Imane Khelif is suffering a horrifying and misogynistic attack, stoked by the likes of JK Rowling (and other assorted feminists and antifeminists) who love to appoint themselves as sex-testers to the world's athletes, despite having no clue at all what they're talking about.

Unsurprisingly, as I learned from THE OTHER OLYMPIANS by @michaelwwaters, NONE of the many athletes who publicly transitioned in the 1930s was an example of a “male posing as a female,” despite the queerphobic, anti-Russian, hypernationalist rumors that circulate to that effect.

In 1811, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué published a Romantic tale about a mermaid, Undine, who marries a human knight in order to gain an immortal soul. 25 years later, Hans C. Andersen riffed on Undine in composing his far more famous allegory for gay pining, “The Little Mermaid.” Unrequitedly obsessed with his guardian Edvard (the prince), Andersen (the mermaid) didn’t envision Motte Fouqué's marriage-based happy ending. He said he didn't want to make his mermaid’s salvation dependent on “an alien creature, the love of a human being” (a heterosexual?).

A shortened version of an essay I wrote about the "essential labor" framing of care labor is coming out in the LRB tomorrow. In anticipation of that, I want to air a few points I feel are crucial when talking about the history of struggles to denaturalize private motherhood. The point of Wages for Housework was neither to recast housework as loveless (because work) nor to flip capital’s devaluation of care on its head, idealizing it. It was to isolate the ‘work’ dimension of all labors of love, so that we might imagine what a non-work love could be.

Love to @AyoCaesar for asking me on BBC Radio 4, being thoughtful, & taking the politics of family abolition srsly. (Which can't be said for Moral Maze host Michael Buerk, who, predictably, laughed reading out my book title & then said "wow what did your parents do to YOU?" yawn) At least my answer to that question - they raised me normally in a middle-class household, while, in my dad's case, making clear that his love was conditional on me being biologically "his" - got Melanie Phillips to spell out her view that blood fictions are what "make us human."