Afghan women forced to wear burqa

[GoodieMoomin]

As the taliban continues to gain ground, the forward looking young women of Afghanistan are having to prepare for some major changes.

I cannot imagine how these women are feeling right now, watching their freedoms slip through their fingers. Honestly, I could cry.

^"My mother says we should buy a burqa. My parents are afraid of the Taliban. My mother thinks that one of the ways she can protect her daughters is to make them wear the burqa,” she says.

“But we have no burqa in our home, and I have no intention of getting one. I don’t want to hide behind a curtain-like cloth. If I wear the burqa, it means that I have accepted the Taliban’s government. I have given them the right to control me. Wearing a chador is the beginning of my sentence as a prisoner in my house. I’m afraid of losing the accomplishments I fought for so hard.”^

www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/aug/15/afghan-womens-defiance-and-despair-i-never-thought-id-have-to-wear-a-burqa-my-identity-will-be-lost

Fantastic and powerful post @NonnyMouse1337

I see that on Twitter, the TRA response to gender critical people pointing out the flamin' obvious (ie. That the Taliban, like all other oppressive men that have gone before them for millenia, have no problems figuring out what a woman is) is to say that that means gender critical posters support the Taliban. I mean, come the fuck on!

@Jackgrealishscurtains

Fantastic and powerful post *@NonnyMouse1337*

I see that on Twitter, the TRA response to gender critical people pointing out the flamin' obvious (ie. That the Taliban, like all other oppressive men that have gone before them for millenia, have no problems figuring out what a woman is) is to say that that means gender critical posters support the Taliban. I mean, come the fuck on!

Christ they’re thick 😒

The burkha is a symbol of diversity according to Lily Cole.

twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham/status/1427270518089072640

Who has also just come out as "queer" although it would seem from the article that "queerness" is now defined as dating and marrying well-off famous men.

twitter.com/StandingforXX/status/1427037255231754248

[quote HPFA]The burkha is a symbol of diversity according to Lily Cole.

twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham/status/1427270518089072640

Who has also just come out as "queer" although it would seem from the article that "queerness" is now defined as dating and marrying well-off famous men.

twitter.com/StandingforXX/status/1427037255231754248[/quote]
Oh my god, whaaaaaat?

And she put that burqa picture up 3 days ago?!!!

What a stupid comment

It’s fabric chains. When worn there is little that can be seen so even the turn of a women or girls head can be monitored

Fucking idiot honestly why are some people falling over themselves to appear inclusive that they do not bother to do a little research

But hey the blue is nice

But hey the blue is nice

Brings out her eyes doesn't it..... Oh... Wait....

Oh it does for Lily

How nice that Lily can dress up in her Burka when she is having a blue day. I bet this women in Afghanistan will be forever grateful to Lily that she is so inclusive

They have feasted at the table of liberty for so long that they think they can ignore reality by chanting mantras and 'queering' words. Bloated by their gluttony, they cheer the erosion of the same rights and protections that enabled their arrogance and ignorance. Their fingers and mouths greasy with the remnants of the fruits of labour of the women that came before them, they sneer at those who understand the precarious nature of our rights and personhood and seek to protect it. They might belch out insults and smears in between mouthfuls, but deep in their hearts they know they would never willingly trade places with the women of Afghanistan, because all the queer theory in the world won't save them from the slaughterhouse.

This ought to be in every newspaper. Very well said, and the truth of it is painfully front and centre.

These western luxury conceits are shameful in the face of what is happening in reality to these women on the basis of their sex, and no amount of interesting labels and self definition will save them.

Why refer to trans issues? Because these women aren't being persecuted on the basis of their gender, they are being persecuted on the basis of their sex. And gendered rules is what is used to persecuted them.
And even now, we are seeing protections for our sex demolished and diminished across the world, East and West, even as western male people have the utter fucking audacity to claim they are the 'most vulnerable' and claim resources, funding attention and political will that should be going to all those who truly are most vulnerable like Afghani women and girls.

But to move away from that particular misogynistic shitshow to the one at hand, what actions can we actually take to do something, even its a small one?
I'm thinking let's write to our MPs as a starter. Let them see that politically their constituents care about this. What female-based charities and organisations can we support?

Because these women aren't being persecuted on the basis of their gender, they are being persecuted on the basis of their sex.

This.

This is what women are trying to be heard on. That the insistence that sex doesn't matter, that it's all gender, that anyone can be any sex they choose and that doesn't matter, that sex can be hidden and disguised and buried and reasoned away, that women can have their sex based rights removed and the words for them hidden harms women and their rights. Seriously, critically harms them .

The women in Afghanistan are suffering right now because they cannot play word games and write nice policies creating an illusion that avoids creating emotional distress to those who would prefer sex not to exist as a concept. They cannot identify out of the burden of gender imposed on them by sex. They cannot identify out of the illtreatment. No one gives a shit how they identify or about their deeply held inner sense of self, or whether they are living their best lives. They are existing in possession of female biology and that is a crime there is no escape from.

This is the reality for all women.

It's just that western women (at the moment) have the voice and the freedoms to do their best to speak out and try to be heard.

And that's fighting against a misogynistic tide of media avoiding them and their voices, back room deals made by misogynists with misogynists to steer policy against them, new police powers to prosecute them for speaking out and a fucking tidal wave of rape threats, sexual violence threats and death threats for daring to speak.

@Jackgrealishscurtains

Fantastic and powerful post *@NonnyMouse1337*

I see that on Twitter, the TRA response to gender critical people pointing out the flamin' obvious (ie. That the Taliban, like all other oppressive men that have gone before them for millenia, have no problems figuring out what a woman is) is to say that that means gender critical posters support the Taliban. I mean, come the fuck on!

I'm sure the TRAs and their simpering sidekicks will be only too happy to re-educate the Taliban in the error of their ways, tell them it is most important that they first dehumanise the sex class of humans they are going to oppress and refer to them as cervix havers, menstruators, birthers and then crack on with that oppression. No-one will care as it is impossible to accurately say which sex class of humans are being so viciously oppressed as sex is a spectrum and changeable and therefore not all members of any particular sex are being oppressed so it can't be that that is the root of their oppression - look the women with penises aren't being oppressed!

I see that on Twitter, the TRA response to gender critical people pointing out the flamin' obvious (ie. That the Taliban, like all other oppressive men that have gone before them for millenia, have no problems figuring out what a woman is) is to say that that means gender critical posters support the Taliban. I mean, come the fuck on!

Plus one idiot who texted the BBC in response to Maya Forstater's interview on radio 5 this morning.

@NonnyMouse1337

My response to a question on another thread.

looking an Afgani woman in the eyes, what connects their suffering with our struggles here?

The embodied reality of womanhood that transcends time, distance and cultures. She is me and I am her. It is a visceral bond that no male can ever identify into and no female can ever identify out of.

It is only an accident of fate that I live in the UK. I am one of the rare winners in the grotesque lottery of life.

Life for women in the UK has been shaped by its own cultural and religious heritage. Its relatively unique and rare historical trajectory enabled British women to organise and win incredible gains for their daughters in a way that women from so many other countries can only dream of doing.

The plight of Afghani women is a stark reminder of the iron fist of oppression that men can wield against women on the basis of our sex. It is an uncomfortable truth that without the majority of men on our side, women truly are at the mercy of the vicious whims and savage violence of men.

My heart breaks for the women of Afghanistan - so many of them had a taste of freedom, opportunity and being a person in their own right, and now it has evaporated almost overnight. I know what is happening to them could happen to me too, if circumstances enabled it. The incel attack in Plymouth reveals the deep hatred and desires of subjugation that some men harbour for women.

Far too many women in the UK take their precious freedoms for granted. Yes, there's much that can be better, but it's important to realise just how rare it is to live in a time and place where women have so many rights and protections within a stable, wealthy society and where most men view us as worthy of full personhood.

Some women are so intoxicated by these freedoms - freedoms they themselves did not win - that they think it's great fun to indulge in all kinds of outlandish luxury beliefs, such as biological sex being a social construct, women are not oppressed on the basis of sex, and that being a woman is nothing but a feeling and set of sexist stereotypes. They have feasted at the table of liberty for so long that they think they can ignore reality by chanting mantras and 'queering' words. Bloated by their gluttony, they cheer the erosion of the same rights and protections that enabled their arrogance and ignorance. Their fingers and mouths greasy with the remnants of the fruits of labour of the women that came before them, they sneer at those who understand the precarious nature of our rights and personhood and seek to protect it. They might belch out insults and smears in between mouthfuls, but deep in their hearts they know they would never willingly trade places with the women of Afghanistan, because all the queer theory in the world won't save them from the slaughterhouse.

I've shared your post .. eloquent and so true. Thank you.

@Helleofabore

because they're the bad guys.

A statement that shows a remarkable level of simplistic thinking. It is the ‘all or nothing’ argument.

That it came with derogatory and belittling remarks and ideological catch phrases is also unsurprising. The pattern is predictable.

This crisis in Afghanistan is horrific and the situation in the UK is not comparable in that horror.

It does not mean the conversation around the meaning of sex and the fact that these girls and women are facing extreme consequences for being born female is not relevant. It certainly makes a mockery of the concept that females can ever identify out of their oppression as a sex class.

That is the relevance of discussing that ideology on this thread. Because being forced to wear a burqa, to lose your dreams, and in some instances be forced into marriage, or death will happen because those people are female. And here in this country women are shamed for calling sex based rights, sex based rights. But in the world of human rights, these are ‘sex based’ rights. It is events such as this that being that label into focus and that rhetoric denouncing them as sex based rights needs to stop.

And it truly highlights the complete lack of ability for some posters to engage in this topic with any meaningfulness. Or being any insight into what being female even means in this world.

The fact that the focus was signaled as ‘hate’ for trans people by discussing the immutability of sex and sex based oppression is just more projection. plus ca change.

No thank you.

Great post.

Also wanted to add to those that are sputtering that western sex based rights don't matter to consider going a little bit further with their concern regarding the women of Afganistan. Right now the public is screaming (rightly so) for the women and children to be brought to the UK and North America. So by their logic it would be just fine to rescue these women/girls but yet subject them to continued trauma by forcing them to share change rooms/toilets with males. Have no say in having a male provide counselling or intimate exams even within a rape shelter. Not being able to identify as a pregnant woman, mother, etc. Is that ok for them because now they are no longer in Afganistan, so you no longer care?

@Cailleach1

Did men ever fight for women's rights? The suffragettes were women. Also, those at the back of this backlash which aims at reducing women's rights are men's rights activists. In whatever guise they present. Those who want to destroy those rights women have fought for. Even the ability to correctly name our sex class.

You'd think as fathers, sons, husbands and brothers that men would have wanted equal rights and respect for women and girls all along. But no ... . It does make me pause, that one.

After many years of mostly lurking on FWR, I (with a heavy heart) have come to believe that many men will possibly fight for 'their' women (mums, daughters, wives, etc) in a personal situation, but very very few men will ever fight for just women in general, ever.

The "don't talk about sex/gender" rhetoric, when women are starkly being oppressed precisely because of their sex, is much like the "don't talk about gun control" rhetoric whenever there's a mass shooting by some nutter who should never have been in possession of a firearm. Of course they don't want us to talk about it, in he same way as the NRA don't want to talk about gun control, when an atrocity that could have been prevented by gun control occurs. These people need to live in a world where they can both deny that sex and sex based oppression is real and square that with not looking like absolute monsters in the face of the most viscous and visceral form of sex based women hating imaginable.

@NonnyMouse1337, your beautiful words need to be on billboards across the country, and projected onto all the houses of government in the UK and the BBC headquarters. I can't stand watching people like Lisa Nandy wringing their hands about Afghanistan, when they contribute to the evisceration of women's rights domestically in their slavish devotion to trans rights activism.

The tribe with talking about sex/gender in Afghanistan is that it all too easily looks like approval for the taliban approach of executing the LGBTQ community (often by brutal methods).

Should anyone wonder about how Biden feels about women, there was a telling passage in the BBC today:

In his memoir Richard Holbrooke, who was special envoy to Afghanistan in the early Obama years, remembered Mr Biden angrily telling him he was "not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of [Afghan] women's rights... That's not what they're there for".

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58224399

@FuckeryOmbudsman

The tribe with talking about sex/gender in Afghanistan is that it all too easily looks like approval for the taliban approach of executing the LGBTQ community (often by brutal methods).

Perhaps It only looks that way if you logic has become twisted into the all or nothing, simplistic view point where that then becomes ‘if you support ‘sex based’ rights you want gender based rights to not exist.

In what world have women supporting sex based rights said that people should face discrimination and hate because of their identity. This is exactly the simplistic thinking shown upthread telling us that showing the non existent foundations of gender ideology was not appropriate on this thread and based on hate (with red pills and other denigrating terms used).

Of course it is also horrendous that LGBT people will suffer as well. Even a young teenager pointed this out to me yesterday after seeing numerous tik toks displaying similar ill conceived concepts.

I guess though that is what happens when you think in mantras and thought bites that work on twitter and tik tok. You lose your ability to think critically. You outsource it to self identified thought leaders who repeat trope you wish to hear and make it entertaining rather than actually seeking to find a grain of truth and build on it.

Any person who thinks a woman discussing sex/gender approves of the Taliban’s attitude towards LGBT people needs to start thinking for themselves and reading what women are actually saying. This is a great example of just how misogynistic the trans movement can be and if you believe it, you too are soaked in ideological thinking.

Time to reclaim perspective. I hope it is not too late.

The not so recent history of Afghanistan has been very effectively erased. If you can find pictures of Kabul in the 70s before the Soviet invasion, you will see busy streets full of women in miniskirts, and not a veil in sight on anyone under 60.

I remember that well.

But Jaysmith, please don’t call the Soviet presence an invasion. They were invited in by the government of Afghanistan specifically to counteract the religious fundamentalist insurgents. The woman-hating insurgents were supported by many western governments and individuals— who then acted all shocked when the Taliban duly took over and abolished women’s rights.

What was life like in Soviet occupied Afghanistan? I've tried looking this up but on'y get statistics about the lives lost in the conflict. But I'm curious about what day to day life was like in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, etc?

Thinking more about this, posters such as on page 2 continually post in ways that monster women discussing the oppression they are experts on due to a life’s experience. Thankfully those posts are deleted. But those posting in such a way simply seem to not be able to comprehend that women have a living and constantly updating knowledge of this type of oppression. To deny this would be the act of a misogynist.

The prejudice displayed by those posters, including the snide implications of supporting right wing and now the fucking Taliban, is rather stark in comparison to the evidenced and usually very considered posts by women on this board.

We discuss the impacts on ourselves, our daughters, our sisters, all women (obviously there will always be a NAWALT poster) of prioritising gender not sex. Maybe that is the biggest issue they have, us not centring the males in our discussion, only females, and for that they monster us. Make us out to be the wickedest evil twisted witches of all time - for not centring males and for ever thinking of women and girls and what they go through.

I am rather taken aback with the idea that those posters actually think that they are on the ‘right side of history’ with these posts, because all it does it shines the spotlight on where the hate is coming from.

And it isn’t feminists.

Lots of fighting age men 'rescued' on the US aircraft, could count a few women, literally 1 or 2. Not surprising, but sad. Even more so that we lost men and women out there, yet they have fled leaving the most vulnerable there and evidently arent prepared to fight for their own country.

I'm not particularly articulate or academic or intelligent but how thick do you have to be to not understand that what is happening in Afghanistan is exactly what we have been pointing out from the start of all this. As PP have said, women and girls are oppressed because of their sex. Our sex based protections can not be overruled by Gender Ideology because women and girls will lose those protections. It's never been about being anti Trans. It's always been about the importance of sex. Sex matters greatly and this truly horrendous situation is the horrible reality of that for many many women.