Alissa Kamholz said that prison was once her “safe place” away from male rapists who abused her throughout her childhood… until the women’s prison forced her to live with a man. #cruelandunusual @IWF
Source: Alissa’s Story | Cruel & Unusual Punishment | Independent Women’s Forum
The internet has actor Hannah Waddingham’s back after she took snappy aim at a photographer who made a sexist suggestion to her on the red carpet.
[W]hile she was posing for photos ahead of the ceremony, one brazen photographer, reportedly a male, yelled out for Waddingham to “show a little leg”.
In a video of the interaction, the request can’t be heard, but Waddingham’s response is loud and clear.
“Oh my God, you’d never say that to a man, my friend,” she said, rather gently.
“Don’t be a dick, otherwise I’ll move off. Don’t say ‘show a little leg’. No.”
Waddingham did actually move on, as bystanders cheered.
“Have some manners,” she tossed back as she left.
An attorney representing a mother in a Family Court case has the audacity to call the judge out for his “boys’ club” ruling switching custody to the abusive father.
Now the Old Boys are coming after her.
Charlotte Proudman is facing suspension of her license to practice law and, meanwhile, the Boys have been trolling her despicably on social media with misogynistic slurs.
The funny part? The judge is actually a member of a literal Boys Only club! And this club happens to boast as members most of the male judges and powerful Old Boys in the UK.
Charlotte is perhaps the most well-known attorney in the UK for representing mothers in custody cases. Seeing up front and center how mothers are systematically discriminated against and oppressed has caused her to be a long-time critic of the Family Court system.
The last straw for the Old Boys with Charlotte (or perhaps the opportunity they were waiting for?) was when she had the temerity to post a 14-tweet thread about a case she had just lost. In it she referred to Judge Jonathan Cohen’s ruling, which gave the abusive father custody, as having “echoes of the boys’ club”.
I lost the case. I do not accept the judge’s reasoning. This judgment has echoes of the “boys’ club” which still exists among men in powerful positions.
Soon after she tweeted this thread, the Bar, also infested with Old Boys, initiated disciplinary proceedings with 5 charges against her.
Not surprisingly, another Old Boy was assigned to hear Charlotte’s disciplinary proceeding: Judge Philip Havers. Amusingly, he is a member of the same, literal Old Boys club! Charlotte requested his recusal and he recently agreed, perhaps because of the publicity her case is getting.
Charlotte was verbally abused in tweets posted by a ton of lawyers. They’ve branded her a cunt, whore, narcissist, dreadful, and an idiot. Charlotte has reported more than 50 lawyers for this abuse and asked the Bar to take action. She says this onslaught has seriously affected her well-being. She is now fearful and has to work with colleagues who’ve been allowed to verbally attack her.
But the Bar minimized the Boys’ attacks on her as just “unpleasant and inflammatory”. They refuse to take action because the messages supposedly do not meet the threshold for regulatory action.
There is a long history of Old Boys retaliating against attorneys who represent mothers well.
Source: (18) Attorney Calls Out Judge for “Boys Club” Ruling: Now She’s Facing Suspension
Death or surgery? It’s a capital offence to be gay in Iran. But gender-change surgery is legal. Now, 4000 Iranians are undergoing the life-changing procedure every year. And many of them are children.
[F]or thousands of “in the closet” Iranian homosexuals and lesbians – an unwanted and unnecessary surgical procedure may save their lives.
The religious government in Tehran insists homosexuality represents ‘Western barbarism’ and is a ‘virus’ that people should ‘kill.’
But a rare quirk of theology and history has combined for a formal – if not willing – acceptance of gender dysphoria.
In a 2022 UN report, Iran Rehman, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran wrote that members of Iran’s LGBT community “are often advised that their gender nonconformity or same-sex attraction represents so-called gender identity disorder, which necessitates ‘reparative’ therapies or sex reassignment surgeries, to ‘cure’ them.”
Iran has become an international hub for gender reassignment surgery. Up to 4000 procedures are carried out every year. However, some reports state the actual number is much higher as there is no requirement for doctors to be qualified.
Critical thinking and open debate are pillars of scientific and medical research. Yet experienced professionals are increasingly scared to openly discuss their views on the treatment of children questioning their gender identity.
This was the conclusion drawn by Hilary Cass in her review of gender identity services for children this week, which warned that a toxic debate had resulted in a culture of fear.
Her conclusion was echoed by doctors, academic researchers and scientists, who have said this climate has had a chilling effect on research in an area that is in desperate need of better evidence.
Some said they had been deterred from pursuing what they believed to be crucial studies, saying that merely entering the arena would put their reputation at risk. Others spoke of abuse on social media, academic conferences being shut down, biases in publishing and the personal cost of speaking out.
Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at UCL’s Institute of Neurology, received abuse after publishing a systematic review of studies that investigated the impact of puberty blockers on brain development. Her review found that “critical questions” remained around the nature, extent and permanence of any arrested development of cognitive function linked to the treatment.
The lack of high-quality research, highlighted by Cass, has been a subject of growing unease among doctors, according to Dr Juliet Singer, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and former governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust.
In 2020, Singer conducted a survey of specialist child psychiatry trainees, which highlighted concerns about the lack of explanation for the exponential growth in referrals to adolescent gender services, the lack of long-term outcome studies on treatments, and insufficient evidence on the long-term effects of hormone blockers.
“There’s been a shutting down of anybody who has suggested we need to think about a deeper understanding of why these young people are in such distress,” she said. “It’s been remarkable the difference from other ordinary clinical practice.”
Another senior researcher in endocrinology, who wished to remain anonymous, said medical professionals had resorted to sharing concerns and views on anonymous WhatsApp groups.
A post office operator who was wrongly prosecuted while pregnant has rejected a Post Office executive’s apology for having sent an email celebrating her conviction as “brilliant news”.
The inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal heard that David Smith, who was managing director of the Post Office for seven months during 2010, sent the email to his team after learning that Seema Misra had been convicted.
She was later sentenced to 15 months in prison for theft and locked up on her son’s 10th birthday while eight weeks pregnant. She was put on suicide watch after collapsing in court. Her case was among those overturned by the court of appeal in 2021.
The inquiry is looking into the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of post office operators who were hounded for more than a decade because of shortfalls in their branch accounts that were due to bugs in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.
Misra rejected Smith’s apology, telling Sky News: “They are apologising now but they missed so many chances before. We had my conviction overturned, nobody came at that time to apologise.”
The UK government has introduced legislation that will exonerate post office operators who were prosecuted between September 1996 and December 2018. The new law is expected to come into force by late July.
[Ed: More evidence for banning the imprisonment of pregnant women and those with dependent children for anything less than the most serious violent crimes.]
Source: Post office operator wrongly jailed while pregnant rejects executive’s apology
BERLIN (AP) — German lawmakers on Friday approved legislation that will make it easier for transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to change their name and gender in official records.
The “self-determination law,” one of several social reforms that Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s liberal-leaning coalition government pledged when it took office in late 2021, is set to take effect on Nov. 1.
Germany, the European Union’s most populous nation, follows several other countries in making the change. Parliament’s lower house, the Bundestag, approved it by 374 votes to 251 with 11 abstentions.
The German legislation will allow adults to change their first name and legal gender at registry offices without further formalities. They will have to notify the office three months before making the change.
The existing “transsexual law,” which dates back four decades, requires individuals who want to change gender on official documents to first obtain assessments from two experts “sufficiently familiar with the particular problems of transsexualism” and then a court decision.
Source: German parliament votes to make it easier for people to legally change their name and gender
JK Rowling today slammed transgender support group Mermaids for ‘total, shameless lies’ and said its ‘fingerprints are all over the catastrophe of child transition’.
The Harry Potter author criticised comments made by the group’s chief executive Lauren Stoner yesterday that it does not advocate for any medical pathway.
Responding to a video of the Sky News interview, Rowling tweeted: ‘Absolute, total, shameless lies. Your ex-CEO referred children to the Tavistock gender clinic.
‘Mermaids has repeatedly claimed puberty blockers are reversible, sent out breast binders to girls as young as thirteen and insisted publicly that unless children are affirmed in their trans identities they’ll kill themselves.
‘Your fingerprints are all over the catastrophe of child transition, and those who funded you, campaigned for you and allowed you to embed yourselves in healthcare systems need to be held to account.’
Rowling’s fury has been echoed by Father Ted’s co-creator Graham Linehan, who demanded criminal investigations into both Mermaids and pro-trans charity Stonewall for encouraging what he called ‘the myth of the trans child’.
This politicisation of mental ill health and gender distress in children and young people, followed by their medicalisation, is the biggest medical scandal that I have ever witnessed. The Cass Review is not the end of that scandal: we need to understand what happened, why, who is responsible, and how to prevent it from ever happening again.
I add my voice to those calling for a statutory public inquiry into how gender identity became embedded in schools and within the NHS.
I also call for the immediate removal of any influence of Stonewall and its cohort from our schools, hospitals and public spaces. Never again can we allow such a toxic and dangerous ideology to proliferate in our institutions.
Greater access to the internet has given children and young people learning resources “but it has also made them vulnerable to new dangers”, according to the review.
“Biology hasn’t changed and adult biology hasn’t changed in the last few years,” Cass said this week. “So it’s not that that’s changed things.
The report says girls spend more hours using social media than boys. A study cited by Cass found 43% of girls used social media for three or more hours a day, compared with 22% of boys.
A systematic review highlighted by the Cass report found that use of social media was associated with body image concerns. Numerous other studies cited by the report implicate smartphone and social media use in mental distress and suicidality among young people, particularly girls.
The report goes on to say that it is “common in adolescence to experience same-sex attraction and not to conform to gender stereotypes. In making sense of these feelings young people are now having to navigate an increasingly complex interplay between sex and gender.”
Source: What Cass review says about surge in children seeking gender services | Transgender | The Guardian
I welcome the findings and recommendations in the Final Report of the Cass Review. https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CassReview_Final.pdf
Like many other women and men, I was smeared as a transphobe for opposing the ideological and dangerous model of healthcare espoused by the network of LGBT+ charities aligned with Stonewall, including Gendered Intelligence, Mermaids, the LGBT Foundation and others. The attacks to which I was subjected came from those organisations, but also from members of Garden Court Chambers, where I practised as a barrister for nearly 20 years.
This politicisation of mental ill health and gender distress in children and young people, followed by their medicalisation, is the biggest medical scandal that I have ever witnessed. The Cass Review is not the end of that scandal: we need to understand what happened, why, who is responsible, and how to prevent it from ever happening again.
I add my voice to those calling for a statutory public inquiry into how gender identity became embedded in schools and within the NHS.
I also call for the immediate removal of any influence of Stonewall and its cohort from our schools, hospitals and public spaces. Never again can we allow such a toxic and dangerous ideology to proliferate in our institutions.
Source: Update #12 – Press release: Dr Hilary Cass Final Report — Allison Bailey
