The Other Half thinks that some of you may be amused by this. 

Previously. 

Update, via the comments:

Joan asks, drily, “Is it performance art?”

Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose it is. It’s all rather performative and narcissistic, and the theatrical breathlessness is presumably for the benefit of a like-minded audience – one that won’t find such behaviour strange or unflattering. I mean, if you were actually having some kind of meltdown, an unpremeditated psychological crisis, would your first thought be to film yourself in order to share the screeching with your equally woke peers, and thereby accrue status?

It’s not just the ladies, of course. Quite a few leftist chaps seem a tad unstable too:  

I wrote earlier about trying to express my reasons to my dad in a calm and intellectual manner. I actually thought I had been calm and well-reasoned. I thought I might even be making progress. Today I found out he put a Trump sign in his yard. I got pissed. Really pissed. And I sent him and my mom a text message. Hands shaking, tears in eyes.

From an item titled, rather triumphantly, Today I Gave My Dad A Choice: Trump or His Grandkids and His Son.

Pronouns declared, obviously.

Update 2: 

As with Ms Christina Cauterucci, a “gender and feminism” enthusiast whose Slate article is poked at here, you have to wonder whether fantasies of coercion and sadistic emotional punishment, and blackmailing your own parents in order to purge them of non-leftist views – using the threat of never seeing their grandchildren – is really a sign of a well-adjusted adult. And not, say, someone exhibiting a kind of cult-like behaviour. And remember, these things are announced publicly, with pride. “What a clever and principled leftist I am.”

Further unspoolings can be found here and here. Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

“I have a gender studies degree.”

So boasts Ms Kyl Myers in the pages of Time magazine. I’ll give you a moment to experience the inevitable hushed awe.

Having, as she does, a degree in gender studies, Ms Myers is vexed by many things. Such as being asked, kindly, while pregnant, whether she was expecting a boy or a girl. This, we’re informed, is not “a simple question with a simple answer.”

My partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender. 

No, of course. No clues there. No information at all, in fact. Just random noise.

The only things we really knew about our baby is that they were human, breech and going to be named Zoomer.

Being enlightened and conscientious parents, Ms Myers and her partner Brent have chosen for their child the name Zoomer. Readers may wonder whether that detail tells us something too. Other fruits of this “gender-creative parenting” include pointedly not “assigning” a gender to their child – though experiments of this kind tend to be inflicted on boys – and instead insisting on “the gender-neutral pronouns they, them and their.” A contrivance whose modishness we’ve touched on before. 

We were committed to raising our child without the expectations or restrictions of the gender binary.

And as trans activists keep telling us, continually interacting with people who aren’t sure what gender you are – in this case, thanks to mommy’s niche fixations – is in no way stressful or aggravating, and could never, ever result in demoralisation and psychological problems. And pretending that your son or daughter isn’t actually a boy or girl will, somehow, in ways never quite specified, “eliminate gender-based oppression, disparities and violence.” It’s “preventative care,” we’re told.

It occurs to me that it’s been a while since we marvelled at the mind of Laurie Penny. We must correct that immediately:  

She “earned that pronoun with a lot of hard work,” you know. While also, rather suddenly, becoming a being of indeterminate gender. A they, depending on who’s nearby, and how fashionable they are.

Update, via the comments:

From the pages of The Atlantic, a new torment for woke sophisticates:

The hidden bigotry of crosswords.

That sound you hear is barrel-bottom-scraping.

The popular puzzles are largely written and edited by older white men, who dictate what makes it into the grid—and what is kept out.

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers – because that’s a thing that exists – is one in which enthusiasts, via social media, grumble about white men, bemoan the insufficient prominence of “queer or POC colloquialisms,” share “off-colour jokes about hypothetical titles for a Melania Trump memoir,” and fret about the exact ratio of male and female names used as clues. Because a lack of “gender parity” in crossword puzzle clues constitutes one of “the systemic forces that threaten women.”

Crossword puzzles can do that, apparently.

The list of possible crossword-puzzle wrongdoings is, of course, extensive, ever-growing and not entirely straightforward.

Transgressions include clues for ILLEGAL (“One caught by border patrol”); MEN (“Exasperated comment from a feminist”); and HOOD (“Place with homies”). 

I’ll give you a moment to steady yourselves, to recover from all that gasping.

In the pages of the Observer, a new niche agony is detected:

Is it ever acceptable for a feminist to hire a cleaner?

Needless to say, it starts off quite dramatically,

The day my cleaner used to visit, I would return home in the evening to the smell of Dettol mixed with Tania’s sweat, to a clean kitchen and bathroom and a drenching sense of guilt.

Gratuitous drama and drenching guilt aside, I’m not entirely sure why hiring a cleaner should obviously be more fraught than hiring, say, a gardener or roofer. And it occurs to me that if you can smell someone’s perspiration above the odour of cleaning products, said person may require some kind of medical attention.

The piece, by empowered feminist author Sally Howard, continues in high gear,

It was the same unease that greeted me when I collected my son Leo from his nursery – a national chain disproportionately staffed by women of colour – or bought clothes from a mainstream clothing outlet that relies, as many do, on female garment workers in the global south.

For the kind of middle-class feminist who as recreation writes for the Observer, life is apparently an endless moral torture inflicted by minor, everyday events, or at least an exhausting theatre of pretending to be tortured by minor, everyday events. Which of the two constitutes a more harrowing and nightmarish existence, I leave to the reader.

For [my book, The Home Stretch], I spent time under cover with the women who clean Britain’s offices and homes. I picked used tampons off bathroom carpets and scrubbed bathtub tidemarks and sauces spattered across kitchen walls; and I discovered a few things.

That some women are so messy and antisocial that bloodied tampons are left for others to step on? Is that a permissible feminist thought?

I learned that fashionable householders’ preference for less-effective eco and homemade cleaning products doubles cleaners’ labour.

No laughing at the back.