So disappointed and angry about DtJ excluding the voices of women with disabilities from their #beingawoman discussions; it’s especially appalling that DtJ community admins have blocked simple announcements about the upcoming White Flower Memorial gathering to commemorate women, men and children with disabilities who have died as a result of violence, neglect or abuse.
silencing tactics
Standing Up For Leelah
[Content Note: discusses harassment, family rejection of transgender teens, suicide, trans* erasure, and silencing tactics commonly used to stifle discussion of these matters ].
I find more and more recs for articles written by Arthur Chu in my feeds lately. This post prompted by reactions to the Tumblr’d suicide note left by transgender teen Leelah Alcorn is a particularly strong piece: Cover-ups, Concern Trolls and Suicide. Chu questions why some people want others to stop sharing Leelah’s words.
Today in Anita’s Irony and Lewis’ Law: my threats will show you that harassment is a myth
Sending a woman rape threats to prove that sexual harassment doesn’t exist proves feminism’s point, not yours.
Give a Voice to Harassment Victims: A legal fund for sexual harassment victim Karen Stollznow
Those of you who are regular followers/lurkers of the atheoskeptosphere probably know about this fundraiser for Karen Stollznow’s legal costs by now, but I’m signal-boosting it for the record …
Debate vs Inquiry and “Reasonable Debate” as a silencing tactic
Debate is not inquiry. Argument is not skepticism. Fetishizing debate makes us less knowledgeable as a culture and even as a movement, not more.
<okay, sure, we’ve been having these debates for decades now. But let’s dredge it up again. Let’s treat the basic bodily autonomy of people with uteruses** as a subject that’s up for discussion, a subject that reasonable people can disagree about. And let’s be calm and reasonable about it.
The attempts to shut women down continue
Two women who have been the subject of floods of contemptuous and dismissive abuse as part of their public life write about their experiences and point out that their experience is the cultural norm, not any outlier experience.
Today in Tangential Learning: the smell of chloroform
As part of following PZ Myer’s account of a campaign against him on campus from the editor(s) of a right-wing student newspaper, I have learnt what chloroform smells like, and it smells like something present in every office and classroom and most private homes.
Then I searched online for a bit more information about chloroform…
Recently in Documenting Incidents: the SFF harassment revelations
SFF joins the Deep Rifts! club.
Methinks ’tis time to update a ‘net classic
The world needs a social justice version of John Baez’ classic simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics AKA The Crackpot Index, to rate our never-ending “feedback” from troglodytes of assorted stripes who are convinced that not only are we Doin It Rong but that we deserve to be threatened into silence for daring to have an opinion in the first place.
Ron Lindsay’s #wiscfi twist on the conventional Opening Speech
How to undermine your own Women In Secularism conference: spend most of your opening speech scolding feminists for Doin It Rong, because why not encourage the already hyper-active flying monkeys to fling more crap at secular women?