Eggs and water balloons thrown as protesters face off at Women Will Speak rally in Melbourne | Women | The Guardian

About 20 people initially attended the planned #WomenWILLSpeak rally that commenced at about 11am, Victoria police said in a statement.

They were outnumbered by 150 protesters from another group, who were “throwing eggs and water balloons at the speakers involved,” the statement said.

A 36-year-old Brunswick woman was arrested at the scene for allegedly assaulting police and was released pending further inquiries, police said.

A live stream of the rally posted on YouTube by Women’s Action Group showed a barricade of police officers in yellow vests separating the #WomenWILLSpeak event from a large crowd gathered with signs.

In the same live stream, some of the protesters in the Women Action’s Group camp can be seen holding signs reading “trans women are men”, “inquiry into gender medicine now” and “no male cheats in women’s sports”.

On Wednesday, a Facebook page titled Trans Queer Solidarity posted about the rally, saying: “We need to out-number them and limit their recruitment like we have before.”

Source: Eggs and water balloons thrown as protesters face off at Women Will Speak rally in Melbourne | Women | The Guardian

The report on murdered and missing Indigenous women and children fails to hold anyone to account. It’s not enough.

After two years and 16 hearings, the Senate Inquiry into Missing and Murdered First Nations women handed down its report yesterday. While important, it was not the moment of reckoning many of us had hoped for.

The Senate inquiry was introduced and spearheaded by Dorinda Cox, the West Australian Greens Senator, who today called the report’s recommendations “weak” and “toothless”.

What the inquiry found is precisely what First Nations women have been saying for decades: that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children are disproportionately impacted by men’s use of violence.

That their stories and lives are ignored by mainstream media.

That police often fail to adequately investigate, search for, or respond to calls for help from First Nations women and children.

And that the data is shockingly incomplete and inadequate. No one is accurately keeping count.

First Nations women represented 16% of all Australian women homicide victims, despite comprising between 2–3% of the adult female population.

First Nations children represented 13% of all child homicide victims.

Not only are First Nations women and children more likely to go missing, they are less likely to be found.

First Nations women are also disproportionately misidentified as the perpetrator, instead of the victim, criminalising First Nations women and creating yet another barrier to getting help.

Source: The report on murdered and missing Indigenous women and children fails to hold anyone to account. It’s not enough.

WDI USA Files Its First Amicus Brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Little, et al. v. Hecox, et al. | WDI USA

On August 14, 2024, the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International filed its first-ever amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is Little, et al. v. Hecox, et al. In this case, the state of Idaho enacted a law protecting female-only sports and a man named Lindsay Hecox (represented by the ACLU) filed a legal challenge, claiming that the law violates his rights under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment (Bradley Little is the Governor of Idaho who signed the law). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ultimately ruled in favor of Hecox and the state asked the Supreme Court to review the matter. Our brief urges the Court to take the case and explains that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling is in direct conflict with Articles VII and VIII of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. Former WDI USA president Kara Dansky is counsel on the brief.

Source: WDI USA Files Its First Amicus Brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Little, et al. v. Hecox, et al. | WDI USA

Report: thousands of US girls underwent trans ‘top surgeries’ – UnHerd

A report from the Manhattan Institute this week revealed that “gender-affirming” mastectomies for patients under 18 are more common than previously believed.

While cross-sex genital surgeries are rare in the US for both adults and minors, mastectomies — also known as “top surgery” in the context of transgender medicine — are widely available to minors and are the most common transgender surgery for this population. Around 5,000 to 6,000 girls underwent “gender affirming” double mastectomies in the US from 2017 to 2023, according to the Manhattan Institute, and at least 50 of those patients were younger than 12-and-a-half years old.

The actual prevalence of these surgeries is likely considerably higher than the latest estimate, since it relies on health insurance data and therefore does not include procedures obtained without using insurance.

Proponents of cross-sex medical interventions downplay the prevalence of these surgeries. The Human Rights Campaign declared last April that “gender affirming surgeries are NOT performed on children”, and the Association of American Medical Colleges wrote, “GAC surgery among youth is rare, experts say.” Marci Bowers, plastic surgeon and president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leasing standard-setting organisation for transgender medical treatments, has made a similar argument. “Surgery really is not done under the age of 18, except in severe cases . . . And even that is rare, I think the estimates are something like 57 surgeries under the age of 18,” Bowers said in 2023.

But their insistence that surgeries for children are rare should not be confused with repudiation of such surgeries. On the contrary, activists strongly oppose restrictions on trans surgeries for kids.

Source: Report: thousands of US girls underwent trans ‘top surgeries’ – UnHerd

Violence against women isn’t the only national emergency – we must also tackle the misogyny that’s causing it

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has declared violence against women a national emergency in England and Wales.

Missing from the conversation is what’s behind the emergency: the misogyny and male violence that underpins these stark figures.

For those of us who research violence against women and girls and support survivors, the “national emergency” declaration is a long overdue acknowledgement – it has been an emergency for some time. Data collected by the Femicide Census shows that on average, a man has killed a woman nearly every three days in the UK since 2010.

Last year, police chiefs placed offences against women and girls on the same level as terrorism and serious organised crime. The decision to now declare it a national emergency is perhaps an acknowledgement that the situation has not improved.

But still missing from the conversation is what’s behind the emergency: the misogyny and male violence that underpins these stark figures.

This violence is not just passively happening to women and girls. They are being subjected to violence predominantly at the hands of men. The majority (77%) of domestic homicide victims (killed by a current or former partner or a family member) from 2017-2019 were female, and 96% of the suspects in those homicides were male.

The national emergency is really men’s violence against women.

Men are also overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violence against other men. There are deep questions that must be answered to do with men, masculinity and violence.

A 2023 Women’s Aid report found a clear link between exposure to misogynistic views on social media, and having harmful perceptions of relationships.

Source: Violence against women isn’t the only national emergency – we must also tackle the misogyny that’s causing it

The letter that helped expose the North Shore Rapist

One of the women who survived the North Shore Rapist helped unmask her own attacker, penning a powerful letter that argued “the community should have the right to protect themselves” in a way she could not have protected herself.

The NSW Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a 2020 ruling that had suppressed Graham James Kay’s name and allowed him to distance himself from his attacks on eight women and girls in the late 1990s.

Kay’s attacks have continued since his release from prison without substantial punishment, and he has since been released back into the community, prompting The Sydney Morning Herald to challenge the suppression order.

Among the pages of evidence provided to the court was a short but powerful letter written by one of the women Kay stalked and assaulted more than 20 years ago.

The woman feared Kay had continued to exhibit “predatory behaviours” since his release from prison, two decades after he attacked her and seven other women and girls.

“The community should be given the opportunity to protect themselves, and they can only do this if they know his identity,” Kay’s victim urged the court in July.

Kay had also been treated softly by the courts before his string of attacks in the 1990s.

He had followed and groped women, spied on other women inside their homes, and been a domestic violence abuser. But despite being brought before the courts five times, he was only punished with good behaviour bonds.

Kay served 18 years in jail for the attacks before being paroled in 2015, but his offending continued.

In 2018, the serial rapist planted a “slobbery kiss” on the cheek of a 16-year-old girl working in a grocery store after the government allowed him to walk around without an electronic ankle monitor.

It was only because of media publicity that the girl knew her assailant was the infamous North Shore Rapist and reported the unwanted kiss to the police, the court found on Tuesday.

Kay was given a good behaviour bond but spent more time in prison because he had a sex worker at his home, in breach of his release conditions.

Despite that, Kay’s restrictions were relaxed again in 2020, and two years later, he stalked and indecently assaulted a terrified woman in Sydney’s CBD.

By then his name was suppressed and crucial details hidden from the public – until the Herald’s legal win this week.

Herald editor Bevan Shields said challenging the suppression of Kay’s name was an “important fight”, but the masthead was spending an increasing amount of time and money challenging similar orders in the courts.

[Ed: This matter needs to be referred to the Judicial Commission. It is an extraordinary demonstration of how the judiciary is failing women in their efforts to protect perpetrators. Thank goodness for Justice Sarah McNaughton now making the correct decision.]

Source: 12ft

A Consensus No Longer | City Journal

The main justification for “gender-affirming care” for minors in the United States has been that “all major U.S. medical associations” support it. Critics of this supposed consensus have argued that it is not grounded in high-quality research or decades of honest and robust deliberation among clinicians with different viewpoints and experiences. Instead, it is the result of a small number of ideologically driven doctor-association members in LGBT-focused committees, who exploit their colleagues’ trust. Physicians presenting different viewpoints are silenced or kept away from decision-making circles, ensuring the appearance of unanimity.

Perhaps because it has never really depended on evidence, this doctor-group consensus has shown remarkable resilience in the face of major system shocks, including several whistleblowers, revelations from court documents that WPATH manipulated scientific evidence reviews, the Cass Review, a bipartisan commitment in the U.K. to roll back pediatric medical transition, and a growing international call for a developmentally informed approach that prioritizes psychotherapy over hormones and surgeries.

But the U.S. consensus now appears to have its first big fracture. In July, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, a major medical association representing 11,000 members and over 90 percent of the field in the U.S. and Canada, told me that it “has not endorsed any organization’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria.” ASPS acknowledged that there is “considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions” and that “the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty.”

Malpractice premiums in this area are already rising, and some insurers outright exclude under-18 gender-transition procedures from their coverage policies.

A key question for these lawsuits is the degree to which surgeons are responsible for determining the medical necessity of the procedures that they are asked to perform.

Nazarian, the Beverly Hills surgeon, told me that surgeons in her professional network who perform gender surgeries typically defer to mental-health professionals and endocrinologists to determine for them whether minors should receive procedures like double mastectomy. That approach, she believes, is misguided, and reduces surgeons to mechanics.

Source: A Consensus No Longer | City Journal

Dozens of children under the age of 10 – and some as young as five – referred to Scotland’s controversial gender clinic | Daily Mail Online

Dozens of children aged under 10 have been referred to Scotland’s controversial NHS gender clinic, the Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Two youngsters were under five-years-old when they were referred to the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow.

In total, 53 children under 10-year-old have been referred to the Sandyford – the only facility for ‘gender identity’ treatment for Scottish children.

Campaigners say they should never have been put forward by doctors or parents for gender assessment at such a young age.

The shock figures – obtained under Freedom of Information by the Scottish Mail on Sunday – sparked concern among campaign groups.

They also come as a potential ban on referrals of under-7s to gender services in England is being considered.

Research led by Dr Andreas Kyriakou, of the department of paediatric endocrinology at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow, also found a ‘disproportionate’ number of those attending the clinic had autistic traits, and that a third of patients had a diagnosis of a mental health disorder.

Source: Dozens of children under the age of 10 – and some as young as five – referred to Scotland’s controversial gender clinic | Daily Mail Online