Saturday, March 26, 2022
This day in Herstory: Keira Righton OBE (née Knightley), born March 26, 1985, is an English actress. She has starred in both independent films and big-budget blockbusters, and is particularly noted for her roles in period dramas. Her accolades include two Empire Awards and nominations for two Academy Awards, three British Academy Film Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, one Screen Actors Guild Award and one Laurence Olivier Award. Knightley was appointed an OBE in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to drama and charity. (more)
'Some Women Have Penises': Placard-wielding trans rights protestors besiege feminist campaigners' meeting held to discuss women-only spaces
Women's Place UK were holding meeting to discuss single-sex spaces
Event in Manchester was protested by around 200 trans-rights demonstrators
They claim the women's rights group is 'transphobic' and 'exclusionary'
Police officers were called to the event as a 'precaution', but no arrests made
From Daily Mail (UK)
By William Cole
March 26, 2022
A women's rights group meeting to discuss single-sex spaces was protested by trans activists - leading to police being called.
Around 200 protestors holding up placards that read 'Some women have penises' and 'If you are transphobic - do one' gathered outside a venue in Manchester where Women's Place UK were holding their discussion.
The group was hosting its annual conference to consider 'the importance and future of single-sex provision in policy and law'.
The protest was organised by the Manchester Trans Rise Up group, which described Women's Place as a 'transphobic hate group'.
Later, Greater Manchester Police said that officers attended as a 'precaution', but no arrests were made.
Police did help move the crowd apart so the Women's Place attendees could leave the building safely. … read full article
Gender event off after trans activists attack ‘extreme’ views
The event was organised by staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital and North East London NHS Foundation Trust
From The Times (UK)
By Eleanor Hayward
March 26, 2022
An NHS child psychiatrists’ conference on gender dysphoria was cancelled after transgender rights activists accused speakers of “extremism”.
A hundred trainee child psychiatrists were due to attend the event, organised by staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital and the North East London NHS Foundation Trust.
A number of high-profile speakers, including academics and charity representatives, had agreed to address trainee psychiatrists last Wednesday.
But the event was cancelled at the last minute after some NHS staff complained it had been “captured by anti-trans ideologues”.
The conference was due to discuss treatment for children identifying as transgender, after a damning report this month by Dr Hilary Cass into the gender identity development service at the NHS’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.
Cass, a retired paediatrician who was due to speak at the event, said the clinic was “not a safe or viable option” for children and a “fundamentally different service model is needed”. …
A number of NHS staff also used the health service’s official whistleblowing service to complain about the views of speakers at the conference, claiming their appearance made the event “unsafe” for trans people. Speakers they opposed include Helen Joyce, an editor at The Economist who last year published a critically acclaimed book arguing that biological sex is immutable. … read full article (web page archive)
Rachel Meade Crowd Justice
From The War on Women (UK)
By Jennifer
March 26, 2022
Rachel Meade’s discrimination case against Social Work England and Westminster Council is going to an administrative hearing on Tuesday, 29th March. Her case still needs a lot of support.
From Rachel’s latest case update:
“I know that there have been numerous fundraising campaigns recently for other cases, but I desperately need your support in order to take my case forward. Anything you are able to donate would be incredibly gratefully received - if you are not able to donate could I ask you to share the page as widely as possible, to raise as much awareness as possible of my case?”
BBC Front Row
From Women’s Rights Network “Last night @BBCFrontRow did a show about art & morality which drew moral equivalence between Eric Gill (serial rapist of daughters) R Kelly (child abuser) Hitler & JK Rowling”
You can listen to the programme here. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to The War on Women!)
Parole Decision Confirms Another Male Prisoner Was Violent Towards Incarcerated Women
From Women Are Human (Canada)
By Karen Finlay
March 26, 2022
CA — Ottawa, Ontario. Women Are Human recently disclosed Anngela Valentino’s Parole Board of Canada (PBC) decision, which confirmed female prisoners’ reports of Valentino assaulting and/or threatening them while incarcerated at Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI). Women Are Human has additionally obtained the July 2020 PBC decision for a different male prisoner, Steve Mehlenbacher, which also confirms a female prisoner’s report that Mehlenbacher repeatedly sexually assaulted her.
Mehlenbacher’s sexual assaults were first reported by Women Are Human in August 2020, after Heather Mason sounded the alarm on social media. Mason is a former Canadian federal prisoner at GVI and is now an advocate for women in prison. At that time, Women Are Human reached out to Mason and another former prisoner, who detailed multiple instances of Mehlenbacher’s predatory and abusive behaviour, and who were thus completely unsurprised that Mehlenbacher had been charged with sexual assault.
Similar to Valentino, Mehlenbacher’s PBC report outlines an extensive violent criminal past, including assaults and threats of violence. Further, the report notes that Mehlenbacher has been Unlawfully at Large multiple times, has consistently violated release conditions, and has institutional behaviour described as “difficult to manage”.
As is the case with Valentino, Mehlenbacher’s report does not specify the prison where Mehlenbacher was most recently housed, but notes that Mehlenbacher completed the Women’s Engagement Program – a program only available in women’s prisons. … read full article (and DONATE to Women Are Human!)
The rise of the heterosexual ‘queer’
Why are so many straight people desperate to be recognised as something they’re not?
From Spiked (UK)
By Gareth Roberts
March 26, 2022
I remember the surrealist comedian Spike Milligan, many years ago, asking ‘Did you hear the one about the Irish queer?’ The punchline? ‘He slept with women.’
You’d think this was offensive on at least two levels, but maybe Milligan was decades ahead of his time. For now we find ourselves in an epoch of the West when homosexuality has become so popular among a certain section of heterosexuals that they are desperate to join in, only without any of the icky matching-genitalia sex stuff. For now they can be queer!
The word queer has transitioned from being a casual slur aimed at homosexual men to a game that anyone can play. And it means something quite different now, apparently.
What does it mean? Like a lot of things that don’t actually exist, such as raspberry earthquakes or hadropodic wibblers, it’s very hard to describe. Wikipedia tells us that, ‘in the 21st century, queer became increasingly used to describe a broad spectrum of non-normative sexual and / or gender identities and politics’. This is strange, because fetishising other people’s lives to add relish to your own seems pretty damn normative to me, and not so very far away from aristos slumming it in the dives of the 1920s.
It’s an ‘umbrella term’, apparently. It means everything, which is another way of saying it means nothing. How can you catch a cloud and pin it down? What it seems to be in reality is an instant, pain-free way for inadequate people to make themselves fascinatingly, glamorously interesting. Or so they imagine. The journalist Terrell Jermaine Starr now identifies as queer, despite only fancying women. Vice recently tried to repackage monogamy as somehow thrillingly radical. … read full article (and DONATE to Spiked!)
Charen: Trans politics needs to slow down and wait for trans science
From Daily Herald (USA)
By Mona Charen
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast. Her most recent book is “Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense.”
March 26, 2022
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas recently used his executive authority to declare that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for those under 18 meet the legal standard for child abuse in Texas, a ruling that authorized the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents who had sought such treatment for their children. This is malice masquerading as policymaking.
Progressives, for their part, anathematize anyone who questions the new orthodoxy about gender. Not to go all kumbaya, but it just might be the case that both sides in these controversies have valid perspectives.
Progressives are right that transgender people used to be treated with some contempt. It’s important to correct that. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity. But conservatives are right that we’ve rushed into radical approaches to medicating children with gender dysphoria because the medical establishment and large parts of the opinion-shaping commentariat have treated this as a social justice matter rather than as a question of what’s best for kids.
Over the past couple of decades, the percentage of kids identifying as transgender has skyrocketed. A recent survey found that 1.8% of children under the age of 18 identify as trans, which is twice the number from 10 years earlier. Brown University public health researcher Lisa Littman published a study speculating that peer contagion was part of the reason groups of teenage girls were coming out as trans, and Abigail Shrier’s book followed up with insights into the social media influencers on YouTube and Tik Tok who encourage unhappy kids to consider that path.
LBGTQ advocates vigorously oppose the group contagion theory, but it’s obvious that behavior and mental health are affected by social cues. Emile Durkheim showed that suicide was contagious more than 100 years ago, and other mental health issues like eating disorders and cutting are associated with particular groups (white, middle-class females). Positive behaviors like volunteering and charitable giving are also influenced by group dynamics. … read full article
Manchester Women Refuse to be Intimidated
Despite the offensive, loud and relentless chanting from the trans activists, women stood and spoke with great passion and eloquence to a brave, determined and focussed audience. Women will not be silenced when it comes to standing for our hard won rights. (Audience Member)
From Woman’s Place UK
By Judith Green
March 26, 2022
A woman’s place is not in Prison, October 2021
In October last year we organised a meeting of several hundred women in London to discuss the inhumane treatment of women in prisons and the risks posed to them by locking them up with male prisoners. There was a small protest outside and the venue’s staff, our supporters and people attending an event in the same building were abused by protestors using the foulest racist and misogynistic language. We refused to be intimidated.
A woman’s place is in Manchester, March 2022
Our first major event of 2022 was in Manchester on Thursday March 24th. The theme of the meeting was women’s access to single-sex spaces, services, quotas and sporting competition; and the impact on that of the Bill for Gender Recognition Reform in Scotland and the Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance on single-sex exceptions across the UK.
150 people, mostly women, attended our meeting. It was the largest gathering of feminists in Manchester for a long time. Sadly, we are used to noisy, abusive protests outside when we bring women together. We also know that the organisers of these protests routinely tell lies about us or misrepresent us. We also know that they are frequently willing to harass our supporters and audience members, many of whom are interested in our campaigns and meetings because they have their own personal histories of physical and sexual abuse and know the importance of women-only spaces.
Intimidation and aggression by trans activists
An estimated 150 trans activists marched noisily to our meeting on Thursday evening. They had been attracted there by publicity that falsely claimed we are a “transphobic hate group” and that we’d be discussing the “exclusion of trans people from public spaces”. Their message was amplified by a Manchester Evening News journalist who was strongly supportive of them and has used derogatory language in his social media feeds about women who hold our views. We had offered this journalist a complimentary press ticket so he could report from the meeting itself but received no response. … read full article
Letter/Contract for Therapist re. Introducing Gender Ideology
From Advocates Protecting Children (USA)
March 26, 2022
Trans-rights activists have been very successful in pushing so-called "conversion therapy" bans, which prevent therapists from doing anything except putting a child on a path to medicalization as soon as the topic of gender comes up. This letter/contract asks your therapist to agree not to introduce the subject of gender during therapy, and to direct the child to discuss the subject with his or her parents, if the child brings it up.
If the therapist will not agree to this, the letter provides a list of studies that underscore the harms of gender ideology. The therapist is asked to read each one, and then indicate that having read and understood each study, s/he still intends to discuss gender ideology during therapy.
This letter/contract serves to educate therapists on the harms of gender, as well as to provide written understanding that the therapist either will or will not discuss gender with the child. … read/download letter
Should prostitution be available on prescription
The unlikely — and sinister — teaming of the sex trade and disability rights
From The Critic (UK)
By Dr Em
March 25, 2022
n January 2022 Rhys Bowler argued that the government should pay for him to have sexual access to women’s bodies. He announced that “Sex workers should be on the NHS for disabled people like me”. Mr Bowler has conflated purchasing a woman to penetrate with sex and claims it is an aspect of disability rights. As always, disabled women are not considered. Rhys stated that “this was my way of feeling better, by having sex”. He admitted to having used sex workers before: “it was easy for me to do it, it was easy for me to gain access”.
In that short statement, Rhys makes few sad observations of our society. He has outlined how easily available prostituted women are and that we live in a society in which it is common place for women’s bodies to be sold to men. Male feelings are paramount and women have been reduced to objectified service animals. Sex, the act, is considered by some to be no longer about passion, connection and mutual desire but bodies for males to penetrate. The importance of language is clear: sex worker sounds like a job, would Rhys be so comfortable saying he should have the right to buy poor, vulnerable, and often forced women for his sexual use?
In 2021 the NHS was funding sexual access to women’s bodies for a different disabled man, Thomas Williams from Lichfield, Staffordshire. Thomas is 30 years old and has autism and cerebral palsy. As part of his care package “he was given £23 a week for sex therapy with his 48-year-old sex surrogate [prostituted woman] Beverlee Lewis”. Disability charities such as Headway have been promoting the bodies of women be used as a therapeutic tool for men with brain injuries, recommending friends and care-workers facilitate visits to “sex services such as escorts, sex workers, or massage parlours that offer sex services”. It was being suggested that these men had no hope of forming relationships following their injuries. Similarly, Thomas argued that “There is a lot of stigma around being sexual and being disabled” and that he “didn’t really see the interaction between boyfriend and girlfriend as something I could have”. There is stigma that has to be challenged but prostituted women are not the answer. Purchasing women reinforces the message that disabled men cannot be sexy and are unlovable. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to The Critic!)
Controversy hits Government’s first global LGBT conference as Stonewall given ‘whip hand’ over event
Move seems to contradict Government plans to cut ties with ‘no-debate’ charity as a result of its hard line views around the trans debate
From The Telegraph (UK)
By Ewan Somerville
March 26, 2022
A row has broken out over the Government’s first global LGBT conference as Stonewall is accused of having a “whip hand” in “dictating” how it is run, The Telegraph has learnt.
The Safe To Be Me conference is taking place in London in June, the largest event of its kind, with worldwide policymakers gathering to tackle discrimination and promote legislative reform for equal rights.
Eighteen officials across three government departments are planning the event, headed by Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, who has called for Whitehall to cut ties with Stonewall’s contentious diversity training.
Despite ministers and the Civil Service signalling a move away from the charity, officials directed gender-critical campaigners to go through Stonewall or the Kaleidoscope Trust, another LGBT group, if they wished to help support the event.
Stonewall is also being paid in a co-chair role for one of the conference organisers, and in the past week the charity has been promoted several times under the conference banner on official Government Twitter accounts.
Now the event threatens to become the latest clash between lesbians and feminists who say biological sex is immutable, and trans activists who argue a person's gender identity overrides their sex. … read full article (web page archive)