Feminism

[Link to mentioned post]: are terfs actual feminists or do most transphobic women just call themselves that?

As a feminist who stans for transpeople I personally don't believe terfs to be feminists and there are a couple of reasons as for why I believe this to be the case:

Transwomen believe themselves to be just as genuine as cisborn women. As such, transwomen often fight for the same rights and desires that cis women want. Empowering transwomen also help cis women in this system, so kicking down your fellow allies and supporters is suicidal.

For those reading this, if you believe that you're a true feminist then I strongly recommend supporting and standing with the transcommunity as they will help you in reciprocal quid pro quo fashion.✊🌻

I'm making this post in order to hopefully reach out to terfs who might be misunderstanding as to why they should be supporting trans people rather than attacking them.

The advancement of women at work is good for everyone. Closing gender gaps in areas such as employment and entrepreneurship could increase global gross domestic product by 20%, the World Bank calculates.

And while there’s a way to go – at current rates, it could take five generations or 134 years to achieve gender parity worldwide, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024 – there are signs of post-pandemic recovery in economies and labour markets.

Hey friends. Reading this now. It talks about how the multiple Nicaraguan rules of power, including the Somoza dictatorship used the female identity to bend the will of the people to their ways. Super dense academic read but a worthy read, none the less.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18023674

Paywall bypass: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/puBWi

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17930532

This one is very shocking, there's lots of things it covers: Abuse in general, religious abuse, psychological abuse, self harm, fat{phobia/misia}, misogyny, power dynamics etc. We still recommend watching it if you can deal with those things and the content warnings in the video because it shows the truth of the companies behind your favourite games and the systems which demand inexpense which leads to abuse and other awful things.

White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in. White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

I come from a family of feminists who love Jimmy Carter. I have watched President Carter work tirelessly to protect women’s rights, magnify our voices and transform our lives. I met him almost 15 years ago and was then asked to serve on his Board of Counsellors and Ambassador’s Program at the Carter Center in Atlanta. The invitation was a thrill of my life, and each and every time we worked together, his wisdom and insights inspired me—and will continue on throughout the rest of my life.

One day, I picked up my phone and it was President Carter thanking me for supporting the incredible projects of the Carter Center and asking that I get more involved with one of their campaigns. I experienced firsthand how the Center’s Transforming Women’s Lives campaign focused on expanding women’s rights and ending discrimination around the world. Its impact was felt from small municipal government services to national policies, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jordan, the United States, Argentina, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Guatemala, Uganda, Peru, Liberia and Brazil.

The Combahee River Collective disbanded in 1980, but their emphasis on a written record helped the collective’s work find a home within academia, contributing to its continued popularity. In the intervening decades, though, the surviving members have seen their statement get chopped and screwed into morsels, divorced from its context. Notably, Okazawa-Rey points to the statement’s most quoted line, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression,” as a point of common misunderstanding. “There’s a line about for Black women to be free, the institutions would have to be changed,” Okawaza-Rey said. “So if you change the institutions to be non-misogynist and non-racist, then all women would be free. This is what we’re saying: not that we’re the most oppressed, and if we are free, then everybody will be free.”

They were not precious: Smith started our conversation by announcing, “We are facing horrors, horrors untold.” But so many of them are, sadly, the horrors we already know, the same ones the Collective had sought to address. (Each of them pointed to issues that they had failed to cover, like trans rights, land reclamation by Native peoples, and disability justice.) When I asked about the efficacy of the text, its ability to endure, Okawaza-Rey turned it around on me — the Statement wasn’t just an ideology; it was a blueprint. As soon as it stopped serving me, it would be time to pick up my pen. “My question, Jazmine, to you and people of your generation is: What’s the statement you would write now?”

Research from the University of Westminster has identified a gender gap in accessing online safety advice and technology. We found that men are more likely than women to engage with and be informed about security and privacy technologies aimed at keeping people safe online.

A recent report includes the following recommendations for researchers, technology developers and providers, online safety advocates and policymakers to consider, if we are to make digital safety protection more inclusive of women’s needs.

(1) Encourage support in the community Some community NGOs that focus on protecting women and girls, such as End Violence Against Women, have in-depth, first-hand experience of safeguarding women’s online safety. They can offer specialised support to women who have encountered online abuse or cyber attacks. These types of support methods tend to be more effective for women, as our study shows women are about twice as likely as men to seek face-to-face advice.

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(2) Make online advice more accessible Our research suggests that revamping online safety advice so it makes sense to people without technical backgrounds would be helpful. Jargon and technical explanations can put people off, and act as a barrier to the dissemination of sound advice.

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(3) Tailor advice to scenarios faced by women Unfortunately, women disproportionately face many specific online threats such as intimate image abuse, cyberflashing and online harassment. Safety advice in response to such harms is usually provided on the websites of NGOs who support women. However, we need such advice, which is tailored to abuse, to be more widely distributed across the online sources mentioned above.

(4) Develop safe online spaces Safety advice in response to online violence against women and girls is often embedded in the support packages that are given to help victims recover from abuse and trauma, via NGOs. But it is also important to develop new online spaces for communities of women who’ve experienced abuse to share advice and support for digital safety.

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(5) Empower women and girls with the right skills Our research suggests there should be greater focus on ensuring women and girls have the right digital skills to understand and take action regarding their online safety. This means making training courses available – these could be offered in schools and local community centres and libraries, via a national effort.

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(6) Analyse risks before releasing new technology When a new technology or online platform is developed, it’s vital to gather different parties with a stake in the issue to assess whether it could contribute to gender-based online harm. Importantly, this should take place before the technology enters public use, rather than only after it has been misused to harm specific users, including women.

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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17772988

A helpful guide on how to be less frustrating towards people of color.

The 19th: For those unfamiliar with the term “petro-masculinity,” what does this rhetoric around oil and gas dominance have to do with gender and identity?

I first thought of this term after Trump was elected in 2016 because I saw this trend of support for fossil fuels and climate denial on the one hand and misogyny on the other. They were usually treated as separate problems, and just coincidentally appearing together.

I come from a critical eco-feminist background where scholars connect the domination and exploitation of the natural world to the justifications for the domination and exploitation of work that is often done by colonized peoples, and by women or feminized bodies. Historically, this process developed under colonial capitalism. It helps me understand that these are not coincidental, that these two go together. In the United States, for example, it can be seen in the way that care work is devalued or taken for granted, in the same way that nature is considered a resource, something free to be taken.

Both of these are background assumptions that drive the capitalist economy. So the separation of them into the economic sphere and the private or identity issue sphere is really making it hard for people to see that these are not separate. These actually work together.

The consulting firm Deloitte estimated in November 2023 that women’s sports would generate more than $1 billion in global revenue this year for the first time ever, which the company said is up about 300% from its last estimate in 2021. Skyrocketing viewership and corporate sponsorships were major factors.

While many point to the WNBA as a blueprint for success in women’s sports, accomplishments in 2024 went far beyond one league or athlete.

Gauff, the 20-year-old tennis superstar, was the world’s highest-paid female athlete this year with $30.4 million in earnings, according to Sportico rankings. Gauff could not defend her 2023 U.S. Open title, but ended her 2024 season with a WTA finals title and a $4.8 million check — the biggest payout ever for a women’s tennis event, per Sportico.

The Olympics neared complete gender parity for the first time among the more than 11,000 men and women who competed in Paris this summer.

More than 34 million people across all NBC platforms in the U.S. watched Biles exorcise the demons of her surprising exit from the Tokyo games three years earlier. The 27-year-old shared a message of resilience and redemption as she added four gold medals to her resume. Nearly everything she did in Paris made headlines — a clap back at social media trolls, a revelation about her mental health, a moment of triumph. Her TikTok showing Team USA’s gold medals from team competition has more than 139 million views.

Archived version

The bill pushes the doctrine of “fetal personhood,” and makes religious references to “God’s image” within its text.

The South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which was introduced originally in 2023 but dropped from consideration in early 2024, has been refiled by state Rep. Rob Harris (R). The bill has seven other Republican co-sponsors, and is set to be considered by the state House Judiciary Committee early next year.

The bill defines fetuses and embryos at any stage of pregnancy as legal persons, thus defining any type of abortion — including those that happen before the state’s six-week abortion ban — as homicide, effectively creating a total abortion ban. Although the legislation’s language makes exceptions for cases where a person’s life is endangered due to their pregnancy or a miscarriage, critics of the original bill noted that the proposal requires a person to prove their own innocence in such cases, meaning that even those who meet the exception criteria could be subjected to criminal punishment.

Notably, exceptions for miscarriages or to save the life of a pregnant person are rarely granted, as these kinds of laws generally have ambiguous language regarding exceptions, leaving health professionals unsure of when a situation qualifies. The latest iteration of this bill’s life exception also requires “reasonable steps” to be taken before a life-saving abortion can occur, likely resulting in lengthier delays to such care, including in cases where immediate action is necessary to save a person’s life.

The authors of the legislation make no effort to hide their far right religious agenda, referring to life as being “created in the image of God” in the text of the bill in an attempt to justify its passage.

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For women from Central America and Mexico who suffer violence at the hands of a domestic partner or gang member, internal relocation to escape gang or domestic violence usually isn’t an option because of law enforcement corruption and ineffectiveness, as well as the widespread belief—often borne out of experience—that internal relocation won’t provide safety.

An application for asylum in the United States offers hope for survival and a future. Yet while a cliché dubbing the United States a “nation of immigrants” persists, most asylum seekers face a path fraught with legal obstacles.

Over the course of this century, research has probed how laws force migrants into spaces of limited rights and numerous social harms. As a result, there exists an extensive corpus of scholarship delineating how shifting statuses constrict life for those who do not have fully legal status.

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Undocumented immigrants [...] exist outside the law while at the same time occupying a hyper-legalized space—one in which laws constrict and limit their life options as they enjoy minimal legal protections but abundant restrictions. Efforts to conform and abide by the law, including completing tax forms or obtaining a child’s birth certificate, expose people with tenuous legal status to risk and immigration enforcement, causing suffering and limiting opportunity.

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Winning asylum is a fraught process, and women who seek asylum occupy a space of legal ambiguity and public opposition—a space we call compounded marginalization—as they await asylum hearings. For years, their lives are defined by uncertainty.

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Women are subject to the choices of individual immigration judges, changing interpretations of the law, and decisions made by politicians more focused on appealing to their constituencies and winning elections rather than humane and effective policymaking. Critically [...] asylum globally exists not to protect large numbers of people from the Global South who need protection in Western nations. Instead, the asylum system seeks to sort a limited population that must run a legal gauntlet—if they can cross the border or survive a perilous marine crossing—to prove they are worthy of protection.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/19499264

Women’s health research is underfunded in both the private and public sectors. A recent reportfrom The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine found that about 9 percent of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) research spending between 2013 and 2023 went to women’s health research. 

The report also found that NIH grant funding has increased overall since 2013 in funds spent and projects funded. But the agency’s funding for women’s health research shrank every year between 2013 and 2023.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17481809

An excellent video about how (long) covid and other diseases/pandemics are awful and how capitalism and governments loves to ignore them in hopes that things will 'carry on' as normal thus creating social stigma and work policies that disable people more and more.

Sexual violence, as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), includes any sexual act or attempt to obtain sex through coercion, regardless of the relationship between the parties. This encompasses rape, unwanted sexual touching, and non-contact forms of sexual violence.

One of the factors that differentiates healthy intimate partner sex from violent sexual encounters is consent: the voluntary, ongoing agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is essential in every sexual act, regardless of relationship status or prior interactions. And it can be withdrawn at any time.

Yet, deeply rooted cultural and societal beliefs continue to shape how consent is understood. A new wide-ranging study conducted by South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council sheds light on the scale of the issue. The results offer a sobering look at how South African women’s autonomy in sexual matters is often dismissed or undermined.

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7.9% women had experienced sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime. That means an estimated 1.1 million women in South Africa have experienced sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime. And, 7.5% of male participants self-reported that they’d perpetrated sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime. This translates to an estimated 917, 395 men who have sexually violated a partner. These grim statistics cannot be ignored.

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