This day in Herstory: Germaine Greer, born January 29, 1939. is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the radical feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century.
Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England.
Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, it offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women were forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfil male fantasies of what being a woman entailed. …
Greer is a liberation (or radical) rather than equality feminist. Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and "agreeing to live the lives of unfree men". "Women's liberation", she wrote in The Whole Woman (1999), "did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual." She argues instead that liberation is about asserting difference and "insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination". It is a struggle for the freedom of women to "define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate". (read more)
Actions and updates
From The War on Women
By Jennifer
January 29, 2022
Last week for conversion therapy consultation
There are 6 days left to fill in the conversion therapy consultation. There are 15 questions which will take approximately an hour. Sex Matters have also provided an easy way of responding. If you are happy with their provided answers you can answer just 2 questions which should only take 10 minutes.
Justice for Jenny Swayne
I am sure most of you are aware of what has happened to Jenny Swayne. In brief, Jenny was arrested for putting up feminist stickers and posters. She was held for over 10 hours and denied her bipolar medication. Her home was searched and her phone and other items, including a book was taken. She was released at 3.30am to travel home alone on her mobility scooter with no phone. There is now a fundraiser for the legal case.
There will be a protest against Gwent Police at 12pm this Monday (31st January) at Newport Central Police Station.
Call to Action
Details for the conversion therapy consultation can be found here.
Jenny Swayne’s fundraiser is here. Please share, and support if you can.
The EHRC is right about the trans conversion therapy ban
From The Spectator (UK)
By Julie Bindel
January 29, 2022
Before I saw the statement, ‘It is with sadness and deep regret that LGBT Foundation is severing all ties with the EHRC [Equality and Human Rights Commission],’ I had never heard of the charity, the LGBT Foundation. How I wish it had remained so. The reason why the Foundation had taken such umbrage with the EHRC is because it had released two statements this week that, according to trans-activists, are ‘extremely damaging [to trans-people] and cannot be supported in any circumstances.’
One statement was about the proposed conversion therapy legislation in England and Wales. The EHRC rightly point out that bullying and coercing lesbians or gay men to become heterosexual, in the name of therapy, is a human rights violation and unacceptable on every level. I should know, in 2014 I went to a small Christian town in Colorado to undergo conversion therapy. I was doing undercover research, and my cover story was that I was deeply unhappy being a lesbian because my church and my family had rejected me. I made it very clear that my unhappiness was caused by external forces, i.e. anti-lesbian bigotry, but despite this, the so-called therapist tried every trick in the book (such as, ‘did your mother really love you?’ ‘Were you sexually abused as a child which led to you hating men?’) to get me to denounce lesbianism.
These people don’t really care if we become actively heterosexual or not, they just want to stop us acting on same-sex attraction.
But the proposals for the new conversion therapy law in the UK include gender identity. Ultimately, if this is passed, it would mean that any talking therapy offered to young people presenting to medical professionals with gender dysphoria would become illegal. As the EHRC pointed out in its report, gender identity is not the same as sexual orientation.
If that were today and I presented at a gender identity clinic, I would now possibly be on hormones
It is known that many of the children that present with gender dysphoria go on to be lesbian or gay in later life, and continue to live as their biological sex. I really could’ve done with some therapy when I was struggling as a young teenager with the feelings I developed for a girl in my class. I thought I must be really a boy, and this belief was backed up by the bigots in my school that told me I wasn't a real girl. If that were today and I presented at a gender identity clinic, I would now possibly be on hormones. What I would have needed was a friendly, skilled ear to listen to my distress and tell me that I was perfectly fine as I was. … read full article
Inclusive language risks ‘dehumanising women’, top researchers argue
From The Age (Australia)
By Wendy Tuohy
January 29, 2022
Replacing words like “women” and “mothers” with terms like “birth-givers” and “pregnant people” in research risks dehumanising women and would harm decades of work to improve the visibility of women in medical literature.
That is the conclusion of 10 prominent women’s health researchers from Australia, the US, Europe and Asia who will argue in a paper published next week that replacing words like “breastfeeding” with terms such as “lactating parents” risks “reducing protection of the mother-infant [bond]” and “disembodying and undermining breastfeeding”. … read full article
Police interview charity chief Nicola Murray after tweet ending referrals to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre
From The Times (UK)
By Mike Wade
January 29, 2022
The founder of a charity supporting women who have suffered domestic violence has been interviewed by police after she was reported for hate crime after stressing its female-only services.
Nicola Murray was left “shocked and panicky” when detectives arrived at her door after an online announcement by Brodie’s Trust that it would no longer refer women to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC).
Talking to the officers, Murray, from Stanley, near Perth, was taken aback when she said they told her: “We need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind making your statement.” … read full article
"Trans Kids" Crowdfunding Hormones, Puberty Blockers
From Reduxx
By Genevieve Gluck
January 29, 2022
Emily Waldron, a boy who identifies as a girl, is one of a growing number of children raising money online for drugs euphemistically referred to as "puberty blockers."
Waldron, 13, last year appeared on the BBC’s The One Show with Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie, who called him an “extraordinary young person."
“I am transgender,” Waldron said. “Four years ago, when I was just beginning to transition, I thought I was the only one like me.”
Waldron, who campaigns for school libraries to stock LGBT-themed children’s books — with titles such as Boy Erased — received over £14,000 after launching a GoFundMe campaign. Waldron has been given puberty-blocking drugs by his family since the age of 12.
A search conducted on GoFundMe’s website can reveal that other parents are using the crowdfunding site to finance the cessation of their children’s healthy development — including for girls as young as 10 years old.
In doing so, many are bypassing medical regulations. In Waldron’s case, ‘puberty blockers’ were not prescribed by an NHS doctor. They were instead purchased from a private clinic thanks to Emily’s internet crowdfunding campaign. … read full article
The detransitioners: ‘The problems I thought I’d solved were all still there’
From The Times (UK)
By Sarah Ditum
January 29, 2022
Sinéad Watson knows that her story will be a difficult one for many people to follow. Though she was born a girl, she identified as a man from the age of 20, binding her breasts and taking the name Sean. Hormone treatment followed a few years later, and a double mastectomy. But at 27, she stopped taking the testosterone and returned to living as a woman. She became one of the small but growing population known as “detransitioners”.
It’s hard to know how many detransitioners there are, because it’s hard to know how many people have transitioned in the first place, and long-term follow-up on patients is poor. LGBT campaign group Stonewall puts the rate of detransition at less than 1 per cent; research from the United States suggests a figure as high as 8 per cent. However, as the number of transitioners has increased in recent years, the number of detransitioners seems likely to head in the same direction.
Referrals to the Sandyford Young People’s Gender Service in Glasgow rose by 705 per cent in the five years from 2013. And although the typical transitioner used to be male and middle-aged, much of that rise probably came from people like Sinéad: adolescent girls and young women who identify as boys or men. Though Scotland doesn’t disaggregate data by sex, the Tavistock in London now sees about three natal girls for every boy referred there. … read full article
NHS England slammed for relaxing single-sex hospital rules after fines for breaches were quietly dropped
From National World (UK)
“Permanently downgrading services for patients is not just unacceptable but, if it is snuck through in a quiet contractual change without even asking patients what they think, utterly outrageous.”
By Harriet Clugston
January 28, 2022
Campaigners have accused the NHS of relaxing rules banning mixed-sex hospital wards by the back door, after financial penalties for non-compliance were quietly dropped from care contracts.
A flat rate £250-per-rule-break fine was previously enshrined in the NHS Standard Contract, used when commissioning care for patients in England, meaning hospitals could face steep penalties for consistent flouting of single-sex ward rules.
All other financial sanctions designed to ensure adherence to quality of care measures were also dropped, including on long waits for cancer treatment or failure to check up on patients discharged from mental health facilities.
Mixed-sex wards were banned in England in 2010. There are similar rules in other UK nations. … read full article
At last, there’s a champion for women’s rights
Self-ID campaigners have grown used to getting their way but the equality commission has now drawn a line in the sand
From The Times (UK)
By Janice Turner
January 29, 2022
The Equality and Human Rights Commission is not fit for purpose, say Liberty and Stonewall; it is “extremely dangerous and damaging”, rails the LGBT Foundation. “Hurt and angered” activists have branded it a “hate group” and the Scottish government is enraged. A furious response to a mere regulatory body, whose sole purpose is to enforce the 2010 Equality Act. So what bigotry has the EHRC committed to inflame these tribunes of social justice? Three things, in a single week.
First, it warned the Scottish government its planned reforms to the Gender Recognition Act, which will allow anyone to change the biological sex on their birth certificate by a simple declaration (aka self-ID), has consequences for women’s rights, particularly in data collection, sport and within the criminal justice system. Then it informed Holyrood that a census question which asks a person’s sex is not (as the SNP claims) a breach of human rights. Finally, the EHRC cautioned against lumping gender identity with sexual orientation in Westminster’s conversion therapy bill. A lack of clear definitions, it said, could criminalise therapists for counselling patients with gender dysphoria. It proposed pre-legislative scrutiny by committee to bring clarity.
In other words, the EHRC did its job. It considered the Equality Act’s nine protected characteristics — age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage, pregnancy/maternity, race, religion/belief, sex and sexual orientation — and kept their competing rights in balance. Previously one has been notably ignored — sex — in favour of a concept with no legal standing at all, “gender identity”. … read full article