Members of the Ballarat community came together to rally against gendered violence after three women were allegedly murdered by men in the Victorian city since February.
Source: Ballarat gathers against gender-based ‘crisis’ | SBS News
Category: Australia
Doctors blast opaqueness of gender clinics | The Australian
Children’s hospitals in NSW, Queensland and Victoria have given no indication they will be changing treatment options for young people with gender dysphoria, despite serious issues raised by the Cass review and growing international evidence over the safety and clinical effectiveness of the drugs.
As an increasing number of voices call for an independent inquiry into the prescription of puberty blockers to young teens, medical experts have urged Australian hospitals to release up-to-date information on treatment plans and long-term outcomes of hormone treatments, warning that the current lack of transparency is leading to harmful outcomes.
Clinicians have also hit out at the nation’s peak body for transgender health, AusPATH, after it this week dismissed findings of the Cass review, saying that the medical body was “digging their heeds in” despite increasing alarm over the rising prescription of puberty-blocking drugs in young teenagers.
Paediatrician Dylan Wilson called on the commonwealth to immediately ban all new puberty blocker prescriptions, saying gender clinics had “absolutely no idea what state of health their former patients are in”.
Source: Subscribe to The Australian | Newspaper home delivery, website, iPad, iPhone & Android apps
Why bullies earn more later in life – Lawyers Weekly
The study really highlighted the fact that, strikingly, conduct problems, such as aggression, are found to be positively related to earnings. This means that children who held aggressive behaviours in their youth, or were considered bullies, were more likely to land a better-paying job later in life, which, in a roundabout way, is almost a reward for this behaviour.
According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, bullying is when “people repeatedly and intentionally use words or actions against someone or a group of people to cause distress and risk to their wellbeing. These actions are usually done by people who have more influence or power over someone else, or who want to make someone else feel less powerful or helpless.”
There was a direct link made in the research that tied aggressive behaviours with trying to “win” in a competitive environment. The authors considered that the positive association between conduct problems and labour market outcomes meant that a reconsideration of discipline policies within schools needed to occur.
“It’s possible that our classrooms are competitive places and that children adapt to win that competition with aggression, and then take that through to the workplace where they continue to compete aggressively for the best-paid jobs. Perhaps we need to reconsider discipline in schools and help to channel this characteristic in children in a more positive way,” said Del Bono.
Enabling is a key theme across the report. We are trained from a young age to “win at all costs”, which creates those adaptive mechanisms that can embolden bullies and aggressors.
[Ed: Did the study control for sex?]
Source: Why bullies earn more later in life – Lawyers Weekly
Qatar Airways avoids Australian lawsuit over women’s invasive examinations
Five Australian women who were strip-searched and invasively examined at Doha airport have failed in their bid to sue Qatar Airways.
They and other women were ordered off a flight and checked for whether they had given birth after a baby was found abandoned in an airport bin in 2020.
The incident sparked public outrage and it was condemned by several nations.
An Australian court found the state-owned airline could not be prosecuted under the laws governing global travel.
Justice Halley also struck out the women’s case against Qatar’s aviation regulator, saying it was immune from foreign prosecution.
However he said they could pursue their claim against a subsidiary of Qatar Airlines called Matar, which is contracted to run Hamad International Airport.
Source: Qatar Airways avoids Australian lawsuit over women’s invasive examinations
Friday essay: ‘too many Aboriginal babies’ – Australia’s secret history of Aboriginal population control in the 1960s
The 1967 referendum is celebrated for its promise that First Nations people of Australia would be counted. But when they were, many white experts decided the Aboriginal population was growing too fast – and took steps to stop this growth. This was eugenics in the late 20th century.
The costs were borne by Aboriginal women who faced covert government family-planning programs, designed ostensibly to promote “choice”, but ultimately to curb their fertility.
For decades, Indigenous communities have spoken of the coercive practices of officials and medical experts around birth control and sterilisation, and how they experienced them. Now historians are finding evidence of these practices in the government’s own records from as recently as the 1960s and ‘70s.
Most Australians are now familiar with the devastation caused by genocidal policies of child removal that resulted in the Stolen Generations. But fewer people know that eugenic practices seeking to limit Aboriginal populations continued even in the second half of the 20th century.
In August 1968, the Canberra Times reported the Aboriginal birth rate was “twice the Australian average” and the “full-blood” birth rate would soon “equal or exceed the rate of the part-Aborigines”.
In 1969, alarm around the Aboriginal birth rate escalated into national politics. Douglas Everingham, Member for Capricornia (and later minister for health in the Whitlam government), agreed the “aboriginal birth rate is excessive”. He suggested free sterilisation.
Pilot projects would address the supposed “special problems” of family planning education “among unsophisticated Aboriginals in remote locations”. The minister warned this would be “sensitive”. He was aware of Aboriginal communities’ claims that family planning was, as he put it, “a white plot to wipe out the Aboriginal race”.
The form of this “direct persuasion” is unclear, but it indicates Aboriginal women were directly encouraged to control their fertility if they did not make the “choice” the white officials wanted for them.
Aboriginal women’s “choice” around fertility took place in a context where women did not have freedom to raise their children, where Aboriginal motherhood was routinely denigrated and where white “experts” spoke openly of “too many Aboriginal babies”.
Given the long tail of eugenic and discriminatory policies in Australia, it is all the more important that First Nations people are able to access community-controlled healthcare reflecting holistic First Nations approaches to health – especially when it comes to women’s health.
Anthony Albanese under pressure to probe puberty blocker harms | The Australian
Anthony Albanese is being urged to replicate a landmark British review into interventionist medical treatments which enable young children to change gender, amid increasing concern puberty blockers may cause serious harm.
The National Association of Practising Psychiatrists has urged the federal government to facilitate a national independent investigation into the use of treatments including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, warning their use should be approached with caution.
Pressure on the Prime Minister to act on the findings is growing in Australia with the federal opposition saying they were “concerning” and should be taken seriously.
While stopping short of advocating for a national ban, National Association of Practising Psychiatrists Philip Morris said doctors had an ethical duty to assess the patient and determine what is safe rather than simply giving them what they ask for.
Source: Subscribe to The Australian | Newspaper home delivery, website, iPad, iPhone & Android apps
Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle seeks $200,000 in damages in first Federal Court case based on gender discrimination – ABC News
- In short: Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman, is suing a women’s-only social media app for allegedly discriminating against her on the basis of her gender identity.
- She is seeking $200,000 in damages for “distress and hurt”.
- What’s next? Justice Robert Bromwich will hand down his decision at a later date.
“This case is the ‘what is a woman?’ case, and one must be able to speak about it fearlessly and frankly,” Ms Nolan said.
Ms Nolan did not use she or her pronouns in referencing Ms Tickle throughout her closing submissions and told the court the applicant did not have the “psychology of a woman”.
“When a woman, biologically born and always so… walks through a dark park at night and hears the footsteps of a man behind her, [she] does not stop to think ‘I wonder which side of Kmart this person shops at’,” she said.
“She laces her fingers around her keys… She speeds up. That is the psychology of the sex embodiment of a woman..
“And if a man was to truly have the psychology of a woman, they would know that, and they would not enter those spaces.
“It proves this applicant accepts the applicant does not have the psychology of a woman and is thereby not a woman, but a man.”
‘What is a woman?’: court asked to rule on definition in transgender woman’s case against Giggle for Girls platform | Australia news | The Guardian
A court has been asked to define what a woman is as a landmark gender identity discrimination case comes to a close in front of a packed gallery of trans and women’s rights campaigners in Sydney.
Tickle is seeking damages and aggravated damages amounting to $200,000. Her team claims discrimination took place when Grover and Giggle – represented by the former Liberal candidate Katherine Deves – did not respond to her request for access and reinstatement to the app. She was also discriminated against when she was removed from the app, the court heard.
Grover has more than 90,000 followers on X, formerly Twitter, and has given up to 50 media interviews in which she has persistently misgendered Tickle, the court heard. Her legal costs are in part funded by the sale of merchandise that is “demeaning” to Tickle.
Grover had previously told the court that she would not address Tickle as “Ms” and that, even if a transgender woman presented as female, had gender affirmation surgery, lived as a female and held female identity documents, Grover would still see her as a “biological male”.
At the heart of the case are definitions of gender and sex and the boundaries of the Sex Discrimination Act. The outcome is likely to have wide-reaching implications for male and female spaces and activities.
To aid in navigating that complexity, the Australian Human Rights Commission acted as a friend of the court. The barrister Zelie Heger told the court on Wednesday that sex was no longer defined in the Sex Discrimination Act, but that “importantly, the act recognises that a person’s sex is not limited to [being a man or a woman]”.
An “11th hour” submission by the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls was deemed “completely unacceptable” by Bromwich.
Tickle v Giggle: transgender woman sues female-only ‘online refuge’ for alleged discrimination in landmark case | Australia news | The Guardian
An app intended as an “online refuge” for women became the site of alleged gender identity discrimination, a court has heard in a landmark case that will test the meaning and scope of the Sex Discrimination Act.
Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from regional New South Wales, is suing the women-only social media platform Giggle for Girls after being blocked from using the app.
In a lawsuit filed in December 2022, Tickle claimed she was unlawfully barred from using Giggle in September 2021 after the firm and its CEO, Sall Grover, said she was a man. Tickle is seeking damages.
The case is the first time alleged gender identity discrimination has been heard by the federal court and goes to the heart of how gender identity – and being a woman – is interpreted.
Tickle gave evidence late on Tuesday afternoon. When asked to detail what “living as a female” meant, the accountant described taking hormones that changed her body, having gender affirmation surgery and undergoing social transitions.
She has changed her gender markers on government documents and spent time and money on her wardrobe and removing her facial hair, as well as using female changing rooms and playing in a female hockey team, she said.
The court heard that Grover started the app after receiving trauma therapy for social media abuse while living in the US.
“It would be a place without harassment, mansplaining, dick pics, stalking, aggression … the vision was to create an online refuge,” said Nolan.
The court heard that from its nascency, the app came under attack. Grover was labelled a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or Terf, and received thousands of applications from men who attempted to join.
By September 2021, the app had 20,000 users but was shut down in August 2022.
The Australian Human Rights Commission, including the sex discrimination commissioner, is acting as a friend of the court, assisting by providing submissions about the scope, meaning and validity of the Sex Discrimination Act. Tickle made a complaint about Giggle to the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2021.
Victorian public sector to get paid reproductive and period leave
Public sector workers in Victoria will soon get access to 5 days of reproductive leave, designed for women dealing with period pain, menopause, perimenopause and IVF treatment.
The entitlement comes as part of a new, four-year pay deal for public servants which includes an annual pay rise of 3 per cent and a one-off $5600 cost of living payment for full-time workers.
The deal also ensures superannuation payments will be made on primary caregiver parental leave up to 104 weeks, up from 52 weeks. Meanwhile, shift workers on parental leave will receive shift penalties they would have received had they not been on leave.
Shift workers will also be awarded a one-off $1000 payment.
Earlier this year, the Victorian government launched an inquiry into women’s pain following a survey that showed close to half of women in the state are affected by issues relating to their periods, pregnancy, birth and postnatal care, as well as conditions like endometriosis.
One in three women said their health conditions affect their ability to work and keep a job.
At the time, Allan said it was time we stopped treating women’s health like some kind of “niche issue”.
“We deserve to have our pain believed and relieved,” she said.
Source: Victorian public sector to get paid reproductive and period leave