5 Indigenous women who didn’t get the credit

Natalie Cromb writes for NITV:

It is no secret where we —Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women— are placed on the scale of relevance and importance in this country. We are last, always.

We are also tireless in our pursuit of rights and betterment for our people, which is why individual achievements are rarely important and why we are often overlooked and don’t receive credit where credit is due. There are countless examples of this and we bring you five cases of incredible Indigenous women achieving great things and not getting near enough credit for their achievement.

https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2018/07/12/5-indigenous-women-who-didnt-get-credit
[category Aust, feminism, herstory]

The Australian left gives away its anti-feminist game

The male-centered left has shown its hand in attempting to no-platform Dr Caroline Norma, a feminist who campaigns against sexual exploitation and violence against women and girls.

Source: The Australian left gives away its anti-feminist game

Jinwar Is a Feminist Commune in Syria Free of Men and Capitalism

With the aid of women’s rights groups and volunteers, a group of women in Syria have created a self-sustainable feminist commune outside of the structures of patriarchy and capitalism.

The village of Jinwar—a word that roughly translates to “woman’s space” or “women’s land” in Kurdish—is in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (also known as Rojava), which became a de facto autonomous region in 2012 amid the ongoing Syrian Civil War. According to Kurdish news outlet ANF News, the village is primarily for women whose families suffered violence by ISIS, which massacred Yazidi men and raped and tortured thousands of women. Widows and women without families can all apply to live there as well. Jinwar opened on International Day Against Violence Against Women, November 25, with 30 homes, a school, museum, and medical center.

Another resident, 28-year-old Zainab Gavary, told the Independent: “Until women educate and empower themselves, there won’t be freedom.”

“There’s no need for men here,” she said, “our lives are good.

https://jezebel.com/women-in-syria-have-created-a-feminist-commune-free-of-1830820318
[category global, feminism, violence]

  

Twitter’s sexist hypocrisy can no longer be ignored

Twitter allows online abuse against women, punishing those who attempt to hold men and the company to account.

Oddly, considering that women are so commonly the targets of “abusive tweets,” the category of “sex” is not included among Twitter’s protected categories.

Amnesty reports that Twitter “is failing in its responsibility to respect women’s rights online by failing to adequately investigate and respond to reports of violence and abuse in a transparent manner which leads many women to silence or censor themselves on the platform.”

Twitter is a boys club. A boys club that protects its friends above its users, even if those friends present a potential threat to women. Indeed, the company’s Terms of Service seem to exist to protect their own, and as a means to censor and silence those who speak the truth in ways they don’t like. Women who are working to hold men accountable and companies like Twitter accountable are swiftly punished, whereas men’s violent or misogynist behaviour is ignored.

Source: Twitter’s sexist hypocrisy can no longer be ignored

Spanish academic gets €1.5m EU grant to rescue ‘women’s writing’

A Spanish academic has embarked on a five-year quest to rescue the works of female writers from the margins of European thought and give them the recognition they have been denied for centuries.
Carme Font, a lecturer in English literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has been awarded a €1.5m (£1.35m) grant by the European Research Council to scour libraries, archives and private collections in search of letters, poems and reflections written by women from 1500 to 1780.
www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/27/spanish-academic-gets-15m-eu-grant-to-rescue-womens-writing [category global, herstory]
— Anna Kerr Principal Solicitor Feminist Legal Clinic Inc. PO Box 273 Summer Hill NSW 2130 Mob: 0402 467 476 [email protected] www.feministlegal.org
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To counter Women’s Wall, Ayyappa Jyothi volunteers line up with lamps across Kerala

On Wednesday, thousands of people, including a large number of women, were seen lighting lamps along several stretches that connected north and south Kerala, in an apparent political message to the Kerala government. The Sabarimala Karma Samithi, backed by the BJP, organised Ayyappa Jyothi, an event to counter the Kerala government’s Women’s Wall, which is an attempt to raise awareness about the LDF government’s stand on the Sabarimala case and to counter the Sangh Parivar’s protests against women entry to the shrine.

Source: To counter Women’s Wall, Ayyappa Jyothi volunteers line up with lamps across Kerala | The News Minute

Hundreds of sexual harassment claims against male police officers

Hundreds of people have claimed they were sexually harassed by male police officers in the past six years, prompting calls from senior officers for outdated and unacceptable behaviour to be “rooted out”.

Yet a fraction of the cases led to dismissal, with a number of cases simply resulting in an officer resigning or retiring.

The true number of harassment grievances was likely to be even higher as only 28 out of 43 police forces provided data, with many – including the Metropolitan police – claiming they were unable to supply information or had failed to respond within the time limit.

One female police officer, speaking anonymously, said: “Most female police officers have had an experience of sexual harassment. We are talking about a whole spectrum of issues, from inappropriate comments or sexism. It’s a problem that won’t go away from this field of work and I am not sure why that is.”

Prof Jennifer Brown, from the Mannheim centre for criminology at the London School of Economics, who led Unison’s research in this area, described it as a “hidden problem” in the police force.

Brown said research suggested sexual harassment tended to be more of an issue in uniformed services, such as the police. “It’s partly because of the gender ratio, more men in the working environment and sexual politics, so the idea that women are encroaching into areas that men have a monopoly over.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/25/revealed-hundreds-of-sexual-harassment-claims-against-male-police-officers-england-scotland-wales
[category global, sexual harassment]

--   Anna Kerr  Principal Solicitor  Feminist Legal Clinic Inc.  PO Box 273  Summer Hill NSW 2130  Mob: 0402 467 476  [email protected]  www.feministlegal.org    Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation.      This e-mail transmission is intended only for the addressee and may contain confidential or privileged information.  Confidentiality and privilege are not waived if you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail.  If you receive this e-mail in error please delete it and any attachments and notify us immediately by reply e-mail.    Feminist Legal Clinic does not warrant that any attachments are free from viruses or other defects.  By opening attachments you assume all liability for any loss, damage or other consequences that may arise.  

Australia’s low-paid workforce a threat to wages growth

Carers – aged care, childcare and disability care workers – have been the No.1 growth occupation in the past 10 years, with an additional 170,000 workers added between the 2006 and 2016 censuses. The majority are women. . . .

Caring roles – caring for children, the sick, the disabled and the elderly – have for the most part fallen to women and historically have largely been unpaid. . . .

Formalisation and expansion of these historically unpaid roles can be considered to be a relatively good thing – especially for women. The care workforce has opened up employment opportunities for many workers, particularly older women. It’s also removed barriers to employment, freeing women up to pursue other paid work opportunities. And it also means that finally some of the work that women have always done can now actually be counted. But there are plenty of problems with building such a large low-paid workforce, not least for the workers themselves.  . . .

Meanwhile, childcare workers continue to advocate a pay rise but earlier this year lost a five-year wage case as unions were unable to prove comparable worth to male-dominated industries.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-s-low-paid-workforce-a-threat-to-wages-growth-20181224-p50o4y.html
[category Aust, workforce discrimination, inequity]

--   Anna Kerr  Principal Solicitor  Feminist Legal Clinic Inc.  PO Box 273  Summer Hill NSW 2130  Mob: 0402 467 476  [email protected]  www.feministlegal.org    Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation.      This e-mail transmission is intended only for the addressee and may contain confidential or privileged information.  Confidentiality and privilege are not waived if you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail.  If you receive this e-mail in error please delete it and any attachments and notify us immediately by reply e-mail.    Feminist Legal Clinic does not warrant that any attachments are free from viruses or other defects.  By opening attachments you assume all liability for any loss, damage or other consequences that may arise.  

Inauthentic Selves: The modern LGBTQ+ Movement Is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf And Based On Junk…

The modern transgender movement is an astroturf tiger. It is not grassroots, it is not organic, and it serves the purposes of no one beyond homophobes and pharmaceutical companies. It is a menace, it has hollowed out the LGBT community, it threatens women’s legal gains for the past hundred years, and it is going to destroy people’s lives. An entire generation of gender non-conforming children that may have otherwise grown up gay are going to grow up to be brain damaged, weakened eunuchs with a medical malpractice lawyer on retainer. This ‘movement’ needs to end before that happens. The LGBT community needs to wake up and start talking back to the fox in the hen house.
medium.com/@sue.donym1984/inauthentic-selves-the-modern-lgbtq-movement-is-run-by-philanthropic-astroturf-and-based-on-junk-d08eb6aa1a4b [category global, trans]

The Open Society Foundations & the transgender movement

The transgender movement has transformed cultural norms and social institutions at breathtaking speed. Most of us, becoming acquainted with the trans issue for the first time, are astonished to discover the extent of the gender revolution. The movement has accomplished in a few years what the movements for women’s and for gay and lesbian rights took many decades to achieve.

Part of the explanation is the amount of money behind transgenderism. The Gender Industrial Complex, as we may call it, has many components. Lucrative sponsorship comes from pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. Charities originally established to fight for homosexual rights (like Human Rights Campaign in the United States and Stonewall in Britain) wield large budgets. Last but not least, three American billionaires have bankrolled the transgender movement on a global scale: Jennifer Pritzker, whose activities were detailed in another blogpost, Jon Stryker, and George Soros.

The largest recipients in this current tranche are the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association ($642,000), Global Action for Trans Equality ($500,000), and Transgender Europe ($500,000). . . .this funding greatly exceeds the resources given to alternative voices.
To sum up, more than a hundred women are murdered each year in the United Kingdom at the hands of males, but no day has been set aside to commemorate their deaths. Transgender murders are exceedingly rare—eight in the past decade (Trans Crime UK 2017; Evening Standard 2018)—and yet they have an institutionalized day of remembrance. Even if we consider the homicide rate rather than the number of homicides, Nicola Williams demonstrates that transgender people are no more likely to become victims than are women (Fairplay for Women 2017).

The prominence of transgender victims, compared to the virtual invisibility of female victims, is partly explained by the amount of resources devoted to compiling evidence and promoting commemoration. Thus funding from large American charities like OSF—along with the Arcus and Tawani Foundations—shapes the political climate in Britain and around the world.

https://4thwavenow.com/2018/05/25/the-open-society-foundations-the-transgender-movement/?
[category global, trans]