She can Parallel Park a Train

She's the Queen of Smarts. Not much else to say.

Just curious but have radfems/terfs ever actually caused any tangible harm to trans women or what?

Are…. are you actually kidding please tell me you are trying to be funny

It’s a legitimate question. I don’t at all support the trans exclusionary parts of radical feminism but from looking through a lot of radfem blogs I have really yet to see anywhere near the same amount of vitriol coming from them as I see coming from other trans people. To be honest I’ve seen more support then anything.

Look, I’m not having this fucking discussion. You should fucking know better. 

[depressingegocentric]

Heya, can I help here a bit? The harm that terfs do to trans women is very much real. Terfs pretty much say that trans women are not women. A lot of times I have seen them condone abuse and murder of trans women, I have seen instances where they themselves have tried to do horrible things to trans women.

[bloodyredbougiegold]

Yes we say transwomen aren’t women (b/c transwomen are male not female and woman = adult human female). But, no we absolutely DO NOT condone the abuse and murder of transwomen. Where are your reciepts proving that we have tried to do terrible things to transwomen?

[oceanicsteam]

Well for starters health care actually generally covered trans needs up until 1980, until Janice Raymond and company helped write the report which ended trans healthcare(sure, of course there were plenty of other people who were in agreement, namely social conservatives. But a report by a leftist academic feminist with the support of some like minded friends gave a great deal of credence to the policy change) This is far more destructive than violence against any one individual and it’s something that is now only starting to change. Then you have more modern ones, most notably Shelia Jefferys and Cathy Brenan who have even teamed up with hardcore conservative groups to oppose trans protection bills and in a few instances even harassed people in real life. Then you have your standard hate posts on twitter and shit. I’d say that’d be irrelevant but some people on here scrounge social media to find any awful post by a trans person among tens of thousands to prove that trans people are awful. But my favorite one actually goes back to the 70s(and Janice Raymond again), and notably this situation at the Olivia Records recording collective http://www.transadvocate.com/terf-violence-and-sandy-stone_n_14360.htm What I love is the fact that this is pre internet. These people didn’t write a stupid post on twitter, they actually sat down and took the time to write death threat letters

[appropriately-inappropriate]

Oh, this is just silly now. 

health care actually generally covered trans needs up until 1980, until Janice Raymond and company helped write the report which ended trans healthcare

Raymond was asked for salient quotes on her study; the actual research was done by Johns Hopkins. 

Let’s see who was actually responsible for this decision. His name is Paul McHugh, former Psychiatrist in Chief at Johns Hopkins. He says: 

We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery"—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

Oh, well. So you mean to tell me they stopped doing a medical procedure because they found that it didn’t improve quality of life for their patients? 

Well, then. That’s a little different. 

And what’s this tasty factoid here?

A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.

Oh, well, fuck! It’s almost like changing the physical appearance does nothing to treat the underlying disorder, and could, in fact, exacerbate it leading to a 20% increase in POST-transition suicidality. 

Oops. 

Moving along: 

a report by a leftist academic feminist with the support of some like minded friends gave a great deal of credence to the policy change

Really? Are you unfamiliar with the political climate in the 80s? 

The decade was marked by one of the hardest shifts to the right in modern history. Reagan was content to let hundreds of thousands of gay men literally die in the streets before he paid a single iota of attention to the fact that AIDS wasn’t a plague sent by an angry God but an epidemiological clusterfuck. 

I really don’t think that the political climate in the Reagan-era New Right were really paying a lot of attention to radical feminist scholars like Raymond. 

But nice try. 

As for TERF Hate, that’s an article by Cristan Williams for the TransAdvocate, and you don’t think that’s a little biased? 

Please, spare me. Olivia Records was an all-female collective that took money from the lesbian-feminist community to put on shows and create a lesbian record label. 

The fact that Stone was male and then used that same male privilege to access training which made them essential to the collective isn’t something to be brushed under the rug, and Stone did occupy a spot that a female–in the mandate of the group, keep in mind–could have occupied just as effectively. 

But here’s a fun quote from Williams: 

Sandy: The Gorgons was a group of women who wore cammo gear, shaved their heads and carried live weapons. We were told that when we got to town, they were going to kill me. Cristan: Wait, they said that they were going to KILL you if you came to Seattle? Sandy: Yes, but we kind of laughed about it. … Cristan: The sheer oppressive weight of this impending violence that was hanging over your head, that’s ready to drop upon you and the people you work with and care about at any moment… That had to feel like terrorism; it’s terror inducing. 

You know, it’s so funny they should talk about aggressive people carrying live weapons and paramilitary gear. 

Gee. Funny Williams should bring it up. 

And then Williams says: 

Wait, they said that they were going to KILL you

Like this is some big horrific event, and not something violent receipts​ gets every damn day from trans women aimed against feminists. I, for one, just delete them, but I once had a nationally ranked trans activist tell me they were going to put a bullet in me, and I’ve had trans women threaten to rape me, and threaten to kill me. 

So, unless Williams is willing to clutch her pearls on my account, I’m calling bullshit. 

Cristan: The sheer oppressive weight of this impending violence that was hanging over your head, that’s ready to drop upon you and the people you work with and care about at any moment… That had to feel like terrorism; it’s terror inducing.

violenttransmalewitness and violent receipts​ are full of examples of the terror-inducing, “feels like terrorism” levels of hate and harassment trans women dish out online and in person.

So, good to know Williams agrees that what trans activists are doing to radical feminists is terrorism. 

scrounge social media to find any awful post by a trans person among tens of thousands to prove that trans people are awful.

Yeah, I didn’t really need to look that hard. There was no scrounging. It’s like looking for grubs–kick any rock and you’ll find em. 

Then you say this: 

they actually sat down and took the time to write death threat letters

(Note: Below, Ms. Brennan is posting a letter she received in the mail)

So there’s that. 

Then again, there was also the time where a trans woman tried to shut down a Vancouver Rape Crisis shelter serving disenfranchised First Nations women in the Downtown East Side at the same time that they were all being killed by a serial killer… 

That’s worse than a death threat, since women actually did end up dead and abused as a result. 

Then there was the time trans activists picketed a memorial for Missing, Murdered and Massacred Women… 

Natalie Reed
11/19/2013

So… VANCOUVER TRANS PEEPS (and allies)… as many of you know Vancouver Rape Relief has invited Janice Raymond to speak at the Vancouver Public Library (presumably the downtown location) on November 30th, as an event memorializing the massacre at L’Ecole Polytechnique. Given VRR’s trans-exclusionist policies, history of trans-misogyny, ongoing support of transphobic feminism, dismissal of Kimberly Nixon, subsequent legal defense, and role in setting legal precedent that permits anti-trans discrimination in Canada, and Janice Raymond’s own history of extraordinary trans-misogyny and central role in the development of transphobia within feminism, we can’t really consider this coincidental or benign, nor can we assume the talk will simply be about L’Ecole Polytechnique, misogynistic violence or women in STEM fields.

In all likelihood, it will almost certainly be an openly cissexist, trans-misogynistic talk, probably based around arguing for trans-exclusionist policy to “protect” the “safety” of “womyn-born-womyn”.

Many folks are trying to prevent VPL from hosting the event, especially given that VPL’s own policies insist upon events being inclusive and respectful towards marginalized groups and identities (and IIRC, gender identity is specifically mentioned). *Hopefully* the talk being prevented from taking place at VPL is what will happen, or at least VPL inviting members of the trans community to respond / debate. BUT IF THE VRR / JANICE RAYMOND TALK PROCEEDS AS PLANNED… I would very much like if we could organize a counter-event to take place at VPL the same day (with or without explicit approval from VPL… library square’s status as public space should permit us to gather there regardless of prior approval- at least long enough to stage the response event- as long as we aren’t being destructive or harassing anyone or anything).

I was thinking of organizing speakers to talk on four topics that would serve as a useful counter-point to the trans-misogyny of Vancouver Rape Relief and Janice Raymond:

1) The consequences of trans-exclusionist policy, and/or trans people being unable to safely access services like rape/abuse/DV support services, homeless and emergency shelters, sexual health services, police services, medical care, etc. …with a definite focus on the rape/abuse/DV stuff (I could take this up as a topic myself, if needed, based on my experiences as a trans rape survivor and my ongoing inability to find any suitable support or resources).

2) The consequences of transphobic, cissexist and trans-misogynistic feminism, as exemplified by writers like Janice Raymond, Sheila Jeffries, Mary Daly, etc., and the consequences of exclusion of or unwelcoming attitudes towards trans women in women’s spaces, organizations, communities, etc. (perhaps tilted towards trans women’s exclusion from feminist space and queer women’s space).

3) Trans-misogynistic violence (which can tie into TDoR and recent events).

4) How trans women are impacted by misogyny and misogynistic violence, like that of the L’Ecole Polytechnique shooting, and how trans-misogyny, transphobia, cissexism, etc interrelates with misogyny, patriarchy, etc.

I think these topics will make a compelling point (ideally to ppl who are there for the Raymond talk, or who have uncritically supported VRR in the past, or who are associated w/ VPL, or who are simply unaware of these issues)… particularly if our event manages to round up better attendance than the Raymond talk itself.

If interested in helping organize this event, or interested in speaking, or interested in helping out in any way at all, please please comment or message me or e-mail me at [email protected] Also, even just expressing interest in ATTENDING could help give a good idea of whether this works as an idea.

Hopefully none of this will be necessary, but given that it’s less than two weeks away, we should start organizing ASAP.

and that the organizer of said picket, Natalie Reed

was also banned from the University of Toronto for making violent threats against students and staff there. 

So, I see your “letter writing boohoo” and raise you the fucking picket of a memorial march for missing and murdered women. 

Unlike your buddies up there reblogging hearsay and “I heard a TERF said something mean about a puppy this one time”, I’m happy to provide the evidence to back my words up. 

Try doing the same next time. 

[radfem-chronicles]

Every radical feminist should have this post bookmarked and on hand the next time a genderist uses an appeal to emotion to silence her.

[sadfemradfem]

I constantly see people crying about how radical feminists “aligned themselves with conservatives” to hurt trans people or deny them healthcare or some other such nonsense, so it’s such a relief to see that get picked apart in such detail.  Next time some asshole talks about how callous and cruel they think radfems are, I’ll cite this and reply with a “boo-fuckin-hoo.” 

[gay-converse-boy-deactivated202]

People flipped their shit at me when I said that the trans community turns everything into a trans issue, but here it is perfectly exemplified in the cases of the Vancouver rape crisis centre and the memorial. Not only did First Nations women die, the trans community didn’t care. And what did they do in the case of the memorial? Picket it, and try to turn the issue of violence against females into - oh what a shock - violence against trans women.

Great job friends.

[guideonragingstars]

Before I had my mastectomy, I asked my partner at the time whether it felt strange. When they cut off your breasts, they start above the nipple and cut off everything down to the fold under your breast, like this. 

I wondered if it wouldn’t feel right to have two pieces of skin joined together that were originally different parts of your chest, whether you’d feel the transition naturally when you moved your hand over it or if it’d just feel like you skipped over a mass of missing skin.

They told me no, that it just felt normal. I didn’t realize until a few months ago that this wasn’t true for me. I didn’t really touch my chest much before then. At almost two years post op, I’ve regained probably all the sensation I’ll get, and let me tell you, it feels fucking awful. Not all the time. It doesn’t quite feel how I feared it would, that strange transition jump from top-of-the-breast to lower chest, but it doesn’t feel natural. The worst part is the nipples. They feel sore right now because I’m on my period, but it’s not the normal ache of period breasts. They feel like huge tender scabs, and they’re several inches above where they used to be. I can only stand the lightest touch on them before it becomes very unpleasant. Aesthetically, everything looks fine. I have probably a small A cup at this point, after going off T. A few years down the road once the incisions have lightened up a little more, you probably wouldn’t even be able to tell I had surgery. But it’s not the same, even if it looks normal. It will never be the same. 

I felt so disconnected from my body that I thought I had to go to such drastic lengths to feel “right”, but having surgery only taught me a whole new level of alienation. Feeling unnatural in your natural body is painful, but feeling unnatural in a body you recreated for the specific purpose of not feeling unnatural is a cruel irony. My body parts aren’t where they should be not because of some magical “brain map”, they aren’t where they should be because I put them there and I can’t take that back. 

[crashchaoscats-deactivated20200]

A big reason why there aren’t many resources for dysphoric people aside from transition is how health care providers and trans activists have created the treatment framework for dysphoria. They’ve chosen to privilege hormones and surgery as the standard treatment above all else. This certainly wasn’t inevitable. When clinics were setting up their procedures for treating dysphoric people they could have chosen to provide more treatments. Trans activists could’ve fought for a greater range of treatments. There could’ve been greater support in trans subcultures for finding ways to treat dysphoria that didn’t involve changing your body. Both groups could’ve put the time, energy and money into making sure transition was one option among many. They could have pushed for research looking for other ways to relieve dysphoria. . And they could’ve made sure there were exit plans and strategies in case transitioning didn’t work out. But that’s not what they did. Instead treatment for dysphoria is largely framed as treatment for trans and genderqueer people. Being dysphoric is equated with being trans. It’s assumed that if dysphoria is severe enough, the most viable treatment is transition and it’s assumed that once someone transitions they’re going to stay on that course. The doctors, therapists and other health care providers are partially motivated by money. They are, after all, selling people goods and services. Therapists could still make some money providing counseling to dysphoric people who don’t transition or detransition but surgeons and those who provide hormones are only going to make money and stay in business if people decide to change their bodies. They have an financial incentive to convince as many people to transition as possible. If this is their specialty than their career depends on it. Some of these people are purely in it for the money but others do really care about the people they’re treating and like to think of themselves as helping people. Once they get into providing these treatments, they also have an incentive to keep believing that what they’re doing is good and less incentive to question if the goods and service they’re providing are actually necessary or helpful or if they could in fact be doing harm. I don’t think it was ever especially likely that mainstream health care providers were going to provide alternative treatments since the most effective treatments for dysphoria I’ve found involve working through trauma and other patriarchal damage. The medical establishment is largely conservative, still dominated by straight white men and historically has been more interested in controlling and making money off of female bodies rather than actually working for our health and well-being. It tends to treat bodies in ways that reinforce rather than challenge the dominant power structure. And trauma is something our society is loath to touch or look at in general. If you look at the history of how our culture has “discovered” and dealt with trauma, you’ll see how some survivors and/or experts start speaking out and talking about living through heavy shit and what it does to people and inevitably there’s social backlash and denial. A lot of people, and especially people in power, don’t want to admit or believe that trauma is real because they don’t want to see how violent and oppressive this society is. It’s happened when people have tried to talk about rape, child sexual abuse and veterans suffering from PTSD. I’d say it’s happening now with detransitioned women talking about how trauma led us to transition and how transition itself was damaging. Trans activists have also chosen to focus on transitioning as the main treatment for dysphoria. Now a lot of them will give lip service to how you don’t have to transition to really be trans and different things work for different people, yadda, yadda, but really, from what I’ve seen as someone who spent a long time in the trans community, transition and transitioned people hold a very privileged place. You get status by changing your body. It’s generally accepted that if you change your body, that means your dysphoria was more serious than someone who doesn’t transition and that often comes to mean you’re more trans than them. You have a special kind of suffering that could only be relieved by this extreme measure so you deserve more care and attention. Your suffering and well-being matter a whole lot in ways other people’s don’t, can’t compare to. A whole lot of trans activism and rhetoric is reactionary, it’s on the defensive. I remember reading a lot of political writing by trans people in books and on blogs and, aside from describing what it felt like to be trans, be dysphoric, transition and so forth, a whole lot of that writing was about defending trans understandings of identity and defending transition as an effective and healthy treatment. A lot of trans activism is about getting access to transition and pushing this particular belief system. It’s not about about trying to understand all possible explanations for how someone could become dysphoric or come to have a trans identity, or find all possible ways of treating dysphoria. It’s about promoting this one particular explanation of trans identity/dysphoria and treatment over all others and then debunking and criticizing the other explanations and approaches. This makes sense when you’re inside of it. After all, a lot of people are threatened and weirded out by trans people and you get treated shitty when you’re trans. The community encourages you to lump all opposition and criticism together so that people who treat you bad because they think you’re an abomination against god are lumped in with people who question whether you could be transitioning due to social forces. Anything that goes against the community’s understanding of itself comes to be seen as an attack to be deflected. And interestingly enough, more time was spent going after people who say we transitioned due to rigid sex roles than those who think we’re going to hell and breaking god’s law even though there are way more transphobic christians than there are radical feminists, social scientists and queer theorists who critique transition and transsexualism. (Younger folks might not realize there used to be queer theorists who criticized transsexualism as reinforcing heteronormativity but indeed there were. There used to be a whole lot of tension and conflict between queer theorists and trans activists but that’s another story) I think that’s because a lot of those critiques strike closer to home. Trans ideology doesn’t want to acknowledge how we’ve all been shaped by the society we live in and the people we interact with. Its adherents want to believe that their dysphoria and trans identities come from inside of them, that they’re innate, biological or, coming from a more genderfuck persuasion, freely chosen. And I think a lot of why this belief gets so adamant is because the social influences aren’t just sexist media images and being forced to wear uncomfortable clothes because of the shape of your body but because we’ve been abused and deeply hurt, often by people we trusted. It isn’t just about denying that we’ve been molded by our culture, it’s about denying some really fucked up shit happened to us. Because it is so much easier to believe that we’ve always been this way, we have some innate condition or we’re choosing this than to admit that people and society hurt us so bad it changed us on a really deep level. Hurt us so bad we can’t stand to be present in our bodies. And looking for why someone could be dysphoric other than an innate condition is going to turn up this trauma and other damage from living in a patriarchal society. If other treatments are sought aside from transition, more people are going to trace back their dysphoria to fucked up shit happening to them, either what people have done to them and/or how this society has limited and hurt them. All this shit is out there waiting to be found, some of us have already found it and are healing from it. But with few exceptions we’re not being sought out to help provide resources for other dysphoric people. Apparently it’s too threatening to admit that at least some dyshporic people aren’t helped and could be harmed by transitioning. There are a few sympathetic health care providers that I know of and some trans people react to us with compassion and support.  But a whole lot of them want to write us off and minimize us. Reading some trans people’s reactions to us, I get the sense that it’s fine with them that our well-being and bodies got sacrificed for the greater good of providing transition to as many people as possible. We’re an insignificant number of exceptional cases. Whatever we suffer doesn’t matter as much as what people who supposedly need to transition suffer because again transitioning is valued over all else. It is so supremely good that a lot of its proponents can’t even seem to imagine that we could actually be damaged from having done it, that it could have made our lives significantly more difficult. That it could give us new problems we’re probably going to have to deal with for the rest of our lives.  Underneath it all, they’re scared they’re not that different from us and could end up in the same situation. If they were really convinced we were different I don’t think they’d need to be so dismissive of our pain and experiences. A lot of trans activists and their supporters have chosen not to listen to us or acknowledge us. It’s pretty clear when you read most articles by trans people about detransition or “regret” that they set out from the beginning to prove that it rarely happens and doesn’t matter and so shouldn’t be used to to question transition as a viable treatment. I’ve never read an article by a trans activist about detransition that mentioned trauma or patriarchy as a reason for why someone would initially transition but they will always list the difficulty of transitioning in a transphobic society as a reason why some people detransition. Their articles about detransition are basically more propaganda defending access to transition. We’re not even people to them, we’re statistics to be explained away.

I see this dismissal of detransitioned people as intimately linked with a refusal to explore other ways to treat dysphoria. For whatever reason, a lot of trans people are really invested in transition being the way to treat dysphoria and they are reinforcing this idea whenever they have the chance. And those with more power in the community make it difficult to question this or look at this issue in different ways. Like I said, a lot of trans culture and discourse is about defending and promoting specific explanations that justify this one treatment. And the ways detransitioned and reconciling women have found to treat dysphoria defies these explanations and calls the need to transition into question. The problem then is that large sectors of the trans community care more about defending trans ideology and having access to hormones and surgery than it does with helping people find the best way to overcome their suffering. 

[gop-tea-pub]

[apparently-im-called-a-snowflake]

You realize that they switched parties right? Essentially the Democratic party back then was the Republican party and held the same beliefs and shit and vice versa until they started to switch political platforms from 1860-1936

Seriously do some research

Also, blocking Comments on your tumblr, real mature of you, you must take criticism and others opinions well.

[gop-tea-pub]

And you realize you are a gullible and foolish moron for believing there was ever, in any manner, a switch of the parties. How long are you douche canoes going to keep repeating that lie to hide your party’s past present and future? This is the kind of BS spewed by Democrats on a daily basis, and unfortunately the media and other so-called watchdogs are so apparently ignorant of American history, Democrats continue to LIE through their teeth to their constituents, and via academia, to our kids. Despite the truth being out there for years, it’s probably not going to explode until some big shot news anchor gives us an “exclusive expose” bringing us all those facts first, so he/she can proudly receive a Pulitzer… While I have only scratched the surface of civil rights history, remember, Democrats claim THEY “are unwavering in our support of equal opportunity for all Americans. That’s why we’ve worked to pass every one of our nation’s Civil Rights laws”… October 13, 1858 During the “Lincoln-Douglas debates”, U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) said, “I do not regard the Negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother, or any kin to me whatever”. Douglas became the Democrat Party’s 1860 presidential nominee. April 16, 1862 President Lincoln signed the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. In Congress, 99% of Republicans voted yes, 83% of Democrats voted no. July 17, 1862 Over unanimous Democrat opposition, the Republican Congress passed The Confiscation Act stating that slaves of the Confederacy “shall be forever free”. January 31, 1865 The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. House with unanimous Republican support and intense Democrat opposition. April 8, 1865 The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. Senate with 100% Republican support, 63% Democrat opposition. November 22, 1865 Republicans denounced the Democrat legislature of Mississippi for enacting the “black codes” which institutionalized racial discrimination. February 5, 1866 U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) introduced legislation (successfully opposed by Democrat President Andrew Johnson) to implement “40 acres and a mule” relief by distributing land to former slaves. April 9, 1866 The Republican Congress overrode Democrat President Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 conferring rights of citizenship on black people; becomes law. May 10, 1866 The U.S. House passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens. 100% of Democrats vote no.June 8, 1866 The U.S. Senate passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the law to all citizens. 94% of Republicans vote yes and 100% of Democrats vote no. January 8, 1867 Republicans overrode Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto of law granting voting rights to blacks in the District of Columbia. July 19, 1867 The Republican Congress overrode Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto of legislation protecting the voting rights of blacks. March 30, 1868 Republicans begin the impeachment trial of Democrat President Andrew Johnson who declared, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government of white men.” September 12, 1868 Civil rights activist Tunis Campbell and 24 other blacks in the Georgia Senate (all Republicans) were expelled by the Democrat majority and would later be reinstated by the Republican Congress. October 7, 1868 Republicans denounced Democrat Party’s national campaign theme: “This is a white man’s country: Let white men rule.” October 22, 1868 While campaigning for re-election, Republican U.S. Rep. James Hinds (R-AR) was assassinated by Democrat terrorists who organized as the Ku Klux Klan. December 10, 1869 Republican Gov. John Campbell of the Wyoming Territory signed the FIRST-in-nation law granting women the right to vote and hold public office. February 3, 1870 After passing the House with 98% Republican support and 97% Democrat opposition, Republicans’ 15th Amendment was ratified, granting vote to ALL Americans regardless of race. May 31, 1870 President U.S. Grant signed the Republicans’ Enforcement Act providing stiff penalties for depriving any American’s civil rights. June 22, 1870 The Republican Congress created the U.S. Department of Justice to safeguard the civil rights of blacks against Democrats in the South. September 6, 1870 Women voted in Wyoming in first election after women’s suffrage signed into law by Republican Gov. John Campbell. February 28, 1871 The Republican Congress passed the “Civil Rights Act of 1871” providing federal protection for black voters. April 20, 1871 The Republican Congress enacted the Ku Klux Klan Act, outlawing Democrat Party-affiliated terrorist groups which oppressed blacks and all those who supported them.. October 10, 1871 Following warnings by Philadelphia Democrats against black voting, black Republican civil rights activist Octavius Catto was murdered by a Democrat Party operative. His military funeral was attended by thousands. October 18, 1871 After violence against Republicans in South Carolina, President Ulysses Grant deployed U.S. troops to combat Democrat Ku Klux Klan terrorists. November 18, 1872 Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting after boasting to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she voted for “the Republican ticket, straight.” January 17, 1874 Armed Democrats seized the Texas state government, ending Republican efforts to racially integrate. September 14, 1874 Democrat white supremacists seized the Louisiana statehouse in attempt to overthrow the racially-integrated administration of Republican Governor William Kellogg. Twenty-seven were killed. March 1, 1875 The Civil Rights Act of 1875, guaranteeing access to public accommodations without regard to race, was signed by Republican President U.S. Grant and passed with 92% Republican support over 100% Democrat opposition. January 10, 1878 U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent (R-CA) introduced the Susan B. Anthony amendment for women’s suffrage. The Democrat-controlled Senate defeated it 4 times before the election of a Republican House and Senate that guaranteed its approval in 1919. February 8, 1894 The Democrat Congress and Democrat President Grover Cleveland joined to repeal the Republicans’ Enforcement Act which had enabled blacks to vote. January 15, 1901 Republican Booker T. Washington protested the Alabama Democrat Party’s refusal to permit voting by blacks. May 29, 1902 Virginia Democrats implemented a new state constitution condemned by Republicans as illegal, reducing black voter registration by 86% February 12, 1909 On the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, black Republicans and women’s suffragists Ida Wells and Mary Terrell co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. May 21, 1919 The Republican House passed a constitutional amendment granting women the vote with 85% of Republicans and only 54% of Democrats in favor. In the Senate 80% of Republicans voted yes and almost half of Democrats voted no. August 18, 1920 The Republican-authored 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote became part of the Constitution. Twenty-six of the 36 states needed to ratify had Republican-controlled legislatures. January 26, 1922 The House passed a bill authored by U.S. Rep. Leonidas Dyer (R-MO) making lynching a federal crime. Senate Democrats blocked it by filibuster.June 2, 1924 Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill passed by the Republican Congress granting U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans.October 3, 1924 Republicans denounced three-time Democrat presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan for defending the Ku Klux Klan at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. June 12, 1929 First Lady Lou Hoover invited the wife of black U.S. Rep. Oscar De Priest (R-IL) to tea at the White House, sparking protests by Democrats across the country. August 17, 1937 Republicans organized opposition to former Ku Klux Klansman and Democrat U.S. Senator Hugo Black who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by FDR. Black’s Klan background was hidden until after confirmation. June 24, 1940 The Republican Party platform called for the integration of the Armed Forces. For the balance of his terms in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (D) refused to order it. August 8, 1945 Republicans condemned Harry Truman’s surprise use of the atomic bomb in Japan. It began two days after the Hiroshima bombing when former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrotes to a friend that “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” September 30, 1953 Earl Warren, California’s three-term Republican Governor and 1948 Republican vice presidential nominee, was nominated to be Chief Justice and wrote the landmark decision “Brown v. Board of Education”. November 25, 1955 Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration banned racial segregation of interstate bus travel. March 12, 1956 Ninety-seven Democrats in Congress condemned the Supreme Court’s “Brown v. Board of Education” decision and pledged to continue segregation. June 5, 1956 Republican federal judge Frank Johnson ruled in favor of the Rosa Parks decision striking down “blacks in the back of the bus” law. November 6, 1956 African-American civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy voted for Republican Dwight Eisenhower for President. September 9, 1957 President Eisenhower signed the Republican Party’s 1957 Civil Rights Act September 24, 1957 Sparking criticism from Democrats such as Senators John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, President Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to Little Rock, AR to force Democrat Governor Orval Faubus to integrate their public schools. May 6, 1960 President Eisenhower signed the Republicans’ Civil Rights Act of 1960, overcoming a 125-hour, ’round-the-clock filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats. May 2, 1963 Republicans condemned the Democrat sheriff of Birmingham, AL for arresting over 2,000 black schoolchildren marching for their civil rights. September 29, 1963 Gov. George Wallace (D-AL) defied an order by U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson (appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower) to integrate Tuskegee High School. June 9, 1964 Republicans condemned the 14-hour filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act by U.S. Senator and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd (D-WV), who served in the Senate until his death in 2010. June 10, 1964 Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) criticized the Democrat filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act and called on Democrats to stop opposing racial equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced and approved by a majority of Republicans in the Senate. The Act was opposed by most southern Democrat senators, several of whom were proud segregationists—one of them being Al Gore Sr. (D). President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, to get the Act passed. August 4, 1965 Senate Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) overcame Democrat attempts to block 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ninety-four percent of Republicans voted for the landmark civil rights legislation while 27% of Democrats opposed. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, abolishing literacy tests and other measures devised by Democrats to prevent blacks from voting, was signed into law. A higher percentage of Republicans voted in favor. February 19, 1976 President Gerald Ford formally rescinded President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notorious Executive Order authorizing the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII. September 15, 1981 President Ronald Reagan established the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities to increase black participation in federal education programs. June 29, 1982 President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.August 10, 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, compensating Japanese-Americans for the deprivation of their civil rights and property during the World War II internment ordered by FDR. November 21, 1991 President George H. W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to strengthen federal civil rights legislation. August 20, 1996 A bill authored by U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari (R-NY) to prohibit racial discrimination in adoptions, part of Republicans’ “Contract With America”, became law.And let’s not forget the words of liberal icon Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood…We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population….So the next time any Democrat claims they’ve been supportive of civil rights in America (and been so all along), ask them to explain their past. “We’ve grown” is not gonna cut it, considering they continue to lie about their past to this day and only someone lacking in common sense would believe two distinct political parties could and would “switch” their stances on civil rights seemingly overnight. Only a willing fool (and there quite a lot out there) would accept and recite the nonsensical that one bright, sunny day Democrats and Republicans decided to “switch” political positions as the knee-jerk defense. Even today, it never takes long for a Democrat to play the race card purely for political advantage. REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS DID NOT SWITCH SIDES ON RACISM As a result of unrelenting efforts by Democrats to shift their racist past onto the backs of Republicans, using the mantra: “the parties switched sides”, a lot of people have requested an article addressing this issue. It does not make sense to believe that racist Democrats suddenly rushed into the Republican Party, especially after Republicans spent nearly 150 years fighting for black civil rights.  In fact, the racist Democrats declared they would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than a Republican because the Republican Party was known as the party for blacks. From the time of its inception in 1854 as the anti-slavery party, the Republican Party has always been the party of freedom and equality for blacks.  As author Michael Scheuer wrote, the Democratic Party is the party of the four S’s:  slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.  Democrats have been running black communities for the past 50+ years, and the socialist policies of the Democrats have turned those communities into economic and social wastelands. An alarming view of what America will be like in a few years due to unbridled socialism being pushed by President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party cohorts, is contained in the article:  “Detroit: The Moral of the Story” by Kevin D. Williamson that is posted on the Internet. Democrats first used brutality and discriminatory laws to stop blacks from voting for Republicans.  Democrats now use deception and government handouts to keep blacks from voting for Republicans.   In his book, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama described what he and other Democrats do to poor blacks as “plantation politics.” The racist Democrats of the 1950’s and 1960’s that Republicans were fighting died Democrats.  One racist Democrat who survived until 2010 was US Senator Robert Byrd, a former recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan.  Notably, the Ku Klux Klan was started by Democrats in 1866 and became the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party for the purpose of terrorizing and lynching Republicans—black and white.   Byrd became a prominent leader in the Democrat-controlled Congress where he was honored by his fellow Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate.” Byrd was a fierce opponent of desegregating the military and complained in one letter:  "I would rather die a thousand times and see old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen of the wilds.“ Democrats denounced US Senator Trent Lott for his remarks about US Senator Strom Thurmond.  However, there was silence when Democrat US Senator Christopher Dodd praised Byrd as someone who would have been “a great senator for any moment.”  Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and, after he became a Republican, Thurmond defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. While turning a blind eye to how the Democratic Party embraced Byrd until his death, Democrats regularly lambaste the Republican Party about David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Ignored are the facts that the Republican Party never embraced Duke and when he ran for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1992, Republican Party officials tried to block his participation.  Hypocritical is the word for how Democrats also ignore Duke’s long participation in the Democratic Party with no efforts by Democrats to block him.  Below is Duke’s political history in Louisiana, which has an open primary system. Duke ran for Louisiana State Senator as a Democrat in 1975.  He ran again for the Louisiana State Senate in 1979 as a Democrat.  In 1988, he made a bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.  Then, on election day in 1988, he had himself  listed on the presidential ballot as an “Independent Populist.”  After his unbroken string of losses as a Democrat and an Independent Populist, Duke decided to describe himself as a Republican, then ran the following races where he lost every time: in 1989 he ran for Louisiana State Representative; in 1990, he ran for US Senator; in 1991 he ran for Governor of Louisiana; in 1992 he ran for president; in 1996 he ran for US Senator; and in 1999 he ran for US Representative. Contrary to popular belief, President Lyndon Johnson did not predict a racist exodus to the Republican Party from the Democratic Party because of Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Omitted from the Democrats’ rewritten history is what Johnson actually meant by his prediction. Johnson feared that the racist Democrats would again form a third party, such as the short-lived States Rights Democratic Party. In fact, Alabama’s Democrat Governor George C. Wallace in 1968 started the American Independent Party that attracted other racist candidates, including Democrat Governor Lester Maddox. Behind closed doors, Johnson said:  "These Negroes, they’re getting uppity these days.  That’s a problem for us, since they got something now they never had before.  The political pull to back up their upityness.  Now, we’ve got to do something about this.  We’ve got to give them a little something.  Just enough to quiet them down, but not enough to make a difference.  If we don’t move at all, their allies will line up against us.  And there’ll be no way to stop them.  It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.“ Little known by many today is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Johnson, who pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  In fact, Dirksen was instrumental to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968.  Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. Democrats condemn Republican President Richard Nixon for his so-called “Southern Strategy.”  These same Democrats expressed no concern when the racially segregated South voted solidly for Democrats for over 100 years, while deriding Republicans because of the thirty-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party. The “Southern Strategy” that began in the 1970’s was an effort by Nixon to get fair-minded people in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were discriminating against blacks.  Georgia did not switch until 2004, and Louisiana was controlled by Democrats until the election of Republican Bobby Jindal, a person of color, as governor in 2007. As the co-architect of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, Pat Buchanan provided a first-hand account of the origin and intent of that strategy in a 2002 article posted on the Internet.  Buchanan wrote that Nixon declared that the Republican Party would be built on a foundation of states’ rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense.  Nixon said he would leave it to the Democratic Party to squeeze the last ounce of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice. The Claremont Institute published an eye-opening article by Gerard Alexander entitled “The Myth of the Racist Republicans”, an analysis of the decades-long shift of the South from the racist Democratic Party to the racially tolerant Republican Party.  That article can be found on the Internet.   Another article on this subject by Mr. Alexander is entitled “Conservatism does not equal racism. So why do many liberals assume it does?” and is posted on the Internet.   More details about the history of civil rights can be found in the NBRA Civil Rights Newsletter that can be found on the Internet.       An excellent video about civil rights history entitled “A pebble in Your Shoe: Why I am a Republican” by Dr. James Taylor is posted on YouTube. The Myth of Republican Racism The unsinkable Representative Charles B. Rangel appeared on C-SPAN over the weekend. Why unsinkable? Well, in 2010 the House of Representatives censured the New York Democrat by a vote of 333 to 79 (when the body was still majority-Democratic) for violating 11 ethics rules and “bringing discredit to the House.” The New York Times called it a “staggering fall” for the senior Democrat. But fall/shmall, he’s since been reelected and will retire at his leisure.While chatting with Brian Lamb, Rangel dropped a few falsehoods as casually as cigar ash. This isn’t to pick on Rangel; he’s just illustrative. His assertion — that the Republican and Democratic parties “changed sides” in the 1960s on civil rights, with white racists leaving the Democratic party to join the Republicans — has become conventional wisdom. It’s utterly false and should be rebutted at every opportunity.It’s true that a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, shepherded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to passage. But who voted for it? Eighty percent of Republicans in the House voted aye, as against 61 percent of Democrats. In the Senate, 82 percent of Republicans favored the law, but only 69 percent of Democrats. Among the Democrats voting nay were Albert Gore Sr., Robert Byrd, and J. William Fulbright.The Republican presidential candidate in 1964 also opposed the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater had been an enthusiastic backer of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts (both overwhelmingly opposed by Democrats). He was a founding member of the Arizona chapter of the NAACP. He hired many blacks in his family business and pushed to desegregate the Arizona National Guard. He had a good-faith objection to some features of the 1964 act, which he regarded as unconstitutional.Goldwater was no racist. The same cannot be said of Fulbright, on whom Bill Clinton bestowed the Medal of Freedom. Fulbright was one of the 19 senators who signed the “Southern manifesto” defending segregation.Okay, but didn’t all the old segregationist senators leave the Democratic party and become Republicans after 1964? No, just one did: Strom Thurmond. The rest remained in the Democratic party — including former Klansman Robert Byrd, who became president pro tempore of the Senate.Former racists of both parties renounced their old views (as Kevin D. Williamson points out, Lyndon Johnson himself voted against anti-lynching laws and poll-tax repeals), and neither party has a perfect record on racial matters by any stretch. But it is a libel to suggest that the Republican party, the anti-slavery party, the party of Lincoln, and the party that traditionally supported civil rights, anti-lynching laws, and integration, became the racist party after 1964.The “solid south” Democratic voting pattern began to break down not in the 1960s in response to civil rights but in the 1950s in response to economic development and the Cold War. (Black voters in the north, who had been reliable Republicans, began to abandon the GOP in response to the New Deal, encouraged by activists like Robert Vann to “turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall. That debt has been paid in full.”) In the 1940s, the GOP garnered only about 25 percent of southern votes. The big break came with Eisenhower’s victories. Significant percentages of white southerners voted for Ike even though the Democratic party remained firmly segregationist and even though Eisenhower backed two civil-rights bills and enforced the Brown decision by federalizing the National Guard. They also began to send GOP representatives to the House.These Republican gains came not from the most rural and “deep south” regions, but rather from the newer cities and suburbs. If the new southern Republican voters were white racists, one would have expected Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to be the first to turn. Instead, as Gerard Alexander notes in “The Myth of the Racist Republicans,” the turn toward the GOP began in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. Eisenhower did best in the peripheral states. Alexander concludes: “The GOP’s southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the … Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, young, non-native southern, and concentrated in the growth points that were the least ‘Southern’ parts of the south.” Just remember, it was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who after signing the Civil Rights and Voting Acts bills into law, got on a plane full of state governors and told them, “I will have these ni@#ers voting Democrat the next 200 years. So you run along little twat waffle. No one believes your lies or speculation. Go back to your safe space, princess.

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Oh, damn.

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It’s funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief (via books-n-quotes)

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I have uttererly failed at parenting.

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She's not as brilliant as I thought she was

Worked here for almost two years.  She thought my naturally curly hair was a perm.

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It's a miracle!

I told her something today that she had no idea about! I'm surprised the world is still spinning

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She's a physicist too.

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/12/leap-forward-x-ray-technology

I mentioned the article to her (which just was published this morning).  She explained it to me after I mentioned the premise to her.  She hadn't read the article.

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She's the smartest person I know, really!

A little background here, I work for a German firm that has a US subsidiary.  It's a very small office, 6 people in total.  Irmtraut (not her real name, but I do know a German woman with that name) is the office manager, who is married to the President of the company.

She's really nice, but she knows everything!! There is not a subject that comes up that she can't expound upon and tell you the history of. It can be obnoxious, because if you're like me, most days, you feel like you have ADD and early onset Alzheimer's.  Here I will chronicle some examples of her awesomeness.