Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Current news and opinion from a Gender Critical perspective
This day in Herstory: The Cavan Orphanage fire occurred on the night of February 23, 1943 at St Joseph's Orphanage in Cavan, Ireland. 35 girls and 1 adult employee died as a result. Much of the attention after the fire surrounded the role of the Poor Clares, the order of nuns who ran the orphanage, and the local fire service. (more)
Updated recommendations for hormone therapy for gender dysphoria in young people
From SocialStyrelsen (Sweden) - Translated from Swedish by Microsoft Edge
Feb 22, 2022
The National Board of Health and Welfare is today publishing new recommendations regarding hormone therapy for young people under the age of 18 with gender dysphoria. Uncertain science and new knowledge mean that the National Board of Health and Welfare now recommends restraint when it comes to hormone therapy. At the same time, it is important that children and young people suffering from gender dysphoria are taken seriously, well treated and offered adequate care measures.
Gender dysphoria means that you have a psychological suffering or a reduced ability to function in everyday life, which is caused by the gender identity not being consistent with the registered sex. The National Board of Health and Welfare is in the process of updating knowledge support for gender dysphoria care for young people and today new recommendations are presented regarding puberty-inhibiting treatment and gender-affirming hormone therapy for young people. …
The National Board of Health and Welfare has previously presented statistics showing that the group of young people seeking care for gender dysphoria has increased sharply. Between 2008 and 2018, the number of new cases of diagnosed gender dysphoria multiplied. The increase was particularly large among those aged 13 to 17 years and with registered female sex at birth.
"The change is greater among young people than older people, and greater within the group with registered gender female than male at birth. Several factors have been put forward as explanations, but it has not been possible to clarify what causes are behind it. As a result, the changes constitute uncertainty that we have had to take into account when it comes to what care should be recommended for minors," says Thomas Lindén, Head of Department at the National Board of Health and Welfare.
Lack of firm conclusions on the efficacy and safety of treatments
At the request of the National Board of Health and Welfare, SBU has produced a literature review where all relevant studies on the efficacy and safety of hormone treatments have been reviewed. The report, which is published today, shows that it is not yet possible to draw any firm conclusions about the efficacy and safety of treatments based on scientific evidence.
"The conclusion is that very little knowledge has been added about the effects and safety of treatments since 2015," says Thomas Lindén. …
The risks outweigh the benefits at the moment
Based on the results that have emerged, the National Board of Health and Welfare's overall conclusion is that the risks of puberty-inhibiting and gender-affirming hormone therapy for those under the age of 18 are currently outweighing the possible benefits for the group as a whole. … read full article (original in Swedish)
White House: Texas stance on gender-affirming care for transgender youth is ‘dangerous’
Texas groups representing parents, teachers and social workers react to new GOP directive that gender-affirming care for trans youth be treated as “child abuse.”
From The Dallas Morning News (USA)
By Lauren McGaughy
Feb 23, 2022
The Biden administration on Wednesday said it was needless and dangerous for Texas elected officials to label gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth as “child abuse.”
In exclusive statements provided to The Dallas Morning News, a White House spokesperson said families should have the right to seek the appropriate health care for their children and blasted state GOP officials for targeting LGBTQ youth.
“Conservative officials in Texas and other states across the country should stop inserting themselves into health care decisions that create needless tension between pediatricians and their patients,” White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. “No parent should face the agony of a politician standing in the way of accessing life-saving care for their child.”
On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a new interpretation of state law that said certain types of medical care for transgender youth are “child abuse.” Gov. Greg Abbott responded the next day by directing state agencies to investigate allegations of abuse, warning that doctors, teachers and parents who fail to report could face consequences.
Attorney general opinions do not have the force of law, but agency leaders are mostly expected to follow them. Since agency heads are often appointed by the governor himself, Abbott’s support for Paxton’s opinion makes their choice in heeding the warning more clear. … read full article
Census guidance for trans people ‘conflates sex and gender’
From The Times (UK)
By Dave Finlay
Feb 24, 2022
Scottish ministers were accused of conflating sex and gender in guidance for trans people about how to answer a census question.
The campaign group Fair Play for Women has claimed that the advice is illegal but last week lost a judicial review at the Court of Session in Edinburgh brought against ministers and the registrar-general for Scotland.
It has taken its case to three civil judges seeking to set aside the guidance which asks whether participants are male or female before going on to state that transgender individuals can give an answer that is different to the sex on their birth certificate without the need for a gender recognition certificate.
Gerry Moynihan QC, for Fair Play for Women, said that a policy document was unlawful if it sanctioned or approved what would be illicit conduct on behalf of the recipients of the advice.
Moynihan told Lady Dorrian, the lord justice clerk, sitting with Lords Malcolm and Boyd, that the term sex was normally used in a binary form, by contrast to gender which could be non-binary. He said the terms ceased to be interchangeable when it came to gender being used in a non-binary way.
“At the heart of the issue here is that by conflating the two what the guidance does is confuse a binary with a non-binary term,” he said. … read full article
Secret Teacher Portals Reveal ‘Pronoun Surveys,’ ‘Black Lives Matter Curriculum.’ Here’s What I Found in the Leaked Content.
From The Daily Signal (USA)
By Kenny Xu (@kennymxu)
Feb 23, 2022
The school district of Loudoun County, Virginia, may have made the headlines for aggressively pushing far-left content onto students, including pornography and critical race theory, but other districts throughout the country are no better off.
At the Santa Barbara Unified School District in California, teachers are given a plethora of politically radical resources that they are expected to implement in the classroom, which are now coming to light.
Christy Lozano, a teacher at the Santa Barbara Unified School District, has revealed that teachers are expected to access a password-protected portal for teaching “culturally responsive material.” She has exposed the far-left content with Laura Ingraham, and she recently provided me with the materials as well.
The materials are laid out in numerous webpages, each encompassing a different progressive cause. Some of the category headings include “Black Lives Matter,” “Bilingual/Multilingual Advocacy Month,” and “LGBTQIA+ Month.” When I started to dig into the materials, it quickly became apparent that they were not simply educational tools. …
But the most shocking information was contained under the LGBTQIA+ page. The linked articles and discussion guides cannot be considered anything less than grooming, which is the emotional manipulation of children to make them more susceptible to sexual exploitation by adults.
Under a “Elementary Lessons and Resources” heading, the page links to several videos and written guides meant to be used in preschool-second grade classrooms. It includes a video and accompanying guide for “Sparkle Boy,” a story about a young boy who enjoys crossdressing. The guide claims “Teachers can challenge traditional gender bias” via the story and calls on teachers to help students “explore gender identity.”
It also links to a video and guide for “When Aidan Became a Brother,” a book about a young girl who “transitions” to a boy. The guide notes that teachers must be very careful to help students use proper terms and pronouns to refer to trans people. One of the reader’s response questions is, “How might your understanding of ‘being yourself’ have changed after reading ‘When Aidan Became a Brother’?” … read full article
Activists call for inquiry into rape crisis centre trans appointment
From The Times (UK)
By Mary Wright
Feb 23, 2022
Britain’s leading equalities watchdog has been urged to scrutinise the appointment of a trans woman as head of a Scottish rape crisis centre after a legal ruling over the definition of “what it is to be a woman”.
Feminist campaign groups want the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to examine the appointment of Mridul Wadhwa as chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, a position that was advertised as open to women only.
Appeal judges at the Court of Session ruled last week that an attempt by the Scottish government to expand the definition of “woman” to include trans women breached equality law. A 2021 ruling had backed the government, but appeal court judges ruled that the definition in the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018 could only cover biological women.
The act’s purpose is to ensure greater gender balance on public sector boards. Feminist groups say it has been misapplied in some cases and that the wider definition to include trans women may have seen biological women overlooked for some roles.
Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play for Women, has written to the EHRC urging it to investigate the procedure of the Wadhwa appointment. She argues that Wadhwa, a trans woman without a gender recognition certificate, should not have qualified for the position. … read full article
What Both Sides Are Missing About the Science of Gender-Affirming Care
From Newsweek (USA)
By Lisa Selin Davis (Author of Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different)
Feb 22, 2022
Last April, Arkansas became the first state to ban what's known as "gender-affirming care," a protocol that affirms a child's transgender identity and allows for medical transition with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and, in some cases, surgeries like mastectomies or orchiectomies. The ACLU, which is now suing the state on behalf of four transgender young people, their families and two doctors, noted that "Gender-affirming care is life-saving care for our clients" and that banning it "runs counter to science and medicine." There have been as many as 25 such bills floated, mostly in right-leaning states.
From the outside, it looks as if the controversies around young people with gender dysphoria—marked distress at an incongruence between biological sex and gender identity—are political: The Left fights to ensure trans kids get the care they need, and the Right bans it.
But when the politics are pulled back and the science scrutinized, a very different picture becomes clear—or rather, it becomes clear just how murky the science is, just how much dispute there is about how life-saving these medical interventions are. Absent a partisan lens, it becomes clear how ambiguous the long-term safety and efficacy is of medical intervention, and how bipartisan the concern about them.
Despite the imprimatur of groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics and articles (some of which have been corrected or amended) asserting clear benefits of gender-affirming care, there remains a "paucity of quality evidence on the outcomes of those presenting with gender dysphoria," per the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. "No consensus exists whether to use these early medical interventions," says an article in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
A review of the research by the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence found that in terms of body image, psychosocial impact, satisfaction with surgery and other matters, "The quality of evidence for all these outcomes was assessed as very low certainty." Finland and Sweden have largely stopped providing such medical interventions to trans-identified youth except in carefully controlled studies, not because of politics but because among the successes are poor results, like children with osteoporosis or increasing numbers of detransitioners who medically transitioned and regret it. … read full article
The case that changed the gender debate
Stonewall’s strategy of 'no debate' has backfired
From UnHerd (UK)
By Maya Forstater
Feb 23, 2022
In 2019 I lost my job after tweeting about the difference between sex and gender identity.
Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender critical” view that human beings cannot change sex, and that sex matters. Some cases, like mine, have become publicly known, but they are the tip of the iceberg. Many of the people who have endured complaints, and been subject to internal disciplinary processes, go unnoticed. As do those so afraid of losing their jobs that they remain anonymous when expressing their views online.
Despite this, the debate has gone mainstream in the last three years. Today, the gender debate can be heard in parliament, academia and the media, as well as on social media and in discussions between friends. There have been best-selling books on the subject and all manner of public figures — from Trevor Phillips and Tony Blair to Martina Navratilova and Tanni Grey-Thompson — have spoken up on the issue.
More people are speaking up about the need for clarity about sex, for safeguarding and women’s rights. They work in education, healthcare, in parliament and the media. Most of all, there are parents speaking up to their children’s schools. … read full article
Trans ideology has captured the university
The censorship of gender-critical feminists comes from the top down.
From Spiked (UK)
By Ella Whelan
Feb 23, 2022
University campuses can be a pretty hostile environment for free speech these days. While No Platform policies and overbearing rules for vetting events have been a feature of the university landscape for some time, the debate over gender ideology has taken matters up a notch.
Censorship on this issue has been all but institutionalised within higher education, partly because so many universities are taking their cues on the gender debate from the trans lobbyists at Stonewall. Many universities, for instance, have signed up to the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme, which gives guidance on how staff and students should discuss and think about issues relating to gender and sex. Essentially, those who do not agree that ‘trans women are women’, or who refuse to put their pronouns in their email signatures, are told they are not being ‘inclusive’ and are pressured into conforming.
Fed up with being told what they can and can’t discuss on campus, 16 academics at the University of Cardiff wrote an open letter in June 2021 calling on their university to ‘review’ its membership of the Stonewall scheme. The letter argues that being ‘associated with Stonewall’ contradicts the university’s core values of academic freedom and respect for the rights of staff. It quotes Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley, who infamously told the BBC that gender-critical views were akin to ‘anti-Semitism’ and that there should be ‘no debate’ over trans issues. … read full article
Bodies for sale
The feminist fix: Sexual harassment will never end if men can pay for it
From The Critic (UK)
By Julie Bindel
Feb 23, 2022
Prior to Unison’s Women’s Conference last week, their general secretary Christine McAnea argued that a legal duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment and unacceptable behaviour in the workplace is “long overdue”. She urged action on the reforms proposed by Women and Equalities minister Liz Truss, that could see employers end up in court. Sexual harassment in the workplace was one of the big discussions at the Women’s Conference this year, with everyone condemning it — after all, how could anybody not?
Paid sexual harassment was completely destigmatised
But then in an Orwellian twist, guess what happened? Paid sexual harassment was completely destigmatised and condoned, and a motion supporting the blanket decriminalisation of all aspects of the sex trade, including pimping, brothel owning and sex buying, was simply rubberstamped by conference delegates.
On the one hand, the Conference condemned sexual harassment in the workplace. On the other, it completely supported the notion that women should be paid to endure it. It defies logic. Even the General Secretary tweeted her support for the motion, with apparently no understanding of the fact that prostitution is commercial sexual exploitation and should never be framed as work or unionised. … read full article
Karen Ingala Smith talks about single-sex services
From Sex Matters (UK)
Feb 23, 2022
Sex Matters spoke to Karen Ingala Smith, CEO of Nia – a charity that offers services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse – about how the charity maintains single-sex provision.
Karen, you’re one of the few voluntary sector leaders who have stood up for women’s single-sex services. Why are single-sex services so important for women who have survived domestic and sexual violence?
Being abused by a man, whether a partner, relative, associate or stranger, can have a profound impact on a woman’s well-being. Lots of women need space away from men to process what has been done to them and to begin to rebuild their lives.
Some women, not all, experience trauma after abuse. Trauma isn’t so much about what is done to you, it’s how your body and mind react to what has been done to you. It’s not a conscious thing, it’s not a choice, it’s not something that women can give themselves a good talking to about and move on.
To address trauma, women need to be in a space that doesn’t trigger a trauma response. And for some women, this means a space away from men.
I think that we should be providing services that support all women’s needs, not just those that are less complicated. Including males in services for those who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse can mean excluding the most vulnerable women who need support. I know not all women survivors need this, but I don’t think those who do not need it, should be denying the space of women who do.
And then there’s safety. Most sexual and physical violence is committed by men. If you want to provide a safe space for women, the statistically most effective thing that you can do to keep that space safe is to exclude men from it, irrespective of how those men identify. In fact, research shows that at best, violent criminality of males with a transgender identity follows the pattern of general male offending. If people say the answer is risk assessment, they’re missing the point. The point of risk assessment is to identify and remove any risks which are not necessary, not to throw extra ones in and hope for the best. … read full interview (and DONATE to Sex Matters!)