The continuing erasure of women - Afghanistan

This makes me so angry, especially the whole "identify as women" thing. Does the imbecile who wrote that genuinely think that women in Afghanistan can just identify out of being women if they don't fancy being oppressed any more? That if a woman in Kabul takes off her burqa and puts on trousers, that the Taliban will just accept that and let her go to the bank on her own? Are they fucking stupid?

All the mealy-mouthed shit about gender being complicated....a bunch of backwards mediaeval fundies don't seem to find it too complicated, so god knows why we do. I am REALLY UPSET about this, and I'm not quite sure why its bothering me so much more than all the other heinous assaults on the rights of women and girls around the world.

Authoritarian countries don't share power democratically so the usual arguments about other cultures deciding things for themselves doesn't work. This is a small group of fundamentalists deciding things for everybody, and their views on women and girls are deeply misogynistic.

The women on television must now have their faces covered.
It really is erasure of women from everywhere so that they cannot be seen to exist. Once that is the case, human rights obviously will not be necessary, either.

They have power, but it's not their country -- it belongs to all the people including all the women. There's no way the majority would support their own oppression.

An article on women who've escaped Afghanistan.

www.ekathimerini.com/society/1184366/influential-afghan-women-regrouping-in-greece/

Thanks, nepeta. Will check it out, hope the link stays.

Bringing this thread up because I have received one recommendation about charities to donate to. This is from someone who is from Afghanistan and works for the women and girls there.

It is Afghan Women's Fund. I hope putting the link here is acceptable, but if not please let me know how to do this properly.

Things are not getting better there for girls and women. While their economy has collapsed and people are suffering the Taliban focuses on getting the female sex under control. This is a common pattern in misogynistic autocracies, of course.

@Plexie I watched the ITV programme. I cried at the part where the reporter was in hospital with the victims of domestic violence. It's horrific what's happening to women in Afghanistan. I wish there was someway that I could support them, especially those brave women who are doing their best to protest against what the Taliban is doing. I don't know of any organisations in the UK that is either raising money or giving publicity to the conditions women have to endure.

Yeah let's see a group of female people put on pronoun badges, cut their hair and put on trousers, announce that they identify as men and be immediately excused the misogynistic punishment for the sin of being born female.

Fuck off with this insulting nonsense, it's worn far too bloody thin now. This is reality for women, not a game for spoiled and overprivileged western males to play.

My reading of Afghan women's tweets is that these fine details do matter.
1: the new law is directed at the mahram, (male relative) not the woman. Afghan women are not only being imprisoned in their homes, but reduced to total dependence on men.
2: the blue nylon chador with a mesh to see through was occasionally worn by a small number of women, but for most Afghan women it's not traditional.

3: the black abayas with a hood to cover the face completely, worn with a niqab (facemask) are completely foreign. Specifically they are Saudi style.

4: (not exactly a detail) the Taliban are from schools in Pakistan and many Afghans feel they are being invaded by Pakistan.

Did anyone see this programme on ITV last night?

www.itv.com/hub/afghanistan-no-country-for-women-exposure/10a2083a0001

One aspect of which I was unaware, is the fate of women in abusive relationships. They don't have access to refuges and some are committing suicide - or trying to. The reporter visited a hospital where one woman had tried to kill herself by setting herself on fire (she died a month later) and another had drunk bleach. Horrific.

Not allowed education. Not allowed to have a job. So no female doctors nurses or midwives.
Not allowed to be treated by a male doctor.
No contraception or health care for women.
Married off at a young age to older men.
Women and girls are going to be dying in childbirth and from other conditions not diagnosed/ treated.
It is barbaric.
I am certain none of them are identifying into being girls or women.

How dare you compare the women on here with the Taliban. 🤬

The Taliban are a backward and uneducated cult but for the moment it's their country to run as they see fit.

Amazing. We could practically run the UN.

We'd do a better job than the current lot.

Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue

Fucking hell.

Fishwishy may be somewhat distracted from making an appropriate assessment of FWR because of concerns around the parlous state in which men find themselves if they're interested in casual sex.

Through misandry in the medical industry [men] don't have access to hormonal contraceptives and are reliant on condoms for contraception.

It's certainly an interesting viewpoint for someone somehow setting themselves up as an informed arbiter of what individual posters of FWR may/not align with in the matter of political, faith-based, or social terms.

I can't find where you commented last week but that's neither here nor there. To be clear, I decline to be force-teamed with you, Fishwishy, and I reject your characterisation.

I mean the utter stupidity of that statement.

That statement implies anyone who is treated as a woman in Afghanistan has identified as one and therefore has chosen the way they are treated. That women and girls are choosing not to get an education or that they have an inner belief of their gender as oppressed and unworthy of basic human right.

It's so cruel and offensive and - seems to me - quite similar to the type of thinking the Taliban are using.

One of the harms around the language of gender ideology is that it's marred the clear reporting of this news and just what it means for women in Afghanistan. Does the writer even care?

It's the TRAs that are like the Taliban - both wish to remove a biological woman's right to say no.

It's so offensive.

If gender was a real thing and you could really identify as the opposite 'gender' then there would be no women in Afghanistan, no women, no girls only men and boys.

No-one would identify out of the right to education, out of the right to bodily autonomy, even to the autonomy to decide what to wear.

This is so blindly obvious and yet this sort of offensive crap is spouted. It's imperialist and misogynist and racist. And victim blaming.

You can't identify out of sex based oppression. Sex is more important than gender.

It's heartbreaking and infuriating. So many men in this world so desperate to control and possess women. And then you get arseholes blaming women for their own oppression.

There is absolutely nothing we can do.

We wasted years on a fruitless military intervention. It cost the lives of 405 British service personel and nearly 3000 injured , some severly , - these where overwhelmingly men. It also cost us £billions. And all for nothing. The Taliban walked back in and are in the process of taking that country back to the middle ages.

Even to give money is pointless. It won't do any good and Afghanistan is just about the most corrupt place on earth.

There are other areas of the world where women are at risk and we can do something, Ukraine is one.