and veganism also holds appeal for those who lean right) but I do know that in absolute terms, it’s pretty bad. Now it has gotten even worse. Woke culture has veered the AR movement in an anti-feminist direction, and in some ways this movement is more susceptible than others to the unquestioning acquiescence to the edicts of SJW thought leaders.

With gender ideology, we’ve gotten to a place in the AR movement where women are branded as TERFs; driven out of their organizations; denied platforms and funding due to their feminism; in my case have their work plagiarized (so that I don’t get credit and visibility from it); blacklisted and excluded from events; and the women who avoid these consequences do so at the cost of never publicly voicing their feminist views. Either that, or they just leave the movement.

I wanted to share a dispatch from the closet that many feminist animal rights activists have been shoved into. It’s an email that was sent to me by a female acquaintance after I wrote my post last year on being dropped as an author from an animal rights anthology. I’m sharing it with her permission and I edited it very slightly to keep it anonymous.

Hi Nassim,

Ugh, I don’t know where to begin…

Your early FB posts on this, and Mary Kate’s writings prompted me to pay closer attention.(2) And then I heard that MK got *fired* from her job because of something she’d written -wtf?

A lot of the verbiage had been troubling me but it wasn’t until I read of Meghan Murphy’s talk (in a Canadian library) being hounded and shut down that, with horror and disbelief, I started reading about what had been developing in the past several years, especially in the UK. 

I wanted to write to you, especially when you posted your last piece on FB re being dismissed from the book, but, coward that I am, was ashamed to be another of the many women who tell you of their admiration and support, but will not also speak up.

I’ve been following a number of sources and barely have the emotional strength to read about it let alone act.

Not only am I struggling to make a living, but the wildly dystopian and incomprehensible nature of what has manifested out of the whole shift from what I thought was settled years ago— that “gender” is a set of artificial “norms“ imposed, especially on women, not a fixed set of behaviors that one can escape or adopt by “identifying” or surgically altering one’s body—is deeply troubling and frightening…

When I was last with a group of friends, one said, 

“Well, I don’t think I’d go as far as to agree with Mary Kate, but…”

What?, but hers is just basic feminism…

I’ve tried writing about it but the fury leaves me unable to focus on anything else. 

The lock-step anti-“TERF“ comments I see on FB, by people who consider themselves deep-thinking progressives … is dumbfounding.

At the Conscious Eating Conference at the end of Feb, just before the lockdown, Pax, acting as conference host and moderator, stood at the podium to introduce Carol J. Adams, and found it relevant to loudly assert that “Trans women *ARE* women”.. and the room erupted in wild applause. (3)

Enough for now…

Notes:

(1) While I have long opposed “intersectionality” as understood in the animal rights/vegan movements, this does not at all reflect an opposition actual intersectionality, as formulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

(2) She is referring to Mary Kate Fain, who was kicked out of an animal rights organization she had founded (not only kicked out, but accosted by AR activists who hurled abuse at her on the street). After losing her job she went on to found the feminist website 4W, that in a short amount of time has become one of the most important resources for the feminist movement and that hosts the writings of dozens of women from around the world (and pays them too!); she co-created Spinster, an alternative platform to Twitter which has the habit of booting off uppity women; she is a prolific writer who also recently started a podcast, and on top of that got a job with a radical feminist organization. Basically Mary Kate is some sort of Wonder Woman who could have put her talents towards animal liberation, but the movement preferred to hound her out.
(Read Mary Kate’s story of losing her job in her article Fired For Feminism.)

(3) The Conscious Eating conference is organized by Hope Bohanec, the editor who dropped me from her book because of my feminism. From my interactions with her, it became clear that she has little experience with and interest in human-related issues but strives to tick the requisite boxes of diversity so as to avoid criticism. Being of relative privilege and disconnected from much of the oppression that women experience in this world, she thinks that “transwomen are the most oppressed of women”. This conference took place shortly after Hope dropped me from her book. The focus that year was “to explore overlapping oppressions”; a panel on the history of the animal rights movement with prominent female activists was titled Animal Rights Herstory Panel.
By Pax she is referring to Pax Ahimsa, a trans-identified female who started “educating” the AR movement on gender ideology, “inclusivity” etc etc years ago. Pax’s blog reveals a person who has no grasp of basic feminist analysis and whose ideas are in complete opposition to it.
Carol J. Adams is a renowned vegan second wave feminist who, interestingly, has been attacked by trans activists for various reasons in the past, but is now seemingly on board with gender ideology and has become mealy-mouthed on sex and gender, presumably to gain the approval of the “intersectional vegan” crowd. Maybe this is the sad result of having built an audience composed more of vegans than of feminists.

Milk, Dietary Racism and the Corporate Capture of the United Nations

When the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced last October that it planned to build closer ties with CropLife International, the trade body of the pesticide industry, civil society and environmental organizations jumped into action. Eleven international organizations sponsored a letter to the Director General of the FAO that opposed the announced partnership. It was signed by 352 civil society and indigenous organizations from 63 countries, and was accompanied by a letter of support from nearly 300 academics and scientists. Seed the Commons, the organization that I co-founded and that opposes the corporate takeover of food systems, signed on.

Then the United Nations convened the UN Food Systems Summit for September 2021, and it became evident that despite last year’s outcry, the UN’s alliances with the private sector were deepening and that they would be putting forth corporate false solutions rather than the People’s solutions we urgently need. Around the world, activists decided to boycott the summit (read Here is why we are boycotting the UN Food Systems Summit by two peasant leaders). The pre-summit that took place last July was met with mass mobilizations, both online and in person. Again, Seed the Commons threw our hat into the ring.

We decided to opt out of the UN Food Systems Summit’s mechanism for input from civil society and instead to join others in organizing around our opposition and building more legitimate platforms to discuss the transformation of our food systems. In response to the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit that took place in July, we participated in the Global Virtual Rally Against the Corporate Capture of Food Systems, a day of political and artistic interventions that kicked off a week of global mobilizations. The pushback is already bearing fruit; we are seeing the crumbling of the legitimacy of the UN Food Systems Summit. The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems has notably withdrawn from the summit, stating “The world urgently needed a food systems summit, but not this Summit”.

I am happy for the small part I played in this, but the true extent of industry ties of the UN is still not sufficiently appreciated and challenged. Last year’s announced partnership between the FAO and Croplife made waves, but it was not the first time the FAO has prioritized industry ties over the health of people. The United Nations, through the FAO and other agencies, has a long history of propping up the dairy industry. Unlike with pesticides, the innocuous – haloed even – reputation of milk has meant that this has largely gone unchallenged.

The ties between the United Nations and the dairy industry go almost as far back as the founding of the United Nations itself; more specifically, to the founding of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Today UNICEF is known as the UN agency that oversees child-related programs and advocacy, but at its start, its mandate was much narrower. Originally named the United Nations Children’s Emergency Relief Fund, UNICEF was created at the first United Nations General Assembly to provide emergency relief (specifically milk, vitamins and cod-liver oil) to children in war-torn Europe. Milk distribution was so synonymous with the work of UNICEF that its first logo was a child drinking milk over the map of the world, and at the time it was nicknamed a “giant organizational udder”. Another common nickname was “milkman of the world”, and UNICEF not only distributed milk but helped rebuild – and sometimes simply build – the infrastructure that allowed local communities to have access to milk. While its initial focus was on Europe, this quickly expanded to the rest of the world, starting in Asia. Milk consumption is not traditional to most of the places targeted by this expansion, so it was no longer a question of rebuilding what had been lost through war but of bringing in something entirely new, which tied into the developmental focus that the United Nations would start to adopt.

Food assistance programs hold the appeal of wholesome, altruistic giving, but their reality is usually more complex. These programs are often donor-based, i.e., organized around the benefit of donors rather than recipients. The first way that food aid benefits donors is by creating an outlet for their products. This short-term benefit can then become long-term, as the effective dumping of foodstuffs can help dismantle local food systems and shift dietary habits, creating new markets for donors and helping to integrate local food systems into the global food regime. The case of milk is no different. Distributing milk to school children provides a direct outlet for milk producers and others involved in milk distribution. In the days of the “giant organizational udder”, skim milk purchased by UNICEF was sourced from American farmers, who were provided an immediate outlet for their surplus stock. From the standpoint of industry growth, children are the ideal recipients of food assistance programs. They are the easiest leverage point over a society’s food culture, as their tastes and habits are still to be formed. And in effect, food cultures have shifted drastically since the early days of the UN and the targeting of children has been a key strategy in making this happen.

It is common knowledge that food systems and cultures have undergone westernization and globalization over the past century, but an oft overlooked part of this has been the globalization of milk consumption. We don’t tend to think of this in the same way that we do the wholesale adoption of pizza, burgers and processed foods, but for many populations it constitutes no less an adoption of Western norms. And more so than fast-food and processed foods, dairy has benefitted from government support and subsidies. The regular marketing of dairy has been compounded by its de facto imposition in children’s daily lives.

A key driver of the globalization of milk consumption has been the creation of school milk programs, which are typically based on some sort of public-private partnership. Parties involved usually include schools, governments and producers, and often also international development agencies, NGOs and multinationals such as Nestlé, Danone and Tetra Laval. Predictably, school milk programs are beneficial to their suppliers. Today in the United States, milk must be served with school lunches for these to be eligible for reimbursement by the USDA, which forces the public school system into a primary outlet for the American dairy industry.

The beneficiaries of these programs are not only dairy farmers but all of those along the supply chain–especially the multinationals that have vertically integrated the supply chains. One of the main players in the global school milk industry is Tetra Pak, which produces packaging for milk cartons. Tetra Pak’s website proudly features the school milk programs they help start in the Global South; they get to sell their products and look like good Samaritans too.

So the short term benefits for the dairy industry are obvious, but the long term impacts are perhaps more important, especially in emerging markets. The food preferences and habits of children have yet to be formed; feeding them milk every day serves to create consumers for the future. The explosion of school milk programs of recent decades has largely taken place in countries and populations with very little prior milk consumption. Serving milk in school normalizes milk consumption, instills the notion that it is a default or even necessary part of a healthy diet, and in effect, can change a food culture in one generation.

Since its foray into milk distribution in its early days, the UN has continued to be a broker for the dairy industry. In more recent years, the FAO has played a key role in supporting what has become a veritable global school milk industry. The logistical support and legitimacy that it provides has increased the access of the dairy industry to a captive consumer base: children.

In 2000, the FAO founded World School Milk Day, which takes place every last Wednesday of September. For one day, with little cost to the dairy industry, schools around the world sing the praises of milk to children. It is celebrated in a growing number of countries every year and is basically a global public relations day. Activities vary but they all highlight the purported benefits of milk, aim to build enthusiasm among children and legitimize the notion of serving milk through schools. In sum, the FAO created a whole “World Day of” to celebrate an institution the purpose of which is to instill habits in children that line the pockets of the dairy industry. Other ways that the FAO has supported the expansion of school milk programs have included helping to organize the International School Milk Conferences and the facilitation of communication among school milk stakeholders.

The perception of milk as children’s food par excellence is becoming universal, but milk was not in fact part of the dietary habits of much of humanity until very recently. The spread of this Western dietary norm has been aided by the marketing of milk as something that is not merely healthy, but necessary to children’s growth and development. The notion of necessity carries with it the belief that a diet without milk – even if varied and calorically sufficient – can only be considered lacking. The association between milk consumption and Western, American or white people is further encouragement to feed children milk, so that their groups can grow to be as strong, tall, successful or developed as those of traditional milk drinkers.

Unlike other Western foods that have gone global, milk is uniquely perceived as key to proper development. This is why it can attract subsidies through food assistance programs rather than depending solely on regular private marketing channels. But the notion that milk is necessary for the development of healthy children should raise the question: how were children from non-milk drinking cultures managing to grow up before?

The sense of necessity that has been ascribed to milk both stems from and propagates Eurocentrism. And by instilling the notion that a diet without milk is nutritionally incomplete, children and their parents are being taught to forget and devalue the diversity of foods from the food cultures they come from–at the same time that these are being lost under the expansion of a globalized corporate food regime. If a diet without milk as lacking, then many traditional non-Western diets are inherently deficient. This is a message that is repeatedly conveyed in the marketing of milk to children.

Eurocentrism recasts not only how we read human cultures but also human bodies. People who are from non-milk drinking cultures are majority lactose intolerant, meaning that they cannot easily digest milk or most dairy products. While this is not a pathology, it is often perceived as such. Indeed, lactose intolerance is the default condition of most humans and mammals. As mammals, we produce the enzyme lactase to aid in the digestion of lactose that we get from our mother’s milk. Lactase production drops after weaning for those who are lactose intolerant, but among humans, some populations developed dairying and in those groups lactose tolerance became an important trait to pass on. Over time, these populations became majority lactose tolerant (or lactase persistent, as they continued to produce lactase past the age of weaning), but they remain the deviation from the norm at the level of our species. Lactose intolerance is normal and healthy, but it has been pathologized due to a Eurocentric view that is now being exported.

The pathologization of lactose intolerance, coupled with the marketing of milk as necessary, imply that when someone in Mexico or China or Vietnam or any of the emerging markets for dairy experiences gastrointestinal distress upon consuming milk, the problem is perceived to be the person, not the product they ingested. Painting diets without milk as deficient goes along with seeing bodies that can’t digest milk as defective. And because milk is deemed necessary, the “defect” of lactose intolerance has to be overcome or bypassed in some way–the solution can’t be to simply go without. Lactose intolerant people are commonly told that rather than ditch dairy, they should work around their impediment, for example by attempting solutions like drinking lactose-free milk, eating cheese (which has less lactose than milk), taking lactase pills, drinking smaller but more frequent portions of milk, and otherwise trying to build up their tolerance.

Let’s state some facts. Milk is not a healthy food, much less a necessary one. Its consumption is associated with higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers. There is not a single nutrient in milk that cannot be easily found in other food sources. The dairy industry has been so effective in marketing milk for its calcium content that it is now commonly believed that milk is the only food source of calcium, or that dairy-free diets require supplementation or special planning to avoid being deficient. This could not be further from the truth. The website World’s Healthiest Foods, which has no vegan or anti-dairy agenda (and includes dairy in their lists of healthiest foods), lists tofu first of their top 10 “healthiest foods rich in calcium”. The diverse food cultures of this world are replete with calcium-rich foods, but they are erased or their importance downplayed by the one-size-fits-all approach to child nutrition of the school milk industry. At the same time, the biodiversity of our food systems – and by extension our diets – is being lost as they are integrated into a global corporate food regime.

In an article titled Is the FAO in the pocket of the pesticide industry?, Pesticide Action Network director Keith Tyrell wrote “This new deal would turn FAO into the marketing arm of the pesticide industry.” It is not a stretch to say that the FAO is already the marketing arm of the dairy industry.

All children are harmed by school milk programs, but children who are from majority lactose intolerant populations are harmed the most. Rather than advocate for the nutritional needs of children to be met with foods that are healthy, diverse and culturally appropriate, the FAO is backing up industry at the expense of eaters. That these eaters are amongst the world’s most vulnerable makes this reversal of priorities all the more egregious.

Last year, civil society responded swiftly to the announcement of the partnership between the FAO and CropLife because many of us immediately understand that such a partnership is a problem. The alliances with the dairy industry are more surreptitious and have gone virtually unchallenged because milk is so widely perceived as healthy, necessary and wholesome. But these perceptions are the result of Eurocentrism and industry propaganda, and it’s time they be updated. It’s also time that we demand that the UN stop propping up the dairy industry, starting with the role of the FAO in the expansion of school milk programs.

Readers might be thinking that the comparison between FAO’s involvement in school milk and its partnership with CropLife is unwarranted because in the case of the former, small farmers are being supported. But the main beneficiaries of school milk programs are multinationals, and even if they were small farmers, supporting them should not come at the expense of children’s health.

 In my video intervention at the Global Virtual Rally to Transform Corporate Food Systems last July, I spoke of how corporate capture is aided by a narrative of lack. By painting a scarcity that doesn’t truly exist, or at least not by default, corporate actors sell us false solutions – like GMOs – to the false problems they have created. The marketing of milk follows the same playbook and further entrenches the power of multinationals and aids in the dismantlement of local food systems.

I also spoke of reclaiming sovereignty and building a People’s food system by putting forth our own narrative: one of abundance. They say that we can’t feed the planet unless they save us with their GMOs? We show that there is already more than enough food to feed every human alive and that small farmers are producing most of it. In my work with Seed the Commons, we did the same with milk. The dairy industry has erased the numerous foods that contribute calcium and protein to children’s diets, and convinced us that without their product, kids can’t grow or thrive. Like capitalists always do: they create the problem, whether material or perceived, and then sell us the solution. Part of countering this is to show that the problem is bogus.

On the last Wednesday of September 2017, Seed the Commons held a counter-celebration, probably the only event to have ever been held in opposition to the widely celebrated World School Milk Day. What we celebrated instead were the diverse food cultures of the world and the plant-based, calcium-rich foods that have nourished generations of children, especially those of some of the main populations that make up our city. We also launched our Get Milk Out campaign, which aims to get the SF Board of Education to pass a resolution opposing mandatory school milk, and to inspire and inform similar activism globally.

This year, World School Milk Day will fall on Wednesday September 29, less than a week after the UN Food Systems Summit on September 23. The announcement they sent out last month with the date and registration details was unironically titled “The ‘People’s Summit’ has arrived!”. (1) But the legitimate people’s summit – the Global People’s Summit on Food Systems – is being held separately on September 21-23.

Opposition to the UN Food Systems Summit and to World School Milk Day are pieces of the same pushback against the corporate takeover of food systems. I invite more activists to take a more far-reaching approach to food system change, which for many will require a willingness to rethink the role of foods and industries towards which they might hold a positive bias. It’s time to say no to the top-down imposition of milk on the children and food systems of the world. People are organizing outside of corporate-captured UN channels to put forth legitimate pathways towards abundance and resilience; we can further defend biological and cultural diversity by bringing back and reasserting the importance of the plethora of foods other than milk that have fed generations. Let’s reclaim the abundance that has been erased by corporate narratives, including that of the dairy industry.

 

(1) Learn more about what’s wrong with the UN Food Systems Summit and with calling it a “people’s summit” at this excellent site.

 

The participation in the mobilization against the UNFSS was the last project I took on before leaving my role of director of Seed the Commons this summer. This article first appeared on seedthecommons.org/blog.

A Beginner’s Gender Critical Reading List

Last year I wrote a post on getting dropped as an author from an animal rights anthology, and I tacked a “beginner’s gender critical reading list” at the end. Both the article and the reading list are very long and arguably might have been better posted separately. In any case, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the reading list so – a year later – I’m reposting it on its own so it remains accessible as a resource. 

Two things to note:

  1. I have not been updating the list, which means that there are no articles or videos that came out after the blog post was published. 
  2. I noticed that some of the links in my list are now dead, usually because the article/video/blog was taken down by the platform that was hosting them. I think it is worthwhile to leave the list as is, because it also serves as a historical record of the erasure and censorship of feminist ideas. 

Enjoy.

The transgender movement and society

The New Backlash. This is a long but excellent read that thoroughly describes and analyses the situation we are in. Written some years ago, still on point. I recommend you take the time to read it.

Sex and Gender. A Beginner’s Guide. Also very long but clear and thorough. If you don’t want to read the whole thing I recommend you at least jump to How Did We Get Here?

Gender Identity: What Does It Mean for Society, the Law, and Women – A talk by Meghan Murphy  A talk that was given at an event that was heavily protested and for which the speakers needed to hire bodyguards.  Transcript here.

To Advance Civil Rights, Oppose Transgender Extremism

Astroturfing: a brilliant article on the corporate funders of the trans trend

Why now? Historical specificity and the perfect storm that has created trans identity politics

The oldest hate crime: How misogyny is being used to strangle women’s debate on sex and gender

The trans ideology of less than 1% of the UK population has bullied the other 99%. Here’s why I, as a real woman, reject it.

Transwomen are women or else “Indigenous women and girls are disproportionately harmed by the laws, policies, and practices that accept gender identity as truth and biological sex as a lie due to our over-representation in transition houses for battered women and their children, rape crisis centres, and prisons in Canada. Indigenous women and girls have long and violent histories of colonization that are ongoing in our contemporary woman-hating, racist, capitalist culture. Research shows that many women and girls in prison in Canada have survived male violence, are poor, and are often imprisoned for non-violent poverty-related offenses. Men who identify as women believe that they should be placed in women’s prisons and leaders and others think so too. One of the reasons I think policy makers are allowing men who feel they are women to serve their sentences in women’s prisons and to be allowed access into women’s transition houses and rape crisis centres is because these places are disproportionately populated by Indigenous and other marginalized women.”

There is no problem with trans people in bathrooms

Gender and gender identity

Gender is not an identity, it is a tool of patriarchy: A feminist view of gender identity politics

If ‘white feminism’ is a thing, gender identity ideology epitomizes it

Toward an End to Appropriation of Indigenous “Two-Spirit” People in Trans Politics: the Relationship Between Third Gender Roles and Patriarchy

What’s healthy about gender dysphoria? Short video by Carey Callahan, a detransitioned woman who is now a therapist.

Gender Colonialism

Gender, Patriarchy and All That Jazz

I am überpoor (satire) “There’s a word for people like me: überpoor (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it; your ignorance just means you’re a privileged bigot). Basically, it describes the state of being poor while enduring the added oppression that comes with having money and a middle-class background. The queer poverty theorist J’amie Olivier came up with it in his brilliant work Whipping Chav. If you’ve not read it, please do. It explains so much about how poor people are not oppressed due to having no money but due to “poorphobia”: a widespread antipathy towards dog racing, Lambrini and the Waitrose Essentials range. Hardest hit by this are the überpoor: people who have been wrongly assigned middle- or upper-class status but are in fact poor. For centuries, such people have simply been invisible. No one has wanted to talk about us and our needs.

Fay Blaney on gender identity and Indigenous cultures at the Vancouver Public Library

The gay people pushed to change their gender

An open letter

On law and policy

Scottish Government Faces Judicial Review for Redefining “Women” to Include Men

California SB 132 Would Allow Trans-Identified Male Inmates to be Housed with Females

Should Men Be Allowed in Women’s Prisons? (video) Posted on August 28, 2020. “At the time of this recording, the California legislature is poised to vote on SB 132, a bill that would allow incarcerated individuals to self-identify as transgender or intersex. Those individual must then “Be housed at a correctional facility designated for men or women based on the individual’s preference.”  This includes sex-specific residential programs such as the Community Prisoner Mother Program.”

Kara Dansky at WNTT – Washington DC (video) Attorney Kara Dansky speaks of legal developments around gender identity and Title IX in the United States.

Interview with Female Erasure Contributor Cathy Brennan (audio)

How do transgender policies affect International laws on women’s rights? (video)

Can women legally be compelled to handle male genitals? (video) That example I gave of the Muslim esthetician not wanting to wax a scrotum? It wasn’t a hypothetical. Look up Jessica/Jonathan Yaniv.

Anna Zobnina (International women’s rights law expert) Where did gender identity ideology come from? (video)

WAVE Handbook 2020: How Gender Neutral Policy and Practice Is Dismantling Women’s Specialist Support Services and Ways to Counteract It

The abuse of civil rights laws needs to stop

On language

An Open Letter to the Guy on Twitter who Wonders if Biological Sex is Real

Reproductive Rights: Women vs. People with Uteruses ‘“Uterus-haver” obfuscates the fact that the group of people at risk of losing abortion access are the same group of people we talk about being underrepresented in government; the same people sent to prison for “suspicious” miscarriages; the same group of people who were denied the vote for several hundred years in our republic. “Uterus-haver” conveniently fractures a cohesive picture of the female situation.’

The Women’s March and the Erasure of Women

The Colonization of Womanhood

Why has “biological reality-speak” become a thought crime?

#CanWeHaveAWord? Why Talking About Women’s Issues Has Become a Minefield

Another college student group hosts a violent, transphobic cupcake party

Vagina Monologues playright: ‘It never said a woman is someone with a vagina’

On biology

Project Nettie: scientists supporting biological sex

Sex is binary: Scientists speak up for the empirical reality of biological sex

Gender Heretics Is Offering 1 MILLION For A Third Human Gamete

Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise In which the academic career of a biologist was ruined because he publicly insisted that male and female are not social constructs.

The fight for women’s rights

Female Erasure with Maya Dillard Smith and Mary Lou Singleton | On Contact with Chris Hedges (video) Maya Dillard Smith is a legal scholar who was pushed out of her job as the Executive Director of the Georgia ACLU because of her reservations over Obama’s directive to public schools to replace sex with gender identity.

‘How the Gender Identity Movement is Hijacking the Fight for Reproductive Sovereignty’ (video)

A letter to the woman who called me a TERF “In this brave new world that you helped to create, look around for your transactivist friends, your lefty male allies, the ones you stood beside and yelled ‘terf, transphobe, bigot’ with, with you shouting the loudest, because you wanted to show what a good ally you were, how inclusive, how progressive. Where are they now? Why, they are where they always were. Benefitting from the patriarchy. Enjoying the new, improved version of it that you helped them to build by crushing the resistance from the women who spoke up for their rights. This has all cost them nothing; it has made the world a better, easier place for men. It has cost you and your sisters who campaigned with them for virtue cookies, everything.”

Why Can’t Women Be More Nice? “The demand that women be ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ goes further than just being a matter of tone policing, it has an impact on what women are allowed to say, and how much we can expect to be listened to when we say it. Women are not just expected to be nice whilst fighting for our rights, we’re expected to be nice instead of fighting for our rights.”

What happens when women try to meet to discuss their rights in 2019

Sex Based Segregation & Fairness in Sports | The Big Picture RT (video)

Women Interrogated by Police, One Thrown in Jail, for Disbelief in Gender Identity Theory

How does transgenderism undermine our right to organize as women, in Brazil?

Supporting Women in Domestic and Sexual Violence Services. Giving a voice to silenced women: evidence from professionals and survivors.

WHRC [Women’s Human Rights Campaign] Launches USA chapter

The Feminist Amendments to the US Equality Act: a new radical feminist approach to challenging gender identity ideology

Opposing Women’s Rights: 100 Years of Violence

Save Women’s Sports

Counting men as women

Why Disabled Women Requesting Female-Only Care is Not ‘Disgusting’

Man Elected to Female Leadership Seat That was Created to Ensure Female Participation in Politics, also: NY Democrats Quietly Dismantle ‘1 Male, 1 Female’ Rule

‘Self ID will stop women playing on an equal playing field’

These Are Not Our Crimes (video)

Labour’s ‘woman’ problem

‘Gender Fluid’ Credit Suisse director named on FT list of Top 100 Women in Business Sigh…

Have some “intersectionality” with your Honey Bumbles: On Gavin Hubbard’s theft of a Samoan victory

No. You may not take our sport. “We all know the truth here and the truth is that the truth is not what matters to the people making these decisions. What matters is what has always mattered — male feelings. Male desire to conquer and conquest has been the single most deadly force throughout history so why shouldn’t they take from women our fledgling sporting competitions?”

Cancelling feminists and their allies 

The Annals of the TERF-Wars Humorous chronology of the trans v. feminist conflict, with a focus on the UK.

Why British Feminists Are Such a Bunch of Evil Witches

The Emperor’s New Penis

Censored by transpolitics: A masterpost A long list of people who have been attacked, unpublished, censored, threatened and more for questioning in some way trans people or ideology.

Women in the United States are Being Fired for Talking About Feminism “A man can not be fired for believing he is a woman, but a woman can be fired for believing he’s not.”

Rose Freedman: Professor’s door ‘covered in urine’ after gender law debate In which a Jewish professor, human rights lawyer and survivor of sexual violence finds her door covered in urine and is called a “Nazi who should be raped”.

Podcast: Indian Filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar made a film about sexual harassment, then got cancelled by liberal feminists

Bullying and Harassment Permitted by Bristol University (crowdfund) In which a feminist from the Dominican Republic loses her PhD scholarship to study in the UK following bullying for her gender critical views.

Fired For Feminism This was written by an acquaintance who was fired for writing an article about the misogyny of identifying as “non-binary”. This was the second time she was #cancelled. The first time, she was kicked out of an animal rights group she founded.

How I became the most hated lesbian in Baltimore In which the only woman and lesbian on the Baltimore LGBTQ Commission’s Law and Policy Committee was pushed out of it.

U of A Professor says she was dismissed over views that biological sex trumps transgender identity for policy reasons

Trans people are real – but so is biology The latest casualty: Sasha White was fired for her job at a literary agency in New York for saying “Gender non-conformity is wonderful, denying biological sex not so.”

Thistle Petterson: How I Became the Most Hated Folk Singer in Madison

A Modern Witch Hunt

Cancel culture cannot erase a strong argument

Transactivism at its Finest – the Blood Root Restaurant Debacle In which the elderly lesbian owners of a vegetarian restaurant that was a decades-long community pillar and catered to all people, including trans, came under attack by transactivists.

Trans-identified male verbally attacks Rose McGowan at Barnes & Noble talk

Dehumanizing women as TERFs

‘TERF’ isn’t just a slur, it’s hate speech

TERF: a term used to stop critical thinking while demonizing homosexuals and transexuals (video) “People who use the term TERF are part of the queer and trans community. Do you know who started the queer and trans community a long time ago? Homosexual people. In LGBT, the first two letters are referring to homosexual people. It’s insane that being a homosexual now is a prosecutable offense in social [justice] circles.”

It’s Time for Progressives to Protect Women Instead of Pronouns

Terf is a Slur  (TRA Diss track) – Grace Adetoro (video) Something different–let’s support radfem artists!

Transgender Activists in Multiple Countries Call For, Launch Organized Violent Uprisings Against Women

The Invisible Women – why are so many women scared to speak out about gender politics?

What’s wrong with gender ideology “TERF graves are gender neutral bathrooms” – truly the language of the new civil rights frontier.

Why I Became An Evil TERF (video)

Social media platforms censoring feminists

The Disturbing Trend of Feminist Censorship on Medium

Reddit is Censoring Women’s Health Support Groups

WordPress shuts down several feminist blogs without warning and WordPress censors GenderTrender; Gallus Mag responds.

Reddit Purges Wrongthink From Women’s Health Support Groups

Why I’m Suing Twitter

F-Droid Bans Feminist Social Media Site Spinster, Then Bans Female Dev For Asking Questions

I’m with the Banned: Twitter in the Time of Gender Fascism

YouTube Censors Interview of Mother Who Lost Daughter to Trans Cult “Whilst Keen might have blasphemed in the eyes of the Silicon Valley gods, the video she posted did not break a single British law.  Despite the content being legal, the 37.1 million British adult users of YouTube will not have the opportunity to hear this important perspective on what is a live political issue within the UK.”

Female-only spaces

Male-bodied Rapists Are Being Imprisoned With Women. Why Do So Few People Care?

The importance of women only spaces and services for women and girls who’ve been subjected to men’s violence

Man Wins Lawsuit Demanding to Change in Locker Room Alongside High School Girls, Assisted by ACLU Girls don’t matter in the United States.

Discontinuation of grant to Vancouver Rape Relief shows trans activism is an attack on women In which a woman’s shelter is defunded for maintaining a female-only space for rape victims.

Why it’s Impossible for Women to Compromise with the Transgender Movement “Just as women and girls share sex-specific facilities while some of us wear skirts and others wear pants, and have managed on a daily basis over decades of sharing facilities to not rape or beat up one another over differences in fashion, men in pants must get comfortable urinating and changing alongside their brothers in skirts. There is no logical reason that a male person in a skirt should trigger violence in a more traditionally masculine-appearing male observer. This issue is men’s problem, and men must resolve it amongst themselves. Women are not human shields that should be placed between two warring factions of males. If the two male groups choose not to get along and share spaces civilly, then the male individuals who identify as women must fight for their own facilities – just as women once fought and won sex-specific facilities.”

Buuuut what about the transvestites? (video) In which a women is banned from a female-only dating app because she opposed the presence of a cross-dressing male, and this youtuber asks who actually counts as transgender.

Expelled from GirlGuiding because of my Gender Critical Beliefs (crowdfund) “I felt that some aspects of Girlguiding policy needed rethinking in the light of their acceptance of self-identity as proof that someone is female, which clashes with my gender critical beliefs. The issues are particularly important around safeguarding, where parents cannot know that their daughter is sharing changing or sleeping facilities with with a person who has the physical attributes of a man or boy but says they identify as a woman or girl. Adult men who say they identify as women will be allowed to share sleeping facilities with and do intimate care for young girls. This meant that the Girlguiding policy required us as adults in charge of children to deliberately withhold information from the children’s parents and guardians.”

Get your story straight on the bathroom debate

Why Women’s Spaces are Critical to Feminist Autonomy

The Left and women

How progressive misogyny works

British Labor Party pledge purge of feminists

The new misogyny targets Cindy Sheehan and Helen Steel

Woman ‘attacked in racist incident at May Day march’

The left and violent misogyny

‘Those involved in progressive movements need to commit to ensuring women’s voices are heard’ Well-known Spycops and McLibel campaigner Helen Steel is now a cancelled woman. ‘Perhaps the most shocking incident was at Manchester Anarchist Book Fair in 2018, where Steel explains she was “physically carried out while trying to persuade them that it was incompatible with anarchist principles to exclude women from participating in discussions about what the word woman means and whether males should be allowed into women-only spaces.”’

When did liberal men start thinking it was acceptable to tell feminists how to be feminist?

What is really radical in sex/gender politics?

Women’s rights in the far left – are feminists actually neo-fascists?

If feminist Linda Bellos is seen as a risk, progressive politics has lost its way

The Women’s Alliance: Confronting Sexism on the Left Is anything more tragically representative of the 2010s rise of woke culture than transactivists calling anti-war work irrelevant? The US is still slaughtering people in imperial wars, but anti-war activism has all but disappeared while bourgeois ID politics have largely supplanted solidarity and radical politics. ‘The Women’s Alliance says, “…given that Veterans for Peace made a position statement regarding transphobia and transmisogyny, we also requested copies of past position statements regarding sexism and misogyny. We have yet to receive any confirmation that they even exist.”   Note that the VFP concern seems centered on men who have transitioned to become transwomen. There is no provision for the fight against trans-misandry—something that is undoubtedly important to those female members who have transitioned and live as transmen. We find this telling as to the nature of these demands. The Women’s Alliance activists were called transphobic bigots and received the usual threats of rape and violence for disagreeing with the theory of gender being promoted by trans activists and now the VFP. Perhaps the most over-the-top attack was directed at Cindy Sheehan, who became a leader in the peace movement after her 24-year-old son was killed while serving as an Army Specialist in Iraq. When she posted a comment in support of the Women’s Alliance Statement, she was told by the trans solidarity crowd on social media that all the antiwar work that she has done has become “irrelevant,” and all her work on behalf of Private Manning is now “negated.”’

An open letter to the left regarding silence

Women’s rights, trans ideology and Gramsci’s morbid symptoms

Class, Identity Politics and Transgender Rights

Women’s meeting besieged by raging crowd “We are attacked as if being critical of gender is some aberration rather than the core principle of feminism that it is. But where women’s groups have led the way the left is lagging behind.”

#Expel Me

On the harassment of lesbians 

Stonewall has sold out lesbians and it’s time they be held to account

Meet the Gay Activists Who’ve Had Enough of Britain’s Ultra-Woke Homophobes

Shame Receipts (Content warning: graphic language)

Lezbehonest about Queer Politics Erasing Lesbian Women

Lesbianism is under attack, though not by the usual suspects

What is the Cotton Ceiling. Presentation by Angela Wild of #GetTheLOut. (video)

RE: “your dating preferences are discriminatory” (video)

Riley, You Are Not A Lesbian – Not A Feminist Either (video)

Lesbians are being excluded from the Vancouver Dyke March in the name of ‘inclusivity’

Interview: Angela C. Wild of #GetTheLOut on Pride in London and Lesbian Erasure ‘In the name of “inclusivity” and “progress,” we have reached a stage wherein same sex attraction is called “hate speech”. Reframing females who are attracted to other females as somehow “bigoted” or “hateful” functions as a vicious form of misogyny, because it denies women’s right to have sexual boundaries.’

Media Blackout on Dana Rivers “Mitchfest” Murder Trial Dana Rivers is a well-known trans-identified male who participated in a campaign to shut down a female-only music festival, Mitchfest, and who harassed lesbians who attended the event. A few months after Mitchfest was shut down, he murdered a Black lesbian couple and their son in Oakland. We do not yet know why he committed these murders, so we can not say whether they were hate crimes. With that said, think of the media coverage that would ensue if the victims had been male. Imagine if a person was known to have harassed gay men, or Jewish men, or Black men, or Muslim men, and to have organized against their freedom of assembly. Imagine that the same person then proceeded to murder members of that community. There would likely be some hypothesis on it the murders being hate crimes as well as increased media coverage of the vulnerability of the targeted community. In this case? Total silence. This family deserves to have their story told. To add insult to injury, the headline of The East Bay Times states that a “woman” was charged with the killings. This was not a woman’s crime.

Medicalizing gender non-conforming and autistic children

The Transgender Child: The Creation of an Emblem for a Political Movement (video) Presentation by Stephanie Davies-Arai for the panel Inventing the Transgender Child organized by the Women’s Human Rights Campaign.

Tavistock: Former Clinicians Call It Conversion Therapy. My Response. (video by GNC Centric, a detransitioned woman)

Bill to ban FGM passes in Wyoming despite pushback by radical trans activists

Transing a 5 year old tomboy (video)

The New Conversion Therapy: How Homophobic Quackery is Targeting Children An important read, so to quote the author: “Do not turn off your system. Do not tune out. Sit your ass down, and pay attention, because as it turns out, homophobia is definitely alive and well in the American medical establishment.”

Interview with Female Erasure Contributor Dr. Kathleen Levinstein PhD. LCSW LMSW (audio)

No Longer Silent, UK Gender Clinic Whistleblower Launches Lawsuit

Protect Gender Dysphoric Children from the Affirmation Model This is a currently active crowdfunding campaign by Keira Bell, a detransitioner. She explains: “I’m an ex patient of Gender Identity Clinics where I was prescribed dangerous, experimental drugs and received a double mastectomy procedure. I am fighting to stop this from happening to minors.”

Irreversable Damage: the trans threat to girls

Children’s Rights, Trans Realities | With Scott Newgent (video) Scott Newgent is a transman / trans-identified female who opposes the transing of children and has launched the Trans Educational Speaking Tour

In Plain Sight | All you have to do to know that something is deeply wrong with Mermaids is watch Susie Green’s Ted Talk

Listening to detransitioners

Does Sex Matter? Gender Identity vs Material Reality: Pt 2 Carey Callahan Detransitioned woman discusses the medical transition of children and the portrayal of detransitioners in the media.

Response to Julia Serano: Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation “The truth is that a lot of women don’t feel like they have options. There aren’t a whole lot of places in society for women who look like this; for women who don’t fit, who don’t comply. When you go to a gender therapist and tell them you have these kinds of feelings they don’t tell you that it’s ok to be butch, to be gender non-conforming, to not like men, to not like the way men treat you. They don’t tell you that there are other women who feel like they don’t belong, who don’t feel like they know how to be women. They don’t tell you about any of that. They tell you about testosterone, that’s about it.” 

Ariel Pereira on Queer Politics The young founder of Detransition Chile speaks of her experiences with lesbophobia, male privilege and more.

Interview: Sam, Nele, and Ellie transitioned as young women, living as ‘men’ before realizing they’d made a mistake

Magdalen Berns

Magdalen Berns was a young Scottish lesbian youtuber who died of brain cancer last year. I have already shared some of her videos above, but she merits her own category. I encourage you to take some time exploring her channel.

Choice quote: Your fucking minds are so open your brains have fallen out.

After Magdalen passed away, I shared some of her videos on my facebook page to commemorate her. In response, a vegan activist told me to throw myself in a washing machine. This person was an organizer with an “intersectional vegan” non-profit that was built on pontificating to animal rights activists to end “all oppression!!” instead of working on single issues. The contention that you can not effectively fight any oppression without ending all oppression is nonsensical and unworkable. But, when voiced with an air of intellectualism, these pronouncements allow people in the animal rights movement to gain moral clout and followship. Some years ago this organization penned an article about the “transphobia” of the animal rights movement, for naming the exploitation of “female reproductive systems” as such, for example in dairy production. The article singled out well-known second wave feminist Carol Adams who, presumably to remain in good standing with the animal rights movement, became willing to be mealy-mouthed in naming sex as an axis of oppression.

JK Rowling

The woman deserves her own category too.

JK Rowling and the transactivists: a story in screenshots

Radical Girlsss Statement in Support of JK Rowling: Migrant Perspectives

An Apology to JK Rowling “JK Rowling recently published an eminently reasonable, heartfelt treatise, outlining why it is important to preserve the category of woman. There’s only one thing wrong with it: it assumes a rational interlocutor.”

TRAs, Rape-Logic and the Economy of Entitlement

Sexism is alive and well in the transgender debate

Strategic Ignorance and JK Rowling

The genius of the “I ♥ JK Rowling” stunt

Statement from J.K. Rowling regarding the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award “I believe the time is coming when those organisations and individuals who have uncritically embraced fashionable dogma, and demonised those urging caution, will have to answer for the harm they’ve enabled.”

JK Rowling’s stance against the thought police “For some unfathomable reason, being ‘politically correct’ is often attributed exclusively to people who are ‘left-wing’. Marxism is of course normally considered to be the essential philosophy of the ‘left-wing’. But Marxist philosophy is dialectical and historical materialism, which has as one of its most fundamental tenets that ideas are true only if they are in accord with material reality, regardless of what any number of people, learned or otherwise, might believe. At one time, practically the whole of humanity believed that the world was flat, and/or that the sun revolved round the earth. But their belief did not make it true. And it follows that, however many people are bullied into believing that there is no biological difference between male and female, it will never be true.”