Reddit Purges Wrongthink From Women’s Health Support Groups

Reddit admins have shut down radical feminist spaces and supported coups in women’s health support groups to ensure ‘inclusivity’.

But users and groups moderators affected by the issue are saying that the new rules attack free speech. They claim the platform is directly attacking not only feminist forums but also ALL groups where women were discussing female health. Days after the r/GenderCritical subreddit, a forum that at the time had about 65000 users, was banned, a PCOS sub was made private for talking about Polycystic Ovaries Syndrome.

Reddit removed the groups moderators and replaced them with users who are trans activists or trans allies. The new moderators made the group private while they purged subscribers and non-compliant moderators. A new group was formed by the latter, but it was immediately banned by the administration.

After the PCOS sub coup, r/ Pregnancy was also targeted and made inaccessible. Many users are taking to social media to denounce that trans activists are taking control of the groups moderation in order to impose the new rules. For them, the message from Reddit is clear: women are being forbidden from talking about female issues. They support this claim with reference to the responses they got from the new moderators, who are demanding women to call themselves “cis women”, “menstruators”, “womb havers”, or to simply not talk about any issues at all that affect female bodies, because doing that is “transphobia”, according to the complainants.

Source: Reddit Purges Wrongthink From Women’s Health Support Groups

Meet Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight, the woman trying to fix Wikipedia’s sexism

Five years ago, Stephenson-Goodknight didn’t have her own Wikipedia page. For most of her life, she didn’t contribute to the website at all. But Stephenson-Goodknight has become a superstar in the community, and a pioneer for gender equality on a platform deeply in need of articles about women. She has written over 5,000 articles for the website, nearly 1,400 dedicated to women specifically.

Stephenson-Goodknight is up against centuries of history that haven’t documented or recognized women’s accomplishments. And in the present day, she’s up against various factions of Wikipedia’s contributors, who are 90 percent male. Some go so far as to delete articles about women or, worse, sexually harass the website’s female users.

But that’s beginning to change, in large part thanks to Stephenson-Goodknight, who, in 2015, co-founded Women in Red, a volunteer organization that works to increase Wikipedia’s women biographies (one of Stephenson-Goodknight’s many gender-equality projects on the website).

Source: Meet Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight, the woman trying to fix Wikipedia’s sexism – The Lily

South Korea rejects US extradition request over child abuse website

A South Korean court has denied a US extradition request for the man behind one of the world’s largest child sexual abuse websites.

Son Jong-woo, who ran the site Welcome to Video, served 18 months in South Korea for producing and distributing indecent images of children.

He was found to be the operator of the website Welcome to Video – a covert online den for people who traded in clips of children being sexually assaulted. Among the victims was a child of just six months.

Authorities tracked down more than 300 other people connected to the website in a wide range of countries including South Korea, Britain, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Spain, Brazil and Australia.

Source: South Korea rejects US extradition request over child abuse website – BBC News

Why is Surrogacy Illegal in Most of the World?

The infertility and surrogacy multi-billion-dollar industries, those who benefit from it, and others, too often attempt to out-shout any criticism of surrogacy by conflating surrogacy with LGBTQ+ rights and labeling all opposition to surrogacy as homophobic.

Defenders of surrogacy see it as a reproductive choice from a vast array of menu items ranging from IVF to adoption. However, these options are not available equally to all, but only to those who can afford them.

Anna Kerr, founder and Principal Solicitor of Feminist Legal Clinic Inc., Sydney, AU addresses the heart of the issue in regard to how much a of choice surrogacy is for the surrogates:

 … how often are these ‘choices’ being made under financial duress or in a context of social coercion?  …  Can we assume that women are truly acting of their own volition when in many cases their lives are so susceptible to the control of others? Or should we be skeptical of claims of ‘free choice’ and ‘consent’ in contexts that so clearly  … smack of abuse and shameless exploitation?

Kerr very accurately foresees surrogacy and other reproductive technologies creating “an Atwoodian dystopia that should provide the basis for litigation well into the future.  … international human rights provisions, do not adequately recognise and protect the natural and fundamental bond between a mother and the child she carries and must urgently be strengthened to prevent further development of a culture in which women’s reproductive capacities are commandeered and their offspring traded as mere commodities by wealthy men

Source: Why is Surrogacy Illegal in Most of the World? | Dissident Voice

Did you know…

…that 80-95% of people who say they are trans choose to have no medical treatment at all – no surgery, no drugs, not even therapy? Transwomen are just male people who subjectively believe that they are female. That’s it.

Despite some commentators describing an “epidemic of violence against trans people“, transwomen are no more likely to be murdered than anyone else, and the best data available shows it’s half as likely. In Scotland, zero have been killed. In fact, transwomen are almost twice as likely to be the perpetrator of a murder than to be murdered in the UK, which is not surprising since a male pattern of violence is retained regardless of any transition or cross-dressing.

Were you aware that 95% of prisoners are men, and 5% women? That most women in prison are there for financial crime, and most men are in for violent offending. Did you know that men commit 98% of sex offences? That 48% of transwomen prisoners are sex offenders (compared to less than 20% in the general male estate) and would swamp the female estate if they all transferred.

Did you know that a woman was asked to leave a shelter because, as a rape survivor, she couldn’t sleep in the same room as a strange male, regardless of how he identified? Are you aware that a man used self-id to access a women’s shelter where he sexually assaulted vulnerable women? Are you aware that a rape relief shelter in Canada lost all public funding for insisting they remain women-only, and had a dead rat nailed to their door?

Are you aware that despite less than half of changing rooms in swimming pools and sports centres being mixed sex, 90% of sexual assaults have happened in them? Yet mixed-sex, ‘gender-neutral’ facilities are constantly pushed, including in schools – contrary to law and building regulations requiring separate sex provision – when it would be more responsible to increase third space unisex provision for the comfort of those who need it.

Are you aware that studies show that puberty blockers result in 100% of children progressing to cross-sex hormones – whereas, if left unmedicated, the Tavistocks’s own research shows over 90%, if supported by counselling, are happy with their sex once they emerge from puberty. Did you know hormone blockers may cause sterility, a large decrease in IQ, bone density loss, and more?

Source: Did you know… – forwomen.scotforwomen.scot

Harry Potter and the Reverse Voltaire

[A]pparently what had prompted my colleague’s enthusiastic denunciation of J. K. Rowling’s statement of the political importance of the concept of sex was not so much any disagreement with the essence of what was said, but the thought that it may or may not be hateful to say so.

“I agree completely with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to prevent you from saying it.”

If we are denied the language and resources to recognise, record, and respond to the facts of female oppression, we will not be able to ameliorate these harms. That is why, despite the many efforts made to prevent us from doing so, so many of us continue to speak.

The ‘Reverse Voltaire’ is of course a nod to its more famous cousin, the quote so-often attributed to Voltaire in defence of free speech:

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The words were not actually Voltaire’s, but those of his biographer, one S. G. Tallentyre. Stephen G. Tallentyre was itself a pseudonym, of one Evelyn Beatrice Hall. Writing in 1906, the female Evelyn chose a male pseudonym to increase her chances of being listened to. And her words certainly were heard, though their true attribution is more often forgotten.

Source: Harry Potter and the Reverse Voltaire | by Mary Leng | Jul, 2020 | Medium

The detransitioners: what happens when trans men want to be women again?

There are no accurate figures for the number of people detransitioning. Most of the detransitioners I spoke to never went back to the doctor who performed their original transition, and to all intents and purposes may be considered a success story by their therapist or medical team.

I fear that the detransitioned women I interviewed are canaries in the coalmine. Not only for detransitioners, but for womanhood. They all, in some combination, found being a woman too difficult, too dangerous or too disgusting. “I put the problem inside myself,” says one, “when actually it is with how the outside world sees women who don’t conform to feminine norms.”

Source: The detransitioners: what happens when trans men want to be women again? | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Sunday Times

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate Harper’s Magazine

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Source: A Letter on Justice and Open Debate | Harper’s Magazine