The Tragic Assassination of Yanar Mohammed (25 November 1960 – 2 March 2026)

It is with great sadness that I share news of the killing by two terrorist men of feminist revolutionary activist, Yanar Mohammed. I was blessed to meet and speak with her many years ago. I am devastated by her loss.

Yanar Mohammed was a prominent Iraqi woman human rights defender and feminist, and the co-founder and director of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). Since 2003, she had worked to protect women facing gender-based violence, including domestic abuse, trafficking, and so-called ‘honour killings.’ Under her leadership, OWFI established a network of safe houses across several Iraqi cities, providing protection and support to hundreds of women. Yanar Mohammed led these efforts despite all the ongoing impediments and risks. She was a strong advocate for secularism and women’s equality. Throughout her activism, Yanar Mohammed faced death threats and, at times, was forced to restrict her movement. (Source: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/killing-woman-human-rights-defender-and-feminist-yanar-mohammed)

What follows next is from MADRE, here: https://www.madre.org/media-item/yanarmohammed/ 

On the Assassination of Feminist Leader Yanar Mohammed

Media: Statement Region: Iraq

Today, Yanar Mohammed – one of the most formidable feminist leaders of her generation – was assassinated in her home in Baghdad in what appears to have been a targeted militia attack. We are devastated by her loss, and we mourn with all the people who loved her and whose lives she changed.

For years, Yanar lived under constant threat, as anti-rights and fundamentalist forces sought to suppress her activism for human rights and democracy. As the Founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), she built an enduring feminist infrastructure to support women and girls confronting violence, displacement, and systemic repression, and to lay the foundation for a better future. She provided food and shelter for survivors of violence and demanded an end to war and militarization.

 

She knew all too well how warmaking devastates communities and accelerates attacks on human rights defenders. In 2004, just after the US launched its war on Iraq, she founded OWFI to protect women, girls, and other marginalized people from these dangers. Almost immediately, she received death threats. She refused to be silent – instead, she called for the solidarity of the international women’s movement. MADRE responded to her, spotlighting her lifesaving work, demanding action from US policymakers, and launching decades of partnership.

Together, MADRE and OWFI provided humanitarian aid, human rights trainings, and community-led organizing for peace and justice throughout Iraq. We provided advocacy and legal support as OWFI fought back against restrictions on women’s shelters and against a years-long campaign of state harassment to impede their work. We will continue to stand by OWFI now, in these terrible days.

Yanar’s assassination is a stark reminder of the risks feminist leaders continue to face globally, and of the ongoing threats to human rights movements. Yet, we also remember that Yanar’s life was a testament to feminist courage rooted in action and fueled by love. She protected people where there was danger, created platforms where women could speak out, and insisted that all people deserve full rights.

As we grieve, we honor a beautiful life that propelled justice – with joy, purpose, love and courage.

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Update:

The Yanar Mohammed Feminist Defense Fund was created to honor Yanar and support urgent needs of the organization she founded, Organization of Women’s Freedom In Iraq (OWFI). In addition, Yanar’s Fund will support women in Iraq and throughout the region who defend women’s human rights and carry forward Yanar’s legacy.

 

___________________________________________________________

What follows is from here: https://marxist.com/assassination-of-yanar-mohammed.htm

We publish here a statement sent to us by the Communist Alternative Organization in Iraq on the tragic death of their comrade Yanar Mohammed, who was assassinated this morning in a criminal terrorist attack at her home. We send our sympathy and solidarity to Yanar’s comrades, family and friends.

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Statement on the assassination of dear comrade Yanar Mohammed

With profound sadness, grief, and immense pain, we announce the passing of our dear comrade Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Alternative Organization.

At 9:00 AM Iraq time this morning, Monday, March 2, 2026, two terrorist criminals on a motorcycle opened fire on Comrade Yanar Mohammed at her residence in Baghdad, inflicting severe injuries. Shortly after arriving at the hospital, she tragically passed away.

While we condemn in the strongest possible terms this brutal terrorist crime against a great fighter for the cause of women’s liberation and equality, and a firm, persistent communist militant for human emancipation, we hold the government responsible for uncovering the perpetrators and bringing them to justice.

The memory of Comrade Yanar Mohammed will remain a shining beacon for us in the struggle for women’s liberation and the communist struggle for a world free from all forms of injustice, discrimination, and oppression.

We will issue a later statement regarding the details of the life and struggle of our dear comrade Yanar Mohammed and will announce the dates for memorial services to honor her memory in Iraq and abroad.

The Central Committee of the Communist Alternative Organization in Iraq

March 2, 2026

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[We also publish below a biographical note about Yanar Mohammed, sent to us by her comrades in the Communist Alternative Organization in Iraq. What stands out is the figure of a comrade who stood up bravely for the liberation of women and the oppressed, against the barbarism into which imperialism has plunged Iraq since 2003. We salute Yanar Mohammed, a fallen comrade, murdered by the reactionary forces she bravely stood up to all her life.]

 

The Assassination of Yanar Mohammed: When the Voice of Freedom Is Targeted in the Heart of Baghdad

By Nazar Akrawi,
3 March 2026

At dawn on March 2, 2026, Iraqis awoke to shocking news: the assassination of feminist socialist activist Yanar Mohammed inside her home in Baghdad. This was not an ordinary political crime, but a bloody milestone in a long-standing social and class struggle between two opposing projects: a liberationist, egalitarian vision that links women’s emancipation to a comprehensive socialist revolution, and a sectarian capitalist–religious order seeking to reproduce domination in its most brutal and regressive forms.

A Feminist Icon Confronting a Return to the Dark Ages

For more than three decades, Yanar Mohammed stood as one of the most prominent leaders of the liberationist feminist movement in Iraq. As the founder and head of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq she did not confine herself to theoretical advocacy. She fought daily battles on the ground: organizing demonstrations, establishing shelters for abused women, and exposing the sectarian patriarchal structure that has governed society and the state since 2003.

She was the only Iraqi socialist feminist activist to deliver a speech on the situation of women in Iraq at the headquarters of the United Nations carrying the voices of Iraqi women to the world and affirming that the women’s question is not an isolated “cultural” or “religious” matter, but a fundamentally social question of liberation.

The Class Roots of the Hostility

From a Marxist perspective, this assassination cannot be understood outside the framework of class struggle. The post-2003 order was not merely a political transition; it was a social re-engineering along sectarian–capitalist lines. Civil and secular structures were dismantled, while political Islam, both Shia and Sunni, rose on the ruins of the state, backed by local and global capital.

This alliance between parasitic capitalism and sectarian religious forces required ideological tools to discipline society:

- Reinforcing male authority within the family.

- Subjugating women in the name of “Sharia” and “identity”.

- Presenting poverty and unemployment as moral fate rather than the result of class exploitation.

From this context emerges the intense hatred toward egalitarian ideas. The call for women’s liberation effectively undermines the patriarchal structure that sustains the reproduction of the class system. The call for socialism directly threatens property, privilege, and power.

The Battle Against the Jaafari Personal Status Law

Yanar Mohammed was at the forefront of those who confronted the so-called Jaafari Personal Status Law, which would have permitted the marriage of girls as young as nine and restricted mothers’ rights to custody and divorce. She did not see it as a mere legal amendment, but as a patriarchal and class assault on the bodies of poor girls in particular—who are most often forced into child marriages that perpetuate poverty and dependency.

Her position provoked a fierce campaign against her by influential Shiite religious forces, which filed multiple lawsuits accusing her of “opposing Sharia.” She insisted, however, that women’s liberation cannot be achieved within sectarian legal frameworks, but only through a secular civil state aligned with the working classes.

A Principled Stand Against Militias and ISIS

During the expansion of sectarian militias and the rise of ISIS, Yanar Mohammed adopted a principled stance against both, considering them two faces of the same reactionary violence. She refused to be deceived by sectarian “resistance” slogans and rejected the blackmail of fear in the name of fighting terrorism. At the last conference of her organization, she reaffirmed her rejection of the militarization of society, stressing that women’s weapons are organization and consciousness—not alignment with new repressive axes of power.

The Struggle Over Women’s Shelters

One of her fiercest battles was the defense of shelters for abused women and girls. Sectarian authorities and Shiite militias repeatedly demanded that these shelters be handed over to the state or shut down under the pretext of “protecting morality.” Yanar categorically refused, arguing that returning women fleeing domestic violence to a complicit authority was tantamount to a death sentence.

The issue became the subject of prolonged legal disputes, yet she continued to operate the shelters despite threats, affirming that protecting women is a revolutionary duty before it is an act of charity.

Why So Much Hatred?

The hatred harbored by the sectarian capitalist order and religious parties, particularly Islamist Shiite forces toward Yanar Mohammed and others like her was not personal. It was class fear:

- Fear of a feminist consciousness that links women’s oppression to capitalist exploitation.

- Fear of an independent women’s movement that refuses to be subordinated to ruling parties.

- Fear of a socialist project that exposes sectarianism as a tool for dividing the working class.

When an activist links women’s liberation to socialist revolution, she is not calling for partial reforms, but for a radical alternative. That is what structures of domination cannot tolerate.

A Legacy That Cannot Be Assassinated

The assassination of Yanar Mohammed was an attempt to terrorize women and silence the socialist feminist voice. Yet, in the balance of history, it reveals the fragility of a system that fears a woman whose only weapons were words and organization.

Yanar Mohammed will remain a global icon of liberationist feminist struggle and a symbol of linking women’s emancipation to class struggle. In an Iraq exhausted by sectarianism and corruption, the question remains: can women’s liberation be achieved without the liberation of society as a whole from exploitation?

Her life offered a clear answer: there is no genuine equality without socialism, and no freedom for women within a system founded on class and sectarian oppression.

What is Women's Courage When Men Define the Terms?

image is from here

Over at Shakesville, I just read Melissa's post "Women are Brave", which you may link back to by clicking *here*. Rather than post a comment on a feminist blog, I'll put my comment here in my own space. I've learned that a male voice isn't always appropriate, and is often enough unwelcome, in spaces designed to be woman-centered.

Her post led me to think back to something I once read by Andrea Dworkin on the subject. I did some searching and found Andrea Dworkin's chapter in her book Our Blood, called "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage". A scanned version of the book is available to be read as a pdf document (or may be downloaded) *here*.

As I reflect on Melissa's blog, Dworkin's work, and on the purgatory of contemporary U.S. society, I am struck with the degree to white men define the terms so many of us live by. Inside a white male supremacist system, "courage" is traditionally and ubiquitously understood to be masculine in nature, belonging to men; a capacity understood patriarchally to be inherently male and associated with strength. Fear is understood to be feminine in nature, the "natural" province of women, and is associated with weakness. For men and boys to be what men determine to be "weak", including by being afraid, is--so the status quo society says--to be less manly and more like a woman or girl. For women to be courageous and strong as men define it, is to be unwomanly and more like a man. If she isn't punished for being "brave" in the patriarchal definition of the word, she might gain temporary male status.

In Melissa's incisive account of a stand-up comedy club, I find examples of how men define not only terms but also act them out in social spaces. At the club, a combination of men's sexual violence against women, including the threat of violence and "jovial" harassment and objectification, ensures that women aren't likely to be too unafraid. As Dworkin has stated, "By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it." Curiously, the only men I know personally who seem to have this deep-seated fear-orientation to the world are male survivors of child sexual abuse. While women do, in fact, live with courage and bravery as they negotiate many challenges and obstacles, men do their best and worst to make sure fear, in women, is never completely irrational or unwarranted.

The misogynist violence that men direct at women ensures that those men aren't seen--by other woman-hating men--as too weak. Rape is one of many acts in which males may cast off their supposed weakness and exercise patriarchal power by terrorising and violating women. War is another realm where men get to be brave and heroic by doing violence and 'conquering' fear, against the bodies, minds, and spirits of threatened people. Military war, when perpetrated by the Western world, is also the place where imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism are acted out in patriarchal terms. Invasion is always sexualised in the male supremacist imagination.

It's going to be interesting to see how U.S. female soldiers in military combat are regarded by male soldiers: will the women be seen as heroic, like the men? Will any individual woman in military combat be treated more like one of the guys? Or will her patriarchally-defined courage be seen as tainted by her gender? (Sort of the way bigoted straight men argue that marriage is tainted if queers--defined by dominant straight male society as feminine men and masculine women--can do it too.) A serious concern is that any woman in military combat may be additionally vulnerable to rape by male soldiers who want to be sure she doesn't believe she's equal to men. I say additionally because we know this is already happening endemically and systematically to civilian girls and women, and to women troops off the battlefield. Or, rather, off the battlefield that men name as such, for many private and social spaces men occupy are battlefields for women, such as the bed, the home, the workplace, and the street.

We also know that U.S. male soldiers practice rape against the women and girls of invaded countries, usually populated by people of color: even a partial list of such countries invaded and/or occupied by U.S. troops or covert operations is long: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Taken together, the body count is in the many hundreds of thousands; how many of those murder victims were also victims of rape is impossible to say. It was likely to be grossly under-reported or not reported at all: all forms of men's sexual violence is under-reported because terrorising people and forcing submission works to silence and shame them. If we leave out all other European countries that made conquest and occupation of other sovereign nations a national pastime, and only focus on Britain's imperial invasions, we are left with very few countries untouched by brutal, white imperial/patriarchal force. (Source for that comment is *here*.)

What we may notice internationally in the West is that when European white women are in seats of typically and traditionally white male power, they sometimes argue, over the disdainful shouts of men, for equality not supremacy. See, for example: To End Extreme Poverty, Let’s Try Ending Extreme Wealth or this: This bold equality push is just what we needed. In 1997.

When we consider the politics of many prominent, activist women of color, we see comprehensive intersectional analysis and proposals for global peace and justice. See, for example: Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development, by Vandana Shiva, and The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings.

A flip side of this issue of gender and courage is seen when we try and make heroes of  men who preached against many forms of violence, such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or John Lennon. This is not at all to say either man was non-violent historically in their own lives. At least John Lennon spoke honestly about his abuses as such and endeavored to be a different kind of man in his later years. At least Dr. King set an honorable example of how to love one's enemy while holding them accountable for their crimes against humanity. But when such men advocate peace-not-war, or equality with women, they become vulnerable to being stigmatised 'feminine'.

Referencing Melissa's post, it says a great deal that men on stage doing comedy or men in the audience, need to reinforce and verbalize the worst aspects of male supremacist/patriarchal practice, and in particular to affirm a phallic identity. I admire the woman who did her own comedy, successfully, disproving so much that is taught in a racist patriarchal society like ours about women's power to create something new that is solely hers while deeply shared, in the midst of a culture of sexual predation and cultural appropriation. More power to her. More power to all women fighting for justice and equality.

Despite the saying that sits atop this post, liberally redefining terms won't shift society's political hierarchies. Many of us strive to make language express the complexities of who we are. As I listen to those singly or multiply oppressed, I hear again and again how difficult it is to make the dominant language speak their truths. It is courageous, isn't it, to endure and survive rape and warfare? I'd say so. But will patriarchal men ever see the courage of it, or only determine her survival to be a residual sign of his weakness?

However we maneuver meanings and memes, such effort is insufficient if our goal is liberation. The means and machinery of gynocidal straight male supremacy and genocidal and imperialist white supremacy must be shut down; new systems and institutions fostering equality and non-violence must become the status quo. Only then will new definitions have rooting and resonance beyond small, non-dominant groups of people. And only then will whole truths be spoken about life under siege, without interruption and mistranslation by the former masters.

Referring back to the phrasing in the image above, I'd say: "When peace-work is routinely seen as courageous, and war-making is popularly viewed as the work of cowards, we will know substantive, life-affirming change has occurred."

And when women of color define the terms we all live by, and govern globally, I will know we have radically purged ourselves of purgatory, razed hell, and brought heaven down to Earth.

Woman-hating is often mistaken for man-hating by anti-feminist men and other male supremacists

image of book cover is from here

 

Toto has the stamina to take on the silly misogynists on websites like Yahoo Answers. Please note the answers given to the question (click *here* to do so), loaded up with misinformation, that Andrea Dworkin hated people. Someone named Sara asks this:

Open Question

Why was andrea dworkin filled with hatred?

was she abused? and why did she looked like that? im all for equality but you have to take a shower once in a while....was her writings more a projection of her insecurities and pen!s envy?

 

Here is Toto's reply:

While the truth sometimes blows fiction out of the water--much to the disdain of those who believe fiction more than truthful facts--we must face these truthful facts: Andrea Dworkin was abused as a child, by molestation, and later in her early adulthood, as she survived rape and battery. She also did not hate men. There's so much evidence of her not hating men that one wonders where the rumor came from that she did.

She lived with a man she very much loved, after all, for the last thirty years of her life. She was close with and felt great love for her father, her brother, and her nephew--she has written about each of them. You can read all about it in her memoir, Heartbreak. She spoke to hundreds of men at a men's conference, not about how much she hated men, but about how men have to be responsible and ethical. (See the link to that speech below.) Where's the "hatred of men" in any of that? The truth also shows that even here, at this website, many years after her death, people still want to say hateful and dishonest things about her and other feminists, not about men.

The harsh truth is that men and many other people hate feminists--and women generally. The lie, perpetuated by anti-feminists and misogynists, is that feminists hate men. But then those that want to make their own hatred invisible often do so by pretending "They hate ME!" It's a sad reality when truth cannot be faced, even with evidence. Men's millennia-old rape of women, men procuring women and girls, men trafficking women and girls, men enslaving women and girls, men battering women to the point of hospitalization and death: these are global social problems. Not women doing such things to men or boys.

Source(s):

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/…
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/…

Someone on Answerbag.com asks a really misogynist question about feminists

image is from here

Just another of a billion examples of how the Internet makes promoting and perpetrating misogyny all too easy. All that follows is on Answerbag.com. The link to the site is below.

Question

Help answer this question below.

Did the existence of Andrea Dworkin prove that Neanderthal women were feminists?

response to the above question is by JulianReal

 

Your question is obnoxious and insulting.

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was a very important US white feminist philosopher and political activist. She was also a brilliant writer. She worked for justice and human rights for and with women across race and class.

Her work including fighting to establish for all women the right to be free of ridiculous and misogynist attitudes like the one glaringly displayed in your question. Your remark proves we haven't come nearly far enough in the struggle to attain justice and human rights (or, even, basic respect) for women, including feminists.

People, like you, who promote the insulting mischaracterisation of women, including of feminists, are contributing to the overall oppressive condition of women being publicly and privately disrespected and assaulted--verbally and otherwise--by men.

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.
-- Andrea Dworkin

Read more: http://www.answerbag.com/category/life-and-society_32

To Righteous White People Concerned With Human Population Control: It's already happening for many people who aren't white

image is from here

One of the things that enrages me is hearing white people arrogantly and smugly discuss the need for "people, everywhere" to practice birth control, to monitor population growth, and to be responsible with birth-rates. It is almost always whites in the "First World" who I hear doing this. They remind "the world" that there's a population problem, as if people around the world never gave it a thought. As if the people who are most crowded in urban areas never thought to consider that "live birth", "child-rearing" and "population" are linked. As if what poor people need is a good sex education class.

What is often left out of the allegedly wise guidance from whites (condescendingly misogynistic, classist, and racist is more like it) is how, for many people who are not white, the human population is being drastically reduced by many factors: the White (Het) Man's wars against people of color, for example, most evident against Asian, Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations--if you know which news to seek out, or if you are not white and are living in the places where people are being destroyed or damaged by combinations of heterosexism, misogyny, classism, Western-white imperialism and colonialism, and other forms of racism.

If you track where Western (including US and European) weapons of mass destruction end up, you'll find that most of them end up in places that are not white-majority. And this is intentional and deliberate: it's called "population control" imposed against Brown and Black people by the White Man. The planting of profoundly toxic, lethal, nuclear waste near reservations is another form of population control. So too is the well-organised machinery of poverty combined with racism and misogyny.

With that as an introduction, I will close this post with this horrific news, which is only "new" news if you're not living the genocidal and gynocidal grief already.What follows is from Indian Country Today Media Network. Please click on the title just below to link back. And if you're white, please stop talking about the need for "population control" in truly racist ways, as if Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people can't figure it out without your "guidance".

Inuit Stillbirth Rate Triple that of Canada’s Mainstream Population 

By ICTMN Staff May 13, 2011
RSS 

The high stillbirth rate among Inuit people is cause for concern, though not entirely because of the numbers themselves, according to one health expert. 

The rate—triple that of the general Canadian population—is troublesome because of what it symbolizes: a lack of aboriginal child health care overall, said Catherine Curry, senior program officer at the Inuit Tuttarvingat Centre, the branch of the National Aboriginal Health Organization that addresses Inuit health and wellness issues. 

Nevertheless, the statistic itself is sobering, the medical journal The Lancet reported in April, according to Postmedia News: In 2009, 3.3 Canadian babies of every 1,000 were stillborn, but Inuit communities were found to have triple that rate. Curry, who has studied Inuit maternal health care in northern Canada, told the news service that poor access to prenatal health care may not only contribute to a higher stillbirth risk but also puts children in general at risk. 

“Many Inuit babies are born alive and need to be healthier,” Curry told Postmedia News. 

“Generally many public health factors and insufficient prenatal care impact infant-mortality rates. Prenatal care can mitigate a lot of those factors.” 

The remoteness of many Inuit communities also plays a role (many do not have midwives on hand, and women must travel or see a series of practitioners), as do violence, poverty and substance abuse, she said. 

The Lancet study was its Stillbirth’s Series, and 69 experts from 50-plus organizations in 18 countries contributed to a worldwide portrait of the unique tragedy. Globally 2.6 million third-trimester babies are stillborn, the Lancet said.

Statistics and Action Fighting Sexual Trafficking of Girl Children by Het Men who Rape Them

logo for anti-trafficking organisation is from here

Just reported on CNN:

79% of all trafficking is by het men for rape with children.

1,200,000 million children worldwide are trafficked so het men can rape girl children.

Approximately 300,000 girl children are trafficked in the U.S.

1 in 4 pornographic photographs is of a child

For more on what is being done, please see this newsletter (a PDF document) from the anti-trafficking group Maiti Nepal. For the source website, please see *here*.

• Maiti Nepal Newsletter January -March 2011 - 2011-04-20
  Newsletter January- March 2011
  
  Newsletter_January_to_March_2011.pdf

Direct from Minneapolis, MN, USA: Malalai Joya's press conference

This just in from Mike J. McCreadie: he believes I am "a f*cking c*nt" (without the asterisks)--sent from his iPhone

portrait of Edith Sitwell is from here

 "I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it."
— Edith Sitwell

Mike J. McReadie, someone I do not know at all,  felt it to be very important, in times of trauma and suffering around the world, to send me this urgent message. One wonders what else he does with his time. I post it as evidence of the kind of person he is, and for the record given past death threats against me. Does this make him both a misogynist AND a "misandrist"?? (Assuming he thinks I'm a man, that is.) I have modified the four letter word below by putting in a hyphen where the "u" would normally be.

fromMike   mjmccreadie777777@gmail.com

sender-time Current time there: 10:36 AM. ✆ to "aradicalprofeminist@gmail.com" date Sun, Mar 13, 2011 subject Ur a fucking c-nt mailed-by gmail.com signed-by gmail.com

Sent from [Mike's] iPhone

Feminist Action Alert: Please Help Identify This Woman For the Sake of Her Loved Ones and So Justice can be Served: Spread this press release throughout the U.S. women's blogosphere. Thank you.

28 Feb 2011 important update: I've receive this message by email: The young woman has been identified! Her mother called looking for her this evening and she has been positively identified. Please keep this grieving mother and other loved ones of her beloved daughter in your prayers and thoughts. -- Julian The following email was sent to me with important information regarding the much-needed assistance of the general public in identifying a deceased woman, in part so her loved ones might know of what happened to her, and also so that those who are responsible for her being where she was found might be brought to justice. Details, including a portrait drawing of her and an image of her ring are below. Let's hope her loved ones might find some justice and closure. I have highlighted portions of the email. Below it is the press release which may also be found *here*. I am an investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia. We have been desperately attempting identify and young African American female who was found deceased in trash bags in a wooded area of a dead end street in southwest Atlanta on 2/2/11. We have run her fingerprints and exhausted all other avenues in identifying her. Fliers have been distributed numerous times in the area where she was found, as well as other locations within the city of Atlanta. The news media was interested for about the first two weeks and then they stopped responding to my weekly requests to run the attached fliers, along with her demographic information, on their news broadcasts. This woman deserves to be identified and to have her family notified of what happened to her, along with bring the person(s) to justice who placed her where she was found. If you could possibly disseminate her information to whatever resources you have, it would be much appreciated. We have received a limited number of telephone calls about her and I am beginning to think that she may not be from Atlanta or Georgia.

Press Release

Deceased Black Female Adult Found Near Park Avenue, SW, Atlanta
 
The initial phases of the postmortem examination have been completed in the case of an adult black female found near Park Avenue, SW, Atlanta on February 2nd. No cause of death has been determined to date. Investigation continues to determine the identity the decedent as well as the cause, manner, and circumstances of death. The autopsy was performed by forensic pathologists Michael Heninger, MD and Rhome Hughes, MD.
 
The deceased is a black female, about 5'8" tall, and weighs about 212 pounds. Estimated age is 20 to 40 years. The head hair is brown with black roots. The right nostril is pierced and contains a white metal stud with a clear stone. A yellow metal ring is worn in the left ring finger and contains small clear stones. There are no tattoos.  One right lower tooth is lower down than the other teeth and one left upper tooth is higher up than the other teeth. The ring is shown in the photograph below.

If you have information which may lead to the decedent's identity, please call the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Center at 404-613-4400, ask for the Investigations Section, and refer to case 11-0242.

An artist's rendering is shown below. Note the stud in the right nostril and the left upper tooth which is higher up than the others.





Posted by:
Randy Hanzlick, MD
Chief Medical Examiner, Fulton County
Posted at 630am, February 4, 2011
Revised and updated February 4, 2011 940am

An Honest, Open Letter to the LGBTIQA Blogging Community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender /Transsexual, Intersex/Intergender, Queer/Questioning, and Asexual)

image is from here

Dear Queer Community,

It seems to me there's kind of a general culture online of throwing around of hateful and disrespectful speech, particularly if not uniquely in the queer blogosphere. I see this in many blogs which I won't name in part because there are too many to name. That said, the list isn't uncountable. It's a definite number--perhaps growing, perhaps not. But what I'm seeing is a rather nasty, almost compulsively snarky, and generally unconstructive way of engaging that seems to do little more than demonstrate that yes, we can insult each other and treat each other in emotionally harmful ways, while never really engaging in meaningful dialogue and respectfully agreeing to disagree.

I also find that our online blogging community both is and is not a voice for the offline community. After checking this out with several people in our community as citizens and activists, what I find is that many of the terms we use to divide ourselves up, to fuel tensions and deepen disagreements do not exist offline in general discourse. This means one of three things:

--the realities we discuss here are not relevant to the lives of people who do not blog, or
--what we discuss does not reflect actual lived life of most LBGTIQA people, or
--how we discuss things is elitist and removed from how people offline speak of their lives and their struggles

I think particular environments are likely to creating their own ways of being and doing things. And in the blogging world, it seems, being snarky, nasty, mean, and hateful is too often held as both acceptable and a worthwhile endeavor.While it may benefit a few individuals to write about other groups of people in demeaning and grossly stereotypical ways, I wonder what the effect is generally on our capacity to care about one another or at least see one another as full human beings.

I hold out little hope that white het men will "come around" and care about the concerns radical activists working to end male and white supremacy, and Western corporate tyranny, and U.S. militarism-as-foreign-policy. I want them to get it and challenge one another accordingly. But I don't have much hope for that. The levels of protections and privileges, the forms of power and the range of entitlements, that WHM possess and maintain, are so encouraging of living in denial about what everyone who isn't a WHM experiences. The denials is a consequence of not experiencing what most people around the world experience.

If you are not raped, or your body isn't socially targeted for rape, and your gender isn't targeted for rape, how are you to know what it feels like to hear that another woman has been raped? How are you to register "rape" as a form of gendered terrorism that men commit disproportionately and intentionally against women and girls? If  you are white, how are you to know the forms of invisibility and stigma people of color carry within them that are inflicted and maintained by white society?

What people raised with male privileges (however modified they might be by other factors), don't generally acknowledge, is the degree to which they shape the behavior of the people with them. I find the same dynamic operating among whites: willful denial of privileges based on race.

What I see in our community is men and males who (intentionally or not) disrespect and hurt women--lesbians and women who are not lesbian--without regard for the effect, except to take pleasure when the effect is damaging to women.What I have observed is gay men, bisexual men, trans men, and trans women raised with male privileges, discounting women's experience as not sufficiently real or valid to take seriously. Or to cause one to make changes in one's own male-privileged and/or misogynistic behavior.

I would say that white racism, male supremacy, and an attachment to the values of corporate capitalism are three forces that combine to make our community one more place where many women are not safe from abuse and harassment. I see this harassment and abuse online, on blogs that seem to think that radical feminists--the few they name--are able to inflict oppressive harm systematically against some in our community the way that men do. To me, that's utter nonsense. How, structurally, would that even be possible? How could that happen systemically, when radical feminists aren't in charge of any dominant systems? Men and males are in charge, not women, not females. And in the West, whites are in charge--not people of color.

Unowned and irresponsible use of white and male privileges are two things I see being acted out on blogs. Gay men disrespect women, lesbian or not, and male-privileged people, trans or not, disrespect radical lesbian feminists--the few they name or believe they know.

I have yet to see one book written by a radical lesbian feminist responsibly and respectfully engaged with. Not one. Why is that? I see writings by men engaged with as if the author was a person deserving of respect and regard. Whole academic disciplines are organised around the ideas and ideologies of men, too often white men. But when the author, the historian, the social and cultural critic, the activist, is a lesbian-identified woman who is not transgender or transsexual, there is not such engagement or care to understand the meaning of the work.

I welcome someone linking me to even one gay male-privileged, bi male-privileged, or trans male-privileged blogger who responsibly, thoughtfully, carefully, respectfully analyses and engages with just one book written by a radical lesbian feminist. Just one. Or with just one activist who is a radical lesbian feminist. Just one. Because I'm beginning to wonder whether anyone who is not a radical lesbian feminist is even capable of doing this. I mean emotionally and intellectually capable. I mean spiritually and politically capable. I have "virtually" no evidence of such engagement happening. And I believe that ought to be a concern for all of us. Because radical lesbian feminism is one of the most pro-liberatory and intentionally anti-status quo movements to rise out of our community, or one portion of it. I know many lesbians do not identify as queer or feel a part of queer community. But het male society does locate lesbians of any political affiliation or identity as "who is queer", and we are defined, often enough, by our oppressors.

Why won't non-lesbian, non-feminist, non-radical people engage responsible and respectfully with radical lesbian feminist authors and activists? I'd like someone to explain why without being anti-feminist, misogynistic, or arrogantly male supremacist when doing so.

Yours in the struggle,

Julian

What Jared Loughner did--how is that different from what the U.S. military and Corporate Conservative thugs do every day?

mug shot of mass murderer Jared Loughner is from here

If Jared Loughner, a white het male U.S citizen, had successfully entered the U.S. armed services, and had he opened fire on a few Afghan or Iraqi men, raping some women before or after, he might be getting a Congressional Medal of Honor. He wouldn't be considered insane for doing so, and he wouldn't be called "evil". But he didn't. He opposed both U.S. wars as international war crimes according to the articles of the Geneva Convention and he made disrespectful comments about "God". Those are some of our soulless and thoroughly corrupt pro-war mass media's favorite clues that someone might be insane. His whiteness and maleness will not be seen as clues. If he were Black, Muslim, and male, he'd be regarded not as a killer or a gunman, but as a terrorist. It takes a lot for a U.S. white man, Christian or not, to be termed a terrorist. It takes very little for a Black, Brown, or Muslim man to be regarded as such.

The media has a story to tell--a single story, of how GREAT the U.S. is, and how it can overcome adversity, such as threats and overt acts of terrorism it sociopathically doesn't see itself perpetrating. We are reminded of a false truth so often that one has to wonder what would happen if the media stopped pummeling us with this propaganda for even one hour. Here is that simple and false truth: "the U.S. is good".

We are encouraged tonight to "be better" by President Obama. "Only a more civil and honest public discourse" can show respect to the white people who are slain and injured, we are told. Only? "We may not be able to stop evil in the world", the President reminds us, which is coded language meaning, "We might need to war against Asia for another seventy years". How about President Obama, and the Republican-led Houses stopping the mass production of fire arms, weapons of war, the invading and occupying of foreign countries, and the ceasing of training of poor people, disproportionately of color, to be paid and PTSD-afflicted killers for a country as evil as any the Earth has known?

President Obama tells us, "We should do everything we can do to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations!" He is speaking of a kind of false innocence he is assuming children have, willfully ignoring how many children are molested and raped by the age of puberty; ignoring how many children gain access to pornography through their parent's computers, or, in the olden days, through their fathers' pornography magazine collection, never stashed away well enough; ignoring how children absorb early the way their care-givers speak about "immigrants", "foreigners", "enemies", and "terrorists" often pretending the terms are interchangeable. (Never mind that Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, M. D. Chapman, and Jared Loughner, and thousands of unnamed rapists of American Indian women are white het men, documented-while-palien U.S. citizens, and killers and terrorists.)

Given that the government and media tell us we should expect to continue to wage war against Black and Brown people, against Asians for the last many decades, against Indigenous people for the last several hundred years, against women across race, through to this day and well into tomorrow.

A few white people lost their lives and others were seriously injured. My heart goes out to the loved ones, family and friends, of those who were hurt or killed by Jared Loughner, including federal judge John Roll, 63; and Christina Taylor Green, age 9 (born Sept. 11, 2001), a softball player invited along to the meeting as a treat by a neighbor; Rep. Giffords' aide Gabe Zimmerman, 30; Dorothy Murray, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and Phyllis Scheck, 79.

One person almost lost her life because she was a woman with some pro-woman political stances, such as being pro-Choice: defending the rights of individual women to determine whether or not they may seek and obtain an abortion to terminate an welcomed pregnancy, including those unwelcomed by a brother or father's incest and a boyfriend or husband's rape. Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords will be in the news as a survivor of a "lone wolf" madman, but the media won't focus on the mass murderer as a white het male misogynist or anti-feminist who specifically wanted the "b-word" to "die", and who was frustrated about his dating life. He won't be called "white" and "heterosexual" because those terms don't carry stigma in the U.S. Instead, he'll be called "a troubled young man" who occupied "a very dark world". "Dark" is the important term, as it reinforces whiteness and lightness as good, and blackness and darkness with evil.

What the corporate media won't tell you is that Jared Loughner's personality was not quite as sociopathic as any U.S. mega-corporations's practices and that of their CEOs and COOs, the U.S. military's leaders and operations, or the long-standing personality of the U.S. government. For more, please see The Corporation.

What the U.S. media exists to do is NOT focus on THE PROBLEM, and instead distract us from THE PROBLEM with relatively minor--however tragic and horrific--incidents. That over a half of a million Haitians have been injured or killed since the White-Man-Made disaster one year ago. You'd think the on-going crisis would warrant more air-time today than what happened in Tucson, AZ.

But one white person, especially if U.S. (and especially if male), has always been worth more than a few dozen thousand lives of people of color. Just note how we regard white U.S. soldiers who die, compared to Central Asian women who die in our gendered and raced wars against them, to occupy and control their land the way white het men seek to occupy and control women across race and region.

How many times has the news media alerted us, regionally or nationally, of a new U.S. casualty of one of our corrupt, racist, empire-strengthening wars against Asia? How many deaths of individuals from Iraq or Afghanistan--non-combatants, civilians, children, women, men, have we heard reported as if their lives matters as much as one U.S. rich white het man? When will those wealthy Corporate Conservative Christian white men stop  committing evil against women and children, globally, including by not doing a damn thing to end human trafficking or poverty?

I am listening to a president speak who will never admit to the sociopathic horrors he oversees, who predicts all evil to continue. He and the newly elected Republican thugs will continue to protect and defend U.S. and Western white het male supremacy, the white right to commit genocide and men's right to rape women, in part through corporately controlled exploitation and possession of women-as-sexxx-things. He and the elected Democrats and Republicans to both Houses will continue to perpetrate this and more atrocity by any means necessary. This will not be reported to you on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, or Comedy Central.

There has never been anything civil about what the U.S. government and corporate media do to poor people of color, globally. The U.S. media and military's leaders and spokespeople have never been honest about what the U.S. government and giant corporations exist to do. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians died and continue to die, Haitian and non-Haitian women are raped and continue to be raped, because of the past and present actions of the U.S. government, European governments, and white male capitalist pimps and greed-mongers. Let's start with that bit of honesty and see if we can "be better".

Mass Rapes, Torture, Executions, Detention, Disappearance, Discrimination against women, lesbians and gay men, people with disabilities, the elderly, migrants, "foreigners", Black, Brown, and Indigenous People, and an Erosion of Human Rights in Democratic Societies is the Rule, not the Exception

What follows is from Voice of America News. Please click on the title to link back. I offer commentary in bold and brackets in the text.

Human Rights Violations the Rule Not Exception in 2010

Lisa Schlein | Geneva 16 December 2010

UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay (file photo)

Human rights violations were the rule rather than the exception in 2010.  [And this has been the case for the last 500 years, with 2010 being no exception. The issue, as always, is this: Who or what government counts as a terrorist, and what counts as terrorism and a violation of human rights?] The United Nations says crimes such as mass rapes [not to mention individualised rapes which are also terroristic against women as a class], torture, extra-judicial executions, arbitrary detention, disappearances remain widespread throughout the world.  Even [corporately controlled quasi-]democratic societies are experiencing an erosion of human rights due to the so-called war on terror and growing xenophobia. [Consider this: which of the following is actually "a war on terror" and which is the perpetration of terrorism? And how do you distinguish the two? Is it by the number of humans who are terrified? Which generates more terror? First World genocide against the Fourth World or Indigenist activism to combat corporate-militarised invasion and occupation of Native Lands? Men's war on women or feminist activism to stop it? And, if three thousand U.S.ers and two buildings are destroyed in an act of terrorism, the U.S. response to invade and occupy two countries in Central Asia is seen as an appropriate response by the U.S. government. Does that mean that when the U.S. government murders hundreds of thousands of people, and destroys thousands of buildings, Afghanistan or Iraq invading and occupying the U.S. for a half dozen or more years would not be terrorism but instead would be the appropriate thing to do?]

[...] U.N. Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay is capping off a turbulent year by celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Throughout the past 62 years, the Declaration has acted as a guide for human-rights values and a beacon of hope for millions of oppressed and abused people. [And it has been routinely, arrogantly, and flagrantly ignored or rejected by many nations in the West, including, especially, the U.S.]

She marks its achievements on Human Rights Day by honoring the hundreds of thousands of human-rights defenders who speak up against discrimination, often at great cost to themselves and to their loved ones. [And the retaliation for speaking out doesn't just impact individuals, although it certainly does do that. Speaking truth to power, and trying to hold brutal governments and corporations accountable also causes additional retaliatory distress and devastation to whole groups and classes of people, such as Indigenous people, Black and Brown people, and women across race, region, and class.]
"While combating discrimination and other important human rights causes, they themselves are often subject to discrimination," she said. "In fact, every year, thousands of human-rights defenders are harassed, abused, unjustly detained and even murdered." [And routinely murdered.]

Geneva Director for Human Rights Watch, Julie de Rivero says it is hard to say whether the situation of human rights now is better or worse than in previous years.  [We can at least conclude this: the rich are richer and more destructive. There's more rape and slavery of girls and women now than ever before.] But it is possible to detect certain patterns. [I'd identify the patterns as specifically this: Christian white het male supremacist. I wonder why no one else does.]

One of these, she says, is impunity for major violations. [Such as the relative impunity to any white- and male-dominated country for global violations of humans, non-human animals, and other life including to the Earth. Such as the relative impunity of the white het male supremacist Christian Churches who have committed child-rape, promoted patriarchal control of women by men; promoted heterosexist practices; lesbian self-hatred, gay self-hatred; promoted and conducted physical, sexual, and spiritual violations of Indigenous children across North America and beyond. Such as the relative impunity of corporate pimps raping and trafficking women. Such as the relative impunity of men who batter women. Such as the relative impunity of husbands who rape women. Such as the procurers who rape women in systems of prostitution. Such as fathers and father-figures and male relatives who, more than twice as often as abusing boys, incest their daughters or other girls in the family. Such as the complete impunity of U.S. white men who rape Indigenous women. But...] She gives Sri Lanka as an example.

"We saw the war end in Sri Lanka, but at a very high cost for civilians that were caught in indiscriminate fire by both sides," said Julie de Rivero. "And, yet, no accountability for war crimes in that country…And last of all, I would say the Bush era cases of torture that were committed under the guise of the war on terror that have remained unaccounted for and for which there is still impunity." [There is never any form of accountability for the war crimes, corporate and other economic crimes, non-war military crimes, anti-woman crimes, anti-queer crimes, racist crimes, genocidal crimes, and ecocidal crimes committed by the U.S. against any other country, nation, tribe, or people.]

De Rivero says the war on terror [but not on U.S. terrorism] and heightened concern for national security are leading to a further erosion of human-rights values, even in democratic societies.  She says the same fears are increasing xenophobic sentiments in European countries. [Translation: this means that white het male-ruled Europe is moving in a fascistically racist/misogynist direction.]

She says another worrying trend is sexual violence against women, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. [The rape of women and girls by men is not, in any reasonable sense of the term, a "trend" nor is it, in any way, limited to the DRC, even while the gross frequency of terroristic rape in the DRC is a particular atrocity. Something that has been going on for millennia cannot be termed "a trend". Or, if that's the case, then over the last 500 years there's been a growing trend of European-descended Christian white het men taking over the Earth and destroying as much of it as possible. The highlighting of rape in one country in Africa without noting how it has been taught to many males across centuries by European men is, to me, racist and misogynistic. This is not to say that European men invented rape. It is to say European men globalised it as a form of terrorism of women and girls.]

"The scale of the phenomenon, I think, always compels us to focus on this particular situation because rape has been so normalized as a weapon of war in that country [and as a weapon of men's war against women in hundreds of countries] that it is shocking and the devastation that it causes is incredible in the lives of individuals and the community," she said. [The global community of womankind.]

"I think you have certain human rights violations that just continue year after year," said Rupert Colville. [Like rape. Like battery. Like trafficking. Like sexual and wage slavery. Like poverty. Like famine. Like loss of access to clean water or to water at all due to damming, such as in Borneo.]

Rupert Colville is Spokes[person] for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

"You get some progress and then you get backsliding on something like torture," he said. "Almost all states have laws that prohibit torture and declare it a crime.  And, yet many states are still practicing it and many States do not prosecute those who commit it."

He says impunity for a whole range of crimes is a major concern, as is discrimination.

"Discrimination [and terrorism] against women, discrimination [and terrorism] against homosexuals, discrimination [and terrorism] against people with disabilities, the elderly, many, many groups - minorities, indigenous peoples," [against whom the problem is spiritual, cultural, sexual, and physical genocide, not only discrimination] said Colville. "So, that is a constant theme really on every continent, including in the developed countries, [especially in and by the CRAP-developed countries] where I think the treatment of migrants [and immigrants if they aren't Christian and white] or foreigners [or people who are returning to land that was stolen from them by "foreignors"] has clearly deteriorated in the past decade or so."

Colville notes the wheels of justice often grind slowly. [Because they are principally controlled by Westerners, Global Northerners, whites, heterosexuals, and last but not least: men.]  He says it can take years for the victims to get redress, but it does happen. [Not in the case of Black people, Brown people, Indigenous people, and women across race. Not in the case of the poor or the people of the Third World. Not by the non-human animals, plant life, seas, atmosphere, and the Earth as a whole system of Life. Can he point to any substantive redress achieved by and for any of those populations or places?]

"As we have seen, there is Chile and Argentina for example," he said. "You do not need to give up hope.  [As Derrick Jensen often notes, hope is not primarily what is needed. Effective oppression-ending systems of full accountability and the complete composting of CRAP is what is needed.] Twenty-thirty years down the line, people still are being brought to court and charged with serious crimes. [That's a pitiful example of justice, and again, "redress" is not primarily what is needed. The ending of all forms of gross exploitation, human violation, and the destruction of Earth is. Poor people cannot sue. Most trauma survivors cannot or will not sue. The Earth cannot sue Western/Global Northern governments, although it will eventually consume them all.] You still see people being brought to courts for crimes during World War II. [This is a classic example of using exceptional cases being presented as if they can be anything other than that.] So, that perhaps is the strength of the system. [No. Wrong. The fact that these cases will always only be exceptions to the rules proves that it is, in fact, the weakness of the system, if "strength" means effectively standing for, creating, and maintaining human rights.] It is that with these very serious crimes there is no statute of limitations. [Well, individual survivors do die.] Circumstances do change and people who think they are actively immune to justice sometimes find that is not actually the case in the long term." [I await this being the case with male supremacist perpetrators of misogynist violence. As yet, I see no evidence of  circumstances substantively changing for girls and women globally.]

The efforts of people who fight for human rights are supported by a body of international human rights law. [This is, tragically, more theoretical than experiential.]

Nine core international human-rights treaties lay out the rights and protections afforded individuals against specific violations.  They specify the obligations and responsibilities of States toward their citizens. [And they, alone, cannot stop States, governments, nations, corporations, and other perpetrators of human rights violations from ENDING the abuses and the crimes.]

Laws are no guarantee of good behavior. [No. But they are frequently a guarantor of very bad behavior--such as the laws that allow corporations to exist at all, let alone avoid paying taxes and being accountable to the abuses they perpetrate.] But states that have signed  treaties are more likely to be persuaded to implement them.  [This is not an adequate tool for achieving justice and liberation. Making patriarchal social organisation illegal and actionable, the pimping and procuring of girls and women illegal and actionable, making militarisation of genocidal First World governments illegal and actionable, and economic globalisation illegal and actionable, and making corporations an illegal entity would be a start. Why won't the UN acknowledge this?]

*          *          * 

Julian's note: I sent this blog post's URL to the UNwatch.org. I await their reply.

The White Queer Condundrum

image of Dan Savage and the U.S. flag is from here

It seems to me that if white queer activists are to move forward, we must do so by agreeing on a some basic political realities: that our oppression is bound up with the oppression of people of color across sexuality; that our oppression is a product of misogyny and other patriarchal values; and if we take white and male supremacy seriously as two interwoven ideologies that are acted out against all of us who are not white, men, and het, then we'd form a rather large base of resistance against the forces committing the racist heteropatriarchal atrocities against us, including gynocide and genocide.

What would have to happen is that white gay men with class privilege would have to stop trying to reach the pinnacle of social-economic-political-structural success, and be willing instead to assess the cost to others of having those privileges and organising to achieve them. If white gay men succeed in obtaining all the rights and entitlements of white het men, then they become as much the oppressor of girls and women of all colors and all sexualities as white het men, do they not?

If whites queer organisations don't examine and challenge how their white and male privileges are shaping their political agendas and projects--specifically, how they are classist, misogynistic, and racist, as well as anti-Indigenist and ecocidal, then whose responsibility is it to challenge them to be more accountable to those they oppress?

My problem with some contemporary political discourse is that once a group is defined primarily as "oppressed" or "without some form of privileges" (you know who you are), that means they ought not be challenged at all on the privileges they do have. Since when has that been a code of responsible political conduct? That has never been part of the radical ethics I've most valued. All my adult life, gay political agendas have been interrogated (most consistently by lesbian feminists). But so too have lesbian politics. So too have white-led and white-majority political organisations; so too have the agendas and values of queer class-privileged people. So too have Black liberation groups. So too have anti-war movements. No group in the last sixty years has gotten a break from this level of political interrogation.

Why should any group with some structural privileges be able to be exempt from direct accountability to the ways they are perpetuating and perpetrating genocide and gynocide?

A case in point:
What I see a lot of online in the blogosphere is non-trans progressive to liberal women being challenged by a few trans folks to first own and then eliminate their transphobia; I see some liberal and progressive non-trans women be very careful to own their cis gender privileges and to work to eliminate them or at least be responsible for them. I see no such similar challenge by those trans people directed at men on men's blogs. Regardless of political persuasion. Men, it appears to me, and anti-feminists generally, get a pass, for some strange reason. And what I also see is that when any non-trans woman calls out the male privileges of some trans people, those women are systematically silenced and shunned. They are not respectfully engaged. They are not regarded as people who might actually know when and where male supremacy lives and breathes--down non-trans women's backs. Non-trans women are cast as oppressors, not the oppressed. And trans people are cast as only oppressed, and not ever oppressors. That's not a bandwagon I'm leaping onto any time soon, because the blatant misogyny of it ought to make everyone take notice and protest, including trans folks who are also discriminated against because of misogyny and male supremacy.

I trust radical lesbian feminists to know about and be able to accurately name male privilege and practice, among other oppressive realities. And while some of the insults that go around and around on the blogosphere against all groups are indeed hurtful and sometimes degrading, and ought not be considered non-hurtful, at some point those of us with past or present male privileges need to be responsible for and with them, even if we are oppressed in some ways. And the way to be responsible is not to simplistically reject the analysis of radical lesbian feminists--because there is disagreement on one issue, for example.

That most contemporary white queer activists, particularly and especially spokespeople representing gay men, liberal queers, and trans people, view Mary Daly with more contempt and discuss her with more disrespect that is aimed at liberal queer activists whose agenda is implicitly gynocidal and genocidal. This is something that needs to be called out as pure misogyny and anti-feminism. The same holds true for gross condemnation by some white trans people and white gay men of Sheila Jeffreys.

Daly and Jeffreys are two of the most important radical lesbian feminist theorists and writers of the last forty years. This isn't to say each woman didn't or doesn't have privileges. This isn't to say those privileges ought not be called out. But their work ought to be engaged with sustantively and respectfully, in my view, using Lorde's letter to Daly as a prime example of how to do exactly that.

Audre Lorde calling out Mary Daly's racism was NOT used by Lorde as an opportunity to bash radical feminism--or Mary Daly; it was an taken as an opportunity to strengthen radical feminism. Far too many gay male and trans activists don't respect radical feminism, lesbian or not. This is a sign to me that there's a deep-seated male supremacist politic and contempt for non-trans women lurking perhaps not terribly far from the surface. And it is grossly misogynistic. And it is terribly heteropatriarchal.

The white queer community must engage responsibly and respectfully with Jeffreys' book Unpacking Queer Politics, for example. It is far and away the best book on the subject I've seen (please let me know if there's any better analysis of what is liberal and male supremacist about contemporary Western/white queer politics). What I see across the blogosphere, from MRA sites to trans sites, is that not only is the book rejected as ludicrous and oppressive, but all of Jeffreys' work is as well.

I hold some critiques of Jeffreys' work as I do about everyone's work. But to not be willing to engage with it except to dismiss it as "man-hating" or "transphobic" is unacceptable political practice, if you call yourself progressive or radical. It is predictably neoLiberal and neo-Conservative behavior. I expect MRA sites to reject all radical feminist writing as "oppressive" (to--cough--men). Men deny patriarchy because men benefit from it, as a class. And at this point I expect liberal queer folks to reject all radical feminist writings as "not helpful" because the liberal queer project hasn't been to uproot white het male supremacy for many decades. White queer politic work, by and large, only seeks to challenge the ways that the het part leaves some privileged queer people outside the realm of having het privilege. This agenda is apparent in causes like being able to join the army to being able to marry. That political work does nothing to end genocide and gynocide, or even to expose the deadly dynamics of white and male supremacy. It is liberal reform work.

How many girl-slaves do their have to be in the world for white queer activists to take up sexual trafficking as "our" issue? How many Indigenous girls need to be lost to their heritage? How many poor girls have to endure the indignities and illness that comes with the kind of poverty corporate capitalism and globalisation both maintain and intensify?

Within the last day or so, the white het men who are the richest in the U.S. won the right to not have their first ten million dollars taxed at all if they pass it on to their children or other heirs. Not taxed at all. And the rest gets taxed at about 33%. Why is the tax rate for the richest 5% comparable to that of the middle class when the rich earn about 80% of all earnings in this country and the remaining 20% of earned income is expected to house, feed, educate, clothe, and supply medical care to the bottom 95% of the population? Do the math: that means the rich can only get richer, even when they drive their companies into the ground through inept or corrupt management.

And the rich are not going to pay more in taxes because President Obama worked out a deal with the greedy WHM supremacist criminals and thieves to keep more of what they earn, that will not create anything at all except more rich Western WHM supremacy.

When will white queer organisations make the deadly connections between corporate capitalism and heterosexism? Between anti-Indigenism and individualism? Between prostitution, militarism, and marriage as interlinking systems and institutions that are necessarily misogynistic and genocidal?

I'm asking. And I would like some of the representatives of white queer agendas, such as Dan Savage, to please explain to me what is respectable or humane about liberal political work.

Should Men's Violence Against Women in the UK be understood as Hate Crime?

image is from here

As someone who I consider to be one of two UK correspondents here at A.R.P. , Jennifer Drew, has noted to me many times, "men" is almost always left out of expressions like "violence against women". Now, granted, do we really think "ending violence against women" means, for example, "ending women's violence against women" or "children's violence against women"? No. (Unless you consider men to be children.) But it is part of the master plan Master's Plan is to invisibilise the perpetrators of oppressor-crime, whether they be rich, white, globally Western, globally Northern, non-Indigenous, het, or male. So, we are left with this question, one which I have asked myself many, many times in reference to North America. I am pretty much on the same page as Julie, here. If a crime is misogynistic, it is, by definition, a hate crime, although not in the legal sense... yet. Another issue fought for by feminist activists is to have the effects of violence be what determines their categorisation, over and beyond the intentions of the perpetrators.Because, as we all know, men claim to do violence to women for all kinds of reasons--most especially because the men "love" the women, and also because those women asked for it, consented to it, didn't run out of the house after the first incident, didn't call the police, didn't say "NO!" enough times, etc.

Any understandings made legal, which highlight the reality of male supremacy as a social-political form of terrorism by men against women and others seen as womanly, is socially beneficial, humane, and in the service to liberation for this oppressed group as long as such laws name male supremacy or patriarchy as one of several social conditions in which women live and die. I very much appreciate Julie Long's discussion below.

I'll state that I'm opposed to non-survivors of female genital cutting using the term female g*n*t*l m*t*l*t**n--without the asterisks, as, to my understanding, it is not appreciated or welcomed by many survivors of involuntary female genital cutting/surgery. The term, in the white, white West, conjures a kind of practice that only "they" do--those darker people from darker continents or countries (or whatever they are*). This is not only inaccurate, but it perpetuates a white supremacist mythology about the "barbarism" of darker-skinned people that is not evidenced if we look at who commits the most barbaric acts against women and girls across race, ethnicity, and region. Overwhelmingly, historically and cross-culturally, in the last 500 years, anyway, that group is Western/white heterosexual men. That this is rarely-to-never specified when discussing global violence is yet another example of how perpetrating groups, particularly when Western, male, white, and heterosexual, are protected in speech, through social custom, by religion, and also in law.

*Western whites, for an allegedly and self-identified well-educated group, remain speciously ignorant about what constitutes a country and a continent, unless it is dominated and occupied by whites. I'll do a separate post on this.

Warning: graphic descriptions of men's violence against women are contained in the article below. It is one of those really disturbing articles that feels to me to be a bit sensationalistic and exploitive of the victims, but that's probably because Western white male supremacy notoriously sensationalises and exploits any and all violence against women, especially men's. That said, I find it a compelling piece of political analytic writing.

Should violence against women in the UK be seen as hate crime?

Julia Long, 30 November 2010

Woman-hating continues to occupy a central and too-often unrecognised and unchallenged position within our culture. Julia Long argues that approaches to stop such violence will fail unless they also address issues of endemic cultural misogyny

About the author
Dr Julia Long is a feminist activist and academic. She is active with the London Feminist Network, co-organising the annual national UK ‘Reclaim the Night’ march, and with OBJECT, a UK-based group which campaigns against sex object culture

On 25 February 2008, Levi Bellfield was convicted in the British courts of the murders of two young women, Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange, and the attempted murder of a third, Kate Sheedy, whom he had run over repeatedly, leaving her with extensive and horrific injuries. Prior to these convictions, Bellfield had faced other charges of abduction, false imprisonment and attempted murder of women, and in 2010 he was charged with the abduction and murder of thirteen-year-old Amanda Dowler. Police believe that he may be linked to a dozen further crimes against women in West London, and former partners testify to being beaten and raped by Bellfield.

Following his trial and conviction, police and media reports spoke of Bellfield’s ‘hatred’ and ‘intense loathing’ of women; a former girlfriend described how he had confessed that he would wait in alleyways wanting to "hurt, kill, stab or rape women" and told of how she had discovered pornographic pictures on which Bellfield had slashed the faces of blonde models. Bellfield had a reputation for sexually harassing under-age girls, pestering them from a van with blacked-out windows in which he kept a mattress, blankets and a baseball bat.

If Bellfield’s hate-motivated violence had been directed at victims on the basis of their perceived race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity, his crimes would clearly have been recognised as hate crimes. However, under UK legislation, women as a group are not recognised as a ‘hate crime’ identity category. What are the implications of this? And would it be desirable for violence against women to be recognised as a form of hate crime?

Feminist understandings of violence against women

Unlike the murders carried out by Bellfield, most acts of violence against women are perpetrated by men known to the victim. According to the End Violence Against Women Coalition: ‘Each year across the UK 3 million women experience violence, and there are many more living with the legacies of abuse experienced in the past. In the UK it includes: domestic violence, rape and sexual violence, sexual harassment, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, crimes in the name of honour, trafficking and sexual exploitation. It is mostly committed by men that women know or are in a close relationship with’. Of the 1,000 women who are subjected to rape or attempted rape each week, most are attacked by men they know, whether as partners, friends or acquaintances. One in four UK women have been affected by domestic violence and according to the Department of Health two women are killed each week by a violent male partner or ex-partner.

Recognition of violence against women as a widespread and serious issue is attributable to four decades of feminist activism, research and scholarship. Feminist campaigns have put violence against women on the political agenda; activists have set up services for victims and brought about important changes in how the criminal justice system deals with violence against women. One of the most important achievements of feminism has been to locate patriarchal power, gender inequality and misogyny at the heart of all forms of violence against women. Feminists make connections between individual acts of rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence and femicide, the broader context of women’s ongoing inequality, and a culture which variously normalises, trivialises or glamorises violence against women. In making these connections, second wave, radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller [*] argued that violence against women occurs within a misogynistic culture, underpinned, enabled and sustained by patriarchal power relations.

However, the struggle for these insights to influence mainstream debates and attitudes to violence against women is ongoing. Within mainstream culture, media, politics and the legal system, violence against women continues to be viewed primarily as a personal, individualised issue. Incidents of violence tend to be seen as either the actions of ‘monsters’ or ‘psychopaths’ (as in the case of Bellfield); the result of unfortunate domestic disputes or choice of spouse; or as attributable to negligence on the part of the woman herself - her clothing, her location, her behaviour, whether she had consumed alcohol. In the UK, considerations of patriarchy only tend to enter mainstream debates when the violence is perpetrated within minority ethnic communities, where it is then seen as evidence of ‘backward’ cultural attitudes to women.

Given that violence against women, in spite of its pervasiveness, continues to be constructed within mainstream discourses as a mainly individualised issue, it is pertinent to consider how feminist insights might best be brought to bear in order to transform debates on violence against women. Would including women as a category protected under hate crime legislation help to bring about a recognition of the systematic and generalised nature of violence against women, and highlight the crucial role of structural power relations between women and men?

Implications of UK hate crime legislation

• Hate crime is recognised as ‘different’ to other crime within the UK criminal justice system. According to the UK Home Office, it is ‘different’ because: hate crime targets people because of their identity. It is a form of discrimination that infringes human rights and keeps people from enjoying the full benefits of our society
• research has shown that hate crimes cause greater psychological harm than similar crimes without a motivation of prejudice
• hate crime creates fear in victims, groups and communities and encourages communities to turn on each other.

The nature and effects of hate crime means that it is seen as particularly serious: Section 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 imposes a duty on courts to increase the sentence for any offence aggravated by hostility based on the victim's sexual orientation or disability. Evidence of hostility based on disability, sexual orientation or presumed sexual orientation must be seen as something that makes the offence more serious. Similar provisions already exist in relation to race, resulting from The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry which also resulted in the imposition of minimum tariffs in relation to the sentencing of murderers motivated by hostility.

Violence against women as hate crime?

The British Home Office description of hate crime would seem to fit very well with crimes of violence against women, as is demonstrated by replacing ‘hate crime’ with ‘violence against women’ in the bullet points above: the resulting description neatly encapsulates several of the key feminist insights regarding the systematic nature and structural effects of violence against women. Similarly, a recognition of the particularly serious nature of these crimes when it comes to sentencing would also seem appropriate and desirable.

However, feminist campaigners have expressed reservations regarding the desirability of utilising a ‘hate crime’ approach. Firstly, hate crime legislation is generally designed to deal with ‘stranger’ or ‘outsider’ violence: violence from a person outside of one’s personal and social circles. Whilst this would obviously apply in cases like Bellfield described above, it is less useful in dealing with the majority of incidents of violence against women, where the perpetrator is likely to be a partner, ex-partner, acquaintance or friend. Campaigners believe that women victims would be unlikely to perceive these acts of violence as motivated by hate or prejudice. Activist Hilary McCollum doubts that defining violence against women and girls as hate crime would help its victims access services and redress: ‘Many people covered by the existing hate crime definition don’t readily identify their experiences with the term – ‘hate’ can feel too big a word, especially for crimes committed by people known to the victim’.

McCollum also voices concern at what she sees as the inadequacies of current hate crime legislation in addressing issues of intersectionality, and the depoliticising tendencies of the term ‘hate’. Without a full consideration and integration of power relations, McCollum argues, ‘hate crimes can be depoliticised as motivated by irrational prejudice, rather than domination, exclusion and control’. Other feminist campaigners express concerns that if violence against women was included alongside other hate crime categories, recognition of its specificities, scale and prevalence could be lost, and funding might consequently be jeopardised.

‘Hate crime’: a useful concept?

The reservations of feminist campaigners with regard to hate crime approaches highlight important inadequacies in the way that such approaches frame acts of violence based on structural inequalities. However, I would argue that the concept of hate crime does at least bring considerations of discrimination and the generalised effects of violence into the picture. The notion of hate crime facilitates and supports a recognition that inequalities and discrimination experienced by certain groups exist on a spectrum that ranges from racist, homophobic and disablist language, through discrimination in employment, goods and services, and ultimately to acts of violence and murder. So whilst the term has its problems, it does at least serve to make links between cultural attitudes, discrimination and acts of violence. What is necessary is a further re-framing of the issue in order to recognise that power and control are key motivations for violence against women and girls, and that individual acts of violence are supported by a context of structural inequality and cultural misogyny.

Returning to the Bellfield case mentioned at the beginning of this article, it should be noted that just three days prior to Bellfield’s conviction, two other men had been found guilty of murder. Steve Wright had murdered five young women in Ipswich, East Anglia, and Mark Dixie was convicted of murdering an eighteen year old woman, and then raping her while she was dead or dying. Both men had previous histories of violence against women. Speaking of all three cases, Kira Cochrane observed in The Guardian:

In each case, what comes through most strongly is just how open, violent and persistent the killer’s misogyny was, and how they were allowed to indulge it, and even boast of it, for years. The reports paint a picture of a society in which misogyny is taken as a given.
Whether violence against women is viewed as hate crime or not, it is evident that woman-hating continues to occupy a central and too-often unrecognised and unchallenged position within our culture, and that approaches to stop such violence will fail unless they also address issues of endemic cultural misogyny.



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[*] Julian's note: those two are white U.S. feminists. Many second wave radical feminists of color, of many ethnic backgrounds, from many regions around the world, have argued this as well, but in far more intersectionally responsible ways than has Brownmiller. Dworkin's work is more responsible in this regard. Radical feminist women of color more aptly note how white supremacy and capitalism, along with patriarchy, are key systems perpetrating violence against women, including by fueling and funding white men's violence against women of color. Susan Brownmiller's work, as far as I am concerned, is irresponsibly white supremacist and racist. This is not to say that her work is unimportant or ought not be read and respected for what it offers us by way of deep insights into men's violence against women as systemic and terroristic. It is to say she misuses racist stereotypes to make some of her points, particularly with regard to the myth of Black men raping white women and by disregarding the role Black women had in anti-lynching activism. For more on this, please see Angela Davis's work, *here*.

This blog exists to de-center the whiteness and redress the racism that typically permeates white historical analysis both of feminism and of men's violence against women. This blogger favors understanding, appreciating, and promoting the critical roles radical feminist women of color, and many other Asian, Black, Brown, and Indigenous have played in all justice movements, including against genocide, gynocide, and ecocide, while also honoring the many white women who have done amazing work to help us collectively understand and confront male supremacist atrocities and cultures.