Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• UN threatens to withdraw aid over policy of apartheid in Myanmar. They're taking the stance that by continuing to support the camps, they're effectively contributing to trapping people there.
  
• Buzzfeed Aus, How a queer woman took on a prominent conservative activist and won. This whole case makes me feel ill, but at least Moleta won.
  

Good News:

• Many thousands of academics and university staff: Thousands of university colleagues support LGBT+ rights – we won’t turn our backs now. Joint letter organised by Caroline Dodds Pennock and others, in response to more bile from Kathleen Stock (which ran in the Daily Mail, I believe, but I have only read it in screencaps).
  
• In a timely fashion, Blake Gutt and Alicia Spencer-Hall's Crowdsourced lexicon of trans and genderqueer studies terminology (primarily but not exclusively with premodernist scholars in mind) is now available in preprint copy.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Shannon Keating, (Buzzfeed US) The time I went on a lesbian cruise and it changed my life. This is a RIDE. It starts out as a weird mix of 'the writer was a guest of Olivia Cruises' and personal-navel gazing, takes a detour through uncomfortable-to-read recounts of transphobic comments made by some of the women on the boat, guns the accelerator through 'booze and dubious makeouts' and ends with a Wild Ride Whirlwind Romance With A Hot Older Butch. I'm could probably take or leave the first three parts, but damn, the fourth part is Impressive.
  
• Anna Spargo-Ryan, Karl. Web 2.0 internet intensity, catfishing, and feelings hangovers.
  
• Ruby Hamad (Meanjin Blog), Folau's fall is a story of whiteness
  

  Yes, it did seem at first that Folau had the backing of the ‘free speech’ and ‘anti-PC’ brigades. Sky News presenter Rita Panahi whined in her Herald Sun column that Folau was being persecuted for his Christian faith; Lyle Shelton shared a cartoon depicting Folau being burned at the stake by an angry feminist. This fueled progressive certainties that Folau was a one of the inner circle of elite conservatism, that he was at one with the privileged, that he was power and they were speaking truth to him.

  Meanwhile, Rugby Australia was doing all it could to distance itself from him—and that meant ensuring the public focus remained on his alleged violation of its social media policy. Any attempt to query—in a country that has seen prominent politicians and media commentators alike routinely scare-monger about Safe Schools and the supposedly slippery slope of marriage equality—why Folau’s comments were so particularly bad that he had to be the sole person sanctioned for them, was met with repetitive bleating about rules, contracts, agreements, and more rules. This societal obsession with rules is peculiar. For a nation of alleged larrikins, Australia seems to be unusually enamoured with following them––but only for certain people of course. This selective conformity serves a purpose: by fixating on these individual rules, we can ignore the structures that both give rise to them and that permit them to be so selectively applied.

  
  
• Rebecca M Jordan-Young and Katrina Karzakis (Scientific American Blog Network), 4 Myths About Testosterone
  

  Myth 4: These regulations are solely about T and performance. Scientific claims are central to this debate, but so is the broader context in which IAAF officials communicate their beliefs about women’s bodies. The vehicle for performance differences is supposed to be T but, as the IAAF has been forced repeatedly to defend the T regulations, it has revealed its concern lies less with the T level than with the source of the T.

  The IAAF has made this concern explicit by narrowing the group of women to whom the regulations apply. Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), the most common reason that women have naturally high T levels, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) were recently explicitly excluded from the 2019 regulations even when their levels exceed the threshold, though the IAAF has argued that women with PCOS and CAH derive “advantage” from high T.

  
  
• John B (The Queerness) Who do you think you are: the uncomfortable misogyny behind recent criticism of Victoria Beckham. I had no idea anyone was criticising her, but sure enough, they are.
  

Comments policy: Everything I said in the caveats to this post applies. I teach critical thinking for a living, but I'm not *your* teacher, and this blog is not a classroom. That means I don't have to abide by the fallacy of 'there's no such thing as a bad contribution to discussion'.