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moodboard: nikita khrushchev is refused passage to disneyland – 19 sept 1959

Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.

“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”

Interpretative dance to Theresa May’s resignation speech adihfoudsfhsdouf

I also keep seeing people on both sides of the line talk about how her legacy will be failing to deliver brexit - either sad for her, or angry, or smug. But that isn’t fair, and that shouldn’t be her legacy. Because her legacy, and the legacy of this government, is one of blood.

Again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

“Cool,” says one kid. “I don’t want to be a boy, I want to be a girl sometimes.” And I say okay.

Children are taught fear. They are taught that the worms are gross. It isn’t until they’re a few years older than my class - up in 3rd or 4th grade - that they start shrieking at my little worm friends. They won’t play the silly games or sing the silly songs or even promise not to tug. A fourth grader hears my lesson about gender and says, “That’s so weird,” and suddenly I hear from the mouths of these beautiful children, “Yeah,” “this is weird,” “No, mine is a girl.”

It is not the 4th grader I blame. It is the person in her life that saw something beautiful and ruined it for her. It is the “put that down, it’s gross,” “you don’t want to get dirty” “there’s us and there’s them.” I want to show her - without the humble little blind noses of worms, we are nothing. We need them. Did you know if they grow a belt they’re over a year old! Spent tunnelling through the secrets of roots. I want to show her: it’s okay if tomorrow you feel like a boy or maybe something neither, something different that is entirely you.

But fear, once discovered, is not an easy stain to get out. We say, “What will we tell the children” and forget - the children already heard. They heard you snickering about the person down the street. They saw you talking to your friend about “those people”. And they internalize it, burrow it into them. We don’t tell the children, we model hatred until the children can’t hear you, can’t hear you declare, “do as I say, not as I do.”

ALDE is a political group in the European Parliament made up of various centrist pro-EU parties. They’re mostly a pro-business, pro-civil rights, pro-centralisation, pro-free-market, anti-tax, pay-lip-service-to-the-climate bunch.

They’re the fourth-largest parliamentary group ATM, which gives them quite a bit of power when it comes to contentious issues so they have become known for opportunistic horsetrading.

They are also quite … shall we say, open-minded when it comes to admitting new members. Because having more MEPs = more influence, they’ll roll out the carpet to basically any new mildly interested party out there, so their members range from the very pro-free-market funded-by-industrialists German FDP and Austrian NEOS to more left-liberal parties like Slovenia’s Liberal Democrats (RIP) to populist parties like the Czech ANO to special-interest parties like pensioners’ parties. At one point they very intensely courted the Italian Five Star Movement (lol) and Orbán’s Fidesz (very lol, although to be fair that was during the accession talks).