The international activist group SEGM, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, has published a review of a radical shift in the standards of care for gender dysphoric children in Finland. A year ago, the Finnish Health Authority issued new guidelines which back psychotherapy, rather than puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, as the first-line of treatment.
Source: Policy shift in Finland for gender dysphoria treatment » MercatorNet
Child protection service documents are often proffered as evidence in family law, criminal, and other trials that involve domestic and family violence (DFV). They can also be or inform the basis for litigation, as well as court findings and orders.
Due to the language used in these documents, judgments can place more weight on the responses of victims/survivors than on the actions of men who perpetrate domestic violence. For example, documents used in court proceedings throughout Australia often framed domestic violence as ‘fights between parents’, ‘parental conflict’ or ‘mutual combat’, or domestic violence was framed as the outcome of a ‘dysfunctional relationship’. This can result in women being blamed for their own victimisation, or even being accused of complicity in the abuse of their children who are exposed to domestic violence.
“It’s essentially victim-blaming,” said analysis co-author, University of Sydney Associate Professor Susan Heward-Belle.
“Three particular representations we found in case notes were of mothers who fail to protect their children in a DFV context; domestically violent men being rendered invisible; and survivors’ mental distress and/or problematic substance misuse being de-contextualised.”
Associate Professor Heward-Belle, a DFV expert in the Sydney School of Education & Social Work, says the consequences of such representations can be stark. For example, legal orders that remove children from the care of their mothers for reasons directly attributable to male violence can be imposed. This is a large and expanding issue in Australia: in 2015–16, 55,600 children were placed in out-of-home care many for reasons directly connected with DFV.
Source: Victim blaming can affect trial outcomes – The University of Sydney
In a departure from the norm, the German gymnastics team elected to wear full length unitards at the Tokyo Olympics qualifiers on Sunday.
Source: German gymnastics team wear full length unitards to push back against sexualisation
When transwomen are included in the female category, what happens to the women and girls? They miss a spot on the team, they self-exclude, they are withdrawn by their parents, they are silenced if they resist, they lose out on the opportunity for prizes and scholarships and are threatened with loss of sponsorship. Inclusion really means exclusion for women and girls.
Source: Allowing male-born competitors in female sports excludes women
A “gender-critical” feminist legal service which refused to remove material from its website that is offensive to trans people has had its tenancy grant terminated by the City of Sydney, in a dispute between a group of radical feminists and the trans community and its allies.
Source: Feminist Legal Clinic evicted for posting anti-trans website links
Women are twenty-seven times more likely than men to be harassed on social media. This shocking finding, published by the European Women’s Lobby in 2017, suggests that cyber-violence against women is not a series of isolated acts, but a systemic scourge. Sociological studies have shown that it is mostly committed by men who, contrary to popular belief, belong to more privileged socio-economic groups. Feeling protected by the virtual nature of their actions, the perpetrators are organised and sometimes carry out “digital raids”, or harassment in packs, with terrible consequences, both personal and professional, for their victims. This documentary focuses on women’s testimony from all walks of life who have been victim of online abuse and examines the harm this phenomenon does to them and to democratic debate.
Source: #FatUglySlut – Online Abuse Against Women – Watch the full documentary | ARTE
Calling someone the wrong pronoun now triggers tears, but you will be sneered at if you think killing grandma is cruel. . . .
The City of Sydney has found Glebe’s Feminist Legal Clinic, a pro bono service that hleps the most vulnerable women, hasn’t met its performance critieria because the Clinic’s “affiliation with women’s sex-based rights movement” have “the potential for generating discrimination and negative attitudes towards the transgender community” . . . Suddenly, championing biological women’s rights is considered by the slow march of the state as discrimination against people born male.
Tasmania’s lesbian have just been told they can no longer exclude people with penises from events , as Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Sarah Bolt, determined lesbian events that exclude trans women carry a “signficant risk” of breaching equality laws. What about women only attracted to the same sex?
. . .
Stay in lock-step, let the state decide, just as they have that biological men are lesbians, standing up for the legal rights of women is to discriminate against others and there is a permanent solution to the temporary inconvenience of age.
Source: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/vikki-campion-nsw-euthanasia-bill-shows-governments-warped-priorities/news-story/a90c62fbf2907af504fc09d450edf901
US — . According to data from The Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, those who claim a non-binary identity make up 11% of the LGBTQ+ population in the United States. These individuals often indicate that they embrace the non-binary identity due to feeling that their personalities do not fit into the male nor female categories.Plastic surgeons in the US, primarily in California, are advertising to this rapidly growing market “gender-affirming” surgeries designed to remove their “genital structures” so that their bodies “neither resembles a natal male nor female.”MoZaic Care, a cosmetic surgery provider in San Francisco, California, offers a “nullification” procedure that “removes external genitalia while preserving a urethral opening and anal opening.”“We are enabling people with severe mental health issues to chop up their bodies,” another concerned Twitter user said. “What has happened to us as a society?”
Source: Plastic Surgeons Advertise Procedures to Free ‘Non-Binary’ People of All Genitals | Women Are Human
The prisoner who sexually assaulted Amy — we cannot legally identify her, so we shall call her J — is a transgender woman, with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), and therefore referred to by the female pronoun, but still had male genitalia.
Amy was equally well aware that ‘J’ still had male genitalia because she often intimidated her and fellow female prisoners at HMP Bronzefield in Ashford, Middlesex, by exposing them.
Moreover, J was serving time for a serious sexual assault on a child and was clearly a danger to other inmates. Yet she had secured a coveted job as a cleaner at the prison gym where Amy also worked. And it was while she was in the gym’s lavatory block that J assaulted her in 2017.
Amy adds: ‘Sex offenders are master manipulators, and if they sniff vulnerability they target it. At the same time, they are going on about their human rights and scaring the prison officers into looking the other way. After J assaulted me, I’d see her around the prison on a regular basis. She would leer at me and smirk.’
Amy and a number of other women heard that J had been sent to the segregation unit as punishment for not taking the medication that prevented her penis from getting erect, ‘which begs the question: ‘Why was she still allowed around us?’
