This day in herstory: Bessie Coleman, born on January 26, 1892, was an early American civil aviator. She was the first African-American woman and first Native American to hold a pilot license. She earned her license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale on June 15, 1921 and was the first Black person to earn an international pilot's license.
Born to a family of sharecroppers in Texas, Coleman worked in the cotton fields at a young age while also studying in a small segregated school. She attended one term of college at Langston University. Coleman developed an early interest in flying, but African Americans, Native Americans, and women had no flight training opportunities in the United States, so she saved and obtained sponsorships to go to France for flight school.
She then became a high-profile pilot in notoriously dangerous air shows in the United States. She was popularly known as Queen Bess and Brave Bessie,[9] and hoped to start a school for African-American fliers. Coleman died in a plane crash in 1926. Her pioneering role was an inspiration to early pilots and to the African-American and Native American communities. (read more)
Hong Kong appeal court rules against transgender pair who tried to amend status on their identity cards
From South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
By Jasmine Siu
January 26, 2022
Henry Edward Tse and a person identified only as Q had applied for judicial review of government’s refusal to amend ID cards but failed at Court of First Instance in 2019
Commissioner of registration will only amend gender entry on ID card if holder has had full sex reassignment surgery unless applicant has medical proof operation cannot be done
A court has upheld the constitutionality of a controversial policy that limits gender status changes on Hong Kong identity cards to those who have undergone sex reassignment surgery.
The Court of Appeal on Wednesday ruled against Henry Edward Tse and a person identified only as Q after they had applied for a judicial review of the government’s refusal to amend their identity cards but failed at the lower Court of First Instance in 2019. … read full article
Gov. Kristi Noem's chief of staff says trans sports participation 'sort of like terrorism'
From Sioux Falls Argus Leader (USA)
By Morgan Matzen
January 26, 2022
Senate Bill 46, a bill that would prevent transgender girls and women from competing on the sports teams that match their gender, passed the House State Affairs committee Wednesday morning.
But it didn't pass without arguments from Gov. Kristi Noem's top staffer, who said transgender peoples' participation in sports is akin to terrorism.
Mark Miller, Noem's general counsel and chief of staff, pointed to other states that have enacted similar legislation and said "it's sort of like terrorism," adding you see it elsewhere and don't want it to get here.
Proponents of the bill, including Miller, argued there are physical differences between those assigned male and female at birth that give women less advantages in competition.
UK equality body warns Scottish Government over gender reform plans
From The Herald (Scotland)
By Tom Gordon
January 26, 2022
THE UK’s leading equality body has warned the Scottish Government against simplifying the law on gender recognition.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission said “more detailed consideration” was needed if there was any attempt to overhaul the 2004 legislation which covers it.
It cited concerns about “extending the ability to change legal sex from a small defined group… to a wider group who identify as the opposite gender at a given point”.
The EHRC said there could be consequences for data collection, participation and drug testing in competitive sport, the criminal justice system and other areas.
It said the “established legal concept of sex, together with the existing protections from gender reassignment discrimination for trans people” provided the correct balance. … read full article
The EHRC delivers
Women’s rights campaigners have been vindicated… for now
From The Critic (UK)
By Olivia Hartley
January 26, 2022
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced on Wednesday afternoon their position regarding reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) in Scotland.
In a letter to the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government, Baroness Falkner, Chairwoman of the EHRC, explained concerns over the SNP government’s proposal to use Self-ID alone to obtain Gender Recognition Certificates:
The potential consequences include those relating to the collection and use of data, participation and drug testing in competitive sport, measures to address barriers facing women, and practices within the criminal justice system, inter alia. As such, we consider that more detailed consideration is needed before any change is made to the provisions in the Act.
This is a blow to the campaign for Self-ID in Scotland and a win for groups like For Women Scotland, a grassroots organisation campaigning on equality and human rights issues impacting on women and children in Scotland. Activists who have tried to shut down conversation on Self-ID, by falsely conflating gender critical views with fascism, have over-reached this time. … read full article
Culture plays role in children’s acceptance of gender-diverse peers: U of T study
From U of T News (Canada)
By Kristy Strauss
January 26, 2022
Shown four images of hypothetical peers – a boy playing with cars and trucks, a girl playing with cars and trucks, a boy playing with a Barbie and dollhouse, and a girl playing with a Barbie and dollhouse – children from Thailand and China were then asked a simple question: Would you want to be their friend?
Their answers depended on which country they were from.
Doug VanderLaan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and his colleagues found that children from Thailand, which traditionally has a culture more open to non-binary/diverse gender expressions, were more open to being friends with gender non-conforming peers. By contrast, children from China, which has traditionally viewed gender in binary terms, masculine or feminine, were more biased against non-conforming peers.
The researchers’ findings, which could have implications for advancing acceptance of gender diversity, were recently published in the journal Developmental Science.
“I thought this would be interesting ... because of this difference between Thai society and many other societies, where there isn’t as much visibility and tolerance of gender diversity,” says VanderLaan, the study’s principal investigator and study site leader in Thailand.
“Specifically, I was curious about whether children from Thailand show the same biases against gender non-conformity that have been observed in the U.S., Canada, Netherlands, and now China. And the answer was no, they don’t.” … read full article
Rice University Coach Says NCAA Athletes Should Compete In Gender They’re Born With
From Shore News Network (USA)
By Laurel Duggan
January 26, 2022
Award-Winning Coach Says Athletes Should Compete Against Gender They Were Born Into
Rice University swim coach Seth Huston challenged the NCAA’s transgender athlete policies in an interview with Swim Swam.
“Lia has every right to compete,” Huston told the outlet, referring to transgender athlete Lia Thomas, a biological male who has been dominating women’s college swimming.
“But I think, black and white right now, you compete as what you were biologically born until we get to a point where we’ve expanded opportunities … I think there’s going to be a lot of frustrated competitors, and families and fans in the sport in the end if we continue down this short-term road right now.”
Will Thomas, now known as Lia Thomas, competed in men’s college swimming for three years before he began to identify as a transgender woman. Thomas now swims for the University of Pennsylvania women’s team and has been shattering records and dominating the sport.
Huston, who was named one of the top 100 greatest coaches by the College Swimming & Diving Coaches Association of America in 2021, is the first active Division I coach to speak out on the transgender athlete debate.
“I just feel like we’re bowing to, in this particular instance, to one person,” Huston said, Swim Swam reported. “And really to the detriment of thousands of other athletes potentially. And I don’t think that’s right.” … read full article
The razor blades libel
From The Glinner Update (UK)
Police, journalists and trans activists join forces to smear feminists with a disgusting, dangerous lie
By ripx4nutmeg
January 26, 2022
It’s now been a little over a month since Harry Miller won his case against the College of Policing, and it appears the police have not learnt very much from it.
Since the start of this year Surrey Police threatened to arrest a man for sharing an image saying ‘trans rights are very, very boring’ and parents who complained to Girlguiding about safeguarding, because one of its leaders is a man who shares pictures of himself in women’s bondage gear and brandishing firearms, found that THEY were being questioned for ‘transphobic’ thinking.
But even those two extraordinary stories are now being overshadowed by what’s happened in Newport. This is the story (so far).
On January 21, Gwent Police tweeted this statement, saying that a ‘number of posters containing offensive material’ have been ‘installed’ throughout Newport and that the public should not remove them, instead an authority will ‘safely remove’ them. This was retweeted by Labour MP Jessica Morden, who later removed the retweet.
Nicola Sturgeon’s transgender reforms ‘could be harmful to women and should be stopped’
Equality and Human Rights Commission strikes blow to First Minister’s hopes of overhauling gender rules by calling for plans to be scrapped
From The Telegraph (UK), via MSN (US)
By Daniel Sanderson
January 26, 2022
The Scottish Government faced renewed calls to abandon the controversial proposals, after the “serious and substantial intervention” by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) backed up concerns of feminist campaigners.
In a major reversal from its previous stance, the body urged the Scottish Government to halt proposals to make it far easier to legally change gender, claiming that the existing system struck the right balance between protecting transgender people and women.
It backed fears, repeatedly dismissed by SNP ministers and pro-trans lobby groups, that the “potential consequences” of the changes would impact on fields such as sport and criminal justice, as well as “measures to address barriers facing women”.
The Scottish Government is expected to publish legislation within weeks which would allow people to “self-declare” their own gender, removing the need for a medical diagnosis, to obtain a gender recognition certificate. … read full article (MSN)
LGBTQ+: A Front For The Techno-Medical Complex
From The 11th Hour Blog
By Jennifer Bilek
January 25, 2022
One of the most brilliant tactics used by the gender industry in their pursuit of dismantling human sexual dimorphism for the profiteering of the techno-medical complex (TMC), was to tie their agenda of promoting body dissociation to the progressive human rights movement for LGB individuals.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in a current legal case being fought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the state of Arkansas. The ACLU is utilizing a 15-million-dollar endowment from two gay men, Jon Stryker, heir to the Stryker Corporation medical fortune worth 14.7 Billion dollars, and his husband, Slobodan Randjelović to overturn a state ban that refuses to allow for drug and surgical experimentation on children’s sex.
The TMC profiteering is the backdrop to the current LGBT. It is obscured by the creation of an ideology promoting medical identities pertaining to human sex, as advancement. The global healthcare industry is a 10 trillion-dollar industry. To grow within a capitalist economy, it must create new markets. Medical identities based on sex feeds this industry, which is why the “transsexual” brand of drugs and surgeries has morphed into the “transgender” brand of sex-on-a-spectrum drugs and surgeries. The ‘transsexual” brand of drugs and surgeries was purchased by a small base of adult men with a sexual fetish, choosing to colonize the opposite sex. The “transgender” brand is the repackaging of this fetish for youth to appeal to a bigger market via corporate normalization. The current ongoing ad campaign of glamorous, mythic individuals that are not male or female is seen as a ready cure for an anxious and disaffected population of teens. Young people can get testosterone delivered to their homes, mastectomies for body dysphoria, chest dysphoria, or simply to masculinize their appearance. Hysterectomies can be performed in full or in part, depending on how one feels, and non-binary surgeries give men the option of keeping their penis while inverting their scrotal sack into a makeshift hole for penetration. Sex-on-a-spectrum or human sex deconstructed into parts works out very well for the TMC, and Stryker Corporation which sells medical supplies and surgical devices. As a species, we are far more profitable as parts, than as whole beings. … read full article