The men who leave their spouses when they have a life-threatening illness | Women | The Guardian

When relationships are hit by serious illness, it can bring existing gender inequalities shockingly to the surface.

In a 2015 paper, researchers tracked 2,701 marriages using a study on health and retirement and watched what happened when someone became unwell during a marriage: only 6% of cases ended in divorce.

But that same study showed that when partners leave, it’s normally men. One study from 2009 found the strongest predictor for separation or divorce for patients with brain cancer was whether or not the sick person was a woman. That same study showed that men were seven times more likely to leave their partner than the other way around if one of them got brain cancer.

Gendered expectations about household work ought to have changed in the last few decades. Women have almost equal representation in the workplace and in 41% of US homes, women are the breadwinners. More men than ever are stay-at-home fathers. And yet, when a woman falls ill, it can really reveal the extent to which men not only feel entitled to a certain level of housework, but also have no concept of how to be an efficient and appropriate caregiver.

Source: The men who leave their spouses when they have a life-threatening illness | Women | The Guardian

Also : http://www.oprah.com/relationships/why-men-leave-sick-wives-facing-illness-alone-couples-and-cancer/all#ixzz6diiZ4V50

 

 

Ashton Challenor, the boy who disappeared – The Glinner Update

Aimee (nee Ashton) Challenor is a 23-year-old trans-identified male who, until recently, had a prominent role in UK politics and within Stonewall, a major LGBT lobbying group.

His political career has been covered elsewhere, but we feel it’s time to shine a light on some of the murkier aspects of this story. There is a certain urgency now that he and his associates are moderators of dozens of groups on Reddit, including some intended for young people.

Ashton / Aimee Challenor grew up in a house where his father raped and tortured a 10-year-old girl whilst wearing a frilly dress and a nappy and calling himself Lucy.

From a very young age, Aimee had intimate relationships with at least three much older males, two of whom claim female identities, all of whom are part of the furry/ furbaby/adult baby/nappy-lovers fetish scenes, all of whom seem to have a deeply troubling interest in pre-pubescence and one of whom, Aimee’s husband, has openly expressed his sexual fantasies involving children.

Whilst we might recognise that Aimee Challenor is a tragic victim in this mess, we must remember the positions of power and influence he held and how quickly and easily he reached them.

He was the Green Party’s LGBTQI and Equalities officer, stood for parliament and in local elections was even in the running to be the party’s deputy leader.

He campaigned vociferously for the Green Party to adopt the policy of self-identification, crushing any dissenting voices.

In 2017 Aimee and his father took out a private court injunction against another member of the Green Party, Andy Healey, to prevent him from speaking at the Green Party conference against the policy of self-ID.

Aimee then tried to bring a criminal prosecution against Healey for ‘hate speech’ (mainly ‘misgendering’ ie correctly referring to Aimee as male) which the police eventually rejected. Aimee attacked the police and the CPS for failing to act and was even given an opportunity to complain to a parliamentary committee.

Andy Healey is still waiting for his suspension from the Greens to be lifted and has no received no apology from those who called him a bigot for raising concerns. Amelia Womack, the deputy leader, Claire Phipps and Rachel Collinson should be doing a lot of soul-searching right now.

Not only did Challenor hold tremendous sway in a major political party, he often appeared in the press and was given a regular media platform. Furthermore, even after the revelations about his father and husband-to-be, Challenor was on the Stonewall trans advisory board until as late as July 2019. He was advising the charity which provides training for schools, public bodies and innumerable businesses.

While women like Helen Watts were losing their positions for raising concerns about Stonewall’s advice, this young and deeply troubled boy, ushered into positions of power and influence with his paedophile father close at heel and his furry, diapered, much-older boyfriends lurking in the background, fought ferociously for the rights of males to identify however they want and smash basic safeguarding principles.

Did nobody ever stop to wonder why?

Source: Ashton Challenor, the boy who disappeared – The Glinner Update

Custom Vaginoplasty “For Your Inner Well-Being” – Jennifer Bilek

 

Most people in mainstream culture, not privy to the internal workings of the trans agenda, have no real understanding of what is transpiring in the medical community advancing macabre and dangerous procedures they term “healthcare for transgender people,” or where all this “care” is leading.

When medical professionals will invert a scrotum to create a man-made vagina, while leaving you with your penis intact for the purposes of your “inner well-being,” will cut off your genitalia completely, to help you express yourself, a young man celebrates his castration with a party and a penis cake and is featured on the cover of a major pop culture magazine, and young women who’ve had their breasts removed because they believe they are men are used in corporate marketing as expressions of self-empowerment, something is very, very wrong.

The medical industrial complex itself, wedded to every inch of the capitalist marketplace are the key drivers of this madness. This should not come as a surprise. Big Pharma has driven so much madness through society from psychosis itself, along with its cure, to drug addiction, depression and childhood psychiatric conditions, all in the name of profits. It is now doing so with identity medicine, their profits carved from the flesh of our human sex.

That people are still attempting to justify this as progressive, speaks to how deeply sick western societies have become. “Transgenderism” may be the last symptom and siren being ignored by people so far removed from their land, each other and biological reality by industrial civilization, that they can no longer feel.

Source: Custom Vaginoplasty “For Your Inner Well-Being”

Policing family violence in NSW | The Saturday Paper

As the NSW parliament debates amendments to family violence legislation, new research shows that some victim-survivors are being charged as offenders instead, while children are not being protected.

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research reported an increase in the proportion of women being identified as domestic violence offenders from 10 per cent of offenders in 2001 to 18 per cent of offenders in 2012.

Last year, 22 per cent of people against whom there were proceedings for domestic assault in NSW were women.

Women who fight back in a single incident often do so in self-defence and they will admit to doing it. In these instances, they are often charged where their male partner is not.

Under the NSW Crimes Act, police are the only authority that can make the application for children to be listed on a violence order as a protected person. In doing so, they have the power within the Family Law Act to “override, suspend or vary an existing parenting order”.

However, police appear anxious not to contradict Family Court rulings or to deal with their complexity. The report says that “reluctance to do so can be correlated with cultural factors and inherent beliefs surrounding a father’s right to their children”.

Source: Policing family violence in NSW | The Saturday Paper

Misogyny in the family courts – VictimFocus Blog – Dr Jessica Taylor

Everyone who works with women who have been subjected to domestic abuse, or children who have been subjected to sexual abuse, will know how volatile, unpredictable and misogynistic our family court system can be.

Each year, thousands of women write to me about their terrifying experiences of the family court system. Despite every woman being an individual, and residing everywhere from Essex to Sydney, the story is the same.

Women who report abuse are quickly reframed as crazy, jealous exes

None of them want to be with their ex, but it’s amazing how credible male ex boyfriends and husbands seem to be, when they accuse the woman of being ‘jealous’ that he’s moved on. Mud sticks, and professionals around her soon begin to make comments or write reports which include these inaccurate assumptions.

No one seems to be taking young girls seriously when they disclose sexual abuse

So why are these signs and disclosures from girls being ignored in the family courts? Why are professionals suggesting that girls are making this up, or don’t know what they are talking about? Why are we so sure that she isn’t being abused, that we will continue contact with sexually abusive parents and ignore her disclosures?

Character assassination is par for the course; and no one seems to care

Reports and hearings often become obsessed with the character assassination of the mother – and become less and less focussed on the well-being and disclosures of the children.

There’s a lot of dodgy psychiatry and psychology going on, with no real process to challenge poor practice

It concerns me how many women are diagnosed or labelled with disorders and psychiatric conditions after meeting a psychologist for 2 hours during an assessment. I have read several reports in which women have been labelled, accused and diagnosed after one short interview, whilst they were under severe stress and worrying about their child being abused.

Parental alienation seems to be the trump card for abusive men

It is clear that real parental alienation does happen in some cases – but choosing to stop contact when a child spontaneously discloses serious sexual abuse is surely common sense, and not an act of parental alienation.

One woman I spoke to was threatened by a judge that if she didn’t support contact with her ex husband, (who had convictions for DV and the child was reporting had sexually abused her), that he would award full custody to Dad as a way to punish/control her.

Evidence is not being gathered correctly or quickly enough when children are at risk from abuse

We already know that on average, children disclose 7 times before someone takes it seriously (according to an NSPCC, 2014 study).

[S]ome children who disclose recent rape or sexual abuse have not been referred for tests or examination for several weeks, sometimes as long as two months, by which time all DNA evidence would be gone, and some injuries would arguably have healed.

I have also come across poor practice in which children have disclosed serious sexual abuse, and the way we have dealt with it is to send uniformed officers into their houses, or taken children to police station evidence suites where the child has instantly stopped talking and has refused to speak about anything.

Decades of research evidence is being totally ignored

Research clearly gives us lists of things to look out for in children who might be being sexually abused, and despite many of these signs being present in these cases, children are being ignored.

Research on offenders seems to be being ignored too. Men with previous convictions for sexual abuse or accessing child sexual abuse imagery have been given unsupervised access to children because professionals have argued that his own children are not at risk.

Final thoughts

Women need to know that their case was not a one-off. They need to know that they are not to blame, and that they are one of thousands of women who have been labelled and gaslit in the family court system. So many women contact me to talk about their cases and experiences, and they have no idea that this happens to other women, too.

Source: Misogyny in the family courts – VictimFocus Blog

A bill decriminalising abortion in South Australia is now before state parliament

A bill to reform South Australia’s abortion laws has gone before parliament which seeks to treat it solely as a health issue and not a criminal one.

Attorney-General Vickie Chapman says the legislation involves a new, highly regulated, medical model that will govern the termination of pregnancies.

“Our proposal removes abortion entirely from the criminal law, a move that would bring us in line with all other Australian states and territories,” Ms Chapman said on Wednesday.

The bill will be subject to a conscience vote of MPs in both the upper house and in the House of Assembly.

Source: A bill decriminalising abortion in South Australia is now before state parliament

B.C. Supreme Court judge orders surgeon to deny trans teen’s mastectomy wish | Vancouver Sun

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has stopped a transgender teen’s double mastectomy days before it was to go ahead, granting the teen’s mother a court order delaying the surgery for almost a month.

“The mother needs to see all of the protocols that led to the two doctors coming to the conclusion that what they intended to do is in the best interest of the child,” said M.A.’s lawyer, Carey Linde.

“She says removing the breasts of her daughter are not in the best interest of her,” said Linde. He said A.M. is also opposed to the teen receiving steroids because they would make her sterile.

“She needs psychotherapy,” A.M. said. “I would like her to be referred to a non-biased psychiatrist.”

A.M. said she would like the doctors to provide her with details about what counselling her child received leading up to the decision to have the surgery.

Source: B.C. Supreme Court judge orders surgeon to deny trans teen’s mastectomy wish | Vancouver Sun

Christian Porter and Alan Tudge: Their family values.

Whilst Attorney-General Christian Porter and Urban Infrastructure Minister Alan Tudge have both spent their careers publicly espousing family values, their alleged behaviour in the corridors of Canberra suggest otherwise.

As former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told journalist Louise Milligan, “Some of the most trenchant opponents of same-sex marriage, all in the name of traditional marriage, were at the same time enthusiastic practitioners of traditional adultery.”

Their actions are profoundly hypocritical.

Barrister Kathleen Foley knew Porter from the age of 16, when he coached her in debating at the University of Western Australia, She later worked as a WA state solicitor when Mr Porter was a WA Crown prosecutor.

“For all of that time I’ve known him to be someone who was, in my opinion, based on what I saw, deeply sexist and actually misogynist in his treatment of women, in the way he spoke about women,”  Foley said on Four Corners.

“I remember him commenting that he would never date a woman who weighed over 50 kilograms,” she said.

“That stood out to me. I also remember a relationship of his that ended and he commented that the woman involved was thin enough, but she didn’t have big enough tits, and the next woman that he was going to date needed to be as thin, but have bigger tits.”

Source: Christian Porter and Alan Tudge: Their family values.

‘Insulting to her’: Mary Wollstonecraft sculpture sparks backlash | Mary Wollstonecraft | The Guardian

It took 200 years to get a statue honouring the life of pioneering philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, but its creators have faced criticism from almost the moment it was unveiled.

The new sculpture was met with dismay and bafflement by some when it was unveiled in north London on Tuesday, with critics asking why it did not directly depict Wollstonecraft and why the “mother of feminism” had been celebrated with a naked female form.

The writer Caitlin Moran tweeted: “Imagine if there was a statue of a hot young naked guy ‘in tribute’ to eg Churchill. It would look mad. This, also, looks mad.”

Source: ‘Insulting to her’: Mary Wollstonecraft sculpture sparks backlash | Mary Wollstonecraft | The Guardian

Towards a New Understanding of Caring – The Radical Notion

I started the organization All Mothers Work in 2014, not only as a reaction to conventional socio-cultural notions of motherhood and labour (the name comes from a cry of frustration over the term “working mothers,” as though mothers who do not work for pay are not also performing labour), but also to challenge a lot of existing feminist thought on the topic. I was overwhelmed by the reception I got for my work; endless numbers of women found themselves so dissatisfied with both radical and liberal analyses of motherhood that some even refused to call themselves feminists because they felt so looked down upon, underrepresented and misrepresented. Like me, they found it to be a fulfilling, vital undertaking that was as hard and as valid as any paid work, and yet this was incompatible with what both patriarchal society and feminism were telling us we should be doing and experiencing. . . .

As a result of the influence of Firestone’s work, feminist analysis of motherhood too often reads as though there are only two choices: rejection of motherhood or collusion with patriarchy. It is futile, self-defeating and in my opinion inhumane to approach reproduction and motherhood as things with no value or worth, to treat women as though none of them really want to be mothers and as though they long to be freed from what must be viewed as the burden of motherhood, while seeing children as little more than parasites who don’t require a primary caregiver (which goes against everything we know about child development and how nurturing works) and who should be made to live away from adults as soon as possible. To me, this is seeing reproduction and motherhood in a patriarchal way. It denigrates motherhood, rejects caring activities, and reveals a lack of interest in what women actually want and what children actually need. . . .

I believe that the way forward is to embrace nurturing and caring more – using our own model. When we look objectively at the labour that can only be carried out by women, and also that which is seen as “women’s work,” we see that women’s labour is productive, life-creating, life-maintaining, life-facilitating, co-operative and egalitarian. Labour deemed male, by contrast, is all too often appropriating, parasitic, exploitative and hierarchical. It relies on women’s labour being performed invisibly and for free, which men obtain and maintain by normalizing and justifying their labour values as superior and natural, through the use of gender. We need to shift the whole of society over to those matriarchal values. That means stripping the concepts of nurture, care and the maternal of the meanings given to them by patriarchy, and creating and living our own.

If women were even paid a minimum wage for the labour extracted from them for free, women would be the leading global economic superpower, before any paid labour done by them was counted in. This is not nothing. This is absolutely huge. And yet patriarchal tropes about the work women do, paid and unpaid, still flourish.

Source: Towards a New Understanding of Caring – The Radical Notion