The Bluestocking, vol XXV: Purity politics, rare genes and giant kicking birds

Hello!

This week, I wrote about the difficulty in deciding which prison to send transgender people to; why London doesn't have to be a monster (although it is a giant); and did Late Night Women's Hour with an Orthodox Jewish rabbi-in-training, an ex-anorexic and a woman who's been celibate for 15 years. The topic was purity. See if you can guess who's who:

(My other photo face doesn't look so bad now, huh?)

See you next week!

Helen


Why can't we stop child abuse?

The snow began falling on February 5th. The next day, in Somerville, just outside Boston, Edward R. Gallison, thirty-five, came in from the storm and knocked two-year-old Jennifer Gallison into a chair. Or maybe he pushed her against a refrigerator. Or maybe she fell and hit her head. She’d been sick, with a fever of 104 or 105. Maybe pneumonia killed her. The facts never quite came out. After the little girl fell to the floor, her mother, Denise Gallison, twenty-two, wrapped her in a blanket and put her to bed. In the morning, Edward Gallison moved the bundle to an unheated storage room in the back of the second-floor apartment. He left the window open. The room filled with snow. Winter ended; the snow began to melt. Then, on Good Friday, Edward Gallison dressed his daughter in a snowsuit, hat, and boots and put her into a garbage bag. He carried the bag down the street and left it in a trash barrel in front of a statue of the Blessed Mother. The body of Jennifer Gallison was never found.

Child abuse is one of those subjects where a pendulum swings every few years between "oh my god, social workers are breaking up families!" and "oh my god, social workers aren't intervening to stop abuse". This New Yorker piece does a great job of uncovering the deeper causes of one of society's most horrifying and inexplicable crimes.

The Woman With A Rare Mutation Who Diagnosed An Olympian On the Internet

There were two photos, side-by-side. One was of Jill, in a royal blue bikini, sitting at the beach. Her torso looks completely normal. But her arms are spindles. They almost couldn’t be skinnier, like the sticks jabbed into a snowman for arms. And her legs are so thin that her knee joint is as wide as her thigh. Those legs can’t possibly hold her, I thought.

The other picture was of Priscilla Lopes-Schliep. Priscilla is one of the best sprinters in Canadian history. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, she won the bronze medal in the 100-meter hurdles. It was the first Canadian Olympic medal in track and field since 1996. In 2010, Priscilla was the best 100-meter hurdler in the world.

The photo of her beside Jill is remarkable. Priscilla is in mid-stride. It’s difficult to describe just how muscular she looks. She’s like the vision of a superhero that a third-grader might draw. Oblong muscles are bursting from her thighs. Ropey veins snake along her biceps.

This is the woman Jill thought she shared a mutant gene with?

My deepest sympathies to whoever had to write the headline and page furniture on this, because the raw ingredients are so unpromising - wasting diseases, Google image searches of athletes, complicated gene mutations - but the story itself is fascinating.


Quick links: What happens when your small town finds out you're a pick-up artist and have been rating local women on their sexual skills. How Twitter feels like it's dying - and why. Bonus: How to save Twitter? Turn off replies and mentions. A couple of great older pieces: how a man who impersonated missing children got more than he bargained for; and the sinister secret behind a fan of suicide chatrooms. A history of bathroom panics. How "phobic" became a weapon in the online identity wars. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart after Jon Stewart is floundering. If you've got a good monitor, this view of the whole earth is AMAZING.


Quote of the week: "When you’re filming a bird that specializes at kicking snakes to death, you’d better be careful about your power cables." (Ed Yong on secretary birds, which would make a great pet for a super villain. Related note: they are the modern equivalent of giant kicking birds that roamed South America when it was still an island. These were called TERROR BIRDS. It's enough to make you want to write your own Gormenghast-style gothic fantasy, just to include them.)

PLUG of the week: Thanks to Julian Simpson's newsletter, I found out about the Criminal Podcast, the first episode of which features a woman who may have been killed by an owl. Thanks to Caroline Crampton's newsletter, I found out about Note to Self, which explores the intersection of technology and society. Both are consistently interesting and well produced.

Guest gif:

That's all for this week. Please encourage your friends and enemies to sign up here: tinyletter.com/HelenLewis