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You know that zany idea that females are members of class of people that have some specific concerns in society – partly due to their biology – and they might organize around those concerns for the betterment of all those who share similar characteristics.
But what you really need, according to the post, is to centre men in your work, because that is surefire way to victory…
Having conversations might be the toughest one on list, but it is so necessary if we wish our democracy to continue to flourish.
“Democracy now requires much more than voting. What should a 21st century Schoolhouse Rocks teach?
Finding information
Most fundamentally, we need to be skilled seekers of information. In this era of deepfakes, bots, and fragmenting media platforms, the ability to access and evaluate information is key. Algorithms push us ever more deeply into one point of view. To address multifaceted 21st century issues, we need deliberately to seek a variety of information, including backstories about controversial events, from differing sources to construct the whole picture.
Understanding our own biases
We must process information skillfully, getting around our inherent neurobiological biases. For example, we naturally lap up information that confirms what we already think but ignore information that challenges our world view. We also are wired for double standards: we attribute another person’s bad behavior to their personality (“she’s late because she’s disrespectful”) while giving ourselves a pass for the same behavior (“I’m late because traffic was bad”). Understanding these natural biases lets us challenge ourselves to explore issues more fully.
Having conversations – not arguments – across divides
Understanding biases promotes a third democratic skill: truly talking with one another. Research, including my own, shows that liberals and conservatives alike often experience cross-divide conversations as an assault on their values. Yet most people also believe these conversations are important and would like to have them to feel connected and informed.
Constructive conversations require listening and asking good questions. Political scientist Andrew Dobson describes listening as our “democratic deficit.” We rarely listen closely to the other side. This undermines our ability to create policy which is seen as a legitimate outcome of democratic debate. Nor do we ask enough genuinely curious questions to learn why others think what they do to help find common ground. As Steve Benjamin, former head of the National Conference of Mayors, noted, “We all suffer from some degree of experiential blindness and need to become experts at learning about others’ perspectives.”
Having complicated relationships
Perhaps the most important – and most difficult — 21st century citizenship skill is maintaining relationships with people who think differently. For a democracy to function, we need not only a robust marketplace of ideas, but also the ability to work together for policy that meets widespread needs. A conservative interviewee in my study remarked, “Everybody is so comfortable being polarized – they are not happy unless they’re mad.”
It’s challenging to hold conflicting feelings about people, appreciating their good qualities while disagreeing on politics. But perhaps we make it harder than it is.
Research shows we overestimate both how much the other party dislikes us as well as how much they disagree with us about policy. Asking genuinely curious questions and remembering what we appreciate just might help us find that we have more in common than we think. Our 21st century democracy needs us to develop these skills.”
You cannot fight against what you do not know and understand. A helpful primer on what how the radical revolutionary left has come to power and influence in our society.
I was recently texted by my local NDP office with regards to getting a sign for the upcoming Alberta provincial election. This is how it went:
So no, you cannot count on my vote because you are participating in the erasure of females in our society. Allow me to provide a non-circular reality based definition of the word ‘woman’. A women is an adult human female.
Play stupid identity politics games, win stupid prizes.
I have nothing to add here except some formatting.
Pro-lifers don’t like complexity. At 17 weeks my placenta detached and he was much too small. I thought I felt my baby’s frantic attempts to breathe. My OBGYN advised me to terminate the pregnancy, there wasn’t much time. But I couldn’t. Every doctor told me it would only get worse. And it did get. But I already loved him. I’d waited 8 years for him. They saw on the Ultrasound that his umbilical cord was yards long. An umbilical cord spinning out a lifeline helplessly. He’d stopped growing. But his heart continued to beat even as his movements – frantic at first when the oxygen cut off, slowed, and he became horribly still. I hated the doctors who couldn’t save him.
An infection spread from the placenta to him. I began to understand, to believe them – that I would die too. I felt that we were dying. But selfishly I waited for more tests, and more tests, dozens of them. In a natural world without medical science, fluid tests, ultrasounds, in a world like the one God may have intended we would have died without the nightmare of knowing beforehand. But we are in this world. When my fever rose my family insisted. I was a mother already.
My child needed me. My family arranged with New York Presbyterian Hospital for us to fly to Kansas because I was now in my 24th week and he would not have filled my palm.
I dreamt of being filled with ice, and death. His organs were shutting down so there was no amniotic fluid. He was in a dry and poison uterus, suffocating. I was panicked by the thought of his suffering. We arrived in Kansas – an arid place I had only imagined through “The Wizard of Oz”. I was delirious, things were getting worse. The doctor in Kansas was kind, but sad. He carried a shotgun because he’d once been shot in both arms. Our taxi driver slowed to a crawl and rolled all the windows down as we arrived at the clinic. I didn’t know why.
My son was in the car with us. I hadn’t realized we were coming to one of those places from TV with angry people outside. They brandished signs cruelly displaying the bodies of tiny fetuses. Pumping the signs up and down and shouting. They saw my son in the car and began shouting at him, “Your mother is killing her baby!”. A nurse pushed through to shield us and guide us into the clinic. A psychologist spoke to my son. The process took a week. There is no such thing as “partial birth”.
I held his tiny body. We had a private service with a minister. He was like a bird in my hands. My son. I had never felt so empty. A trickle of blood ran out of his nose and I wiped it. Back in NYC some too observant people in my building knew. My milk had come in. The mail carrier who delivered his ashes to me knew, and I could see she wanted me to know that she disapproved. I saw she also felt sorry, but like she was supposed to despise me. We’d always gotten along. I closed the door and held the box under my robe and sobbed on the floor.
“Don’t worry, he just forgot something. He has to go back to get it, then he’ll come back.” my son was wise. I felt so much sadness. 15 months later I had a baby.
I was nursing him in the glider, and the song “Frankie and Johnnie”, was playing. I picked up the NYTimes. On the front page I saw that the doctor from Kansas had been killed while ushering in church.
Abortion Doctor Shot to Death in Kansas Church (Published 2009) A suspect was in custody in the killing of George Tiller, a doctor in Wichita, Kan., who survived a 1993 shooting. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01tiller.html
Murdered by a man who traveled miles to kill the baby killer, hunting him down on a Sunday morning. People think of abortion as ending life, but it saves women’s lives, mothers’ lives. There is life today because of Dr Tiller. Where there would have been only emptiness and death.
#RoeVWade #AbortionRightsAreHumanRights #WomensRights #SCOTUS There is a complexity in the decisions a woman makes when the situation is impossible to fix. Women should be treated like humans.
I post this letter written to Alberta Health Services regarding the experience one Albertan woman had in the context of the language being used in a letter to her regarding pap testing. She has given me permission to reprint her letter in hopes that more Albertan women will also write to Alberta Health Services or the Alberta Public Ombudsmen to tell them in no uncertain terms that erasing females from our healthcare system is an unacceptable practice.
“To Whom It May Concern,
I hope this finds you well. I am lodging a formal complaint re: the language used in a recent letter from the AHS in regards to pap testing.
The letter asks, “Who should have a pap test?” and the answer is “women and people with a cervix”. All “people with cervixes” are women so this sub setting of women informs me that AHS is now practicing Gender Ideology as opposed to neutral, clear and scientific language one expects from an institution dealing with medicine. As the AHS now defines women as an identity what the author should have written was “cis women and people with cervixes”. That would clarify for all readers that the AHS has joined the zeitgeist which allows men to identify as women, teaches children they have a “gender identity”, and dehumanizes women by “queering” our language from mothers to “birthing parents”.
I AM a woman.
I do not identify as a woman. I do not like the word “woman” being disappeared in order to be more “inclusive”. Inclusive to who? Not to me. Not to women from religions who do not believe in “gender” and/or whose beliefs dictate a separation of men from women in public spaces. Not to women with mental health issues like Dementia or Alzheimer’s. Not to women who have depression and anxiety as girls and women are called dehumanizing/disassociative terms like “bleeders”, “menstruators”, “birthing bodies”, “pregnant people”, “bodies with a vagina”, “cervix owners”, “chest feeders”, “womb carriers” etc. by institutions supposedly serving our health & the health of our children.
And this adaptation does not serve women and girls for whom English is a second language and who already have far more challenges navigating a medical lingo which is now also “queering language” in the name of equity. I assume that this wording was brought in as a part of a formal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy. Yet the vast majority of indigenous women generally do not like being called “native womb carriers” and many black women are not overly fond of being called “black birthing bodies”, both terms I have recently seen used by institutions in the medicine and publishing fields.
Ostensibly this linguistic split is to support the women and girls identifying out of their sex class and into Identitarianism, a belief system which all of society, no matter what reasons they have to resist, are being made to affirm. While this is being framed as a help to women/girls who it really helps is men who now can identify into every sphere of the hard-won sex-based rights of girls and women with no more than a magical declaration: “I am a woman.” It is via this linguistic practice that a woman who was raped in BC was compelled by the court to call the man who raped her by “she” and “her” pronouns while giving her testimony.
In the same vein, convicted rapists and violent men are now living in women’s prisons throughout Canada where, if we’re interested in Equity, indigenous women are very over represented. So, were putting rapists and violent men into prisons to bunk down with the indigenous women we’re supposed to be practicing reconciliation with? That seems counter intuitive!
This process of identifying also allows men/boys access to any women/girl’s sex-based space or sport. For example, in the US this weekend a 29-year-old man (ranked 838th in the men’s division) stole a woman’s skateboarding title & prize money from a 13-year-old girl because he identifies as a woman. That couldn’t happen without Gender Ideology, an ideology which the AHS is now promoting in it’s communications. As the AHS serves all women and girls, it would also do well to remember the lesbian population. When the AHS practices Gender Ideology by reframing women as an identity you cement a belief system where men are women on demand.
So heterosexual men who identify as women now demand sexual relations from lesbians under the auspices of “breaking the cotton ceiling”. When those women have to courage to refuse, they are called bigots and transphobes. Sometimes they lose their jobs and are cancelled. Sometimes, as in the case of Allison Bailey, a black lesbian barrister in the UK, you have to go to court for stating the truth. Finally, did it occur to anyone at the AHS that women with cervix cancer themselves might be upset at the term “people with a cervix”.
Every girl and women on this planet understands the immense challenges of our sex but to be dehumanized from the material reality of being a woman when fighting for your life because you are a woman is a grotesque charade. Shame on the AHS for adopting and enforcing this de-facto religion which is both misogynistic and anti reality. This belief system is decoupling our youth and mentally ill from reality and turning them into life long medical patients because of a supposed “identity” and forcing all of us, even women fighting cervical cancer, to go along with it.”
We have to act now folks. This toxic gender ideology will not go away on its on.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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