What matters in 2021, it seems, is not whether someone has a cervix or a penis, but whether they “feel” male or female.
Now if I had only had known this clever trick during the summer of 1976, I could have self-identified as a burly bloke instead of a scared pregnant girl.
It is easy to mock, but the Scottish government’s apparent determination to erase sex and replace it with gender identity could have serious consequences.
The economic and cultural oppression of women and girls throughout history and across the world is predicated on biology.
It turns out that in the United States, the survival rate of infants, the most dependent age group of all, has gone way up during the pandemic. There are reports that premature births, one leading cause of infant mortality, fell significantly in the early months of lockdowns, when women in their final trimester of pregnancy were able to do something many of them cannot afford to do in normal times: Stay home from work.
Shortly after this stunning surgical success story, people started wondering if such a surgery – and subsequent pregnancy – could work in male bodies (example; example; example).
The notion that you can remove and insert organs like they are pieces of an engine or puzzle reflects a stunning disrespect for the functional integrity of the female body. This type of thinking and practice underpins medical interventions that damages females.
Furthermore, scientists write that donor uteri from living women function better than donor uteri from dead women (Jones et al., 2018). It is rather terrifying to think about what could happen when wealthy males and their scientifically-curious teams of doctors and surgeons might achieve, in terms of seeking out sources for women’s body parts.
Don’t worry though, the authors do offer a solution to this issue of organ sourcing.
Uteri could come from transmen (females who identify as men), provided these females are willing to risk a hysterectomy. Transplanting a vagina and cervix in addition to a uterus would be the optimal solution, according to Jones and colleagues, as this would solve several problems at once (more on this below).
In these hard times, families unexpectedly crash-landing on to universal credit are discovering the full brutality of Britain’s benefits system, the meanest among comparable European countries. Stripping a third child of any support smacks of China’s former one-child policy, which forced abortions on women pregnant with a second.
The British Pregnancy Advisory Service survey shows that more than half the women likely to be affected by the two-child limit who have had an abortion during the pandemic said the rule – introduced in April 2017 – was important in their decision to terminate. Fear for the household’s precarious finances, and knowing a third child would be shorn of so much once provided by the state, propelled them into the decision to abort.
On October 7, 2020, Keira Bell went to court in London to fight against a system that pathologizes and medicalizes youth nonconformity. At 16 years old, after just three appointments, doctors began the process of transitioning Bell, medically, to ‘change’ her sex. Tomorrow morning, the judgement on her case comes in.
Bell is a former patient of Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service for under 18’s, where she was given puberty blockers at age 16, and prescribed testosterone at age 17. She was later sent to the adult Gender Identity Clinic in London, and by the age of 20, surgeons had performed a double mastectomy on her.
Bell raised £50,491 (over $67k) to bring this case to court. She isn’t looking for compensation. She’s looking to change the policies that currently work against kids like her.
Young people do not reach full cognitive brain development till around the age of 25, a fact that the medical field collectively decided to either forget, or ignore, when it came to medicalizing and performing surgeries on kids like Bell. In the US, toddlers, as young as 1, are labeled “transgender,” children, as young as 8, are medicalized, and double mastectomies are performed on kids as young as 13.
Statistically, the majority of kids like Bell would grow out of ‘gender dysphoria,’ if allowed to grow up, without interference.
Medical malpractice has been committed on a global scale, because no one will challenge the foundational lie, that this is a biological condition.
This shift from a psychological condition to a biological one happened when activists and patients got involved with WPATH and APA, changing definitions from Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria.
If the court rules in Bell’s favor, young people will have a better chance of growing up before life-altering decisions are made. This case doesn’t just represent Bell, it represents thousands of young people who’ve come forward with similar stories, despite a powerful campaign to silence them.
Firstly, and especially for anyone who isn’t already aware of this, the purple line is a line of temporary skin discoloration that can be seen in the anal cleft of some women as they progress in labour. In early labour, the line is short, and it gets longer as labour progresses. Some midwives are good at telling how far along a woman is in her labour by looking at the purple line.
The purple line was first discussed in the literature (to my knowledge, but please see below) in a letter written to The Lancet by Byrne and Edmonds (1990), who described it as a ‘clinical sign which will indicate the progress of the first stage of labour without vaginal examination’. Interestingly, they attributed a Sister H Lake as having first observed the purple line. I can only assume that Sister Lake was a midwife, and have previously made some efforts to track her down, but without success.
In 2010, Shepherd et al published the results of their research study into the purple line. In an article that is freely available, they observed the progress of 144 women in labour and saw evidence of the purple line in 76% of the women. These researchers hadn’t set out to find out more about the actual physiology of the purple line, but their results showed a medium positive correlation between the length of the purple line, the dilation of the woman’s cervix and the station of the baby’s head. One of their findings that I find the most fascinating is that the line was far more likely to appear when a woman was in spontaneous labour.
Having seen the purple line many times myself, though, I find it hard to believe that Sister Lake was the first birth attendant to notice it. I often wonder whether, one day, someone doing some historical midwifery research will come across an even earlier reference to this in old texts. Or perhaps in other eras it was so well known and accepted that there would have been no need to even mention it…
A breastfeeding charity has sparked outrage by allowing men who identify as female to attend meetings for mothers struggling to feed their babies.
The British branch of the La Leche League (LLLGB) is offering to provide breastfeeding support to transgender women, who were born male.
A statement on the charity’s website says: ‘Trans men, trans women and non-binary individuals may choose to breastfeed or chestfeed their babies.
‘You do not need to have given birth to breastfeed or chestfeed, as we can also see in the experiences of those nursing adopted babies.’
Chestfeeding is a term used to avoid causing offence to women who have transitioned to become men and feel uncomfortable using the word ‘breast.’
But this week a former La Leche League leader told how ‘alarmed’ she was at the prospect of trans women joining meetings with other mothers in a post on Mumsnet.
She wrote: ‘I was a La Leche League leader for many years and am very upset to see how the organisation has lost its focus on the mother and baby.
‘LLLGB should not be promoting the idea that males can induce lactation to feed a baby.
‘There is no evidence to say this is safe, only an anecdotal example of a case where a doctor in the US enabled this to happen using off label drugs,’ she added.
