A South Korean court has denied a US extradition request for the man behind one of the world’s largest child sexual abuse websites.
Son Jong-woo, who ran the site Welcome to Video, served 18 months in South Korea for producing and distributing indecent images of children.
He was found to be the operator of the website Welcome to Video – a covert online den for people who traded in clips of children being sexually assaulted. Among the victims was a child of just six months.
Authorities tracked down more than 300 other people connected to the website in a wide range of countries including South Korea, Britain, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Spain, Brazil and Australia.
The infertility and surrogacy multi-billion-dollar industries, those who benefit from it, and others, too often attempt to out-shout any criticism of surrogacy by conflating surrogacy with LGBTQ+ rights and labeling all opposition to surrogacy as homophobic.
Defenders of surrogacy see it as a reproductive choice from a vast array of menu items ranging from IVF to adoption. However, these options are not available equally to all, but only to those who can afford them.
… how often are these ‘choices’ being made under financial duress or in a context of social coercion? … Can we assume that women are truly acting of their own volition when in many cases their lives are so susceptible to the control of others? Or should we be skeptical of claims of ‘free choice’ and ‘consent’ in contexts that so clearly … smack of abuse and shameless exploitation?
Kerr very accurately foresees surrogacy and other reproductive technologies creating “an Atwoodian dystopia that should provide the basis for litigation well into the future. … international human rights provisions, do not adequately recognise and protect the natural and fundamental bond between a mother and the child she carries and must urgently be strengthened to prevent further development of a culture in which women’s reproductive capacities are commandeered and their offspring traded as mere commodities by wealthy men
…that 80-95% of people who say they are trans choose to have no medical treatment at all – no surgery, no drugs, not even therapy? Transwomen are just male people who subjectively believe that they are female. That’s it.
Did you know that a woman was asked to leave a shelter because, as a rape survivor, she couldn’t sleep in the same room as a strange male, regardless of how he identified? Are you aware that a man used self-id to access a women’s shelter where he sexually assaulted vulnerable women? Are you aware that a rape relief shelter in Canada lost all public funding for insisting they remain women-only, and had a dead rat nailed to their door?
Are you aware that despite less than half of changing rooms in swimming pools and sports centres being mixed sex, 90% of sexual assaults have happened in them? Yet mixed-sex, ‘gender-neutral’ facilities are constantly pushed, including in schools – contrary to law and building regulations requiring separate sex provision – when it would be more responsible to increase third space unisex provision for the comfort of those who need it.
[A]pparently what had prompted my colleague’s enthusiastic denunciation of J. K. Rowling’s statement of the political importance of the concept of sex was not so much any disagreement with the essence of what was said, but the thought that it may or may not be hateful to say so.
“I agree completely with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to prevent you from saying it.”
If we are denied the language and resources to recognise, record, and respond to the facts of female oppression, we will not be able to ameliorate these harms. That is why, despite the many efforts made to prevent us from doing so, so many of us continue to speak.
The ‘Reverse Voltaire’ is of course a nod to its more famous cousin, the quote so-often attributed to Voltaire in defence of free speech:
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The words were not actually Voltaire’s, but those of his biographer, one S. G. Tallentyre. Stephen G. Tallentyre was itself a pseudonym, of one Evelyn Beatrice Hall. Writing in 1906, the female Evelyn chose a male pseudonym to increase her chances of being listened to. And her words certainly were heard, though their true attribution is more often forgotten.
There are no accurate figures for the number of people detransitioning. Most of the detransitioners I spoke to never went back to the doctor who performed their original transition, and to all intents and purposes may be considered a success story by their therapist or medical team.
I fear that the detransitioned women I interviewed are canaries in the coalmine. Not only for detransitioners, but for womanhood. They all, in some combination, found being a woman too difficult, too dangerous or too disgusting. “I put the problem inside myself,” says one, “when actually it is with how the outside world sees women who don’t conform to feminine norms.”
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.
We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
Martine Rothblatt, born in 1954 is an exceedingly accomplished entrepreneur and lawyer. As the founder of United Theraputics, he was the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry. He identifies as a transsexual and transhumanist and has written extensively on the connections between the two.
The normalization of disembodiment has already been institutionalized and deeply imbedded in the marketplace. Children are being used in experiments both psychological and medical which are dissociating them from their bodies. Their schools have become indoctrination farms, the largest international law firm in the world has been recruited to help with legal construction of the “transgender child” and more than fifty clinics have arisen in the US alone in the past ten years to manipulate their puberty and hormones, setting them down a life-long path of medicalization at a time when we have never been more set apart from each other by our machines. The jig is up on this purported “human rights movement.” If we want to hold fast to our humanity, there is no time to waste. We are in the eleventh hour and must end this tech-driven, hubristic flight from flesh, mortality and nature.
They can’t come for my job, I’m in a gender critical organization, so I’ll speak. I’ll be one of the ones to say, we got this wrong. We need to go back. We need to re-evaluate how we treat gender non-conforming children with personality disorders or with ASD. We need to be much more careful with what medications we are willing to give to children. We should hold the medical community accountable for their years of careless experimentation on vulnerable children and put on full display the damages they have caused. The pharmaceutical industry also needs to be exposed, including how much money they are making off of this, how much they pay to social influencers on youtube and other social media services to continue the narrative and influence more young children. We need to examine how much they lobby the government for legislation for the T agenda which is causing a great deal of harm to an entire generation of vulnerable children, closeting an entire generation or two of lesbians, and silencing women all over the world.
The Covid-19 pandemic shows all too clearly the importance of data. Knowing that men and older people are more likely to die and that certain ethnic groups are also more at risk is worrying but vital information. Without accurate data, we are flying blind. In England and Wales, men are around twice as likely as women to die from the disease. But do fears about wading into the gender debate mean that crucial statistics are not being collected properly?
The UK census has collected data on sex since its inception in 1801, yet the census authorities plan to advise respondents to the 2021 census that they may answer the sex question according to their gender identity. This will damage the ability of the census to monitor inequalities between women and men, and to assess the sex-differentiated impacts of Covid-19. The 2021 census will be remembered as the Covid census. It should provide a unique opportunity to analyse the impact of the pandemic across social groups. It would be unfortunate if that opportunity was placed in jeopardy through the unforced error of muddled guidance on the sex question.
A South Korean court has denied a US extradition request for the man behind one of the world’s largest child sexual abuse websites.
