In vivid and emotional testimony at a Senate hearing Wednesday, four elite American gymnasts testified about the abuse they had suffered by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and their feelings of betrayal by investigators, including from the FBI which they say let them down.
Olympic gymnast Simone Biles tearfully said she blames Nassar and also “an entire system that allowed his abuse,” including USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
In his opening statement, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin, D-Ill., called the FBI’s handling of the case “a stain on the bureau.”
“In the 15-month period that FBI officials shirked their responsibility, Nassar abused at least 70 young athletes,” Durbin said. “For many of them, this was a continuation, but for others they were abused for the first time while the FBI sat on the case.”
Two women who claim they were forced into sex trafficking have filed a lawsuit against Nevada officials and others over the state’s lax prostitution laws.
The suit alleges that more than one-third of roughly $14 million in revenue generated from illegal prostitution in the United States was collected in Las Vegas, citing a 2021 report. Legal brothels generate an estimated $75 million a year in Nevada, which in turn collects 9 percent in tax revenue.
“Nevada’s legal prostitution system has inherently contributed to the sex trafficking of these plaintiffs for both the benefit of sex buyers who flock to Nevada and for the profit of Nevada and its tourism industry,” Christen Price, senior legal counsel at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said in a news release about the lawsuit. “The plaintiffs were subjected to violence, threats, and other forms of control by sex trade profiteers, which is precisely what the Thirteenth Amendment forbids. Ultimately, these Nevada defendants must be held accountable for enabling this abuse.”
In a letter dated Sept. 6, a U.K.-based attorney for Andrew disputed whether the claim was viable, saying the lawsuit didn’t appear to have been served following proper procedures under the Hague Convention.
The Welsh First Minister probably thought he was onto a winner when he lent his support to the LGBTQ+ Action Plan, a magical document which promises to “create a society where LGBTQ+ people are safe to live and love authentically, openly and freely as themselves”.
After a grassroots revolt in England, proposals to allow gender self-identification were dropped, and attention is finally being paid to the long-term impact of treatments offered to children with gender dysphoria. In Wales, however, the Labour-led administration has adopted policies discarded by the UK government, promising to “seek to devolve powers in relation to Gender Recognition and support our Trans community”.
Around 150 protesters stood on the slate steps of the Senedd yesterday morning to protest the plan and organise in defence of sex-based rights. They were met with a small counter protest; a gaggle of around 50 trans activists.
Every movement needs its myths, and being on the side of multinational corporations and pornographers — not to mention government policy — is a tricky position for any self-respecting “civil rights” movement to find itself in. As such, transgender activists vehemently believe, or purport to believe, they are at risk from so-called TERFs.
Looking across at the counter-protesters, Susan, a middle-aged lesbian from LGB Alliance Cymru, laughed and told me: “Apparently a load of them live in a squat, what do they think we’re going to do? Turn up and hoover?”
Yesterday on Twitter, I wrote an angry tweet. It went like this:
“I just really need to know how Judith Butler’s definition of women applies to Afghan women who are being beaten on the streets by the Taliban. Have you ever considered that your academics really don’t fit the lives of women in the global South?”
In Afghanistan (extreme example) but also in Pakistan, where I live, in India, in Nepal, Bangladesh, Middle Eastern countries, North Africa, women (or people with female bodies) are being abused, harassed, assaulted and killed not just because they have female bodies, but because they refuse to hand those bodies over to men to do with as they please.
Because this possession and ownership of female bodies is absolutely tied to female biology and the production of children and sexual comfort for those men, separating sex from gender completely negates this form of oppression which is hugely insulting to all of us who are still fighting to end sex-based discrimination in our countries and regions.
Imagine a Muslim woman in the UK who escapes a violent marriage and threats of honor killing. She goes to a shelter where she feels safe because it is a female-only space. Not just because she is away from the realm of immediate male violence, but because as a Muslim woman she does not feel comfortable sharing intimate quarters with a person with a male body. This allows her to reconcile her awful situation as well as her need to feel she is acting in congruence with her identity and principles of modesty as a Muslim woman.
But if a trans woman with a penis is in the same space, then the Muslim woman will be in a terrible conflict about her actions in leaving her home. Suddenly, she is not able to remove her hijab or undress because she cannot do those things in front of a person with a male body who is not a family member. This not a hypothetical, there are Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu women who are now excluded from single sex-only spaces because the definition of woman has changed to include women with penises. To call that Muslim woman a TERF because she expresses discomfort is yet another abuse for her.
I’m afraid the trans rights activists are acting like Western colonisers and imperialists all over again, imposing their ideas of gender and sexuality on us the same way their Empire was imposed on us for a good part of the 20th century. I don’t really want gender colonialism in the 21st century. Do you?
Sonia Appleby, 62, was awarded £20,000 after an employment tribunal ruled the NHS’s Tavistock and Portman trust’s treatment of her damaged her professional reputation and “prevented her from proper work on safeguarding”.
Appleby, an experienced psychoanalytical psychotherapist, was responsible for protecting children at risk from maltreatment.
In its conclusion, the tribunal found that she was subjected to “quasi disciplinary treatment” following her whistleblowing disclosures, which were seen by some managers as “unwarranted interference”.
Alana McLaughlin wore a shirt with the words “End trans genocide” written on it after he shamelessly beat a woman during his first MMA fight at Combate Global on September 10 in Miami. The 38-year-old served in the U.S. Army Special Forces for six years, before leaving in 2010, and was diagnosed with PTSD after serving in Afghanistan, undergoing “sex reassignment surgery” in 2016. He only recently began training in MMA, inspired by Fallon Fox, the fighter who fractured a woman’s skull in 2014 — one might say that only a sadist could watch a man knock out a woman and feel inspired, instead of repulsed, but then again, what can we expect from an ideology that demands women give up their boundaries and sanity to placate the desires of entitled men.
‘Jessica Phoenix’ Sylvia (né Ernest Andrew Sylvia), a convicted sex offender currently incarcerated in Washington state, opened a Twitter account in April of this year to promote the transfer of convicted male offenders under the guise of an organization called the Gender Identity Justice Campaign. On his website, Sylvia describes himself as a “queer theorist” and advertises himself as a public speaker.
The case of ‘Jessica Phoenix’ Sylvia is far from the first example of a dangerous man being shielded by gender identity ideology and endorsed by activists and media.
Trimble began a letter-writing network among other trans-identified male prisoners which educates them on how to politically organize for transfers into women’s prisons.
In 2014, trans-identified celebrity Laverne Cox published a video in support of a trans-identified inmate called ‘Synthia China Blast’, né Luis Morales, who was convicted for the rape, murder, and abuse of the corpse of a 13 year-old girl named Ebony Williams.
US prisons are notoriously dangerous, and even moreso for males who are convicted of child sexual abuse. What pedophile in his right mind would turn down the opportunity to transfer into a women’s prison, safe from the threat of being killed by a cellmate? What sex offender would refuse the chance to change his name, thereby rendering null the requirement to be listed on a sex offender registry, erasing his crimes from public consciousness?
In the UK, more than 16,000 registered sex offenders breached their Harm Prevention Orders to notify authorities of any changes in their information, including of their legal names, over the past five years. More than 900 registered sex offenders went ‘missing’ between 2017 and 2020, and that data was obtained from within only 16 of the 43 police forces that responded to Freedom of Information requests. According to an investigation by The Times, convicted child sex abusers changed their names by deed poll, did not inform authorities, and used their new identity to gain access to children.
Pedophiles can even be potentially granted access to children from within prison. Take, for example, the case of Mark Campbell, convicted of raping his own daughter, which caused her such distress that she has attempted suicide several times. In prison he began ‘identifying as a woman’, and in December 2020 a judge in Wisconsin ordered the state to fund a surgery that will allow him to be transferred to a woman’s facility. If Campbell is later transferred, it will likely be to Taycheedah Correctional Institution, which hosts a summer camp for children and mothers.
Last year, a woman in Illinois’ Logan Correctional Center accused trans-identified inmate Janiah Monroe (Andre Patterson) of rape, claiming that she was discounted and punished by prison staff for reporting the assault. Patterson was also accused of sexual assault by several other women, and had discontinued ‘hormone therapy’ upon arrival at the women’s facility. While in a men’s institution, Patterson had murdered a cellmate, strangling him with his bare hands.
It is mad-making to witness journalists for major US publications supporting the ‘right’ of sex offenders, pedophiles, and murderers to legally change their identity, misappropriate womanhood, and be incarcerated with a vulnerable population of women, the majority of whom are themselves victims of male violence.
In vivid and emotional testimony at a Senate hearing Wednesday, four elite American gymnasts testified about the abuse they had suffered by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and their feelings of betrayal by investigators, including from the FBI which they say let them down.
