“What’d I say?”
WELCOME BACK to WTFriday, our weekly round-up of the week’s news that’ll make you wish that recurring daydream you have of being a cat was actually reality. Well, more than usual, anyway. Let’s go.
Stacey Dash Said That Transgender People Should Use Bushes For Bathrooms
Intellectually, I know that characters in movies aren’t real, and that the actors who play them are usually nothing like the characters portray. I guess I just haven’t come to terms with that fact emotionally, because every time I hear about or see the crap that Stacey Dash gets into, I shed a tear for my poor, sweet Dionne. All she ever wanted to do was to learn how to drive, and here Dash is driving herself at reckless speeds into extreme conservatism.
Dash recently announced that she’s releasing a memoir titled There Goes My Social Life: From Clueless to Conservative, and, besides extolling her Second Amendment right to own a gun, she also has some advice for transgender people when it comes to which bathroom they should use: “OK, then go in the bushes. I don’t know what to tell you, but I’m not gonna put my child’s life at risk because you want to change a law. So that you can be comfortable with your beliefs — which means I have to change my beliefs and my rights? No.”
“Dash America,” a brand that somehow wants to reshape feminism or the way people view it, is also in the works and soon to roll out of the actress’ camp, according to CNN. When asked what the alternative to “chipping away at what it is to be a man and be masculine” is, Dash expresses nostalgia for the “‘Mad Men’ days” when “men were men.” SMH. Someone get this chick a clue, stat. Or a time machine, if she misses Don Draper’s misogynistic ass that much. [h/t CNN]
Donald Trump Calls For Hillary Clinton To Be Jailed
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Hillary Clinton hated e-mail so much that she sends and receives all her correspondence by snail-mail. People will not let this e-mail scandal go — least of all Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s negative karma for the past three hundred years made flesh. He’s calling for Clinton to be charged with a felony crime and jailed over her use of a private server to store e-mails pertinent to her work as Secretary of State. While the FBI is investigating whether any sensitive information was improperly handled, it is unclear whether Clinton will face any charges or be indicted. Trump’s latest dig at Clinton is a response to Clinton’s critique that he is “dangerously incoherent” when it comes to foreign policy. True to form, Trump brought up the e-mail server scandal, and also implied that “it’s like taking Sominex… and hard to stay awake” when listening to Clinton give speeches. Trump is nothing if not consistent.
It’s a bit ironic that Trump is calling for Clinton to be prosecuted for illegal activities when one of his business ventures, for-profit education company Trump University, is currently facing civil fraud lawsuits in court. His response? That the presiding judge is “a hater” and a Mexican with an inherent conflict of interest.
Guys, the reality of a Trump presidency is looming closer with every passing day. We’re on the Titanic at the part of the movie when the ship starts breaking in half, and we don’t even have a charming waif named Jack to make our last few moments bearable. [h/t Politico]
ACLU Director Quits Because She Doesn’t Thing Transwomen Should Be Able to Use the Women’s Restroom
Maya Dillard Smith, interim director of the Georgia chapter of the ACLU, has resigned from her position because she no longer is able to support the organization’s push to secure the right for transgender people to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. She cites an incident in which her two young daughters allegedly shared a bathroom with “‘three transgender young adults over six feet with deep voices'” and were left “visibly frightened'” and “concerned about their safety.'” As if invoking trans panic wasn’t already enough, she also denies transfolk their gender identity by asking: “‘What do we do about women who are the survivors of rape, for whom it would be traumatic to share a public restroom where you take down your underwear, and there’d be men in the bathroom?'”
Smith is also behind a website called Finding Middle Ground featuring a video in which a young girl (nice appeal to emotion, there, Smith!) tells viewers that some boys “feel like they’re girls on the inside” while others are just “perverts.” (Perverts! Is anyone else fuming? Just me?) The video, site, and Smith herself are being championed by anti-LGBT conservatives across the nation. Does anyone have the number for the producers over at The Americans — this is seriously some next-level sleeper agent spy sh*t. [h/t The Advocate]
Women Are Being Killed by Their Partners Left and Right, and No One is Doing Anything About It
In the wake of the murder-suicide that occurred earlier this week at UCLA, in which Mainar Sarkar murdered Professor William Klug after killing his estranged wife Ashley Hasti in Minnesota, Jezebel‘s Anna Merlan has compiled all the headlines featuring women murdered at the hands of their male partners this past week. Counting headlines shared by users in the comments, they amount to over twelve. Some of them are particularly gruesome and heartbreaking, like the case of the eight-months-pregnant woman who was stabbed to death by her husband and then set on fire, or the woman who was tortured to death and whose corpse was drained of all its blood by the father of her recently-born infant.
Those are just the ones that made the news. As Merlan points out, domestic violence in the United States claims the lives of more than 1,000 women a year. She also argues that news of women being murdered by the men in their lives has become so common that we fail to register it anymore, whereas we can still be talking about the death of a gorilla a week later. It’s some sobering stuff, and we need to find a way to confront this epidemic of men killing women in this country before it’s too late. What we’re doing isn’t working. [h/t Jezebel]
That’s it for this edition, guys. I can’t with this anymore. I’m gonna go curl up in my bed and pray the entire human race get struck by lightning this weekend.
