Feminist Legal Clinic

Nurse in patient pronoun row will face no further action, trust says

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

A nurse warned over using incorrect pronouns to address a transgender patient will face no further action over concerns she breached patient confidentiality when she spoke to the media about the incident, Epsom and St Helier Hospitals NHS Trust said.

Jennifer Melle faced a private disciplinary meeting with Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust on Tuesday.

Ms Melle, 40, from Croydon, south London, said she was racially abused by a transgender patient at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton in May 2024 after she referred to them as “Mr”.

The nurse was given a written warning from the trust at the time and continued in her role, and the trust also wrote to the patient to warn them that threatening and racist language was not tolerated.

After Ms Melle spoke to the media about her experience in March 2025, she was suspended with full pay, over concerns the patient could have been identified from press reports, potentially breaching patient confidentiality.

Ms Melle is taking the trust to an employment tribunal in April over claims of harassment, direct discrimination and indirect discrimination, because of her gender critical beliefs, relying on the protected characteristic of religion or belief because of her evangelical Christian beliefs.

She has been supported in her case by Darlington nurses Bethany Hutchison and Lisa Lockey, and Fife nurse Sandie Peggie, who have all been involved in tribunals regarding facilities shared with transgender colleagues.

Source: Nurse in patient pronoun row will face no further action, trust says

Major Step Forward on Gun Safety After Bondi Tragedy – Gun Control Australia

20 January 2026

Gun Control Australia welcomes the passage of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Act 2026 and commends the Albanese Government, with Greens support, for acting decisively to strengthen Australia’s gun laws in the wake of the Bondi mass shooting.

This legislation represents a significant step forward in protecting our communities. It establishes a national firearms buyback scheme – an approach with a proven record of reducing the number of high-risk firearms in circulation and preventing future tragedies.

The reforms also strengthen firearms background checking by enabling assessments to draw on defined national intelligence inputs, closing critical gaps that have existed across jurisdictions. In addition, the legislation strengthens oversight of firearm and related component imports and exports at Australia’s borders.

We particularly welcome the Government’s commitment to establishing a National Firearms Safety Council, as proposed by Greens Senators Larissa Waters and David Shoebridge. The Council will provide independent, evidence-based oversight to ensure firearm laws and regulations consistently prioritise public safety across Australia.

These reforms align with long-standing community expectations, reinforced yet again by the horror of the Bondi gun massacre. Australia is home to more than four million privately owned firearms, many of them stored insecurely in suburban homes. Around 2,000 guns are reported lost or stolen each year, roughly one every four hours.

By reducing the number of firearms in the community and strengthening national safeguards, this legislation will help make Australia safer. While there is more work to do, today marks an important and historic step toward preventing gun violence and protecting lives.

Source: Major Step Forward on Gun Safety After Bondi Tragedy – Gun Control Australia

Civil Service to hire trans equality chief as Labour dithers over Supreme Court ruling | The Telegraph

The Government is advertising for a senior civil servant to “lead on trans equality”.

A new policy manager at the Cabinet Office will focus on the “implications” of 2025’s judgment, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the term “women” in the Equality Act referred to biological sex, meaning trans women are not women under equalities law.

However, Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, has continued to block the publication of guidance that would force business and public bodies to protect women-only spaces.

Maya Forstater, the chief executive of Sex Matters, said: “We are in the absurd situation that civil servants are advising Bridget Phillipson on the EHRC code of practice while the head of the Civil Service is claiming he cannot tell those staff members what rules are lawful until the guidance is finalised.

“Meanwhile, the Cabinet Office is telling individual government departments to take their own legal advice rather than developing a single, standard policy that follows the law. This is an untenable position. Sex Matters will be considering its legal options.”

Source: Civil Service to hire trans equality chief as Labour dithers over Supreme Court ruling

Deborah Meaden admits ‘I was tunnel-visioned’ over cancel culture denial as BBC star makes U-turn | GB News

Deborah Meaden has conceded that her “eyes have been opened” to the dangers of cancel culture after initially appearing to question its existence earlier this week.

The Dragons’ Den star found herself at the centre of a heated online debate when she questioned GB News regular Adam Brooks for “examples” of when anyone has “cancelled, sacked or arrested” in Britain for their opinions.

Ms Meaden’s request for evidence prompted an avalanche of responses from high-profile figures and ordinary citizens alike, each sharing their experiences of cancellation.

The exchange, which took place earlier this week, has since been viewed by hundreds of thousands of users and sparked widespread criticism of the BBC star’s handling of the numerous examples presented to her.

Among those who responded was Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan, who recounted how he lost his career and a musical adaptation of the beloved sitcom after speaking out against transgender ideology in defence of women’s rights.

Pool player Lynne Pinches, GB News regular Connie Shaw, former Green Party deputy leader Sharar Ali, and many others also provided Ms Meaden with accounts of their experiences.

And returning to the social media platform on Sunday, Ms Meaden conceded she framed her initial enquiry “poorly” and that she was “tunnel-visioned” on her belief that some solely used the concept of free speech as an excuse to express hate speech.

Swimmer Sharron Davies, who’s no stranger to cancel culture herself, praised Ms Meaden for acknowledging the newfound information she’d received. “Thank you for taking the time,” Ms Davies began.

Source: Deborah Meaden admits ‘I was tunnel-visioned’ over cancel culture denial as BBC star makes U-turn

Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane | ZeroHedge

Bill Ackman quote-tweeted a graph showing the partisan gap between young men and women almost doubled in 25 years.

Women moved radically left. Men stayed roughly where they were.

Before getting into the mechanism, something important: this pattern isn’t only American. It’s global.

The Financial Times documented last year that the gender ideology gap is widening across dozens of countries simultaneously. UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, Brazil, Tunisia. Young women moving left on social issues, young men either stable or drifting right.

South Korea is the extreme case. Young Korean men are now overwhelmingly conservative. Young Korean women are overwhelmingly progressive. The gap there is even wider than the US. Contributing factors include mandatory military service for men (18 months of your life the state takes, while women are exempt) and brutal economic competition. But the timing of divergence still tracks with smartphone adoption.

Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can’t hunt pregnant. You can’t fight nursing. Survival required the tribe’s acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get hardware that treats social rejection as a serious threat.

Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.

This shows up in personality research. David Schmitt’s work across 55 cultures found the same pattern everywhere: women average higher agreeableness, higher neuroticism (sensitivity to negative stimuli, including social rejection cues). Men average higher tolerance for disagreement and social conflict. The differences aren’t huge, but they’re consistent across every culture studied.

Not better or worse. Different selection pressures, different adaptations.

But it means the same environment affects them differently. Consensus pressure hits harder for one group than the other.

Social media is a consensus engine. You can see what everyone believes in real time. Disagreement is visible, measurable, and punishable at scale. The tribe used to be 150 people. Now it’s everyone you’ve ever met, plus a world of strangers watching.

And look at the timeline. Facebook launched in 2004 but was college-only until 2006. The iPhone was launched in June 2007. Instagram in 2010. Suddenly, social media was in your pocket and in your face, all day, every day.

Women were roughly stable through the early 2000s. The acceleration starts around 2007-2008.

The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.

This machine wasn’t designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.

Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.

Four years surrounded by peers who all believe the same thing. Professors who all believe the same thing. Reading lists pointing one direction. Disagreement is not even rare, it’s socially punished. You learn to pattern-match the acceptable opinions and perform them.

Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn’t “believe this or face social death.” It was “here’s an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real.”

Different machines, different failure modes. Women got compliance. Men got passivity.

The answer isn’t “women are emotional” and it isn’t “social media bad.” The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.

We’re watching the results in real time. Two failure modes. One graph. Both lines are moving away from each other and away from anything healthy.

Source: Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane | ZeroHedge

Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Exposure and Cancer – NCI (published Jan 2025)

What is DES?

Diethylstilbestrol (DES) is a synthetic form of the female hormone estrogen. It was prescribed to pregnant women between 1940 and 1971 to prevent miscarriage, premature labor, and related complications of pregnancy (1). The use of DES declined after studies in the 1950s showed that it was not effective in preventing these problems, although it continued to be used to stop lactation, for emergency contraception, and to treat menopausal symptoms in women (2).

In 1971, researchers linked prenatal (while in the womb, or in utero) DES exposure to a type of cancer of the cervix and vagina called clear cell adenocarcinoma in a small group of women (3). Soon after, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) notified health care providers throughout the country that DES should not be prescribed to pregnant women (4). The drug continued to be prescribed to pregnant women in Europe until 1978 (5).

DES is now known to be an endocrine-disrupting chemical, one of a number of substances that interfere with the endocrine system to potentially cause cancer, birth defects, and other developmental abnormalities.

What is the cancer risk of people who were exposed to DES in utero?

The overall risk of cancer is not elevated in people whose mothers used DES while pregnant compared with the general population (6–8). However, females exposed to DES in utero, commonly called DES daughters, are at increased risk of several specific cancers.

Do the children of women who took DES have problems with fertility and pregnancy?

Several studies have found increased risks of premature birth, miscarriage, and ectopic pregnancy in females exposed to DES in utero.

Some studies suggest that the increased risk of infertility in DES daughters is due mainly to uterine or fallopian tube problems (14).

Males exposed to DES in utero have an increased risk of testicular abnormalities, including undescended testicles or development of cysts in the epididymis (15). There is also some evidence of increased risks of inflammation or infection of the testicles (15). However, DES sons do not have an increased risk of infertility, even when they have genital abnormalities (15).

What health issues might DES grandchildren have?

The data also suggested that infertility was greater among DES granddaughters than among unexposed women of the same age (25) and that they may have an increased risk of preterm delivery (24). However, this association is based on small numbers of events and was not statistically significant. Researchers will continue to follow these individuals to study the risk of infertility.

Recent studies have found that DES granddaughters and DES grandsons may have a slightly higher risk of cancer (26) and birth defects (27), including hypospadias in DES grandsons (28). However, because each of these associations is based on small numbers of events, researchers will continue to study these groups to clarify the findings.

How can people find out if they took DES during pregnancy or were exposed to DES in utero?

Women who think they used DES during pregnancy, or people who think that their mother used DES during pregnancy, can try contacting the health care provider or institution where they received their care to request a review of their medical records. If any medications were taken during pregnancy, obstetrical records could be checked to determine the name of the drug.

Is it safe for DES daughters to use hormone replacement therapy?

Each woman should discuss this question with her health care provider. There is no evidence that hormone replacement therapy is unsafe for DES daughters. However, some clinicians believe that DES daughters should avoid these medications because they contain estrogen (32).

Source: Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Exposure and Cancer – NCI

“It doesn’t touch me”, Rachel Ward is unbothered by online trolls – The Australian Women’s Weekly

Rachel Ward speaks out after receiving an on-slaught of online hate simply for ageing and choosing to do so naturally.

It was days before Christmas – mid-summer – and cicadas trilled in the background as actor, director and beef cattle farmer Rachel Ward posted a video to her Instagram feed thanking friends and neighbours for their support throughout the year.

No one – least of all Rachel – imagined this chatty, generous and otherwise innocuous post would attract a band of ill-mannered (and inarticulate) trolls.

‘OMG!! What the hell happened to her. Wow!! She has aged really bad.’ ‘I wish I never saw her like this!’ ‘She looks ravaged.’ And worse.

Her daughter, Matilda Brown, also an actor and food producer (at The Good Farm Shop), was incensed. She jumped to her mum’s defence and reposted the comments, calling out the idiocy of criticising a 68-year-old woman for, essentially, looking 68. “Warning!! Naturally aging woman. Proceed with caution,” she wrote and posted a series of exquisite photographs of Rachel with her grandkids, and at work on the farm.

The resulting pile-on of love is what Rachel has focused on, she says, sitting in her kitchen, enjoying a morning cuppa as she chats with The Weekly.

“Why are we giving ourselves these expectations to maintain youth, and what is perceived as attractive? It’s so great to not weigh into that anymore. Maybe if I was 40, I would mind the comments, but now I’ve so left any kind of attachment to youth and beauty behind … It doesn’t touch me because it’s not important anymore.”

Rachel let her hair colour grow out last year, against Bryan’s advice. It was a conscious decision.

“I’d been wanting to do it for a while,” she explains. “It was Bryan who was very resistant. I was just, ‘Well, you’re grey, why does it matter?’ And he was like, ‘You don’t need to go grey yet.’

“I had no idea it was going to be this white, but I like it, and my daughter cut it, so it’s her haircut. My kids like it, the grandkids don’t have a problem. and even Bryan seems to have come around to it, so there we go.”

Source: “It doesn’t touch me”, Rachel Ward is unbothered by online trolls – The Australian Women’s Weekly

Plan to pay Australian surrogates for the toll of pregnancy | SMH

Surrogates would receive monthly payments of up to $2000 for the “pain and discomfort of pregnancy” under a proposed overhaul of Australia’s surrogacy laws.

Labelling the current system “confusing, restrictive and not fit for purpose”, the Australian Law Reform Commission has also recommended consistent surrogacy laws across the country and a new national regulator.

The recommendations come as a record number of Australians go overseas for surrogacy arrangements due to a shortage of domestic surrogates.

Last financial year, 369 children born through surrogacy arrangements became Australian citizens, up from 218 in 2021. It has been reported that in 2020, about 76 children were born through domestic surrogacy.

In a bid to boost the number of domestic surrogates, the commission recommended reimbursing Australian surrogates for more of the real costs and losses of surrogacy to ensure they are not out of pocket.

Surrogacy Australia operations manager Anna McKie said the new hardship payments were not about profit, but that they acknowledged the profound “wear and tear” on a woman’s body and mind during and after pregnancy.

One of the most exciting proposals, McKie said, was the introduction of surrogacy support organisations that could oversee financial arrangements between surrogates and intended parents and co-ordinate payments in a trust account.

[Ed: Very exciting development for those intent on the unconscionable exploitation of women and children. This demonstrates that submissions by many feminist groups, asking for a complete ban on all surrogacy, fell on deaf ears at the ALRC. Disturbingly this reporting by the SMH fails to provide any representation of the objections to these recommendations which effectively introduce commercial surrogacy by stealth, indicates significant capture of this media by vested interests.]

Source: Plan to pay Australian surrogates for the toll of pregnancy

I was warned my children would be ripped in half when we divorced. But I had no idea just how brutal custody cases can be | Parents and parenting | The Guardian

My experience of court was eye-opening. And when I sat in on other cases, I realised how often mothers are vilified.

I lost my case. My son was to live mainly with his father, and my daughter mainly with me, though they’d be together for weekends and holidays, alternating between us. I wasn’t astonished at the court’s decision, though I was surprised the court was prepared to separate the siblings. But I was shocked at the arguments that had been successfully used to vilify me. It turned out that I lived in a culture where women who were seen as too independently minded could have their children taken away.

As my daughter and I adjusted to being on our own in the grim January lockdown that ensued, I continued to read about women fighting for custody – about Sand, Norton, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker and Britney Spears, and about thousands of ordinary women across the centuries, whose divorce and custody files I’ve been able to read.

I also went into court as a journalist, and over the past year or so I’ve become used to sitting again in the cluttered, carpeted courtrooms where my own fate had once been decided.

In court, month after month, I have come to think that children have as little agency as they did in the 19th century, when in England they were legally the possessions of their fathers with no rights of their own. Most pernicious now is the idea of “parental alienation”, introduced by the American child psychiatrist Richard A Gardner in 1985 to characterise a “disorder” wrought by the (possibly unconscious) “indoctrinations” of men-hating mothers. Gardner’s own writing is no longer given much credence, but his ideas slip in through expert reports by unregulated psychologists. Here, children are enmeshed, or unconsciously aligned with their mothers. Their wishes and feelings can’t be trusted because they’re likely simply to reflect the wishes and feelings of their all-powerful mothers.

It’s not that the mothers in the cases I’ve seen have been perfect – far from it. The courts aim to be gender neutral, and some kind of shared care is the desirable norm, although they publish no data on how often this is achieved. Yet in case after case, I’ve seen an imperfect mother lose custody to an imperfect father because their children were in some way rejecting the father. Imperfect women are made more imperfect by a court system that can seem designed to exacerbate their faults and to heighten conflict. The predictable result is that children are handed over to fathers who end up over-empowered by the court process – their faults minimised. Watching these mothers suffering in courtrooms, I’ve found that I end up respecting them all the more for the desperate sincerity with which they try to present their cases to the court, often digging themselves in further as they do so. And I’ve felt painfully sorry for the children who lose their mothers because they love them too much, which can only be the mothers’ fault.

Source: I was warned my children would be ripped in half when we divorced. But I had no idea just how brutal custody cases can be | Parents and parenting | The Guardian

Archbishop of Canterbury betrayed me, claims ‘abuse victim’ | The Telegraph

An alleged abuse victim has accused the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury of betrayal after she “mishandled” claims of sexual assault by a priest.

The alleged victim, known as N, claims that the Rt Rev Dame Sarah Mullally, who is the current Bishop of London, “failed” him by sending a confidential email about the allegations directly to the priest concerned.

The Telegraph has seen the correspondence in which Bishop Sarah wrote to the priest saying that N’s claims were “unsubstantiated”.

As a result of how Church of England officials and Bishop Sarah handled his complaint, he claims to have been left feeling like “human wreckage” and driven to multiple suicide attempts.

Lambeth Palace has since admitted failings in how N’s complaint against Bishop Sarah was handled. Church officials also claim that an investigation of the priest found no safeguarding concerns, although N disputes this.

In an interview with the Telegraph, N said: “Sarah Mullally and her systems hurt me even more than [my abuser] did, by their collusion and giving the abuser power to silence me when I complained.

Last week, Bishop Sarah was cleared of mishandling the abuse allegation by her closest-ranking colleague, the Archbishop of York, the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell.

N said that he was “disgusted” that Bishop Sarah will imminently become Archbishop of Canterbury.

N added that the “reality” of the Church of England is that “it is a shell institution, which not just departs from the Christian gospel, but actively works against the Christian gospel, and is not so much a church of Christ as a church of Pontius Pilate”.

“They have demonstrated in their record that they speak out of both sides of their mouth. So on the one hand, you have people like Stephen Cottrell and Justin Welby and Sarah Mullaly shedding tears on camera for survivors, while, on the other hand, they’re absolutely armed to the teeth [with lawyers and PR firms] against survivors.

Source: Archbishop of Canterbury betrayed me, claims ‘abuse victim’

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What health issues might DES grandchildren have?

How can people find out if they took DES during pregnancy or were exposed to DES in utero?

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