Federal appeals court rules professors do not to have to respect student pronouns – JURIST – News – Legal News & Commentary
The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held . . . that public universities cannot compel professors to respect student pronoun preferences. Per the court, such speech is protected under the First Amendment, particularly if pronoun preferences go against a professor’s religious or philosophical beliefs.
This decision comes amidst a wave of transgender-rights cases currently ongoing across the US. Alabama is on track to pass a bill that would make providing any gender-affirming treatment for transgender youth a felony. Several states are also considering or have recently passed bills that would prohibit transgender youth from playing school sports on teams that align with their gender identity.
Rape suspects can choose to self-identify as female | Scotland | The Times
Rape suspects are able to self-identify as female, it was revealed after a freedom of information request by a feminist policy think-tank.
Police Scotland said that if a rape or attempted rape was perpetrated by a “male who self-identifies as a woman . . . the male who self-identifies as a woman would be expected to be recorded as a female on relevant police systems.”
Source: Rape suspects can choose to self-identify as female | Scotland | The Times
ACLU blocks woman’s request for data on numbers of transgender inmates in women’s prisons | The Post Millennial
A woman was interested to know how many inmates in Washington state identify as transgender, and how many of those transgender identified inmates have been given transfers to go from men’s prison to women’s prison, and the reverse. To get this information, she filed a Freedom on Information Act request. Instead of getting the information she requested, she got sued by the ACLU.
WoLF is fighting the injunction, which aims to prevent the public from obtaining information about the number of male prisoners currently housed in women’s prisons.
“I started requesting information about what is happening in US prisons after learning about cases abroad where violent male offenders were housed in women’s prisons,” the woman who made the request told The Post Millennial, “including a case where a woman became pregnant as a result. Due to the shameful lack of impartial media reporting on this issue, the public can’t trust the institutions we’ve come to rely on to get accurate information.
The Washington Department of Corrections did not respond to the public request within the given time period, and WoLF tells The Post Millennial that is is unclear as to how the ACLU got wind of this FOIA request, and had time to put together a lawsuit, within the 10 days from which the request was made.
The woman is not wrong. In fact, Washington state radio host Dori Monson has detailed several accounts of women who are housed in women’s prisons in the state and have been raped by gender non-conforming males who identify as transgender and have successfully been transferred into women’s prisons. Monson writes that there were “two inmates moved from male to female prison. One is a serial killer who admitted to killing prostitutes and hating women, another is a sex offender charged with having sex with a 12 year old.”
In California, after a bill was passed in July 2020 that authorized inmates to be housed according to gender identity and not biological sex, despite their status as regards sex reassignment surgery, more than 260 inmates have requested a transfer since the beginning of the year when the law took effect. California also has a policy of funding sex reassignment surgeries for inmates, and prior to the new law, once a biological male prisoner had undergone that surgery, namely castration, that person could be transferred to a women’s prison. This resulted in the case of a notorious baby killer undergoing the surgery and then being transferred into the same prison where the women whose children he killed is housed.
Women, including former inmates, have launched protests, but it’s nearly impossible to figure out what’s going on because once a biological male identifies as female, the Correctional Services of Canada officially records them as female. This means, additionally, that the crimes those biological men committed before they self-identified as women are recorded as crimes committed by women. And the numbers as regards the sex-breakdown of inmates in women’s prisons is not accurate.
Women’s Liberation Front
WoLF works to abolish regressive gender roles and the epidemic of male violence through legal and policy advocacy and public education.
Source: Women’s Liberation Front
It’s not transphobic to question transgenderism | The Spectator Australia
At no point during my lifetime has any fixation consumed western culture with the rapidity of our obsession with transgenderism. I’ve never seen anything like it. Documentaries flooded television schedules. Films and series suddenly had trans characters; Transparent had a trans protagonist. Publishers are now awash in manuscripts about coming out as trans and transitioning. Schools, even kindergartens, have revamped their curriculums, social services their protocols. On university campuses, it’s now routine to include one’s ‘preferred pronoun’ in class introductions. None of this is new to you Speccie readers, who have withstood the same cultural avalanche. But if you’re savvy, you’ve either exclusively talked up how bloody marvellous this all is, or you’ve kept your mouth shut.
So what sorts of, if you will, transgressive thoughts do acquaintances fear being overheard? They sometimes venture timidly that maybe, just maybe, telling three- and four-year-olds that they have to ‘decide’ what gender they are, before they’re old enough to entirely grasp what gender means, might be a little confusing. Or that perhaps adolescents whose brains are still developing should be discouraged from taking irreversible medical steps while they’re still figuring out who they are. Others might worry tentatively that swapping genders could seem to offer the troubled a cure for problems that are bound to survive surgery intact. Still others might puzzle over why so few gung-ho parents on those documentaries seem concerned about their kids’ capacity to reproduce.[R]ight now children and adolescents are making radical, often permanent, decisions about their futures that some kids might come to regret. The least we owe them is to talk about it.
Source: It’s not transphobic to question transgenderism | The Spectator Australia
Transgender Facebookers Scheme to Burn ‘TERFs’, Lesbians in Bonfire | Women Are Human
US — . Two transgender-identifying Facebook users were seen on Facebook yesterday apparently plotting to burn women they identify as TERFs. Transgender allies cheered them on. “The best remedy for a TERF is gasoline and a match,” Pacy Willa, who is male and uses she/her pronouns, wrote in a status posted to Willa’s Facebook page […]
Source: Transgender Facebookers Scheme to Burn ‘TERFs’, Lesbians in Bonfire | Women Are Human
Woman: human being or profit centre? | Morning Star
Socialists should not support the decriminalisation of prostitution – an institution of oppression that has been used for centuries to ensure the subordination of women and the division of the working class, writes ANNA FISHER.
The Nordic Model approach decriminalises those who are prostituted and provides them with support, genuine alternatives and routes out.
It also cracks down on pimps and traffickers, and makes buying sex a criminal offence — with the key aim of changing men’s attitudes.
This approach is founded in the socialist feminist understanding of prostitution as an institution of oppression that has been used for centuries by the capitalist system to co-opt men, and to ensure the subordination of women and the division of the working class.
More recently women have become the locus of wealth extraction as the global capitalists have turned to mining women and girls’ bodies for the primitive accumulation of capital through the industrialisation of prostitution, porn, egg harvesting and surrogacy.
Prostitution in all its forms is inherently dangerous and can never be brought into line with even the most basic health and safety guidelines.
We need to reduce the size of the prostitution system, while providing those caught up in it with a viable transition out.
This is exactly what the Nordic Model aims to do — and can do when implemented properly and with solid support from the working class.
Evidence for puberty blockers use very low, says NICE – BBC News
The evidence for using puberty blocking drugs to treat young people struggling with their gender identity is “very low”, an official review has found.The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said existing studies of the drugs were small and “subject to bias and confounding”.
The assessment of the evidence into the drugs was commissioned by NHS England.
NICE also reviewed the evidence base for gender-affirming hormones – sometimes known as cross-sex hormones.
The review found the evidence of clinical effectiveness and safety of gender-affirming hormones was also of “very low” quality.
“Any potential benefits of gender-affirming hormones must be weighed against the largely unknown long-term safety profile of these treatments in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria,” NICE said.
Source: Evidence for puberty blockers use very low, says NICE – BBC News
Stop the contagion of violence against women
What would happen if governments approached the other pandemic in our midst – violence against women – with the same level of urgency and leadership?
Violence against women and girls is the most widespread human rights violation in Australia and the world, with approximately one in four having experienced physical and/or sexualised violence by an intimate partner. The most common characteristic shared by survivors is their gender, and people who perpetrate are predominantly male.
Children and young people are frequently overlooked but suffer greatly, with one child a fortnight dying in the context of domestic and family violence (DFV). Many first experience abuse in utero: 1 in 4 women who experience DFV are abused for the first time when pregnant. Stopping the contagion requires that the impact on children is identified and responded to early. Many women separate from abusive partners to protect children, only to find that their children are exposed to unsupervised time with ex-partners who often continue the pattern of abuse, through their child.