It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse! It’s another edition of your Weekly Reader! As always, if you have something you’d like to share, drop a link in the comments! The more articles, the better! Because “to share is to care”, as the Quintessons once said by accident. Maybe they had the Christmas spirit. Or just didn’t want to be a Grinch. 😉
10 Points for TERFindor (from Splice Today): “Gender critical feminists—commonly referred to as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs—believe that gender identities don’t exist; only biological sex matters. At best, they support equal protections under the law for trans people, but don’t believe trans women can ever be “real women.” At worst, however, gender critical feminists propagate dangerous conspiracy theories that threaten the lives of trans people. They’d have you believe that trans women are male sexual predators pretending to be women in order to infiltrate women’s space, and that a Trans Gestapo is committing genocide against butch lesbians. There’s no evidence to support either of these claims, but they’ve already managed to convince both conservatives and centrist liberals that trans people are the biggest threat to women’s rights.”
On Bevin’s Pardons and Prison Abolitionism (from Love Joy Feminism via Patheos): “Countries like Sweden have prisons that function drastically differently from our punitive, broken prison system, and yet they have both lower crime rates and lower recidivism rates. We imprison more people than any country in the world, and yet call ourselves “the land of the free.” The system is fundamentally broken.”
Oprah Winfrey Helped Create Our American Fantasyland (from Slate): “Despite the “magical thinking” reference, neither Williams nor other skeptics have seriously addressed the big qualm I have about the prospect of a President Winfrey: Perhaps more than any other single American, she is responsible for giving national platforms and legitimacy to all sorts of magical thinking, from pseudoscientific to purely mystical, fantasies about extraterrestrials, paranormal experience, satanic cults, and more. The various fantasies she has promoted on all her media platforms—her daily TV show with its 12 million devoted viewers, her magazine, her website, her cable channel—aren’t as dangerous as Donald Trump’s mainstreaming of false conspiracy theories, but for three decades she has had a major role in encouraging Americans to abandon reason and science in favor of the wishful and imaginary.”
Dear Jo, (from Vanessa Nichols): “Rowling wrote her way into so many lives. She’s resonated with so many with her underlying themes of magic and “be who you are” and all of the things that we needed to hear.
Yet.
Here she is.
Excluding.
Perpetuating narratives that are a danger to our trans community.
She’s breaking hearts.”
We’re Already in a Civil War (from John Pavlovitz): “That’s why those of us who are here on the ground are fighting a different battle in a different way.
We’re fighting for the vulnerable people: for the migrant child and the transgender teenager and the Muslim family; for the sick and the afraid and the hungry.
We won’t wage this war with guns or cannons or bombs or knives.
We’re fighting with our numbers and our ideas, with our dollars and our votes.
We’re fighting for the soul of this place, and we aren’t going back to that earlier war they desire.
We aren’t going to rewind in time and injure human beings while declaring the value of human beings, or allow religion to be perverted to declare anyone immoral inferior.
That simply isn’t up for debate.”
‘SEGREGATION’S CONSTANT GARDENERS’: HOW WHITE WOMEN KEPT JIM CROW ALIVE (from Pacific Standard): “Good white women, and especially good white mothers, “married gender roles [with a] devotion to racial segregation.” They had a special obligation to police the color line where public and private life intersected: Midwives classified the race of the babies they helped bring into the world; public school teachers plucked students suspected of being mixed-race from their classrooms. Some educated women nourished the illusion of a more “affectionate segregation,” in columns containing fond tales of their housemaids and childhood mammies.”
Rape culture isn’t a myth. It’s real, and it’s dangerous. (from Vox): “Rape culture pressures women to sacrifice their freedoms and opportunities in order to stay safe, because it puts the burden of safety on women’s shoulders, and blames them when they don’t succeed. As a result, certain opportunities are left unavailable to women, and still others are restricted by expensive safety precautions, such as not traveling for professional networking unless you can afford your own hotel room. That amounts, essentially, to a tax that is levied exclusively on women. Over time, the cost of that tax adds up to opportunities lost and progress not achieved. When women give up social and economic opportunities in order to stay safe, that affects their progress overall, which in turn affects society’s progress overall.”
Religious Homophobia: It’s About Straight Sex, Not Gay Sex (from Medium): “Self-loathing, hating ourselves for who we are and what we do (a distinction that emotionally is virtually moot), is miserable. Religiously amplified self-loathing, a kind of morally triggered compulsive-anxiety syndrome, can be more than miserable. It can be a form of psychological self-torture.
I remember the first time I had a panic attack. When it was finally over, I remember saying to someone, “I had no idea how miserable a panic attack can be! If someone had presented me with anything to take that feeling away — a street drug, say, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.” Religiously amplified self-loathing is miserable like that. People are willing to try anything to make it go away.”
That’s all for now. Drop by again for more links, articles and facts that you didn’t know you needed. Until then, happy reading!
Iacon East 