This day in Herstory: Bernadette Peters, born February 28, 1948, is an American actress, singer, and children's book author. Over a career spanning more than six decades, she has starred in musical theatre, television and film, performed in solo concerts and released recordings. She is a critically acclaimed Broadway performer, having received seven nominations for Tony Awards, winning two (plus an honorary award), and nine nominations for Drama Desk Awards, winning three. Four of the Broadway cast albums on which she has starred have won Grammy Awards. (more)
Doctor accused of sexually assaulting rape victim
From BBC News (UK)
Feb 28, 2022
A doctor has been accused of sexually assaulting a rape victim while he was working as a police casualty surgeon.
Krishna Singh allegedly touched the woman and made inappropriate comments during an examination at a Motherwell police office.
His trial at the High Court in Glasgow heard he told the hospital worker she was "not a good time girl".
The 72-year-old, of Airdrie, denies 84 alleged sexual related crimes said to have happened between 1983 and 2018.
It is claimed most of the offences happened at medical practices in North Lanarkshire.
Mr Singh is alleged to have examined the woman at the police office on 2 March 2008 after she was raped at her home.
She told the court she had not been impressed by his attitude and he acted as if she had woken him out of his bed.
The woman claimed Mr Singh swabbed her face mouth and neck.
She added: "He asked me what I was wearing and if I was wearing a skirt and I said I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. … read full article
Nonbinary gender on Oklahoma birth certificates targeted by Republican bill
From The Oklahoman (USA)
By Hogan Gore
Feb 28, 2022
Oklahoma Republican legislators moved on Monday to no longer allow nonbinary designations on state-issued birth certificates.
After a 7-3 vote in the Senate's Health and Human Services committee, Senate Bill 1100 passed despite procedural and legislative opposition by Senate Democrats.
The bill is intent on removing the ability of the Oklahoma State Department of Health to accept requests and amend birth certificates to reflect a person's gender preference.
As part of a legal settlement stemming from a lawsuit filed in 2020, Kit Lorelied, 46, is the recipient of the state's first gender-neutral birth certificate, where an "X" denotes their sex designation instead of a male or female gender marker.
Nonbinary people do not identify as strictly male or female.
In keeping with the settlement agreement, the department in October issued a nonbinary birth certificate to Lorelied, an Oregon resident. … read full article
Women's privacy is flushed away: After Sarah Vine touched a nerve with readers over the lunacy of unisex loos, a mother who ran the gauntlet of urinals in a theatre says it's an erosion of a treasured sanctuary that confused and upset her daughter
Rise of gender neutral bathrooms 'seemingly insidious', Hilary Freedman writes
This comes following venue Playhouse Theatre's gender-neutral toilet policy
Other venues, including schools, restaurants, and universities made the move
From Daily Mail (UK)
By Hilary Freeman
Feb 28, 2022
Women's bathrooms are far more than the rooms we visit to perform our ablutions.
They are where we go to do our make-up, cry, gossip, laugh — to bond with other women.
When we become mothers, they are where we dash with our toddlers before — or after — they have an accident. In short, they are female sanctuaries.
I once took a positive pregnancy test in the ladies' loo at House of Fraser. Another time, I was in the toilet at London's Soho Theatre when I realised I was miscarrying another baby.
would have wished to share with strange men.
When I was younger, the women's toilets in nightclubs and pubs were a private haven, somewhere to escape the unwanted attentions of persistent men.
I want my six-year-old daughter to have these same safe spaces available to her when she is older. … read full article
MRI features uncover differences between the brains of autistic girls and boys
From Health Imaging (USA)
By Hannah Murphy
Feb 28, 2022
Researchers recently uncovered evidence that the brains of males and females with autism are organized differently, which could contribute to how each gender experiences symptoms.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) manifests discordantly between boys and girls. At a ratio of 1 to 4, ASD is more frequently diagnosed in males, and previous studies have shown that females who are diagnosed with the neurodevelopmental disorder tend to experience symptoms on a less severe scale.
“There is limited research examining the neurobiological differences between females and males with ASD,” lead author, Kaustubh Supekar, PhD, with the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, and co-authors explained. “Additionally, how gender differences in neurobiology relate to gender differences in the clinical symptomatology of the disorder is also not known.”
Understanding if and how the brains of children with ASD might differ based on gender could help clinicians to cater treatments on an individual level. This is what led the experts at the Stanford University School of Medicine to compare hundreds of MRI brain scans from children with ASD to images from a cohort of typically developing boys and girls.
Using such scans, researchers were able to develop and validate a convolutional neural network that could accurately differentiate between males and females with autism. When the algorithm was applied to MRIs from the group of typically developing children, it was unable to differentiate gender between neurotypical girls and boys. This led the experts to conclude that gender differences in the functional brain organization in ASD do exist.
Additionally, patterns of connectivity associated with motor, language and visuospatial attentional systems varied widely between genders. Differences between the primary motor cortex, supplementary motor area, parietal and lateral occipital cortex and middle and superior temporal gyri tended to be the greatest indicator of motor symptom severity, with girls who displayed patterns similar to the boys’ having more marked symptoms.
“Our discovery of robust neurobiological gender differences in ASD psychopathology has the potential to transform our understanding of the diverse aetiologies of the disorder, as well as inform the development of gender-specific diagnosis and treatment strategies,” the authors concluded.
The detailed research can be viewed in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
WPUK: Socialist Party and Stonewall
From Woman’s Place UK
Feb 28, 2022
An article about Stonewall published by The Socialist in December 2021 made the claim that “some in the women’s and labour movement” are jointly campaigning with right-wing journalists and politicians.
As a women’s rights group made up of activists with long records in the left and labour movements, we wrote and asked the paper to publish this right of reply. We received no response.
We publish it here for the record.
Dear Editors,
Michael Johnson’s article “Stonewall attacked by the establishment” (The Socialist 15/12/21) refers to “some in the women’s and labour movement” he asserts are jointly campaigning with right-wing journalists and politicians “to present trans and non-binary people’s rights as conflicting with women’s rights.
For those who follow this discussion, that will be understood as a reference to Woman’s Place UK (WPUK).
Anyone familiar with our organisation knows that all our main activists are longstanding feminists. Many are actively involved in their unions; others work with women and girls affected by male violence and sexual abuse and several of us are proud of the solidarity work we’ve done with the people of Palestine. This may be why MI5 have never bragged about us naming them as employer of the year, an honour awarded to them by Stonewall.
We are a grassroots activist organisation which relies entirely on the voluntary, unpaid labour of women who hold down full-time jobs on top of our family and caring commitments. We don’t get money from big business and the HR departments of major employers. … read full article
Hi Laura … are you aware?
From Twitter (USA)
By Angus (@madadhruadh)
Feb 27, 2022
(Editor’s note: the following exchange sparked a notable thread, worth repeating here, with kind permission from @madadruadh. The first three tweets in the exchange are copied as tweets; the entire thread from Angus follows.)
Hi Laura,
Are you aware that @RooneyRachel is highly renowned for writing a book which encourages girls and young women - tomboys in particular - to feel confident and comfortable in their own bodies?
Are you aware that finding such confidence and comfort was one of the key aims of the women's rights movement?
Are you aware that such feminist luminaries as Germaine Greer and Camille Paglia have excoriated gender identity theory precisely because it undermines young women in their ability to hold their own in society, and instead presses them to treat their own bodies as canvases so as to force them to conform to regressive societal norms?
Are you aware that people with DSDs ("intersex" conditions) are increasingly feeling like strangers within their own sex because the pernicious habit of "pronouns in bio" - as in YOUR bio - suggests that their biological sex should be publicly debated?
Are you aware that many transsexuals such as my good friend @heterodorx are campaigning for radical bodily self-acceptance while you flippantly disregard the importance of that same concept?
Are you aware that there are now over 25 thousand detransitioners in one Reddit group alone?
That 25% of detransitioners believe that they transitioned due to internalized homophobia?
That 80% of young children with gender dysphoria naturally reidentify with their own sex if left to their own devices, rather than having hyper-awareness of sex role stereotypes shoved down their throats?
That thousands of loving and engaged parents have joined groups such as @genspect to raise awareness of these facts?
That there is no high quality scientific evidence that transition improves life outcomes - and indeed, there is limited evidence that it worsens them?
Are you aware that a >$1bn industry is profiting from cross-sex hormones and surgeries? That body image standards are increasingly influenced by hardcore porn, and the average age at which hardcore porn is now seen is estimated to be 11 years old?
Are you aware that alliances of doctors, such as @SEGMtweets, have arisen because these facts are not known to a wider public? That some of the most prominent clinicians arguing that young children should not be transitioned themselves struggled with gender issues in childhood, such as @stellaomalley3?
Have you heard detransitioners' testimonies? Have you in fact listened to any dissenting voices on this topic at all?
Or is your version of feminism the one which involves doing what grey-suited pharma execs tell you to do?
When the scale of your mistake becomes clear, in the coming years, remember this: Women like @RooneyRachel will not have to answer to you. You will have to answer to them.
The Twitching Generation
Around the world, doctors have noticed teenage patients reporting the sudden onset of tics. Is this the first illness spread by social media?
From The Atlantic (USA)
By Helen Lewis
Feb 27, 2022
Three years ago, the psychiatrist Kirsten Müller-Vahl began to notice something unusual about the newest patients at her clinic in Hannover, Germany. A typical Tourette’s patient is a boy who develops slow, mild motor tics—blinking or grimacing—at about age 5 to 7, followed later by simple vocalizations such as coughing. Only about one in 10 patients progress to the disorder’s most famous symptom—coprolalia, which involves shouting obscene or socially unacceptable words. Even then, most patients utter only half a dozen swear words, on repeat.
But these new patients were different. They were older, for a start—teenagers—and about half of them were girls. Their tics had arrived suddenly, explosively, and were extreme; some were shouting more than 100 different obscenities. This last symptom in particular struck Müller-Vahl as odd. “Even in extremely severely affected [Tourette’s] patients, they try to hide their coprolalia,” she told me. The teenagers she was now seeing did not. She had the impression, she said, that “they want to demonstrate that they suffer from these symptoms.” Even more strangely, many of her new patients were prone to involuntary outbursts of exactly the same phrase: Du bist hässlich. “You are ugly.”
Müller-Vahl, a professor of psychiatry at Hannover Medical School and the chair of the European Society for the Study of Tourette Syndrome, was not the only one puzzled by this phenomenon. The global community of Tourette’s researchers is tight-knit, and as they talked it became clear that a shift in patients and symptoms was happening all over the world, at the same time. Before the pandemic, 2 to 3 percent of pediatric patients at the Johns Hopkins University Tourette’s Center, in Baltimore, had acute-onset tic-like behaviors, but that rose last year to 10 to 20 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal. Texas Children’s Hospital reported seeing approximately 60 teenagers with sudden tics between March 2020 and the autumn of 2021, compared with just one or two a year before that. … read full article
Living in a War Zone: My Daughter's Tragedy in Slow Motion
From Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) (USA)
Feb 28, 2022
I am speaking as the parent of a young woman who declared a transgender identity aged 17, (a month prior to turning 18) completely out of the blue. So many parents feel that they cannot speak out for fear of harming their relationship with their child. I am speaking because, as I have sadly discovered over the last 3 years, this phenomenon is much, much bigger than my family, and we most certainly do need to talk about it and raise awareness of what is being done to our children. Our daughter has just turned 21 and has been in the transgender bubble for just over 3 years. She had been estranged from us for the past year, however she miraculously reached out to us exactly one week ago. For that reason, the last week has been a very emotional one for our family. There has been so much damage done and the healing process will be a long and rocky road, yet right now I have a glimmer of hope that I certainly did not have when I started writing this several weeks ago.
Our daughter was raised in a loving, supportive family. She has three older half-brothers who are now 31, 33 and 36, and a younger brother who is now 16. They were all raised by us in the same loving way we raised our daughter. We have a fabulous relationship with all of her brothers. Growing up she was not particularly “girly” and did not like dolls for example, but I thought nothing of that because I hated dolls as a kid and I was a bit of a tomboy myself. She loved soccer and handball and she was a brown belt in taekwondo. She tried so many extra-curricular activities – dance, singing, gymnastics, swimming and tennis – to name a few. She used to walk with me every morning when I walked our dogs and went to the gym with me as well. She enjoyed shopping with me and choosing her own clothes. We would go and have our nails painted together. We would go to plays and concerts together. We had such a close and loving relationship. She was very smart and did really well at school.
She was bullied at school and as a result of the bullying and the lack of support from the school, we moved her to a new school when she was 13 years old. That went well for the first 2 years and she had a stable friendship group of really lovely girls. Around the time she turned 15 she switched friendship groups. The new group had a girl who “did not identify as a girl” and that was my first introduction to gender ideology. I felt the new friends had a very negative influence on our daughter. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE TO PITT!)