RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://mashable.com/article/national-period-day-what-is/

We rarely talk in public about periods, but this is changing with Saturday’s first-ever National Period Day. 

On this day, people in all 50 states are rallying to highlight an invisible problem — period poverty. Many menstruators (not all people who menstruate are women; transgender men and non-binary people get their periods too) cannot access or afford essential items to manage their periods, like tampons and pads. This is in part because 35 states in the U.S. levy a sales tax on menstrual products, considering them non-essential. 

Everyone, whether a menstruator or not, is welcome to join in on the rallies. 

Nadya Okamoto, 21 years old, is leading the clarion call. Okamoto founded PERIOD, a youth-run nonprofit that supplies people with period products, when she was 16 years. She was drawn to the issue when she learned about period poverty while talking with people experiencing homelessness who couldn’t afford menstrual products, as Mashable reported in 2018. Okamoto was a homeless teenager herself at the time.

PERIOD @periodmovement

If faces were bleeding, someone would do something THIS SATURDAY is the first-ever #NationalPeriodDay. We’re hosting rallies in all 50 states to demand menstrual equity and an end to the #tampontax. Find your local rally at http://nationalperiodday.com . @SeventhGen @BBDOSF

https://quillette.com/2019/10/18/the-defenestration-of-domingo/

The #MeToo movement has ended the U.S. career of legendary 78-year-old Spanish tenor Placido Domingo, one of classical music’s greatest ambassadors and impresarios. For nearly half a century, his intense stage presence and warm, soaring voice captivated opera audiences; during the 1990s, he reached millions of new listeners as a member of the itinerant Three Tenors. In recent years, long after most singers have retired from the stage, he has continued a grueling international performance schedule, now singing baritone roles with remarkable pitch control and legato.

Domingo’s entrepreneurial drive has been as untiring as his stage career. He was pivotal in creating Los Angeles’s first full-time opera company, LA Opera, the culmination of two decades of artistic diplomacy in Southern California. As LA Opera’s general director, he wooed philanthropic support from philistine Hollywood and the city’s political class. In 1993, he founded the international opera competition, Operalia, one of several institutions he has established to promote young singers. He led the Washington National Opera as general director from 1996 to 2011, and his conducting career has spanned opera pits and concert stages around the world.

He has championed the unjustly neglected Spanish opera form, Zarzuela, which he sang growing up in Mexico City, and his charitable endeavors have extended beyond classical music; he led fundraising for Mexico City following its catastrophic earthquake in 1985. Testimonials to his kindness, generosity, and bottomless work ethic abound. Helga Rabl-Stadler, the president of the Salzburg Festival, the most important classical music gathering in the world, recently praised Domingo’s “appreciative treatment” of festival employees: “He knows every name, from the concierge to the secretary; he never fails to thank anyone performing even the smallest service for him.”

On August 13, 2019, however, the AP announced that nine females, all but one anonymous, were accusing Domingo of making unwanted sexual advances decades ago. The accusers—chorus singers, a few small-time soloists, and one ballet dancer—alleged wet kisses, solicitations to rehearse at his apartment, whispered blandishments while on stage, a hand down a shirt or up a skirt in cabs, and persistent phone calls.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-origins-of-the-transgender-movement/

We must not ignore cultural blind spots that put children at risk of abuse.

Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from remarks delivered at a Heritage Foundation summit.

I’ve been asked to talk about the origins of transgenderism and how it relates to children and their exploitation. But first, I would like to start with a little story.

Yesterday I was wandering around outside the Supreme Court chatting with some people who were there to support what’s known as the LGBTQ+ community. I spoke with a lovely guy who identified as homosexual and then four teenage girls who identified as lesbian and queer. They asked me what I thought of the Human Rights Campaign, so I told them up front that I think it’s a force for tremendous harm in this country. Then, I asked them what they thought of Martin Luther King’s idea, the one about not defining people by irrelevant characteristics like their skin color, or in this case their sexual desires. They said it sounded like a very good idea.

Later, two men who were slightly less open-minded wanted to tell me about some horrible feminists called “terfs” who are apparently in cahoots with an even more horrible right-wing institution I probably hadn’t heard of because I’m Scottish. It’s called the Heritage Foundation. So, if anyone knows anyone from there, just let me know, because I want to make sure I don’t die by association.

The reason I mention this story, of course, is — other than the Heritage Foundation being a symbol for all that is evil and far-right in American politics — my experience with the LGBTQ+ community was that it wasn’t really a community so much as it was a big mishmash of people who feel they belong to a certain cause for very different reasons. Yet they were all there at the end of the rainbow to claim their pot of gold, which they had been promised by the Human Rights Campaign.

I’ve been asked to get to the origins of this movement, and I’m going to try to do that. Of course, as you know, it’s just one stripe of the rainbow, and I couldn’t possibly do it justice in ten minutes, but I’ll do my absolute best. There are three things that I think have been changing since the mid-20th century. The first is in medicine, the second is what I like to call an ontology of desire, and the third is what I and others call the politicization of everything.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/political_correctness_versus_common_sense.html

The masters of political correctness in America are moving fast. 

For example, consider the explosion of so-called gender identities.”  In 2016, New York City released a list of 31 genders approved by the city’s Commission on Human Rights.  While writing my book Reclaiming Common Sense, I consulted Google to find out how many genders there were then and was told that the answer was 63.  Today, while writing this article, I re-Googled that question, and it was revealed to me that the latest number is 112.

Political correctness about gender identities is metastasizing rapidly, making it difficult for ordinarily busy people to keep up.  And keep up we must, just as people living in the Soviet Union had to keep up with the constantly changing Communist party line.  Not long ago, everyone understood the unchanging commonsense reality that human beings are either male or female.  Today in New York City, the rules have been changed — and failure to keep up can have dire consequences.  New York City’s special 31 genders are surrounded by special legal protections.  Businesses can now be fined as much as $250,000 for refusing to address someone by his preferred pronoun.  As we have seen in the news, even in cities that have not yet have caught up with New York City in terms of imposing legal penalties, failing a test of political correctness about genders can result in public shaming or the loss of a job.

There is more to this story.  Consider the names given the genders officially approved by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights.  The names include “drag king,” “drag queen,” “butch,” “femme queen,” “gender fluid,” “gender blender,” “gender gifted,” “gender bender,” and “femme person of transgender experience.”  Talk about rubbing our noses in it!  The commissioners have gone out of their way to be outrageously transgressive.  This is not accidental.  They are making it abundantly clear they are ridiculing normal people and the world of common sense — the more outrageous, the better.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/10/let

In his essay Politics and the English Language George Orwell wrote:

A man may take a drink because he feels himself to be failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

On Fox News the other day Tucker Carlson interviewed Ralph Abraham, a Republican Louisiana gubernatorial candidate who happens to be a medical doctor experienced in delivering baby girls and boys. Both madly agreed that there are only two genders; thus, all unbeknown, falling into a linguistic quagmire. Taking a lead from Orwell, this is me writing to Carlson:

You interviewed a doctor today running for a state governorship. Both you and the doctor referred to gender not to sex. Language is important in moulding culture. There are two sexes, male and female. Using the term gender — a modern affectation transposed from the field of grammar, where it is used in some languages to describe the masculine or feminine forms of nouns and pronouns — muddies the water.

I have seen outlandish claims about there being tens upon tens of different genders. It is self-evidently ridiculous to claim that there are tens upon tens of different sexes. Language has allowed outlandish claims to be made and you and many other conservatives (or more generally, if you like, people of common sense) have fallen into the trap.

Sex is the right word as a noun to cover the two categories of people, according to their reproductive function. Stick to that and you expose the foolishness before it gets to first base.

While officials in Bali have been busy threatening to prosecute those who engage in sex outside marriage, the University of Technology Sydney has pursued the opposite goal. Its administration wants to make sure students are instructed in explicit sexual material whether or not one consents to such an education.

The irony underlying this latest leftist scheme, is that under the guise of highlighting the importance of “consent” when one has sex, people are being exposed to depictions of sexual activity without their consent. What’s more, UTS is not alone in pursuing this approach. Sydney University has adopted a similar strategy. According to the UTS website:

Consent Matters training

Consent Matters is a compulsory online training about appropriate behaviour and positive intervention.

Every single staff and student will complete it once during their time at UTS to ensure that all members of our community have a shared understanding of healthy relationships and can help if they see unacceptable situations.

This training is one part of our program to reduce unwanted sexual behaviour and encourage healthy relationships.

Deadline for completion

The deadline for coursework students to complete Consent Matters training is the results release date of your first session at UTS.

Failure to complete Consent Matters

You will only be able to view your results if you have completed the four modules and received 100 per cent in the quiz at the end.

If you fail to do this, you will receive a Consent Matters sanction and will not be able to view your results.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/portland-bans-urinals-in-195m-gender-neutral-remodel-of-government-building/

The City of Portland has banned urinals in the $195 million remodel of the Portland Building, which houses administrative offices for the city. While urinals use less water than toilets, they are a relic of a bygone era when men and women were recognized as biologically different.

A spokeswoman told NBC affiliate KGW News that she could not estimate how much it will cost to remove the urinals, which have been a feature of the building since its construction in 1982.

Chief Administrative Officer Tom Rinehart explained the urinal ban in an email to employees last February.

“We will continue to have gender-specific (male and female) multi-stall restrooms that are readily available to any employee that prefers to use one. But, there will be no urinals in any restroom in the building. This will give us the flexibility we need for any future changes in signage,” he wrote.

According to KGW, the building will have gender-neutral multi-stall bathrooms intended to be used by men and women together. These free-for-all restrooms — a dream come true for perverts — will be on the first, third, and fifteenth floors.

Every floor will have at least one bathroom open to “any gender,” in most cases a single-stall restroom. Throughout the building, there will be 42 “all-user stalls” and 104 sex-specific stalls.

Rinehart framed the urinal ban as a way to “remove arbitrary barriers.” In his email to employees, he wrote, “I am convinced that this is the right way to ensure success as your employer, remove arbitrary barriers in our community, and provide leadership that is reflective of our shared values.”

https://time.com/5684822/mattel-gender-neutral-doll/?utm_source=pocket-newta

A child opens a box. He starts jumping and screaming with joy—not an unusual sound in the halls of Mattel’s headquarters where researchers test new toys. But this particular toy is a doll, and it’s rare for parents to bring boys into these research groups to play with dolls. It’s rarer still for a boy to immediately attach himself to one the way Shi’a just did.

An 8-year-old who considers himself gender fluid and whose favorite color is black one week, pink the next, Shi’a sometimes plays with his younger sister’s dolls at home, but they’re “girly, princess stuff,” he says dismissively. This doll, with its prepubescent body and childish features, looks more like him, right down to the wave of bleached blond bangs. “The hair is just like mine,” Shi’a says, swinging his head in tandem with the doll’s. Then he turns to the playmate in the toy-testing room, a 7-year-old girl named Jhase, and asks, “Should I put on the girl hair?” Shi’a fits a long, blond wig on the doll’s head, and suddenly it is no longer an avatar for him but for his sister.

The doll can be a boy, a girl, neither or both, and Mattel, which calls this the world’s first gender-neutral doll, is hoping its launch on Sept. 25 redefines who gets to play with a toy traditionally deemed taboo for half the world’s kids. Carefully manicured features betray no obvious gender: the lips are not too full, the eyelashes not too long and fluttery, the jaw not too wide. There are no Barbie-like breasts or broad, Ken-like shoulders. Each doll in the Creatable World series looks like a slender 7-year-old with short hair, but each comes with a wig of long, lustrous locks and a wardrobe befitting any fashion-conscious kid: hoodies, sneakers, graphic T-shirts in soothing greens and yellows, along with tutus and camo pants.