Over 300 Female Athletes Urge NCAA To Protect Women’s Sports

More than 300 high-profile female athletes signed a letter released Wednesday asking the National College Athletic Association Board of Governors to preserve a “fair and level playing field” for women’s sports.

“Allowing males to enter women’s sports eliminates the connection between an athlete’s effort and her success,” Kenyon said. “Under the NCAA’s current rules, I’m concerned that we will soon effectively have men’s sports and co-ed sports — without any dedicated category for females only.”

“Biology is not bigotry,” she said. “Biology is the whole reason that we have separate sports for women, so that girls can compete and showcase their talents, earn their championship titles and their medals.”

Source: Over 300 Female Athletes Urge NCAA To Protect Women’s Sports

The Chilling Effect – Wild Woman Writing Club

One day I get a phone call from the HR department telling me they have had a complaint. Apparently my classes are no longer safe because I am transphobic. I ask the HR woman to elaborate.

The person who called to complain claimed to be an ex-student, although they did not leave their name so we will never know if they genuinely were a student. My crime was liking a Tweet by Kathleen Stock. I had just heard about puberty blockers and as I was writing and researching on the subject of HRT used for menopausal women for a publication, I had started wondering about the role of pharmaceutical companies in the increased prescribing of puberty blockers for children. . . .

Cut to a year later. My 12-year-old daughter has gone swimming with friends at the local leisure centre. The last time we went, there was a women’s and a men’s changing area. But the centre has been ‘modernised’ and loads of council money has been spent making it ‘better,’ apparently. One of the changes the centre made was to create a ‘changing village’ where men and women, girls and boys shower and change together in one space. My daughter and her two friends (who were all 12) were approached by a grown man who started fondling them. One of the girls was grabbed and kissed. He stroked their hair and kept asking them their names. . . .

Most of my female friends simply don’t want to know what’s going on, and think I am catastrophising. Much like climate change, until your own house falls into the sea from coastal erosion, it’s hard to believe it’s really happening. My only ally is a friend whose daughter has started wearing a binder and is demanding a mastectomy. She gets it because it’s on her doorstep. We both feel her daughter is simply gay, and yet to admit this is to somehow let down all her gender-fluid friends. It’s a horror show.

Source: The Chilling Effect – Wild Woman Writing Club

Association of Media Coverage of Transgender and Gender Diverse Issues With Rates of Referral of Transgender Children and Adolescents to Specialist Gender Clinics in the UK and Australia

This study found evidence of an association between increasing media coverage of TGD-related topics and increasing numbers of young people presenting to gender clinics. It is possible that media coverage acts as a precipitant for young people to seek treatment at specialist gender services, which is consistent with clinical experiences in which TGD young people commonly identify the media as a helpful source of information and a trigger to seek assistance.

Source: Association of Media Coverage of Transgender and Gender Diverse Issues With Rates of Referral of Transgender Children and Adolescents to Specialist Gender Clinics in the UK and Australia | Adolescent Medicine | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network

Doctor accused of drugging, sexually assaulting patients while they slept at Sydney clinic

A court is told Ali Khorami, a doctor at a sleep research clinic in Glebe, sexually assaulted overnight patients and drugged one woman by spiking her orange juice.

Source: Doctor accused of drugging, sexually assaulting patients while they slept at Sydney clinic – ABC News

Exposing youth to porn is dangerous, but the harms of pornography don’t end there

We know porn consumption harms children. But is it fine, as a New Zealand PSA implies, if it is watched only by adults who understand the acts they see on film are “not real”?

A 2018 investigative report conducted by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet based on criminal cases related to gang rapes found that 70 per cent of the rapists were between 15 and 20 years old, while the victims’ average age was 15. In some cases, both the perpetrators and the victims were younger than 15.

Today, a majority of scenes in mainstream porn contain both physical and verbal abuse targeted against the female performers.

That the porn stars are presented as cool, happy people reinforces the myth of the “happy hooker” — a self-driven, consenting woman who is in the industry by choice, making great money.

Dark web aside, the regular pornographic content accessible by non-premium Pornhub visitors is documented rape, torture, and sadism perpetrated on female bodies − many of them minors. They are real human beings, who often will struggle with trauma and PTSD for life as a result of their experience in the sex trade.

This is what porn is about, and there is no trace of it in this superficial, harmful, naïve ad. No, children should not be watching porn. But that content doesn’t magically become harmless the moment an individual turns 18.

Source: Exposing youth to porn is dangerous, but the harms of pornography don’t end there

40,800 female births doomed in Vietnam every year – VnExpress International

Every year, the long-standing preference for boys in Vietnam’s society terminates 40,800 baby girls before they are born, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

Globally, this figure is estimated at 1.18 million each year, with 666,300 in mainland China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), and 461,500 in India.

Naomi Kitahara, UNFPA representative in Vietnam, said because of decades of gender-biased sex selection and the neglect of daughters relative to sons, a shocking 140 million girls globally are missing today from the world’s population.

“When men far outnumber women, social problems can emerge, exacerbating forms of gender-based violence, including rape, coerced sex, sexual exploitation, trafficking and child marriage,” she told the event to launch the report in Hanoi.

Source: 40,800 female births doomed in Vietnam every year – VnExpress International

Children’s news website apologises to JK Rowling over trans tweet row

A news website aimed at British schoolchildren has agreed to pay an unsubstantiated amount after it implied that JK Rowling’s comments on gender caused harm to trans people.

The Day said: “We accept that our article implied that what JK Rowling had tweeted was objectionable and that she had attacked and harmed trans people. The article was critical of JK Rowling personally and suggested that our readers should boycott her work and shame her into changing her behaviour. Our intention was to provoke debate on a complex topic.

“We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted. We accept that our comparisons of JK Rowling to people such as Picasso, who celebrated sexual violence, and Wagner, who was praised by the Nazis for his antisemitic and racist views, were clumsy, offensive and wrong.

Despite calls for a boycott of Rowling’s works, her publisher, Bloomsbury, said that sales of her Harry Potter books had increased during the lockdown as parents bought copies to read with their children during the pandemic.

Source: Children’s news website apologises to JK Rowling over trans tweet row | Transgender | The Guardian

When you look at how much people actually take home, women still earn much less than men

The latest ATO taxation statistics show that women in 2017-18 made up a record number of the top 10% of income earners, but that good news is unable to mask that overall – whether in high or low-paid jobs – women continue to earn much less than men.

But the big difference is overall numbers. Women make up only 30% of workers in the top 30 paying occupations, but two-thirds of those working in the bottom 30 paying jobs.

And this brings us back to barristers. The average income for a barrister is $131,251, but the median income was just $45,376 – the second largest gap between the average and the median.

The median income for a male barrister in 2017-18 was $113,667, while for women it was a paltry $32,464.

Source: When you look at how much people actually take home, women still earn much less than men | Greg Jericho | Business | The Guardian

The word ‘woman’ is already taken

A hundred years after women won the right to vote in many countries, Rowling has now engaged in a campaign the suffragettes could not have imagined – a battle to hold onto the word woman itself. The response was predictable and brutal. As the actors her books had made famous lined up to distance themselves from her, Rowling became the target of an emotional campaign that has the hallmarks of a modern-day witch hunt.

While it might be tempting to look the other way, for me this is personal. I am a trans woman, so it is my identity – supposedly – that is being denied. However, I am also a high school science teacher and I know magical thinking when I see it. Trans women are male – I certainly am as I fathered three children – while women are female. Male people are not female people and therefore trans women are not women. Whatever emotions might surround the debate, JK Rowling is correct.

As gender has been conflated with sex, gender identity has quietly displaced sex in policies and laws.  Effectively we have been able to choose not only our gender but our legal sex, with devastating consequences on women’s sex-based rights. As Kiri Tunks, a founder of Woman’s Place UK said, “If you can’t define what a woman is, how can you defend women’s rights?”

As they seek “validation” from others, they need society to not only chant the mantra, “trans women are women (and trans men are men)”; they need everyone to believe it as well. This has moved beyond the policing of speech and into the control of thoughts. When women object they are met with fury, as JK Rowling has experienced.

Source: The word ‘woman’ is already taken – Otras miradas