Transgender Activist Ordered To Stand Trial For Oakland Triple Murder – CBS San Francisco

A transgender activist and former teacher was ordered Wednesday to stand trial on three counts of murder for the shooting and stabbing deaths of a teenage man and two women in East Oakland in November 2016.

Dana Rivers, 63, of San Jose, is scheduled to return to Alameda County Superior Court on March 21 to have her trial date set.

She’s accused of killing 19-year-old Toto M. Diambu, who was also known as Benny Diambu Wright, 57-year-old Patricia Wright and 56-year-old Charlotte Reed.

Oakland police who came to the gruesome scene said Rivers was covered with blood, was holding a gasoline canister and was about to flee when she was arrested by officers who responded to reports of gunfire at a house in the 9400 block of Dunbar Drive at about 12:30 a.m. on Nov. 11, 2016.

Source: Transgender Activist Ordered To Stand Trial For Oakland Triple Murder – CBS San Francisco

Rivers was an organizer and participant in “Camp Trans”, the largest organized protest in transgender history. Camp trans was a campaign against the rights of lesbians to hold an annual women-only music festival called “Michfest” on private land.

After 40 years Michfest buckled under the pressure of the boycott and ceased to exist in 2016.

A few months later, in November 2016, David Warfield/Dana Rivers went on to brutally batter, then stab, shoot, and burn two women who were long time Michfest attendees and their adopted son. David/Dana was charged with stabbing, shooting, and beating Patricia Wright and Charlotte Reed and their son Benny, and then burning them.

Source: https://www.gendertrending.com/2019/08/13/media-blackout-on-dana-rivers-michfest-murder-trial/

 

Ex-prisoner challenges MoJ policy after alleged sexual assault by trans woman | The Guardian (UK)

A prisoner who was allegedly sexually assaulted behind bars by another inmate has challenged the Ministry of Justice over its policy on placing transgender women in women’s prisons.

The MoJ policies, Monaghan claimed, were discriminatory and erroneously overlooked “permitted exceptions [under the Equality Act] to the requirement that trans women be treated ‘for all purposes’ as in their acquired gender”.

Source: Ex-prisoner challenges MoJ policy after alleged sexual assault by trans woman | Prisons and probation | The Guardian

Executive Summary – Sexuality and Gender

Executive Summary of “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences”

● The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — is not supported by scientific evidence.

● According to a recent estimate, about 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as a gender that does not correspond to their biological sex.

● Studies comparing the brain structures of transgender and non-transgender individuals have demonstrated weak correlations between brain structure and cross-gender identification. These correlations do not provide any evidence for a neurobiological basis for cross-gender identification.

● Compared to the general population, adults who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery continue to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.

● Children are a special case when addressing transgender issues. Only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.

● There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents, although some children may have improved psychological well-being if they are encouraged and supported in their cross-gender identification. There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.

Source: Executive Summary – Sexuality and Gender

The myth of the male bumbler – The Week

Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler — the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth — is the best and hardest proof.

It’s counterintuitive, I know. For decades now, the very idea of a duplicitous, calculating man has been so exceptional as to be almost monstrous; this is the domain of cult leaders, of con artists, of evil men like the husband in Gaslight. And while folks provisionally accept that there are men who “groom” children and “gaslight” women, the reluctance to attach that behavior to any real, flesh-and-blood man we know is extreme. Many people don’t actually believe that normal men are capable of it.

Predatory men normalize their predation and support each other.

Most of us know that when a politician sits on the stand and insists that he “does not recall,” that it’s a political performance, a manipulative pretense intended to obfuscate. Let’s apply that intelligent skepticism toward this rash of professions of male incompetence. To put it in pragmatic terms: You can be a bumbler, or you can keep your job. You can’t have both.

Source: The myth of the male bumbler

Witch hunt tourism is lucrative. It also obscures a tragic history – National Geographic

[W]hile witch tourism may be fun, some scholars worry that these stereotypes do more harm than good. The selling of dolls in gift shops like those in Spain “perpetuates the idea that the so-called witches … were not victims of a terrible persecution, but were fictional figures,” says Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch. “I do not think the tourists who buy these dolls realize that these were women who were charged with fictional crimes, and then horribly tortured and most often burned alive.”

Hundreds of years later, misperception around witchcraft still circulates. As a result, witch hunts are very much a 21st-century practice in many parts of the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Papua New Guinea.

While authorities in most countries simply turn a blind eye, some legal systems sanction the persecution. In addition to having laws against sorcery (a crime that carries a death sentence), Saudi Arabia established an anti-witchcraft unit in 2009 within the country’s religious police department.

“Violence against women has greatly intensified in recent years,” says Federici, “for reasons, I believe, that have some relation to the violence inflicted on women through the witch hunts of the past.”

The failure to recognize the history of the witch hunts may be a factor, too. “No ‘day of memory’ has been introduced in any European calendar,” writes Federici in the introduction to her 2018 collection of essays Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women.

Source: Witch hunt tourism is lucrative. It also obscures a tragic history

‘NEW TABOO?’ Surgeon Says Sex Change Regret Is ‘On The Rise’ – But No One’s Talking About It | The Daily Wire

One of the world’s top genital reconstructive surgeons says “sex change regret” is on the rise, and that more patients are coming to him to have their “gender confirmation” surgeries reversed — but that people, too afraid to be politically incorrect, just aren’t talking about it.

Professor Miroslav Djordjevic told Canada’s National Post that, for the first time in his long career as a world-renowned surgeon, people who have had sex change operations are coming to him to have them reversed, a procedure that is not just expensive but very painful.

One psychotherapist, James Caspian, who specializes in transgender issues, told the Post that he wanted to publish a paper on the topic of de-transitioning after meeting with Djordjevic and hearing his stories, but after confirming his research plan with Bath Spa University, and submitting preliminary research which suggested Djordjevic wasn’t alone in seeing an increase in “de-transitioning” requests, Bath Spa turned down his proposal, citing “ethical concerns.”

“[A]fter submitting the more detailed proposal to Bath Spa, [Caspian] discovered he had been referred to the university ethics committee, which rejected it over fears of criticism that might be directed towards the university,” the Post reported, adding that Bath’s primary concern was the “powerful transgender lobby” that operates on social media.

Source: ‘NEW TABOO?’ Surgeon Says Sex Change Regret Is ‘On The Rise’ – But No One’s Talking About It | The Daily Wire

The New Zealand women trapped in Australia and imprisoned in abuse under the Hague Convention – ABC News

It’s a nightmare scenario that is a common plight for international women living under the shadow of domestic violence in Australia.

New Zealand women in particular face a unique set of circumstances that throw up enormous barriers in allowing them to escape partner abuse.

Under the common 444 visa, New Zealanders have the right to live and work in Australia, but because they remain citizens of their homeland, they are not entitled to government benefits.

When faced with domestic violence and without finances to leave, many as a last resort flee back to New Zealand, but then can be forced back by their abuser to Australia.

The legal tool is the Hague Convention, which prevents children being taken across borders unlawfully, and is predominantly judged on the black-and-white fact of a border crossing, not the extenuating circumstances.

Source: The New Zealand women trapped in Australia and imprisoned in abuse under the Hague Convention – ABC News

New Evidence That Grandmothers Were Crucial for Human Evolution | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

For years, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the existence of menopause, a life stage that humans do not share with our primate relatives. Why would it be beneficial for females to stop being able to have children with decades still left to live?

According to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the answer is grandmothers. “Grandmothering was the initial step toward making us who we are,” says senior author Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. In 1997 Hawkes proposed the “grandmother hypothesis,” a theory that explains menopause by citing the under-appreciated evolutionary value of grandmothering. Hawkes says that grandmothering helped us to develop “a whole array of social capacities that are then the foundation for the evolution of other distinctly human traits, including pair bonding, bigger brains, learning new skills and our tendency for cooperation.”

Source: New Evidence That Grandmothers Were Crucial for Human Evolution | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

Tonje Gjevjon: Today, many would consider me a girl “born in the wrong body” — KIRJO

The LGBTQ+ movement around the world is pushing women’s needs aside to make way for men’s demands: the demand for surrogacy, the demand to legitimize the right to buy sex from prostituted women, and the demand that men who identify as women be allowed to enter all women’s spaces.

What once started as a fight for justice for lesbians and gay men has become a movement that erases same-sex attraction as a sexual orientation. The few lesbians who dare state that being lesbian is a sexual orientation based on sex, not gender identity, are accused of being exclusionary, hateful, prejudiced, and of making the lives of men who identify as women difficult.

But lesbian teens are, as other teens, looking for a sense of belonging — a group that they can relate to. We have clubs for people who collect stamps, saunas for gay men, but no clubs for lesbians.

The increase in the number of young girls who want to be boys is alarming. At the same time, there has been an increase in teenage girls suffering from mental health issues.

I’m a lesbian tomboy who grew up in an age where the concept of being “born in the wrong body” didn’t exist. If I were a child today, I wouldn’t have stood a chance against trans activism. I can’t bear to think what might have happened if I had been assessed at The Karolinska University Hospital, which hosts Sweden’s largest gender identity clinic, or the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.

Source: Tonje Gjevjon: Today, many would consider me a girl “born in the wrong body” — KIRJO