Category: Reproductive Rights

Kerala: The transgender couple whose pregnancy photos went viral – BBC News

A pregnancy photoshoot by an Indian transgender couple – who paused their hormone therapy to have a baby – is being widely shared on social media.

Ziya Paval, 21, and her(sic) partner Zahad, 23, who live in the southern state of Kerala, were in the process of gender transition when they decided to have a baby.

Ms Paval, who says she(sic) always wanted to be a parent, was recorded male at birth and now identifies as female.

Mr Zahad, who uses only one name, was observed as female at birth and now identifies as male. He(sic) is currently pregnant, and the couple expect to welcome their baby soon.

“It is very difficult to survive,” Ms Paval says, adding that she(sic) will have to take on more dance students.

“Zahad will go back to work about two months after the baby is born. Then I will take care of the baby.”

Source: Kerala: The transgender couple whose pregnancy photos went viral – BBC News

Why You Should Only Take Folate and Never Folic Acid

Too much synthetic folic acid from supplements and fortified foods may harm brain development and could be involved in rising rates of neurodevelopmental disorders in children.

Story at a Glance

  • It’s extremely rare to get too much folate from foods, but it is possible to get too much folic acid, the synthetic version of folate found in supplements and fortified foods.
  • In pregnant mice, high levels of folic acid harmed brain development in offspring, and low levels of vitamin B12 made the damage worse.
  • The combination of low vitamin B12, which often occurs in people eating vegan or vegetarian diets, along with high folic acid, could be increasing neurodevelopment disorders in children.
  • Due to prenatal supplements and fortified foods, many people have abnormally high levels of folic acid.
  • Studies looking into the effects of folic acid on autism development are conflicting, with some showing a protective effect, but a growing body of evidence points to potential harms when consumed in excess.
“There’s no doubt the introduction of folic acid diet fortification has been beneficial, substantially lowering the incidence of neural tube defects,” Ralph Green, University of California–Davis professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, said in a news release. “However, too much folic acid may have detrimental impacts on brain development, and that’s something we need to sort out.”7
Mr. Green and colleagues conducted a study that found excess folic acid is associated with neurodevelopmental risks, especially in concert with vitamin B12 deficiency8—a significant concern as folic acid intake has grown.

Source: 12ft

Global awareness of women’s health being ‘hijacked by vested interests’

The global drive to increase awareness of women’s health is being hijacked by major corporations promoting flawed or ineffective tests, treatments and technology, doctors and public health experts have warned.

[F]eminist health narratives are increasingly being co-opted by commercial interests to market products or interventions that are not backed by evidence, said researchers writing in the BMJ.

The surge in marketing risks harming women through inappropriate medicalisation, overdiagnosis and overtreatment, said Dr Tessa Copp, a public health researcher at the University of Sydney, Dr Minna Johansson, a GP in Gothenburg, and colleagues.

Companies have historically exploited health agendas by co-opting messaging about female autonomy to encourage women’s consumption of unhealthy commodities like tobacco and alcohol, they wrote. But this phenomenon has now expanded across women’s health.

They cited two examples of how feminist discourse was being hijacked to push non-evidence-based healthcare to healthy women.

The first was the anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) test, which measures levels of AMH in the blood, linked to the number of eggs in a woman’s ovaries.

The test does not reliably predict the chance of conceiving but fertility clinics and online companies globally are marketing it to the general public suggesting as much, the experts warned.

The second example cited was the view that all women having screening should be notified about their breast density, one of several independent risk factors for breast cancer.

Breast density notification can also increase women’s anxiety, confusion and intention to seek additional screening, while the unreliability of breast density measurement is another concern, they added.

In conclusion, they say: “We need to ensure the goals of feminist health advocacy are not undermined through commercially driven use of feminist discourse pushing non-evidence based care.”

Source: Global awareness of women’s health being ‘hijacked by vested interests’

Early Female Transgender Identity after Prenatal Exposure to Diethylstilbestrol: Report from a French National Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Cohort

In recent decades, a significant increase in the number of transgender people has been reported. Although, its etiology is unknown, biological, anatomical, genetic, environmental and cultural factors have been suggested to contribute to gender variation. In XY animals, it has been shown that environmental endocrine disruptors, through their anti-androgenic activity, induce a female identity.

In this work, we described four XY individuals who were exposed in utero to the xenoestrogen diethylstilbesterol (DES) and were part of the French HHORAGES cohort. They all reported a female transgender identity starting from childhood and adolescence. This high prevalence of male to female transgenderism (1.58%) in our cohort of 253 DES sons suggests that exposure to chemicals with xenoestrogen activity during fetal life may affect the male sex identity and behavior.

Source: JoX | Free Full-Text | Early Female Transgender Identity after Prenatal Exposure to Diethylstilbestrol: Report from a French National Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Cohort

If the ABS guts Australia’s time use survey, women’s work will count for little

Childcare is probably Australia’s largest industry, most of it unpaid.

We know this because of Australian Bureau of Statistics time use surveys. Since 1992 these surveys have recorded what thousands of Australians say they do with their time in diaries kept for 48 hours.

But if the Bureau of Statistics proceeds with its current plans for scaling down the survey we soon won’t be able to tell.

Australia has not only led the world in recording time use, but also in recording simultaneous activities – what Australians do when they multitask.

In 1997 the survey found that whereas the average time spent on childcare as a main activity was about two hours per day, the average when simultaneous activities were taken into account was closer to seven hours per day. Among the simultaneous activities were preparing meals and washing clothes.

Now the bureau wants. . . .to exclude simultaneous activities.

This means we will no longer get a good read on the total amount of childcare and other domestic activities we are doing. Our surveys will also no longer be directly comparable to those of other countries.

Time-use expert Lyn Craig of the University of Melbourne says that without the contextual data the bureau proposes to leave out we won’t be able to capture the full dimensions of care work, including whether the breakdown by gender is changing.

Those who specialise in time-use research say the bureau’s current plan is destined to fail. There’s a good deal of women’s unpaid work it won’t capture.

In 1988 New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring wrote a famous book called Counting for Nothing about how women and the environment were invisible in policymaking.

If the bureau proceeds as planned, it will take us back toward those days.

Source: If the ABS guts Australia’s time use survey, women’s work will count for little

A new senate inquiry is hoping to break the silence and stigma around menopause

Senator Marielle Smith

The Senate Community Affairs References Committee will spend the next 9 months delving into the issues related to menopause and perimenopause.

More specifically, the Senate inquiry will consider:

  • The economic consequences of menopause and perimenopause, including workforce participation, productivity, and retirement planning;
  • Physical health impacts, including symptoms, associated medical conditions, and access to healthcare services;
  • The mental and emotional wellbeing of individuals experiencing menopause and perimenopause, considering issues like mental health, self-esteem, and social support;
  • The impacts on caregiving responsibilities, family dynamics, and relationships;
  • Cultural and societal factors influencing perceptions and attitudes towards menopause and perimenopause, including within culturally and linguistically diverse communities and women’s business in First Nations communities;
  • Levels of awareness amongst medical professionals and patients of symptoms and treatments, including affordability and availability;
  • The level of awareness amongst employers and workers of the symptoms, and the awareness, availability, and usage of workplace supports;
  • Existing Commonwealth, state and territory government policies, programs, and healthcare initiatives addressing menopause and perimenopause; and,
  • How other jurisdictions support individuals experiencing menopause and perimenopause from a health and workplace policy perspective.

Submissions to the Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry, Issues related to menopause and perimenopause, are sought by 16 February 2024.

Individuals and organisations are encouraged to share their opinions and proposals in writing by addressing responses to the inquiry’s terms of reference. Submissions can be uploaded at: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/Menopause

Source: A new senate inquiry is hoping to break the silence and stigma around menopause

Hopeful anthology about the gender war

Gender-based statistics are removed in several countries. Women are renamed womb carriers or pregnant people. Yvonne Hirdman, who launched the word “gender” in Sweden, reads a new anthology and reflects on what has happened to gender research.

The book I promised to review is called, Women’s Rights Gender Wrongs. The global impact of gender-identity ideology , and is an entry in this war.

It is an anthology (ed. Kath Aiken & Sally Wainwright) which is divided into two parts. The first consists of essays/reports from women around the world about the impact “gender-identity ideology” has had in each country – for example in terms of legal systems, social policy, education and health systems.

The second part contains short reports from 35 countries around the world on how the country in question lives up to the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, a declaration that requires CEDAW, the Women’s Convention, to be confirmed. 1

So what is the book about? The title trumpets its thesis: that women’s rights – as women – are threatened or have already been curtailed or sidelined by an ideology that does not recognize biological sex as a basis for rights, but replaces this with an experience, a sense of identity.

[S]o the core of this movement that leads away from woman/sex to gender according to the book’s author: to de-biologize motherhood, to be able to become a “generic” mother or father.

“Exploitation of reproduction is at the core of the post-queer agenda and appropriation of women’s reproductive capacity is at the core of patriarchy”.

Neither Beauvoir nor we (at least I) ever denied the existence of sex: the vagina, the breast, the X-chromosome. What we denied was that these biological characteristics created collective female characteristics. This attribution of stereotypical gender characteristics emanates directly from biological functions: if you have a vagina, you are predestined to scrub toilets – the kind of idiocy that has kept women under the tyranny of the cutting blankets. So simple.

Source: Parabol | Hoppfull antologi om genuskriget

Anglicare refused to assess Aboriginal baby’s aunt as carer because she was in same-sex relationship, court hears | Indigenous Australians | The Guardian

Anglicare refused to assess the Aboriginal aunt of an Aboriginal baby as a long-term carer because she was in a same-sex relationship and, with the knowledge of the New South Wales government, sought to have the baby adopted to a non-Indigenous couple, a court has heard.

The nine-month-old, who cannot be identified for legal reasons and is known to the court by the pseudonym Daisy, has complex needs. At four days old Daisy was discharged to the Anglicare adoption agency and placed with a non-Indigenous couple as “authorised pre-adoptive carers”, court documents show.

In October, the DCJ filed a care plan with the court, as required by law. In it, DCJ recommended the baby be adopted. It did not tell the court it was aware there were other family members who could be assessed and had applied to care for Daisy.

But the same day, a DCJ caseworker filed an affidavit in which she claimed Anglicare did not even assess the cousin and would not assess the aunt because she was in a same-sex relationship.

The magistrate said the act “requires that Daisy, because she cannot be restored to the care of a parent, should be placed with a relative, kin or other suitable person in accordance with a guardianship order”.

“[DCJ] was not able to explain why Anglicare was being paid to case manage … when seemingly not willing to make decisions in accordance with the Care Act,” Sheedy said.

Source: Anglicare refused to assess Aboriginal baby’s aunt as carer because she was in same-sex relationship, court hears | Indigenous Australians | The Guardian

Miriam Cates is right about surrogacy | Helen Gibson | The Critic Magazine

It is a fundamentally dishonest and exploitative practice

Much ado in Westminster this week, following the revelation by Miriam Cates MP, in a wide ranging interview in The House Magazine, that, like Pope Francis, she supports a ban on surrogacy.

“Anger as top Tory MP and mum of three Miriam Cates calls for surrogate baby ban”, screamed a Daily Mail headline. And yet, looking at the responses to Ms Cates’ mild assertion that “to deliberately bring a child into the world in order to separate it from its mother at birth … is just ethically not acceptable” I didn’t see much anger, more indifference, if anything.

Surrogacy is illegal in most countries in the world, in all forms. Commercial surrogacy, where a woman is paid for surrogacy and adverts can be placed for surrogate mothers, is banned in the UK in favour of a so-called “altruistic” model. Surrogacy is only legal in a handful of US states and countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Georgia and Ukraine. It’s certainly not a standard global practice to which everyone concurs with the view of it being “just another way to have a family”, whatever its champions may tell themselves.

Responding to Ms Cates in the Daily Mail, Chairman of the surrogacy agency Surrogacy UK, Alan White, said “surrogates don’t see themselves as mothers, they see themselves as extreme baby-sitters or looking after someone’s baby and doing that wonderful thing of doing the part of having children women or gay men can’t do for themselves.”

Only a man could call pregnancy and childbirth “extreme babysitting”.

[O]f course, a woman is not a microwave, or an oven. Without the mother, an embryo would remain just that. A woman’s uterus is not a neutral environment, one woman’s body is not interchangeable with another’s.

Epigenetics determines the development of the baby in utero; meaning the environment of the specific woman’s body can encourage or inhibit the development of certain characteristics that may emanate from the genes of the commissioning parents, but that her body ultimately decides whether or not to enable to develop. This reality makes the claim that a mother is just a “gestational carrier”, or “host” all the more galling.

Stop Surrogacy Now UK, a women’s rights group concerned with the growth of surrogacy at home and abroad. She said to me “we see all the time women reduced to nothing more than body parts, wombs for hire; we hear MPs talk about the need for ‘access to surrogacy’, without remembering there’s a living, human woman involved in this process; to say nothing of the impact of being handed away at birth on her child”.

Surrogacy might just be one of the biggest cons ever played against women. Convincing women that the child they grow from their own body and blood isn’t theirs, not theirs to bond with, not theirs to mourn; using their bodies for babies and milk, before leaving them behind without another thought, might just be the cruellest trick of the last fifty years.

Source: Miriam Cates is right about surrogacy | Helen Gibson | The Critic Magazine

NSW #ThisIsNotEquality Campaign CALL A MP/MLC Today

Alex Greenwich MP’s LGBTQI+ ‘Equality’ Bill is scheduled for Parliamentary debate on

THURSDAY 8 February 2024

Parliamentarians set to vote on the Bill

DO NOT UNDERSTAND ALL THE HARMS OF THIS BILL

WE NEED TO TELL MP’s OFFICES (again!)

woman holding a mobile phone in her left hand looking anxious

For list of MPs and what to say: https://mailchi.mp/womensrights.network/nsw-equality-bill-debated-nsw-parliament-8-feb-call-a-mp?e=e3c96effa8