Women are twenty-seven times more likely than men to be harassed on social media. This shocking finding, published by the European Women’s Lobby in 2017, suggests that cyber-violence against women is not a series of isolated acts, but a systemic scourge. Sociological studies have shown that it is mostly committed by men who, contrary to popular belief, belong to more privileged socio-economic groups. Feeling protected by the virtual nature of their actions, the perpetrators are organised and sometimes carry out “digital raids”, or harassment in packs, with terrible consequences, both personal and professional, for their victims. This documentary focuses on women’s testimony from all walks of life who have been victim of online abuse and examines the harm this phenomenon does to them and to democratic debate.
US — . According to data from The Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, those who claim a non-binary identity make up 11% of the LGBTQ+ population in the United States. These individuals often indicate that they embrace the non-binary identity due to feeling that their personalities do not fit into the male nor female categories.
Plastic surgeons in the US, primarily in California, are advertising to this rapidly growing market “gender-affirming” surgeries designed to remove their “genital structures” so that their bodies “neither resembles a natal male nor female.”
MoZaic Care, a cosmetic surgery provider in San Francisco, California, offers a “nullification” procedure that “removes external genitalia while preserving a urethral opening and anal opening.”
“We are enabling people with severe mental health issues to chop up their bodies,” another concerned Twitter user said. “What has happened to us as a society?”
The prisoner who sexually assaulted Amy — we cannot legally identify her, so we shall call her J — is a transgender woman, with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), and therefore referred to by the female pronoun, but still had male genitalia.
Amy was equally well aware that ‘J’ still had male genitalia because she often intimidated her and fellow female prisoners at HMP Bronzefield in Ashford, Middlesex, by exposing them.
Moreover, J was serving time for a serious sexual assault on a child and was clearly a danger to other inmates. Yet she had secured a coveted job as a cleaner at the prison gym where Amy also worked. And it was while she was in the gym’s lavatory block that J assaulted her in 2017.
Amy adds: ‘Sex offenders are master manipulators, and if they sniff vulnerability they target it. At the same time, they are going on about their human rights and scaring the prison officers into looking the other way. After J assaulted me, I’d see her around the prison on a regular basis. She would leer at me and smirk.’
Amy and a number of other women heard that J had been sent to the segregation unit as punishment for not taking the medication that prevented her penis from getting erect, ‘which begs the question: ‘Why was she still allowed around us?’
On Monday, Rowling, 55, retweeted a threat from a since-deleted Twitter account that said, “I wish you a very nice pipebomb in mailbox.”
“To be fair, when you can’t get a woman sacked, arrested or dropped by her publisher, and cancelling her only made her book sales go up, there’s really only one place to go,” she wrote.
When a user asked if the threat was, in part, because of comments she made about the trans community, Rowling confirmed “yes.”
“Hundreds of trans activists have threatened to beat, rape, assassinate and bomb me,” she said, saying that she’s since “realised that this movement poses no risk to women whatsoever.”
The Norwegian women’s beach handball team has been fined for wearing shorts, and not bikini bottoms, at a European championship match.
A fine of $1,770 was given to the women’s team after their shorts were ruled “a case of improper clothing”.
Tonje Lerstad and Julie Berg, two of the players in the women’s national beach handball team, appeared on tevevison following the event, and agreed that the sport’s uniform rules were sexist and prevented many women from taking up the sport.
“We’ve just been told that this is the rule,” Lerstad said. “We want to grow this sport so everyone can feel they want to participate. Because of body insecurities, a lot of women just say, ‘No, I don’t want to do this,’ and that’s really sad.”
Berg said the support the handball team has received since has been overwhelming.
Nearly three dozen women are suing the adult video website Pornhub and its parent company alleging they knowingly profited from footage depicting rape and sexual exploitation, including of minors.
“More research on sex changes in young people under the age of 18 is urgently needed. Doctors who provide transgender care in Nijmegen and Amsterdam say they know too little about the target group and the long-term effects. In the meantime, they feel pressured by the long waiting lists. “All the research out there comes from ourselves.”
On February 27, Algemeen Dagblad, the second-most widely read newspaper in the Netherlands, published an astonishing article. Written by Berendien Teteleptal, the author reports that “more research on sex changes in young people under the age of 18 is urgently needed. Doctors who provide transgender care in Nijmegen and Amsterdam say they know too little about the target group and the long-term effects.” (See here for an English translation of the article.)
What makes this article surprising is that it was a Dutch team of researcher-clinicians (one of whom is extensively quoted in the piece) who pioneered the use of puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria; this practice is now widespread in the western world.
Quoted in the aforementioned article by Tetelaptal, Thomas Steensma, one of the lead researcher-clinicians at the Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria in Amsterdam, asks some critical questions that U.S. “affirmative” clinicians largely ignore.
Because what is behind the large increase of children who have suddenly registered for transgender care since 2013? And what is the quality of life for this group long after the sex change? There is no answer to those questions. And that must happen, think Steensma and colleagues from Nijmegen.
Steensma is not alone amongst Dutch clinicians. Annelou L.C. de Vries a psychiatrist with the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Amsterdam University Medical Centers, who, like her colleagues, has published widely on pediatric gender issues for many years. In a commentary published in the October 2020 issue of Pediatrics, de Vries writes:
According to the original Dutch protocol, one of the criteria to start puberty suppression was “a presence of gender dysphoria from early childhood on.” Prospective follow-up studies evaluating these Dutch transgender adolescents showed improved psychological functioning. However, authors of case histories and a parent-report study warrant that gender identity development is diverse, and a new developmental pathway is proposed involving youth with post puberty adolescent-onset transgender histories. These youth did not yet participate in the early evaluation studies. This raises the question whether the positive outcomes of early medical interventions also apply to adolescents who more recently present in overwhelming large numbers for transgender care, including those that come at an older age, possibly without a childhood history of GI [gender incongruence]. It also asks for caution because some case histories illustrate the complexities that may be associated with later-presenting transgender adolescents and describe that some eventually detransition.
Tokyo will feature the most female athletes ever at an Olympics. But the Games do not have a good track record when it comes to gender equality.
The Olympics do not have a good track record when it comes to gender equality. At the end of the 19th century, when it was founded, the modern Olympic movement deliberately excluded women. Games patriarch Baron Pierre de Coubertin argued an Olympiad with women would be:
impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.
The Tokyo Games will feature the most female athletes at an Olympics, with 48.8% of competitors set to be women.
Noting this is actually shy of 50%, this is nonetheless up from 45% at the 2016 Rio Games and 44.2% at London 2012. At the Tokyo Paralympic Games, 40.5% of athletes will be women, compared to 38.6% at Rio.
To put this into a historical context, at the first modern games in Athens in 1896, women were banned from competing (although there are reports at leaset one woman ran the marathon).
At the 1900 Paris Olympics, women were allowed to compete, but they were only 22 out of 997 competitors. Women were also restricted to a select number of five “ladies” events: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrian and golf.
Women also make up significant proportions of the IOC organisation, but the numbers remain low at the leadership level. For example:
IOC membership (recruited by the IOC itself) is 37.5% female
the IOC executive board is 33.3% female
women account for 47.8% of the members of the IOC’s commissions, which advise the organisation on specific issues, such as ethics, science and athletes
more than half (53%) of the IOC’s administrative employees are female.
Some Olympic leaders also have a long way to go in terms of the way they view women and women in sport administration. In February this year, the head of the Tokyo Olympic Organising Committee, Yoshiro Mori, resigned after complaining to a Japanese Olympic Committee meeting that women talk too much.
