Category: Global

How Britain’s Feminist Grass Roots Turned the Tide Against Gender Extremists

Though Liz Truss, Minister for Women and Equalities, likely won’t be releasing the government’s policy response till July, leaks confirm that “self-ID” (as it’s widely known) will not be introduced. Moreover, Truss says she wants to protect gender dysphoric children from making “irreversible decisions” in regard to their bodies, and would allow women to create and maintain safe single-sex spaces free of male-bodied individuals. This is a huge win for so-called “gender-critical” activists, who lack the deep pockets and institutional influence of the far more fashionable trans-rights lobby—even if there is still a long way to go to repair the damage that’s already been done.

To understand why it has taken so long for these policies to be rolled back, it is important to consider the outsized influence of websites such as Pink News, which purport to advance mainstream LGBT news and attitudes, but in fact have been co-opted by a highly motivated faction of (mostly male) trans activists.

Whenever women have attempted to meet to discuss the impact of gender ideology-driven public policy on women’s rights, venues are bombarded with tweets, calls, emails, and other forms of pressure from trans activists who claim that giving an audience to the other side of the debate is inherently hateful. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, activists have led a genuinely McCarthy-esque campaign of blacklisting against dissenters.

Source: How Britain’s Feminist Grass Roots Turned the Tide Against Gender Extremists – Quillette

Puberty Blockers Are Dangerous Experimentation On Children –

New Zealanders will be shocked to realise the experimental nature of treatment being carried out on children and adolescents in the name of gender-affirming medicine.

The treatment involves ‘puberty blockers’ – drugs that are shown by overseas research to have negative effects in the short term, with the long-term effects on the brain and bones not yet known. Yet these dangers are not explained on the Ministry of Health’s website, which claims they are ‘safe and fully reversible’.

A recent BBC documentary exposed the emerging scandal. The NHS recently quietly removed all claims that puberty blockers are ‘safe and reversible’ from their website. Carl Henegan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, has described the off-label use of puberty blockers on under-18s as an ‘unregulated live experiment on children’.

Source: Puberty Blockers Are Dangerous Experimentation On Children –

What we can learn from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life’s work

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday at age 87, she was the most senior Justice on the Supreme Court of the United State’s liberal wing. She was also the second woman ever to be appointed to that hallowed court.

But when Ginsburg first left law school, she couldn’t get a job anywhere despite graduating at the top of her class at Harvard law. It was 1959.

“To be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot,” she would later say about this time, was “a bit much.”

She would often cite Justice Benjamin Cardozo: “Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.” She was wary, she said, of “taking giant strides and thereby risking a backlash too forceful to contain.”

Ginsburg’s radical heart was laid bare when she would often joke about how frequently she is asked when she would consider there to be enough women on the supreme court and she would reply: “when there are nine.”

Source: What we can learn from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life’s work

Hundreds of women detained in latest Belarus protests

Thousands of women marched in protests in Minsk over the weekend, calling for the resignation of President Alexander Lukashenko.

Since the country’s election on August 9, mass protests, attended mostly by women, have been weekly occurrences in the Belarusian capital of more than 2 million people.

Critics of Lukashenko’s leadership purport that voting was rigged and that opposition rival Svetlana Tikhanovskaya should have been rightfully elected. Fearing for her safety, Tikhanovskaya has since taken refuge in Lithuania.

Source: Hundreds of women detained in latest Belarus protests

Row Ignited as The Mandalorian Star Gina Carano Refuses Gender ‘Pronoun Bullies’

US — . The Mandolarian actor and Mixed Martial Arts star Gina Carano has re-ignited the row between feminists and transgender activists over the use of gendered pronouns. It began with a campaign by transgender activists to compel celebrities to put their ‘preferred pronouns’ in their Twitter bios – as way of normalising this practice by trans-identified and non-binary people.

Source: Row Ignited as The Mandalorian Star Gina Carano Refuses Gender ‘Pronoun Bullies’ | Women Are Human

Disney’s Mulan tells women to know their place

The story of Mulan has been told and retold for 1,600 years. This latest version is more conservative, when it comes to a woman’s place, than one told in the 17th century.

Within the film, the villain Xianniang (Gong Li) provides a powerful contrast to Mulan. Xianniang invites Mulan to join forces and rebel against the Emperor. She wants to build a kingdom where strong women like them are accepted for who they are, but Mulan responds, “I know my place” – emphasising her duty is to serve her Emperor.

Ultimately, Xianniang sacrifices herself to save Mulan. By refusing to work within the system, Xianniang’s death signifies the failure of her radical approach.

Rather than being a story of female empowerment, Mulan promotes the idea that women must put male authority figures before themselves to achieve recognition.

The story of Mulan hasn’t always sent this message. In a version by the 17th century author Chu Renhuo, set at the end of the Sui Dynasty (581-618), Xianniang is a warrior princess who becomes Mulan’s sworn sister. They lead a group of women soldiers and travel together. This friendship is absent from the Disney film.

Source: Disney’s Mulan tells women to know their place

STATEMENT: Whistleblower Report of Hysterectomies in ICE Detention Is Emblematic of Widespread Reproductive Coercion and Abuses of Women’s Rights

Washington, D.C. — In a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility operated by the private corporation LaSalle Corrections, details gross human rights abuses in the facility. The complaint includes allegations of medical neglect, dangerous practices in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and startling claims of coerced, mass hysterectomies.

Reports of mass hysterectomies and medical neglect in ICE detention are horrifying but sadly not surprising. The United States has a long and sordid history of reproductive coercion and forced sterilization, particularly targeting Black, Latina, and Native American women as well as women with disabilities and incarcerated women. These racist, eugenicist practices are often sanctioned by U.S. law, which to this day allows for the sterilization of anyone deemed “unfit.” Furthermore, abuses of women’s health and rights in immigration detention are nothing new. Detention facilities routinely deny adequate health care and inflict abuse and neglect, from lack of maternal health care to limits on reproductive autonomy to sexual abuse. The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to deny reproductive freedom to people in immigration custody, including rolling back the presumption that pregnant women generally should not be detained and taking steps to deny young women the right to an abortion.

Source: STATEMENT: Whistleblower Report of Hysterectomies in ICE Detention Is Emblematic of Widespread Reproductive Coercion and Abuses of Women’s Rights – Center for American Progress

A child’s consent to transition: the view from Down Under

Imogen (No. 6) [2020] FamCA 761; (10 September 2020)

The court had a variety of questions to grapple with. If there is a dispute about medical treatment for an adolescent, was it mandatory to make an application to court to resolve that dispute? If Imogen was Gillick competent – could she make her own decision without her parents’ consent? If the court had to resolve the dispute then what was the legal test?

The court found that where there was such a dispute about the existence of a medical condition or the need for treatment, it was mandatory to make an application to the court – and interestingly there was official guidance that got the law wrong about that.

The discussions in this case are very relevant for every common law jurisdiction – there has been a staggering increase in recent years of the number of children wishing to ‘transition’ from one sex to the other and some interesting legal actions on the horizon, criticising the swiftness with which children are put on the path of ‘affirmation’ that leads to medication and surgery.

The court noted at paragraph 27 that the Australian Standards gave incorrect guidance as to the law about when an adolescent could consent to stage 2 treatment – an interesting parallel to the situation in England and Wales where a number of official guidances around treatment of trans children are being challenged as unlawful.

Source: A child’s consent to transition: the view from Down Under | Child Protection Resource

300 years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice?

It spanned more than a century and a half, and resulted in about 2,500 people – the vast majority of them women – being burned at the stake, usually after prolonged torture. Remarkably, one of the driving forces behind Scotland’s “satanic panic” was no less than the king, James VI, whose treatise, Daemonologie, may have inspired the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Now, almost 300 years after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, a campaign has been launched for a pardon for those convicted, an apology to all those accused and a national memorial to be created.

“In Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, there are monuments to all sorts of men on horseback, and even a full-size statue of a named bear. But there is nothing to commemorate the hundreds, if not thousands, who died as a result of one of the most horrible miscarriages of justice in Scottish history,” Mitchell said.

Those arrested under the Witchcraft Act were usually tortured into making confessions. Women, who made up 84% of the accused, were not permitted to give evidence at their own trials. Those convicted were strangled and burned at the stake so there was no body to bury.

Source: 300 years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice? | Scotland | The Guardian