June 3rd: Just another day in the war on women

What will today bring?

Yesterday’s news about Marion, shocking though it may have been, was just another incident in the many that make up the average day in what JK Rowling called “the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced.” Here’s just a few.

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You may remember the beautiful celebration of Michfest we published some time ago. That story of one of the last women-only festivals ended when two of the women who attended were viciously murdered along with their son. The accused, Dana Rivers, appeared in court today and Kara Dansky, to my knowledge the only journalist covering the story, provided this recap.

Just after midnight on November 11, 2016, police received reports about gunshots being fired at a home on Dunbar Drive, in Oakland, California. When they responded, they found Rivers drenched in blood and running from the doorway of the house. He was in possession of knives, ammunition, and metal knuckles. The house was on fire. Inside the house, the police found two women whose bodies were riddled with bullets and stab wounds. They also found a young man laid out in front of the house who had been shot to death. Rivers has been charged with numerous serious and violent offenses, including murder and arson.

The victims: Patricia Wright and Charlotte Reed, a married lesbian couple, and Toto Diambu (known as Benny Diambu-Wright), their 19-year-old son.

Previously, Rivers had been active in “Camp Trans,” a campaign against the rights of lesbians to hold the women-only annual festival called “Michfest” on private land (the campaign succeeded in getting Michfest shut down in 2015). Patricia and Charlotte were regular attendees at Michfest.

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A male student at Brunel University posted a picture of his gun and said he would use it on women supporting Marion Miller.

This man has several guns and really doesn’t like women.

Incredibly, Brunel University initially supported this individual.

It was only hours later, after numerous women complained, that they deleted the tweet and reported the student to the police.

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The UK Trans Alliance, said to be a group of parents of trans children, which has previously called for women to be murdered, also defended the student - but, unlike the university, haven’t backed down.

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Also on June 3, Mermaids published this quite extraordinary tweet and revived Rush Limbaugh’s coinage for feminists: ‘Feminazis’

The Institute of Race Relations, which posted the article where the image came from, later deleted the image and replaced it with one that shows that it came from a bus in Spain. The muddled article though, which compares feminists to the far right, is still up.

Oh, and India Willoughby said ‘trans people are the new Jews’. The television personality posted a video saying that trans people were “marched off to their deaths” in the 1940s and Britain today is “trying to eradicate trans people as much as possible … If Jewish people were being treated this way there’d be an outcry but because it’s trans, it’s perfectly fine”. The idea that trans people were killed in the Holocaust is brought to you by the same revisionists who insist that trans people were central in the fight for gay rights during and immediately after the Stonewall riots, which is heavily contested by people who were actually there.

To sum up: on the same day a woman was charged for posting photos of Suffragette ribons, a male student issued extremely violent threats to women, which his university initially defended, and a trans activism organisation still defends; a man who helped bring about the end of a women-only event appeared in court over the murder of two lesbian attendees, and their son; and just a few days after Stonewall’s CEO compared the understanding that men aren’t women with antisemitism, Mermaids tweeted a picture of a trans Hitler to prove that feminists are part of the far right, and one of Britain’s most prominent trans activists compared males not being allowed to use women’s toilets with the Holocaust.