Something Nissa This Way Comes

I will say that the flowchart is a composite of a number of penitential manuals from the early middle ages; these rules weren’t really codified anywhere and the penitentials didn’t really have an official status (in fact, the Church tried to ban them a number of times), although penitential questioning was a real thing. By the later Middle Ages the concept of sex being forbidden on certain days of the week seems to have died out, although I think it was still technically banned during Lent and on major holy days, and foreplay was also deemed more or less acceptable. And of course there was no way to enforce any rules about sex unless people confessed to them; indeed, it doesn’t seem like people would generally have access to those rules outside of the confessional.

“Nah. That’s just the entrance exam for the marching band.”

Racially motivated extremists pose the most lethal domestic terrorism threats to the US, according to an unclassified intelligence report that warned that the threats could grow this year.

The blunt assessment, in a report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, echoes warnings made by US officials, including the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who testified earlier this month that the threat from domestic violent extremism was “metastasizing” across the country.

Merrick Garland, the attorney general, has also described it as a top priority as his justice department works to prosecute hundreds of people who participated in the mob attack on the US Congress in January.

The riot laid bare the threat posed by domestic extremists and led Joe Biden to assign his intelligence officials the task of studying the scope of the problems. A brief and unclassified summary of that threat assessment was made public Wednesday; a full classified report was presented to the White House and Congress.

“Today’s report underscores how we face the greatest threat from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, especially white supremacists, and militia violent extremists,” said the Democratic representative Adam Schiff of California, the chair of the House intelligence committee.

Intelligence officials said in their assessment that extremists seen as risks for violence are motivated by a range of ideologies.

Developments such as the anger over restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic and a belief in the debunked narrative that November’s presidential election was fraudulent “will almost certainly” spur additional violence in 2021, the report said. Numerous courts and Donald Trump’s own justice department upheld the integrity of the election.

The report says the most lethal threat is presented by racially motivated violent extremists, who officials say are most likely to conduct mass attacks against American civilians, and militia groups, who are seen as likely to target law enforcement and government officials. The threat from militias increased in 2020 and is expected to increase again this year, according to the report’s summary.

The report says white supremacists display what officials say is “the most persistent and concerning transnational connections”.

Judith Butler says that J.K.Rowling and the transphobic TERFs do not speak for feminism at large.

If you haven’t heard about Judith Butler before, here is a short summary: She is one of the most important gender theorists in modern times.  

When right wing extremists despair about postmodern gender theory, she is probably one of the thinkers they are referring to (not that they have ever read her). 

She has shown how social structures, language,  the stories we tell and the roles we play strengthens the oppression and marginalization of women. In other words: For her gender is definitely a cultural and social phenomenon, and because of that she is on a collision course with the so-called “gender critical feminists” (TERFs) who want to reduce gender to biological sex.

I strongly recommend that you read the recent New Statement interview with Butler, where she addresses the thinking and the tactics of TERFs in very clear terms. The interview is behind a paywall, but you should be able to access a couple of articles for free.

Still – in case you are locked out – here are some important excerpts.

She refuses to think of transphobic TERFs as mainstream feminists.

I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. 

So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. 

I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen. 

She dismisses J.K. Rowling’s idea that allowing people to identify as they want will be a threat to women in women’s bathrooms.

The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. 

This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. 

She dismisses the idea that the term “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF)  is a slur.

I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women’s spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? 

My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. 

My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.

She does not accept the idea that the term gender can be defined once and for all, for example in reference to biology.

We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. 

It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women… Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. 

She also says:

It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists’ return to biological essentialism. 

It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.

So there you have it: One of our leading feminist philosophers are comparing TERFs to the transphobic extremists of the right. And she is right to do so.

It is important to stress this: TERFs are not representative of feminism. They represent a toxic fringe movement that at this point in time does more to help right wing misogynists than women. 

Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”

Pink News has also covered this interview.

Butler criticized TERFs back in 2014, as well, as reflected in this interview.

Judith Butler: the backlash against “gender ideology” must stop

Look at how Butler is dissecting the TERF position. She isn’t arguing on their terms - half the goal of exclusionists is to draw you into an argument over their false premise, in order to get you to legitimize their position. No, Butler is doing exactly the right thing, and pointing out their whole foundation is flawed. Her deconstruction of TERF ideology is most cutting because it’s effectively, concisely, and clearly explaining that the premise of their beliefs is wrong at every level - that what they propose is not for debate because it is fundamentally false.

gotta be the equivalent to this

A Worker Reads History Bertolt Brecht

I was at the ROM, about six years ago, at a special exhibit on Babylon. And there was a brick, formerly part of a palace. And Nebuchadnezzar, the one who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, had had his name in cuneiform stamped on every single brick, to emphasize that he had built it.