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New anti-semitism just dropped.

This time, it's "starving people who try to eat a dead shark."

It's a whale shark, not a whale.

The first thought when you see something odd like this should be 'am I missing some context?' and then go find out what the bigger perspective might be.

Now, I am finding it odd that none of the 'ceasefire now' people appear to be celebrating the current ceasefire, or making posts demanding that Hamas disarm and return the deceased hostages in order to turn this into a lasting peace. Hamas holds power through their ability to control the international resources that flow into Gaza, and this do this by controlling the international information flow. If they can refocus attention and keep Israel in your minds as 'pure evil, then you are pre-conditioned to blame Israel if/when the ceasefire process breaks own. If you continue to allow placeholder anti-semitism to prevent you from advocating for peace, Hamas will stay in power and Palestinians will suffer more.

Actual current issues in Gaza:

Creating safe routes for aid distribution

Persuading Hamas to stop fighting and give up power

Getting international commitment to rebuilding Gaza and restoring governance.

Meanwhile, Hamas has their uniforms back on and are executing their rivals in the city square on a weekly basis.

Shut tf up Zionist cunt.

I'd called it a refugee crisis, but I'm trying to address your claim the state of Israel is a form of settler-colonialism. The zionist movement gained steam in Europe as pogroms intensified, and many Jews fled to Britain which, although it was more tolerant, also wanted to get rid of so many Jews flooding into the island. The UN division of territory is more similar to the partition of Pakistan and India - which was also done at the request of religious leaders hoping to avoid religious conflict, although the results were a disaster.

the displacement of hundreds of thousands of palestinians from their lands, from houses that settlers went on to occupy, is decolonization?

No, most of that was war but to be honest I've always wondered what people are talking about when they imagine what 'decolonization' is going to look like. I'm assuming that, by your standards, a de-colonizing war is completely justified. Most comments justifying Hamas' actions are based on it being a war of resistance against colonialism, which I find disingenous since 'Palestinian' as an identity didn't exist until Israel was created and the displaced Arab population wasn't absorbed by the surrounding Arab states.

However, Israel only declared its independence within the boundaries of the proposed UN territory, it didn't declare war. Instead, it was Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq that invaded Israel the following day in an attempt to overthrow the new state and claim as much territory for themselves as they could. By the end of the war, Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied the West Bank rather than securing and creating independence for the remaining Arab residents in the area. That initial population of under half a million people now claims 17 million descendants in multiple countries, and are now known as Palestinians.

After the war, Jews in the region were also displaced and had to move into Israel's territorial boundary, although a lot fewer since there was a smaller Jewish population and they had gained territory as a result of the war. Once Israel was created though, 300,000 Jews were expelled from surrounding Arab countries and fled to Israel along with another 400,000 refugees - which is roughly the same number of Palestinians displaced in the conflict. Arabs who accepted the creation of Israel remained within the territory, where they make up 20% of the population today.

the creation of an ethnostate that grants birthright not on the basis of indigeneity to the land (because yes, of course there were jews in historic palestine)

Historic Palestine was the name given the area by the Romans AFTER the Jews had been driven out. The Jews lived in historic Judea and the Kingdom of Israel. The people now called Palestinians didn't conquer and settle in the area for another 7 centuries.

Also, Israel is a religious state not an ethnostate. Jews make up 73% of the population, Arabs of various religious backgrounds make up 21% and Christians and others constitute the remainder.

but on the basis of being jewish (meaning it also gives this right to people who have no ancestral ties to the land)—all while stripping palestinians of their rights and turning thousands of them into refugees within their own territories—is decolonization?

I think this is the source of our biggest disagreement - indigeneity is not a race, it's a relationship to the process of being colonized. The process can happen on religious or cultural grounds, such as in northern Ireland, and are not necessarily racial in nature. The Jewish diaspora was created by the Roman destruction of the Second Temple era, which led to almost 2000 years of Jews being a religious minority in every other part of the world. Additionally they were viewed as an ethnic or racialized group under various governments from the medieval Crusaders to the Nazis. While many displaced Jews inter-married with other ethnic groups and people converted in and out of the faith over this long period of time, retaining the identity of the Jewish faith constitutes - in my view - retaining the heritage from that indigenous society.

The Arab caliphate version of settler-colonialism used religion as well as language, settlement, economic and political control in their conquest. In particular, they would enslave non-Muslims when they conquered a territory, thus driving religious conversions to Islam as they conquered the Levant in the 7th century. So while you may argue existing Israelis aren't ethnically pure enough to claim the heritage of their former kingdom, the current Arabs population in Palestine didn't arrive until 700 years after Jews had been forced out.

the zionist project was always a settler colonial one, and that’s why they initially toyed with the idea of creating a jewish state in uganda and even argentina.

You're confusing what the British Foreign Secretary proposed with what the Zionist movement actually wanted, which was to return to their homeland.

They chose palestine because they needed to create a mythos that compelled jews back to an imagined homeland

You're not seriously saying Biblical Israel was imaginary, right?

—regardless of whether this was true for them specifically or not—and because the british liked the idea of having a foothold in the middle east and its oil.

The British definitely felt guilty about not taking in refugees during the Holocaust and not allowing Jewish refugees to flee to Mandatory Palestine. But you're overstating how helpful they were to Zionists. In the 1920s to early 30s they actively prevented Jewish refugees from landing in Mandatory Palestine. Once they stopped trying to hold back the flood of refugees, and the Jewish refugee population in the area swelled.

and no, actually, the MENA region is not a monolith

Agreed, despite many attempts to create a pan-Arab superstate and a new Muslim caliphate, the region remains divided into 22 states.

so MENA jews are not automatically indigenous to palestine unless they’re… actually indigenous to palestine specifically.

calling the partition of india and pakistan "a disaster" is an irresponsible understatement when you don't follow it by saying it displaced some 15-20 million and killed between 1-3 million people. and saying it was done "at the request of religious leaders" is, again, an absolutely laughable fiction meant to absolve britain of its responsibility for what happened. what strategic interest would britain have in the partition? funny you would ask: "Maintaining oil stakes in the Middle East and securing air routes would become a major task for Britain once India was lost to it. Britain desperately needed a foothold in the Indian subcontinent where it could legitimize its presence as an ally of the newly created state of Pakistan." even the NYT agrees britain is to blame: winston churchill "believed Pakistan would prove a faithful friend to the West and a bulwark between the Soviet Union and a socialist India," and the british empire "had long resisted democratization and had institutionalized differences based on identity between its subjects" by codifying the caste system like never before. this divide and conquer strategy, of course, exacerbated hindu-muslim antagonism.

speaking of the british and how they've only ever acted out of self-interest, let's start chronologically in 1917 when "Britain's Foreign Secretary ... signed a letter promising Jews a 'national home' in Palestine." this was the balfour declaration, whose "pivotal role ... in virtually every phase of the Palestinian issue cannot be exaggerated" according to the UN and which many agree was an attempt to establish "a firm foothold in the Middle East after [WWI]." then in 1922, britain was awarded "an international mandate to administer Palestine during the post-war deal-making that redrew the map of the Middle East"—a mandate that supported the balfour declaration. all of this to say, britain had internationally-recognized authority over the territory. now why would they then restrict jewish immigration? well, they realized they'd been too hasty and, as the guardian puts it, "attempted to limit Jewish immigration in order to contain anti-British sentiment in the Arab world" so as to protect their economic interests in the region. but overall, leading up to the creation of the state of israel, the british "protected Jewish immigration, encouraged Jewish settlement, subsidised Jewish defence and protected the Yishuv ... from the native population." then, as the british army withdrew, it "was careful to hand over its main military bases to the Zionist forces. ... The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the mother country's soldiers to subdue the natives." and of course, the US stepped into the role britain left behind when "in 1957, ... Israel wisely turned to Washington for the external support without which it could not survive." none of this, of course, resembles actual decolonization, which anyone with half a brain can attest to by just reading about algeria or haiti.

funny to see your strawman arguments since I never claimed indigeneity is about race, let alone racial purity. you're the one making this about religious purity (truly a moment to behold: a radfem turning to the bible as a legitimate governing text); I, on the other hand, am the one treating indigeneity as a political category that describes the material relationship between a people and their land. now, if we take your argument at face value that somehow all jews come from palestine (an absolutely ludicrous claim because, as I said, MENA jews are not interchangeable and being native to iraq, for example, doesn't make you native to palestine), how do you contend with those who were gone for 2000 years? why would these diasporic jewish populations—who had not stewarded the land for millennia—suddenly have the same claim to palestine as the jews who actually remained and made up 7% of its population after WWI? again, no one's talking about racial purity, but retaining a jewish cultural/religious identity is not the same as maintaining a material and political relationship to a land. or are you now going to tell me the turks should claim sovereignty over mongolia? but of course, this is if we even deign to entertain your argument, which goes against what zionists truly believed back before they embarked on an international PR campaign: "Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister ... stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea." modern liberal zionists want to reject the notion that israel is a settler-colonial state because colonialism is no longer trendy, but their predecessors' writings will always betray them. and even the UN is now urging the international community to recognize israel's "intentionally acquisitive, segregationist and repressive settler-colonial occupation." it is no surprise, then, that israel did not vote in favor of the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

2. Yes the British were self-interested. And?

3. Yes this is what I'm struggling to understand. To frame Hamas as fighting a war of resistance that is justified because it's against settler colonialism assumes that Palestinians are the indigenous people, and the Israelis are settlers. But what's the expiry date on being indigenous? If you are exiled from your land, is there a time limit for when the new arrivals now belong there? I guess that time limit is more than 75 years, because Israel hasn't become indigenous yet, but less than 1400 years, otherwise the Jews would be the older inhabitants and thus more legitimate. This isn't my theory by the way - I think this is just a reglious war - but I can't make sense of your assertions about how settler colonialsm works.

'Cheering' is a strong word to use. I feel it's important to bear witness to war, but its suffering and losses should never be taken lightly.

Gaza was occupied by Egypt from 1949 to 1967.

Israel occupied Gaza from 1967 until it withdrew in 2007, so... Gaza has actually spent more time under Egyptian and Hamas rule than Israeli governance.

By: Buck Angel

Published: Jul 21, 2023

A guest post by Buck Angel, which really should be in The New York Times—maybe they’ll republish it?

Every day, I’m called a new name. Sometimes it’s something obviously insulting, like bigot or transphobe. Sometimes it’s something more subtly designed to twist my knickers, like female. My critics assume this will wound me, because for the last 30 years, I have lived as a man. I medically transitioned at age 30, after what felt like a lifetime of struggle, and after many years of therapy and evaluation.

Transition saved my life. But being called female doesn’t hurt me, because while I changed my body, I’m well aware that I can’t change my sex. And even though I’ve felt since I was a young child that I would have preferred to be—and should have been—born male, I don’t believe that children should medically transition. I’m one of the oldest and most visible female-to-male transsexuals in the country, but because of my views, today’s trans activists not only don’t speak for me, they try to cancel me.

Let’s rewind. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, a time of tomboys, when I was one of several typically masculine girls in short hair and sports shorts, running wild. There wasn’t much difference between me and those other tomboy girls back then; I beat up the boys and earned their respect. For the most part, my parents let me dress and live as a boy. The few times I had to wear a dress for church were torture, but other than that I had an excellent childhood.

My parents assumed my tomboyism was a phase I’d outgrow, but at puberty, I became deeply uncomfortable with my female body, a condition I had no name for back then. I lived for many years as a butch lesbian, and was an internationally successful androgynous model. Sometimes I wore suits, but when they stuffed me into a dress, I would spiral.

Eventually, the disconnect between my body and my sense of myself became too great. Sad and lonely, I turned to drugs, became homeless, engaged in prostitution, lost most of my friends and family, and hit bottom.

Once I got sober, and got therapy, I also got clarity. I told the therapist I felt that I should be—no, that I was—a man, and, unlike everyone else I’d ever said this to, she said, “I hear you. I believe you.” She gave me a diagnosis of what was then called gender identity disorder, which didn’t feel like a stigma. It felt like a lightbulb going off, which allowed me to understand and accept myself. I had a mental condition. That’s why I experienced anguish. Our next task was to figure out how to treat it.

Gender clinics were hardly in existence then. She couldn’t just affirm me and send me off for drugs and surgery with a letter. We spent over a year exploring the source of my distress and what it meant to be or live as a man or woman. She dug deep, she pushed back. And eventually, together, we decided that the potential benefits of transition were worth the risks. I had already passed the “real life” test. Now I went in search of medical treatments.

We filled out an inch-thick pile of paperwork for a program at Stanford, and never even received a reply. Eventually, we found an endocrinologist who explained to me that if I took testosterone, it would be experimental. But by that time, after 25 years of navigating the world as a differently-gendered person and more than a year of intensive psychological evaluation, I was ready.  

I did something even more radical than transitioning once my body changed: I became an adult film star, a man without male parts, making space for nonconforming bodies, raising awareness and increasing body positivity for trans people. Some of my lesbian friends called me a traitor, and haters sometimes called me a tranny, but for the most part, I found acceptance and joy. Until about five years ago, I was happily living as a transsexual, or, as I call it, “a man with a female past.”

Then several things started to change. The word transsexual—a person of one sex who changes their body to appear more like the other—was eclipsed by the word “transgender,” an umbrella term that included everyone from tomboys gently rejecting stereotypes to trans women who’d had penectomies, plus myriad gender identities that seemed to have no locatable meaning. The idea that people could actually change sex, that sex was mutable or unreal, took hold in society, especially with young people.

Then, as some clinicians, including trans women, have admitted, a rash of teen girls started to declare themselves trans and transition; some said they’d had no mental health treatments before doing so. Then I started to hear about and from detransitioners, who’d taken cross-sex hormones or had breast or genital surgeries, not to cure some kind of organic dysphoria but because they’d been taught that if they felt uncomfortable with themselves or their bodies, maybe they needed to change them to match their brains. One study of detransitioners showed 55 percent felt they weren’t properly evaluated.

When it comes to gender dysphoria, talk therapy is more important than anything else. In fact, several European countries are now insisting that therapy is the primary treatment for it, with medical interventions under strict regulation. Physical transition is hard both on your body and mind; I should know. You have to make sure this is the right path for you by working with a therapist who will push back and question and explore the source of your desire to change. Dysphoria is in the brain. If you’re skipping over the brain and going straight to the body, you’re not helping trans people.

People accuse me of climbing the ladder and pulling it up behind me, transitioning and then trying to stop other people from doing so. That’s not my goal at all. I transitioned at age 30 and never looked back or felt I’d made a mistake, and I welcome adults who can adequately weigh the risks and benefits of transition to join me. But I never could have been sure without the struggle I navigated, without my brain growing mature enough to decide. Every choice I made was in adulthood.

One reason I’m so adamant about not medically transitioning children is that those tomboy girls I played with growing up, who were just like me back then, didn’t turn out like me. Some are gay women. Some are straight. Some feminized during or after puberty. Some stayed masculine. Childhood gender nonconformity or even gender dysphoria aren’t indications of any one adulthood. We can’t just slap the label trans on a kid who’s differently gendered and assume we know what path that kid should take for the rest of their life. In fact, several studies show that the vast majority of kids who are gender dysphoric in childhood resolve their distress by the end of puberty, and a majority of those grow up to be same-sex attracted.  

Instead of focusing on identity, we should be focusing on the rigid gender stereotypes kids are absorbing every day. Give them the room I had to be masculine or feminine without presuming what it means about their futures. For suggesting these ideas, my own so-called LGBT+ “community” attacks me, tries to silence and intimidate me, accuses me of condemning children to a lifetime of suffering. But that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying it may be hard to live in their bodies, but it’s important that they try, because we don’t know how to forecast the future from their current struggle, but we know it’s important that they learn to navigate and overcome hardship.

Myself, I’m glad for my many years of struggling. Struggle made me strong. Now the struggle is so different. It’s a struggle to tell an inconvenient truth in a world that thinks truth is transphobic. It’s a struggle to keep my business going amid #cancelbuckangel hashtags. It’s a struggle to feel part of a community that would oust a pioneering elder for wrongthink.

Background: During adolescence, bullying often has a sexual content. Involvement in bullying as a bully, victim or both has been associated with a range of negative health outcomes. Transgender youth appear to face elevated rates of bullying in comparison to their mainstream peers. However, the involvement of transgender youth as perpetrators of bullying remains unclear in the recent literature. Objective: The aim of this study was to compare involvement in bullying between transgender and mainstream youth and among middle and late adolescents in a general population sample. Methods: Our study included 139,829 students in total, divided between a comprehensive school and an upper secondary education sample. Associations between gender identity and involvement in bullying were first studied using cross-tabulations with chi-square statistics. Logistic regression was used to study multivariate associations. Gender identity was used as the independent variable, with cisgender as the reference category. Subjection to and perpetration of bullying were entered each in turn as the dependent variable. Demographic factors, family characteristics, internalizing symptoms, externalizing behaviors, and involvement in bullying in the other role were added as confounding factors. Odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) are given. The limit for statistical significance was set at p < 0.001. Results: Both experiences of being bullied and perpetrating bullying were more commonly reported by transgender youth than by cisgender youth. Among transgender youth, all involvement in bullying was more commonly reported by non-binary youth than those identifying with the opposite sex. Logistic regression revealed that non-binary identity was most strongly associated with involvement in bullying, followed by opposite sex identity and cisgender identity. Transgender identities were also more strongly associated with perpetration of bullying than subjection to bullying.

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Secondly, we found that transgender identity was generally associated with perpetrating bullying and that the association was stronger than that of transgender identity and being bullied. To the best of our knowledge, past research has not examined perpetration of bullying among gender minority youth, thus rendering comparisons to prior research impossible. In a study by Dank et al. (2014), however, it was reported that the few transgender young people in their study were the ones most likely to perpetrate dating violence among their sample.

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Thirdly, non-binary identity was more strongly associated with involvement in bullying than opposite sex identity. Past research has found elevated rates of being subjected to bullying among youth (Lowry et al., 2020; van Beusekom et al., 2020) and transgender youth (Gower et al., 2018) who perceive themselves as more gender non-conforming (i.e., masculine females or feminine males) than youth with no such perception. Non-binary identifying youth particularly may display gender expression that does not conform to either masculine or feminine roles, and this may make them vulnerable to being bullied either due to simply being different from the mainstream, or as a result of heterosexist control. We found, however, that not only being bullied but also engaging in bullying was even more common among non-binary (perception of gender conforms to both or neither sex or it varies) than among opposite sex identifying youth.

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"Non-binary" is just a new way to bully other people.

Trying to make people refer to you in stupid ways like, "schglie/schglem," at the threat of being called a bigot, is the modern day equivalent of making the kids in the playground bow and call you "the god of the jungle gym" at the threat of being beaten up.

When, unlike the playground, society has given you the power to actually carry out that threat, you're not "marginalized," you're the ruling class. (What's that "power plus" arithmetic again?)

Whenever you enter the room, people tense up. And you love it. Everybody pays attention to you and you steal the oxygen out of the room. You say it's about "being kind," but you and everyone else knows what you are, which means it's really about being in control.

1. Despite collecting data on the sex of the participants (question #1 on their survey, according to them), they don’t report on it. Specifically, who is bullying who is not broken down by sex, the data ONLY breaks it down to differentiate between ‘opposite-sex identify transgender’ and ‘non-binary’ students.

When they state that being bullied has a high correlation of being the bully later in adolescence, do they mean that boys who are bullied by other boys take it out on girls? Who knows? Despite acknowledging that “A considerable share of bullying among adolescents is of a sexual nature...” there’s no follow-up on how that impacts girls.

It’s like reading a paper about ‘domestic violence’ as if it’s a household scrum with equally distributed violence. When I read that they follow the ‘gender minority stress and resilience’ (GMSR) theory I knew they’d bury this lede, since the premise of the theory is that if/when trans people turn out to be rapists, murderers and dysfunctional assholes at a rate higher than the general population, it’s only because they’ve suffered so greatly. ‘Hurt people hurt people’ writ into academic theory.

i had top surgery six years ago, but i do not feel mutilated. i have been taking testosterone for seven years, but i do not feel gross or undesirable or disgusting. yes, i know i am a woman. this is the truth. but i am also transsexual, in the sense that i am socially read as male and took steps to appear that way.

I really need people to truly understand how poisonous this extension of feminism and bioessentialism is. Incoming hatred against literal children for being born male:

Children. Innocent children, whose only "crime" is being XY, are being demonized by this author.

THIS is why we call radfems dangerous. This is why we call bioessentialism dangerous.

If you identify as a radfem who genuinely believes that socialization and not biology is the source of men's violence, I desperately need you to read works by intersectional feminists. I desperately need you to leave radfeminism, because this is what a lot of your compatriots are pushing for. Complete female separation. Complete segregation of an entire sex based on the false belief they are "inherently violent".

How far back did you have to search to find this text? The 1980s use of ‘wimmin’ kinda gives it away, but yes, there was indeed debate about whether women-only spaces should include male children, since feminist mothers have male children and face quite a bit of internal conflict that despite raising them in a feminist household, they often revert to the social norm of sexism. It’s something of a niche discussion, but honestly doesn’t look as bad as your content does. If you oppose ‘essentialism’, can you explain why gender expression seems to involve so many medical procedures? Oh right, it’s because gender is fake and a smokescreen to hide sex-based oppression, but biological sex is objectively real. Glad we agree.

she's right and she should say it

This is a great point. And similarly, with phrases like “some men have vaginas”, when they want us to think of human female anatomy as “male” just because the person IDs as male, but more accurately* a “man with a vagina” is a male who has had sex reassignment surgery, aka, a trans woman.