Natasha Stott Despoja elected to UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women – ABC News

Former South Australia senator Natasha Stott Despoja will be the first Australian on the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women for almost three decades.

Ms Stott Despoja will be on the committee for four years and will be the only representative from Oceania.

Source: Natasha Stott Despoja elected to UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women – ABC News

Transgender reform debate heats up Tasmanian Liberal conference – ABC News

[T]asmania’s Liberal Party faithful determined the state’s landmark transgender reforms, which passed State Parliament with the support of Liberal Speaker Sue Hickey last year, should be repealed.

A motion to repeal the changes, which make gender optional on birth certificates and remove a requirement for transgender people to have sex reassignment surgery before they can legally change their gender, was moved at the party’s annual State Council meeting at Bellerive on Saturday.

Source: Transgender reform debate heats up Tasmanian Liberal conference – ABC News

Of all people, female prisoners deserve single-sex spaces | UK| The Article

A female prisoner is bringing a Judicial Review against the Government after she was sexually assaulted by a transgender, male convicted rapist who was placed in a women’s prison. The victim is challenging the lawfulness of placing male-bodied transgender prisoners convicted of sexual and violent offences against women in the female estate. The High Court case was due to begin last week but has just been adjourned till later this year.

Make no mistake; the public sector is suffering from ideological capture in the shape of “gender identity ideology”; and that capture is undermining science, data and research, and women’s rights. To illustrate this we need to look no further than the Minstry of Justice’s revised policy document that covers the care and management of transgender individuals within the prisons estate.

Alarm bells go off straight away when we read that the policy refers to individuals who express a wish to live as a gender “opposite to the biological sex assigned to them at birth”. This is scientifically illiterate. Everyone knows that sex is not assigned at birth. But the language is familiar — you will find it wherever institutions have succumbed to gender ideology.

The Ministry of Justice has unilaterally brought in sex Self-ID, a policy now explicitly rejected by the Government. It says that, “Individuals managed by HMPPS are able to self-declare that they are transgender and are supported to express the gender (or non-gender) with which they identify, with staff using correct pronouns”. This appears to mean that a violent rapist can declare that he is female, and from then on female staff will be required to refer to him as she.

Source: Of all people, female prisoners deserve single-sex spaces | TheArticle

Brazen Hussies review – reclaiming the history of Australia’s women’s liberation movement | Australian film | The Guardian

Brazen Hussies adds depth and breadth to the second-wave stories of our popular imagination: consciousness-raising circles in the suburbs, femocrats seizing power in government, Germaine Greer urging a female orgasm-led revolution. The film’s focus is the movement’s key campaigns. While their brothers and lovers were dying in Vietnam, early women’s liberationists organised against women perishing in backyard abortions. Covering domestic violence, equal pay and childcare battles, it also reminds us change can be glacial.

Source: Brazen Hussies review – reclaiming the history of Australia’s women’s liberation movement | Australian film | The Guardian

I Signed Up to Study Sexual Health. What I Got Was Gender Ideology, Fetishism, and Porn – Quillette

I am not a conspiracy theorist. And as recently as a year and a half ago, if someone had told me the things I am reporting here, I would have accused them of culture-war paranoia. That was before I enrolled in a professional training program that I’d hoped would expand my skills as a therapist, but instead delivered an extreme form of ideological indoctrination.

The Sexual Health Certificate Program is a prestigious University of Michigan program conducted in affiliation with the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT). As someone who recently studied in the program, I can attest that, notwithstanding whatever mission AASECT once had, it now operates largely as a de facto activist group that seeks to reshape standards applied to mental health care and education, and to limit the rights of parents to make decisions about their children.

I am not an extreme social conservative complaining about the failure of these organizations to support “abstinence only” sex education. Nor do I object to teaching kids that it’s okay to be gay or bisexual. The agenda of AASECT now extends far beyond those old debates, and into an overlapping set of doctrines that encompass gender, violent BDSM subcultures, polyamory, pornography, and intersectionality. My opinion is that it is no longer focused on teaching scientifically verified knowledge or responsible clinical practices, and now seeks to instead impose an orthodox set of beliefs about sexuality. . .

Our first classroom module was titled “Sexual Attitude Reassessment.” I amused myself with the thought that this sounded like an unsettling euphemism for a brainwashing session. Sadly, that’s what it was. . . .

Source: I Signed Up to Study Sexual Health. What I Got Was Gender Ideology, Fetishism, and Porn – Quillette

The sole function of the clitoris is female orgasm. Is that why it’s ignored by medical science? | Women | The Guardian

Medical textbooks are full of anatomical pictures of the penis, but the clitoris barely rates a mention. Many medical professionals are uncomfortable even talking about it.

The first comprehensive anatomical study of the clitoris was led by O’Connell and published in 1998. A subsequent study in 2005 examined it under MRI. It was not, O’Connell discovered, just a small nub of erectile tissue, described in some texts as the “poor homologue” of the penis. Instead it was an otherworldly shape, with the nerve-rich glans merely the external protrusion of an organ that extended beneath the pubic bone and wrapped around the vaginal opening, with bulbs that become engorged when aroused. It looked like an orchid. It was beautiful.

In 2016, O’Connell co-authored a paper that found, based on a series of macroscopic anatomical dissections, that there was no evidence of erectile tissue in the vaginal wall – in other words, that the G-spot did not exist. (O’Connell has stressed there was more work to be done on the subject, including mapping the urethra.) To date, the only known erectile tissue in the area is the clitoris, leading to the working theory that the G-spot is just the engorged bulbs of an aroused clitoris felt through the vaginal wall.

Source: The sole function of the clitoris is female orgasm. Is that why it’s ignored by medical science? | Women | The Guardian

Jack Turban’s Dangerous Campaign to Smear Ethical Psychotherapy as Anti-Trans ‘Conversion Therapy’ – Quillette

Readers who wish to read the full text of the authors’ original letter, including the complete list of sources, are invited to consult the Archives of Sexual Behavior web site.

Turban and his co-authors (whom we will describe simply as “the authors”) set out to examine the effects of what they describe as “gender identity conversion” on the mental health of transgender-identifying individuals. In examining data from the 2015 US Transgender Survey (USTS), they found that survey participants who responded affirmatively to a specific yes/no question—“Did any professional (such as a psychologist, counselor, religious advisor) try to make you identify only with your sex assigned at birth (in other words, try to stop you being trans)?”—reported poorer mental health than those who responded negatively. From this, the authors conclude that what they call “gender identity conversion efforts” (“GICE”) are detrimental to mental health, and so should be avoided in children, adolescents, and adults. These conclusions were widely publicized by mass-media outlets, including as a means to advocate for legislative bans on “GICE,” a policy step that the study authors have explicitly endorsed.

We agree with Turban’s position that therapies using coercive tactics to force a change in gender identity have no place in healthcare. However, we take issue with the authors’ problematic analysis and flawed conclusions, which they use to justify the misguided notion that any practice that deviates from reflexively “affirmative” psychotherapy for gender dysphoria (GD) is harmful and should be banned. Their analysis is compromised by serious methodological flaws, including the use of a biased data sample, reliance on poorly constructed survey questions, and the omission of any control variable that tracks subjects’ baseline mental-health status.

Given the risky and irreversible nature of “gender-affirming” treatments, it is concerning that for many years now, there has been a lack of systematic research into the role that developmentally-informed psychotherapy can play in the amelioration of GD, especially among young people. The need for the continued development and evaluation of non-invasive psychological treatment alternatives for GD has never been more urgent, given the fact that over three percent of young people now report transgender identification or ideation. In the face of this phenomenon, it is time to raise the bar on science—or at least enforce the bar that already exists—and to heed the first and most fundamental tenet of medicine: “First, do no harm.”

Source: Jack Turban’s Dangerous Campaign to Smear Ethical Psychotherapy as Anti-Trans ‘Conversion Therapy’ – Quillette