Things have been rough-going for a while. I have mentioned before how I often feel overwhelmed by personal responsibilities, let alone maintaining any kind of online presence.

I’m trying to keep the blog and YT channel alive until at least Summer, the little guy starts school this Fall so I will suddenly have whole chunks of time to fill. I will miss him, of course, it’s sad to see him leaving such a simple time of life. I do miss my babies, but I also miss my hobbies.

So, naturally, I have started another novel. It began sinking in today just how huge a research project it will be, based on real people and places. But it’s haunting me, following me around and whispering in my ear, and has been for some time, come to find out.

“Being a girl and hitting puberty is so traumatic.”

An anonymous Tumblr post expressed a common shame in simple words. It rippled through Gender Critical social media in the form of screenshots after the original post was quickly deleted.

Her spurt of stifled frustration struck a chord, breathlessly relating a firsthand account of female suppression: “You go from being a genderless little free thing to being hit with shaving and makeup and growing breasts and skincare and menstruation and suddenly being sexualized, 

“When like a few years ago you could take your shirt off to play in the stream and trade cards with the boys and come home covered in mud and not even think about it.”

The new Daily Show is pretty bad.

Jon Stewart recently rejoined the conversation on his own non-network show, a little grayer but with his signature energy intact. He’s back to his consciousness-raising schtick, covering topics like gun violence and economic inequality with the deft balance we came to expect during his 16-year tenure in the Daily Show anchor chair.

Your Replacement Is Here

Trevor Noah has always seemed more scripted to me. His tone changes pretty drastically when he’s off-script, his natural rhythm peeking out to reveal a softer, even pensive style. Ironically, these are the moments he looks most natural as Stewart’s successor – Trevor is also kind, but firm. Jovial, but principled.

However you feel about Dave Chappelle, he’s too big for the mainstream to ignore. His special The Closer has broken the cultural dam, unleashing the torrents of questions TRAs have worked so hard to keep us from asking.

The Flow Of Information

The staff walkout at Netflix made the news. NBC probably spun it the hardest, summarizing the day of protests as, “The media giant [was] forced to listen to its workers.” Because a longtime pillar of the establishment, now owned by Comcast, is just happy to see workers getting their own back, right? 

“I do like the decision to make Janice Raymond sound like an evil witch…”

I’ve spent some time tracing the line Wokists have drawn between feminists and the Right Wing, but this node in the TERF dot-to-dot has a few things that make it special.

Credit is due to YouTuber King Critical, whose encyclopedic knowledge of literature brought this misdirection to light. While reacting to Jessie Gender, he spotted a misquote that changes the whole meaning of the referenced passage. Jessie tweaks a sentence in a foundational text, and uses it to smear radical feminism.

Science has been kinda dodgy lately. Foundational psychological studies are defying replication. Sexed brains don’t exist, then they do, then they don’t.

But today, science really came through for me.

If you’ve been fighting in the TERF wars for a few years, you’ll remember the infamous cuttlefish comparison. I came in on the end of it, but the basic idea was that sex is a spectrum because some animals can switch their sex in certain conditions.

The very idea of switching sex seems to imply that it’s not a spectrum, but let’s move on.

Made the mistake this morning of clicking on The Humanist Report. 

I knew it was going to piss me off, the headline was Stephen King Says JK Rowling “Canceled” Him For Supporting Trans Women. I do my best to keep track of narratives on all sides. They usually take a couple of minutes to warm up to the bullshit.

But Mike Figueredo goes right for it. “So, by now, I think it’s abundantly clear, since author JK Rowling has made it known every opportunity she had, that she hates trans women. Okay, we get it!”

NO YOU DON’T. I actually read her essay and as many tweets on the subject as I can find, so I can say with some authority that SHE NEVER SAID THAT.

The current model of Choice Feminism is riddled with problems.

In radfem and GC spaces, we take them as a gimme. We understand that many of the alternatives we throw around are older than any of us, that radical feminism is not a reaction to Choice Feminism.

In our sheltered enclave, it’s easy to forget how confusing it is out there.

French YouTuber Alice Cappelle takes on some meaty subjects with a laywoman’s perspective. She lays out details and liberally quotes others, while admitting she doesn’t always know where she stands on things.

I knew something was up when I woke up to 19 notifications.

They had me right – A smallish account with only so much energy to defend myself. But they just really hated my Cyberpunk article!

After the original poster proclaimed it was “NOT ok to insult anyone because of their opinion,” a group of them wasted no time dogpiling me to tell me why my opinion meant I needed to die.

Hardly bothering with ‘transphobe,’ they labeled me ‘vile,’ ‘disgusting,’ toxic,’ (of course!) and even abusive. My writing was referred to as “a pile of dog shit.” I was told to take ‘feminist’ out of my bio. And called a bigot and a fascist, for good measure.

When your identity is built on a lie, reinforcing it is a constant preoccupation. This obsession bleeds into everything you do.

One Stunning&Brave soul calling himself Bella Blondeau shares his view through a trans lens darkly. The game Cyberpunk 2077 strikes him as pretty transphobic, and he would know!

But while trying to illustrate transphobia in gaming, Bella actually demonstrates his lack of understanding of gender theory or the real world he’s so desperate to avoid. He complains that the game is an “insidious attack on trans personhood” because characters are chosen based on the player’s voice.

Just a quick note of warning to readers and the wider feminist community.

This afternoon in Montreal, a man who calls himself Billboard Dad was out doing his thing. Interestingly, that thing is protesting the Canadian government’s stance on gender politics.

“I was having peaceful conversations on Saint-Catherine Street, joined by a local man. A bunch of these thugs suddenly swarmed me, I'm told there were about 7.“

He got footage of several people surrounding him, one of them shouting, “Transphobes, fuck off!“ while hitting Billboard Dad with a traffic cone!

It’s not every day I find something I think everyone needs to hear.

Today was one of those days. These are the moments that still fill me with hope.

Two Truth Bombs And A New Subscription

Michael Browne has been feministing about as long as I have, with even less exposure. 

I assumed YouTube’s algorithm made the introduction but, retracing my steps, I found his video on Ovarit. He appears to have uploaded it himself.

Michael has been taking on the big boys for a while, releasing long, detailed responses to the likes of Riley J Dennis and Contrapoints. More recently, he commented on Philosphy Tube’s transformation and even Lindsay Ellis. 

“America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic; what it is to educate a child; what it is to foster justice; what it is to express oneself properly; what it is to be a nation – all is being refounded upon a religion.“

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But Professor John McWhorter was writing this week about race theory in America, not gender.

He is talking about the same thing we are, without knowing it.

Last week, I pointed out that Kyle Kulinski over at Secular Talk had stumbled upon the same issue we in the feminist community have been wrestling with for years – That lots of so-called Liberals really aren’t very. 

The story of the Reddit attack on Wall Street is being twisted in some strangely familiar ways.

Today on Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski shows us how tech companies and publications are working together to paint the Redditors as right-wing extremists.

He pulls headlines from Business Insider describing Discord banning r/Wallstreetbets for “hate speech”, and Newsweek claiming it’s all a cover for recruitment.

Kyle points out Discord’s convenient timing, “It’s not a coincidence that the day they took them down is the day that they were bankrupting hedge funds and taking down wealthy and powerful people.”

The intersection between feminism and wifery is getting crowded.

Traditional adversaries, this convergence has bent philosophy into a massive black hole right at the center of everything.

The Tradwife: Traditional, But Aware

The Tradwife is easy to find these days. She has a big presence on Catholic Twitter in English, Spanish and Portuguese. She is Classically Abby. She likes to write about her “Traditional” life. Tradwife blogs sprout like flashy toadstools along the rotting bark of conservative thought.

They frustrate the shit out of me.

We have to stop holding back before it’s too late.

Dr. Amanda Foreman should be a household name. In her excellent four-part BBC series ‘The Ascent of Woman,‘ she explains why our past has never been a straight line: “The status of women is a barometer of a society’s tolerance, fairness and openness.”

Dr. Foreman asks the big questions – Why did history become dominated by men? Why has nearly every society placed harsh limits on us? And why are we so vulnerable to the changing winds of politics, economics and religion?

The world has gone crazy, but I push myself to not let anything completely slide. The blog is especially vulnerable, it would be easy to get caught up in the daily scramble and lose touch with my webspace.

My developer Jay is a few years older than me, our kids go to school together. A peach of a man, he comes from a military family and at politics from the Other Side. We laugh about that quite a bit. We met a few years ago when my older son joined Scouts, the one year Jay was Scout Leader.

We live in the same subdivision, his son works at the grocery store up the street. I see him and his family around plenty, even for a small town. But we only got together professionally this past Winter. It was actually Hubs who put it together in conversation that Jay was moving into managing blogs, and I definitely have one.

Hug a conservative. We must beware of tribalism.

It’s the old story of the single-issue voter, red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal.

It’s what causes the thought error that, because radical feminists and religious fundamentalists agree on the existence of biological dimorphism they must, in fact, be members of the same group.

Or that someone who is “Pro-LGBT” supports social programs or civil liberties.

As those on the Left are fighting to defeat corrupt Republicans, we must remember who it was that corrupted them.