A Dyke A Broad #26: The Big Nothing Edition
The big nothing I've been up to, plus the big nothing even the Biden admin has been doing for women's rights.
Hello from Paris!
My life feels very Bruegel, very Auden, these days—the tiny legs of Icarus disappearing into the sea as the ship sails on, the farmer plows, and the dyke scours the lime deposits on the sink and plugs the nail holes in the sheetrock.
Yeah, there I am, the sheep eating a leaf as wars rage, flying boys fall, French ICUs burst at the seams and, for instance, Turkish women get slaughtered in their homes.
On March 20, the increasingly regressive Erdogan government withdrew Turkey from the Istanbul Convention, a human rights treaty of the Council of Europe against violence against women and domestic violence. The influential Islamists, of course, said the move wasn’t about punishing women, but honoring tradition, preventing divorce, thwarting homosexuality and trans ideas (though according to President Erdogan himself LGBT people don’t actually exist in Turkey) and protecting the family unit, which apparently depends on the continual threat of violence to keep women in their place.
Withdrawing was like declaring open season on them. The day after, six women were murdered instead of the usual one or two. I know because last week I climbed on my borrowed bike and hung out for a while (fully masked) with a young Turkish friend who can’t believe how easy it is to roll things back.
She’s young. It hasn’t quite sunk in that nobody cares really, about women’s deaths or their lives. Except for brave feminist activists in Turkey willing to face an emboldened authoritarian.
Last week, after five weeks of negotiation, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women produced a nearly useless document that reduced a promising fifty-page draft to a mere 24 milquetoast pages dumping essential passages about sexual harassment and violence, equality between the sexes, and the rights of girls.
The final document did little more than pitifully observe that all that violence and harassment may well lead to a “hostile environment” “inequalities” “imbalances of power.” Nothing a little tinkering won’t fix, a lightening of the thumb on the scale.
One anonymous diplomat quoted by the Agence France-Presse (AFP) said they were incredibly disappointed. After the horror of Trump, they’d expected the new Biden administration to have their backs, but instead the United States actually gave a platform to conservative Catholic organizations who bolstered the fierce defense of “traditional values” by the unholy trinity of Russia, Cuba, and of course the Vatican. Just so you know who our enemies are.
It’s like women are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the Right are the religious and ideological conservatives of all stripes who want us back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. But on the Left we’re faced with a mysterious compulsion to erase sex-based discrimination despite all the impoverished women, all the raped women, all the corpses to the contrary.
Nope, what really matters is gender.
Centering trans lives is our way to gender LIBERATION. This is where feminism needs to be.
That’s what a dyke feminist journalist posted the other day.
Because apparently feminism shouldn’t be fighting the sex-based subjugation of half the world’s population. You know, the lowly females that the movement was founded to serve. And that haven’t gotten very far. Not really. No, they (we) don’t deserve our own movement.
The bizarro thing is that I remember the same very cis lez sharing #MeToo posts and railing against the pussy-grabbing Trump. It’s almost like she doesn’t connect rape, harassment and discrimination or women’s poverty to her own female body. Or notice it’s males that benefit. As if 2 + 2 = -3. Maybe it does.
Or maybe Feminism 2021 is just one big Olympic-level feat of disassociation and double-speak that you used to only read about in medical journals discussing psychotic breaks.
Whatever. I have a coat hook to install. Dinner to make. A head to bang against the wall.
Exceptional Women
In Argentina they’re celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the French aviation pioneer Adrienne Bolland, who made history as the first to cross the perilously windy Andes in a teensy-tiny plane in 1921. This video is great. (Don’t forget to turn on the automatic translation, which is actually very good). At any rate you get to hear her voice.
Then there’s this lady…
Health
More and more it looks like there’s not a perfect pill to fix gender dysphoria for kids. Here’s yet another important article from a reputable source reporting that Evidence for using puberty blockers to treat kids with gender dysphoria is very low. This should matter if you believe that every medical treatment should have to answer at least two questions—Does it work? Is it safe?
And in case you missed it… here’s Caroline Criado Perez on the revolutionary artificial heart that’s… only good for males.
She also breaks down the new male-default definition of women as people that do not produce testosterone.
That’s it from my tiny ‘hood of St. Blaise.
Disgruntledly yours,