Saturday, June 25, 2022
This day in Herstory: Rose Cecil O'Neill (June 25, 1874 – April 6, 1944) was an American cartoonist, illustrator, artist, and writer. She built a successful career as a magazine and book illustrator and, at a young age, became the best-known and highest-paid female commercial illustrator in the United States. O'Neill earned a fortune and international fame by creating the Kewpie, the most widely known cartoon character until Mickey Mouse. (more)
US - Trans-Identified Adult Male Takes First Place Against 13-Year-Old Girl in Women’s Skateboarding Event
From REDUXX (USA)
By Jennifer Seiland
June 25, 2022
Netizens are expressing outrage after an adult man beat out a 13-year-old girl for first place in a women’s skateboarding competition held today in New York.
Ricci Tres, also known as Ricci And Tres, took top spot in the women’s division of The Boardr Open today held in New York City, taking home a $500 prize for a first place win.
Tres, a 29-year-old trans-identified male, came in first place against 13-year-old Shiloh Catori. Of the 6 competitors, 4 were under the age of 17, with the youngest being 10-year-old Juri Iikura. ... read full article
UK - 'My first thought as I came round was Oh God! What have I done?': Man suing the NHS over trans surgery he bitterly regrets has bravely waived anonymity to share his ordeal
Ritchie Herron, 35, says life has been unbearable since surgery four years ago
His case first emerged after he shared experience on Twitter under pseudonym
He claims NHS failed to take mental health crisis into account before procedure
From Daily Mail (UK)
By SANCHEZ MANNING
June 25, 2022
For Ritchie Herron, a bright and articulate civil servant from Newcastle, life over the past four years has become almost unbearable. It takes him ten minutes to empty his bladder, a process as painful as it is slow. Any sex drive is long gone. In fact, he says, his crotch is numb, ‘shell-shocked’ from the damage done to him under the apparent care of the NHS.
‘Numb’ rather sums up Ritchie’s whole demeanour as he struggles to process what has happened to him. Today he reveals – in an exclusive interview – that he is the man preparing legal action against the NHS over an operation that removed his genitals.
Ritchie’s case emerged last week when he posted about his experience on Twitter under a pseudonym, TullipR. His brief testimony, which was picked up by the Daily Mail, was as shocking as it was damning for the NHS ‘gender clinics’ that help people change sex. ... read full article
UK - We need an urgent gender op inquiry, say campaigners
From The Mail+ (UK)
By SUE REID
JUNE 25, 2022
AN URGENT inquiry into NHS gender-changing operations on young people, some still teenagers, was demanded by campaigners last night.
It came as a historic legal action against the health service was launched by a man in his thirties who says the drastic surgery was the ‘biggest mistake’ of his life.
He says the removal of his male sex organs has left him incontinent, infertile and feeling like a ‘sexual eunuch’. ... read full article
UK - Is trans surgery just state-sanctioned mutilation?
Severe body modification is never good, whether it’s done for Islamic reasons or trans reasons.
From Spiked (UK)
By Brendan O’Neill
June 25, 2022
There is a question about body modification among the young that nobody wants to ask, let alone try to answer. But it’s time we put it out there. Why is it ‘mutilation’ when a young woman’s vagina is cut for religious reasons, but ‘affirmation’ when it is done for trans reasons? Why do we balk in horror at the ritualistic removal of parts of the outer vagina in young women in certain countries in Africa, but we cheer ‘bottom surgery’ as a form of ‘trans healthcare’ in the West? We need a reckoning with this moral disparity in how we view the ideological alteration of women’s bodies. We live in a world in which you can be arrested for subjecting your daughter to body modification for Islamic reasons but you will become a star on TikTok for allowing your daughter to have her breasts removed for gender-affirmation reasons. And we need to talk about that. ... read full article
“I felt sorry for them”
A thread from Twitter
By She-Rex
Posted June 23, 2022
It’s been almost a year since I started following this topic on Twitter. I had no intention of staying. I’d been watching KJK, Doc Stock and The Mess We’re In on YouTube, during the build up to the Olympics, and wanted to join the conversation on Ovarit 1/
Or was it after the Olympics? I don’t remember exactly. What I do remember is that Laurel Hubbard was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I had no idea about the prisons or the rape crisis centres or the women’s refuges, I’m very sorry to say… 2/
I’d been slowly, slowly peaking for about 6 years. Yes, it took a long time… forgive me! I’m young and I was indoctrinated. 3/
When I first started hearing the word transphobic, it was from a work colleague. He’d started volunteering with the police on Friday nights. Expecting to see a lot of action , he was disappointed about the amount of time he was spending on a trans identified male’s doorstep…
…because someone had looked at him funny. He insisted that everyone call him “Mrs something ridiculous sounding” and apparently you couldn’t even breathe around him without being accused of some transgression. “We don’t do these visits for ANYONE else” my colleague told me..
He was frustrated that this guy had the police by the balls and the saddest part about this was that the police team that my colleague was assigned to, was supposed to be making sure that vulnerable female students were getting home safely from the SU. They even had a mini bus..
So I filed that away in my mind and went on with my life. A strange person, I thought. I carried on *being kind* and pretending that I didn’t notice that the men dressed as women were men. I sold them dresses and patted myself on the back for having such a good poker face…
Did I find them a little bit creepy? Honestly, yes. A little bit tragic too. I felt sorry for them. It was weird, but I didn’t see any harm… 8/
Then, one day, a man refused to leave the women’s changing rooms, after a Muslim woman had quietly complained to my colleague at a till. “I’m a trans woman” he said. He wasn’t. “I identify as a woman, you can’t prove that I don’t” Incredulous, we left him there…9/
And opened another changing room. Another lady asked if she could come too. You see, it’s not actually about being trans at all. It’s about males being able to dominate female spaces, using a trans loop hole. He just wanted to sit with his wife. 10/
Was he safe? Yes, I think so. Probably? Did those women feel safe? I don’t know, but they certainly didn’t feel like they had any dignity or privacy behind those flimsy curtains. I filed this experience away in my mind. 11/
After completing my studies, I moved on from retail and went into education. It didn’t take long before I started coming across “trans kids” in primary schools. One kid, in particular, stuck with me. 12/
… and it wasn’t the “trans kid” at all! It was the little boy with autism, who was very confused and upset about the whole situation. He couldn’t understand why everyone was lying, because, he was told, lying is wrong. His friend had gone away a girl and come back a boy… 13/
He’d come back after the summer holidays and everyone was acting differently. The world didn’t make sense and it made him want to scream and cry. He was getting in a lot of trouble for his outbursts. I felt sorry for the kid. I understood him. I filed it away. 14/
Then I moved, further away from my family, to a new city. I had a room in a house full of girls. It was the only way I could afford to live there. I felt alone and it was scary walking home on winter nights. Would anyone notice if I didn’t make it home? I’d wonder. 15/
There was one particular unlit path that sent shivers all through my body, even just thinking about it. I felt vulnerable, so I tried to catch the train that stopped closest to my house, whenever I could, which usually meant getting home after 9pm. 16/
I should mention that I felt vulnerable because I’ve been stalked, assaulted and harassed… and I count myself lucky that that’s all I’ve had to deal with. ANYWAY, one cold winter night, the train broke down. 17/
But not before I’d struck up the most uncomfortable conversation with a trans identified male, who I’d smiled awkwardly at as I made my way to a seat. Seeing that I was *one of the good ones* he started ranting to me about transphobic immigrants. He stared at me intensely. 18/
His eyes were wild. He looked angry as he spun wild conspiracy theories about the transphobic NHS and the brown people that work for it. “They want us all dead” he said “I’m sure that’s not the case” I tried to reassure him. I was bewildered…19/
The train ride was only supposed to take 5 minutes but we’d been sat on the platform for more than 15. I kept looking at my phone, half-listening, looking around to see if other people were hearing what I was hearing. Then, the announcement came. Wait or walk? I decided to walk.
I excused myself, relieved, actually. The perfect excuse to get away from him. “I’m actually just going to walk” I said, and sprung up to walk towards the door. “Me too” he said “which way are you going?” My heart dropped.
And then it began to race. I felt, suddenly, like I couldn’t breathe. It was so cold, I could see my breath, but I became so hot that I was beginning to sweat. I couldn’t think of a lie… so I told the truth. Of course we were going the same way, we were on the same train…
There was no escaping him… And I want to make this clear, if he hadn’t been dressed as a woman, talking about how everyone hates him, I am sure that I’d have found some way to brush him off, but I felt trapped. Would he think that I was transphobic? Would he get angry?
What would the people on the platform think? Too many thoughts were racing through my mind in that moment. I was balancing my safety with his feelings. My safety with how other people would perceive me. I felt frightened, helpless and angry, all at the same time.
So of course, frozen with fear, I walked with him. When he suggested a different route, I went with him. I didn’t know where I was. I could barely hear him talking over the sound of my own pulse. Every corner we turned, I was looking for some place that I recognised…
But everywhere looks different in the night time and I still didn’t know my way around. I could run, I thought, but I might end up on a dead end street. I wondered if he was going to push me into the shadows at any moment… a memory of a school boy pressing himself against me…
Groping me and pushing me into a bush, a long forgotten memory, surfaced… Finally, we reached a busy road, I saw shops that I recognised. Bursting with adrenaline, I ran and didn’t look back…
I couldn’t file this one away so easily. I wrestled with it. I told my friends and they laughed about it. “You attract weirdos” they said. “I do” I joked. Just another strange encounter, I guess. I moved on, I moved away to a place that I could hardly get internet…
The debate that was rumbling away online, totally passed me by. Until the pandemic hit. I came home to my family. I started working from home… and I noticed something strange was happening on the television.
People were fawning over Laurel Hubbard. They were falling all over themselves to be kind to Laurel Hubbard, making sure Laurel Hubbard was comfortable. “She’s an unwilling history-maker” I heard someone on the television say… “No” I thought. “No, he’s not…”
“No” I finally said it.. out loud, to myself. “No” I should have said it before. I should have said it to that man in the changing room. I should have said it to the man on the train. I have a right to say “no”. Why haven’t I been saying “no”?
And that’s when the spell broke. When I realised they’d taken away my right to say “no”. When I realised the pain that it had caused me, the night when I thought my chest might explode…
That’s when I realised how awful this all was and I hadn’t even started to dig in to the medicalisation of children and vulnerable adults. I hadn’t even considered the implications for women less fortunate than me, I’m very sorry to say…
The more I read, the more I watched, the angrier I became. Why are so many young women supporting this? Why can’t they just SEE IT? I tried to tell my friends. I quickly realised how captured they were…
It feels like you’ve woken up in a burning building and you’re trying to shake the people you love, trying to wake them up, but they all just turn away from you, one by one, pulling the covers over their heads as the roof starts collapsing…
Ok, maybe that’s a touch dramatic… but it feels like they’re in a cult and they’d rather carry on believing the lies than face up to the fact that they’ve been had.. in a big way. I’ve long lost track of numbering, sorry this is so long…
Anyway, all this to say… I’m so grateful to the women who put themselves out there and fight this, any and every way they know how, for the women of my generation. I was in Bristol on Sunday and I was in awe of
and all of the speakers who bravely spoke up.
Seeing the olive branches being offered, after that event, it really felt like something BIG was happening. I don’t want to lose that feeling. We have to work together to beat this. I know that we can do it, if we stand united. All of us have something to offer…
We are all angry, but we are not “filled with hate” as they like to say. This is a movement, which is primarily powered by motherly, daughterly and sisterly love… and we have the truth on our side! Love and truth will win in the end
Ps I’m pretty sure the man on the train is now in prison for flashing and threatening to kill Muslims.
UK - Council axes talk by feminist writer because of her views on trans rights
Nottingham City Council says allowing Julie Bindel to speak at a library would violate its commitment to being an ‘inclusive city’
From The Telegraph (UK)
By Henry Bodkin
June 25, 2022
Council chiefs cancelled a talk by Julie Bindel, the feminist writer, on protecting women from male violence because it contradicts their position on trans rights.
On Saturday, Nottingham City Council said allowing Ms Bindel to speak at one of its libraries would violate its commitment to being an “inclusive city”.
Citing its allegiance to the campaign group Stonewall, the council said it was preventing the event from going ahead because of Ms Bindel’s views on transgender rights and in support of the city’s LGBT community. ... read full article
UK - Cancelling Julie Bindel is an assault on free speech
Aggressive activists want to give the impression that there is no debate to be had, that anyone who dissents from their line is a bigot.
From The Telegraph (UK)
June 25, 2022
Yesterday, Nottingham City Council cancelled a talk due to be given by the writer Julie Bindel, citing her views on the trans debate. Taking its lead from Stonewall, the charity that has pushed employers and institutions towards promoting an extreme approach to gender issues as a settled matter, the Council said it did not want the event to be seen as “implicit support for views held by the speaker”. … read full article
US - Biden’s Title IX change is dangerous for kids
A bad policy from the Obama years is being made much worse
From The Post by UnHerd (UK)
By Leor Sapir
June 25, 2022
Last week, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released its proposed new regulations under Title IX, the law enacted exactly 50 years ago that prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex” in education. In addition to weakening protections for students accused of sexual misconduct — thus moving campuses closer to the draconian Obama-era rules that even liberal and feminist law professors argued were an abomination of justice — the proposed rules would require schools to treat students according to their “gender identity” in virtually all areas of school life.
To those following the tortuous story of Title IX, OCR’s proposed regulations are no surprise. Last October, President Biden reappointed Catherine Lhamon to lead OCR. A duplicitous bureaucrat and crusading ideologue, Lhamon had served in the same role under Obama and was a major force behind catapulting Title IX to the center of the American culture wars. OCR’s decision to redefine “sex” as “gender identity” is troubling for three main reasons. … read full article
UK - BBC staff told there are more than 150 genders and urged to develop ‘trans brand’
Material provided to radio staff by Global Butterflies, a transgender group drafted in by corporation for training sessions last year
From The Telegraph (UK)
By Ewan Somerville
June 25, 2022
BBC staff have been told there are more than 150 genders, and to develop their “trans brand” by declaring their pronouns on email signoffs.
The Telegraph has obtained material provided to radio staff by Global Butterflies, a transgender group that the BBC drafted in for training sessions last summer and autumn. ... read full article
Civil servants are told to let self-identifying trans staff use whichever single-sex toilets they want under official guidance
Civil servants were told gender identity could 'differ from day to day'
They were given a handbook and training on trans and non-binary employees
A trainer also told them that saying 'adult human female' could be transphobic
One civil servant said the new rule 'adds to a feeling of a lack of privacy'
From Daily Mail (UK)
By ALASTAIR LOCKHART
June 25, 2022
Civil servants should let people who identify as transgender use whichever single-sex toilet they want, new guidance has said.
Government officials were given a 'Gender Identity and Intersex HR' handbook which provides advice for those who identify as transgender, non-binary or intersex and their managers.
The guide, written in collaboration with a trans rights group, says 'all individuals have the right to express their identity at work and present in their gender.’ ... read full article
Australia - What are the stages of puberty and are they a good measure of sporting power?
New rules affecting transgender women athletes in elite swimming have sparked controversy. What do they have to do with the stages of puberty? And what does the science say?
From The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
By Wendy Tuohy
JUNE 26, 2022
Trans women athletes were effectively barred from international swimming competitions in June, when the sport’s world governing body, FINA, introduced one of the strictest rules for eligibility to compete in women’s events.
Its inclusion policy sparked debate after stating that people assigned male at birth may participate only if they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2, or have transitioned before the age of 12, whichever is later. A separate open gender category will be created instead. ... read full article
Netherlands - Child Sex Abuse Doll Creator Offers Pedophile “Packages” in Africa
From REDUXX (USA)
By Genevieve Gluck
June 25, 2022
A Dutch national responsible for manufacturing toddler- and baby-like sex dolls he claims are “therapeutic” for pedophiles has called for self-identified “minor-attracted people” to join him in an unnamed location in Africa for the purposes of having their sick desires “protected.”
Bram Joosten, a native of Bennekom, Netherlands, recently advertised “protection services” in a video titled “How to be safe and happy as a pedophile.”
In the promotional video, posted June 14 to a website owned by Joosten called Doll Orphanage, Joosten encourages pedophiles to relocate to Africa in order to “start a new life where you as a MAP can be safe, content and happy.” ... read full article
Canada - Stop pretending
From Writing behavior by Eliza Mondegreen (Canada)
By Eliza Mondegreen
June 25, 2022
We need a movement for all of the 'people'—who share some crucial but verboten characteristics—who are directly affected by the end of Roe v. Wade that includes exactly none of the 'people' who aren't, and we can rebuild feminism for women from there.
Mixed-sex feminism that's built on the flimsy foundation of subjective identity claims and prioritizes validation for males does not work for women. Protecting our rights requires recognizing the realities of female embodiment. But mixed-sex feminism renders female biology an unspeakable privilege. ... read full article