Aborting baby girls proves Britain’s multiculturalism experiment has failed | The Telegraph

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

It is rarely spoken about, but has come to light of late after the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which provides abortions to more than 100,000 women across the UK annually, was criticised for suggesting that termination on the grounds of “foetal sex” was not illegal.

The Government’s own figures indicate the scale of the problem. There was a “statistically significant imbalance” in the ratio of boy to girl births between 2017 and 2021 for children of Indian ethnicity, particularly so in instances of the birth of a family’s third child, analysis by the DHSC has found. This is when the pressure is really on women in such circumstances to produce a son.

“This may indicate that sex-selective abortions are taking place,” the report concluded. “If so, it is estimated that approximately 400 sex-selective abortions may have taken place to female foetuses over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021.”

This is truly a global issue, but to know that it is happening in modern Britain appals me. How are we allowing this to take place?

As ever, it seems to boil down to everyone being “culturally sensitive”, an approach that too often involves sacrificing basic protections for women and girls. We saw that with the grooming gangs scandal and we saw it when the British Medical Journal Group published an article this month defending female genital mutilation.

We should be prepared to confront the issue. Whose values are we protecting otherwise? The answer, of course, is the values of cultures that think girls are so worthless that they should not even be born.

Source: Aborting baby girls proves Britain’s multiculturalism experiment has failed

FRANCE: Women’s Rights Activist On Trial Over Criminal “Transphobia” After Stating That Women Must Be Wary Of “People With Penises” | Genevieve Gluck

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A women’s rights activist in France is on trial after being accused of promoting violence against transgender people for stating that women needed to be wary of “people with penises.” Dora Moutot, an author and campaigner, faces possible criminal penalties, with prosecutors arguing that her views contribute to a harmful social climate linked to “trans youth” suicides.

Source: FRANCE: Women’s Rights Activist On Trial Over Criminal “Transphobia” After Stating That Women Must Be Wary Of “People With Penises”

Doctor silenced for posts on gender | The Australian

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A prominent Australian psychiatrist who has warned of the risks of gender-affirming medical treatment for children and teenagers has been banned from posting his objections on social media and had restrictions put on his practice by the health regulator.

Queensland psychiatrist Andrew Amos has been ordered by the Medical Board of Australia and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency to stop making online statements about gender issues and is barred from having direct clinical contact with any patients.

Dr Amos’s supporters say the move is a warning to medical ­professionals who might consider speaking out publicly against gender-affirming treatment for minors, and that it represents a gross overreach by regulators in response to complaints by trans activists.

Dr Amos is an academic psychiatrist at James Cook University and chair of the Queensland Section of Rural Psychiatry with the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists but has been at odds with the RANZCP over gender medicine, arguing that the gender-affirming model of care is incompatible with evidence-based practice.

Under the restrictions, Dr Amos must provide AHPRA with details of all his social media profiles to show he has not posted any comments “in relation to gender medicine, gender identity and/or expression and trans­gender persons”. Also, he cannot practise except at an “approved” location and is barred from “any role requiring direct or indirect clinical patient contact”. The condition does not affect him while he is working as an academic but would be severely limiting if he returned to clinical practice.

It is understood the conditions were imposed in response to four complaints, the first following controversy over the case of transwoman Jennifer Buckley, who had transitioned from male to female and used a combination of hormones and drugs to bring on lactation to breastfeed her son.

In September 2024, Dr Amos said in a post on X that men who induced lactation were the embodiment of narcissism but did not refer directly to Ms Buckley.

Last year, the Medical Board received two anonymous complaints over an ABC online article which quoted Dr Amos criticising gender-affirming medical treatment and cited posts he had made on X that “there is no reliable evidence that trans identification can be differentiated from psychosis” and that “doctors who affirm gender delusions are liable for patient harms”.

A final complaint in September last year related to an exchange on X between Dr Amos and Stephen Whittle, a transman in the UK, in which Dr Amos suggested Professor Whittle was a woman pretending to be a man.

Dr Amos declined to comment about the case. AHPRA declined to answer questions about why conditions had been imposed on Dr Amos but issued a statement saying: “AHPRA and the National Boards expect healthcare to be delivered free from discrimination … We respect practitioners’ freedom of expression, including advocacy via social media, provided it does not involve abuse, discrimination, or pose a risk to public safety.”

Source: Doctor silenced for posts on gender

BBC faces legal wrangle over ‘dangerous’ coverage of transgender issues

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A parents’ group representing more than 650 families is threatening legal action over what it claims is “dangerous” BBC coverage of transgender issues that could put vulnerable children at risk of copycat suicide.

The Bayswater Support Group has sent a formal pre-action letter warning that unless action is taken within 14 days, they will take the case to the High Court.

The parents argue linking gender questioning to suicide risk – particularly in mainstream political and current affairs shows – risks sending a devastating message to distressed teenagers.

They argue that if struggling young viewers hear that failing to affirm a child’s gender identity could lead to suicide, it could reinforce feelings of hopelessness – and increase the risk of copycat behaviour.

If the case proceeds, judges will decide whether Ofcom has failed in its duty to properly safeguard children by declining to examine whether there is a wider pattern of risk in the BBC’s coverage.

Source: BBC faces legal wrangle over ‘dangerous’ coverage of transgender issues

How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

IAll entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media. 

The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out. 

“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.” 

In reply, Brockman justified the women’s inclusion, and says they’d been a part of a related book about AI, which needed to be inclusive to sell. “Today, it’s impossible to get a publisher to buy such a book with essays by 25 men and no women,” he wrote. 

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.” 

In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).”

For women like Lauren Aulet, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, the files revealed conversations that were more brash than she expected. “I think what was most shocking was simply how blatant and explicit the misogyny was.”

“We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the ’50s and ’60s, and what we have now is like implicit bias and microaggressions,” she said, adding: “I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it’s just perhaps behind closed doors.”

Source: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

Revealed: The British surrogacy firm that pays ‘exploited’ women in Mexico just £12,000 to carry babies to term | Daily Mail Online

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

Campaigners who claim poverty-stricken Mexican women are being exploited want the UK Government to ban the trade after My Surrogacy Journey became the first British agency to establish an overseas office directly to arrange surrogates.

Surrogate mothers in Mexico are paid £12,000 a time – a fraction of the cost in the US, where a deal can cost as much as £250,000.

One of the key reasons behind Mexico’s increasingly popularity is that it allows pre-birth agreements that see surrogates sign away their rights to a child – meaning it is easier to bring a baby back to the UK, where commercial surrogacy deals are illegal.

Source: Revealed: The British surrogacy firm that pays ‘exploited’ women in Mexico just £12,000 to carry babies to term | Daily Mail Online

Why Judith Butler Was Inevitable – by Matt Osborne

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How did a philosophy that once sought liberation for women become about inclusion for men? This is the question Kate Phelan, a philosopher and lecturer of feminism at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, poses in her new book, Feminism Defeated.

The book presents her argument in two parts. The first half of the book shows how and why post-structural feminism, broadly known as ‘third wave’ feminism, displaced the political project of female emancipation that was central to second-wave feminism. The second half of the book explains the consequences of this self-defeat.

Academic feminism ceased to be grounded in women’s lives, merged with post-structuralism, and spawned Intersectionality. Intersectional feminism added layers of social categories, such as race and class, on top of the sex-based lens of feminism. By emphasizing social categories, the sex-based concern of women became just one concern among many. The coup de grâce came from the philosopher Judith Butler, who declared that gender was a social construct, an identity to be performed, rather than a natural condition of being.

By embracing the concept of ‘intersectionality’, academic feminists unwittingly created a new hierarchy of needs that ultimately defeated feminism. Every intersectional political turn will require some women to choose men over women until all women have eventually chosen men over women. So, for instance, solidarity with the ‘working man’ is an enemy relationship with the ‘capitalist oppressor’, a rich woman, imposing a hierarchy that derails the feminist project. Solidarity with the black man is an enemy relationship with a white woman, derailing the feminist project. This never, ever works out as liberation for women.

In the second half of her book, Phelan lays out the consequences of this self-defeat and explains why post-structural feminism would inevitably lead to the end of women’s rights by including men in the category of ‘women’ at the intersection of women’s liberation with transgender liberation.

If women struggle to envision themselves as a cohesive political class, perhaps the radical future envisioned by second-wave feminism remains unimaginable precisely because it is impossible: women cannot fully emancipate themselves from the men who built and sustain civilization while continuing to live within it. Kate Phelan suggests that Judith Butler was inevitable. She has written a convincing argument.

[Ed: Except civilisation was not built and sustained by men alone and it would quickly crumble without women. Indeed men are the destroyers of civilisation.]

Source: Why Judith Butler Was Inevitable – by Matt Osborne

Lawsuits over transgender medicine for minors could be huge | The Economist

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Two recent pieces of news suggest that doctors who prescribe irreversible transition procedures to adolescents should take the legal threat seriously. The first was an award of $2m to a single patient in New York on January 30th.

In December 2019, at the age of 16, Ms Varian underwent a double mastectomy. Far from improving, her mental health grew worse. By 2022 she had decided to detransition. The following year she filed a medical-malpractice lawsuit against both her psychologist and her surgeon. It was the first such lawsuit by a detransitioner to come before an American jury. “I was 16 and I was really, really mentally ill, obviously,” Ms Varian told the court, according to the Free Press. The jury awarded her $1.6m for past and future pain and $400,000 for future medical costs.

The second warning came on February 3rd, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) came out against gender-related surgery for patients under 19. In a statement, it cited “limitations in study quality, consistency and follow-up, alongside emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms”.

All this echoes warnings issued in some European countries.

Source: Lawsuits over transgender medicine for minors could be huge

Liberal’s paid $500,000 to Josh Frydenberg’s sexual assault victim which set benchmark for Brittany Higgins’ $2.4 million – Kangaroo Court of Australia

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

When the Scott Morrison government paid Josh Frydenberg’s sexual assault victim Rachelle Miller $500,000, to silence her 5 weeks before the 21st of May 2022 federal election, that set the benchmark for the government to pay Brittany Higgins $2.4 million in December 2022 for being raped by Bruce Lehrmann at parliament house.

It must be noted that Brittany Higgins received $1.9 million after costs and spent an estimated $1 million or more on legal fees defending a defamation case by Linda Reynolds. So, it is possible Rachelle Miller ended up with more.

Source: Liberal’s paid $500,000 to Josh Frydenberg’s sexual assault victim which set benchmark for Brittany Higgins’ $2.4 million – Kangaroo Court of Australia

Banning transgender women from lesbian group could ‘undermine their dignity’, court hears – ABC News

A Victorian lesbian group is seeking an exemption to the Sex Discrimination Act so it can legally prevent transgender women from attending its events.

The Human Rights Commission told the Federal Court today an exemption could cause harm to transgender women.

What’s next?

A judgement will be handed down later this year.

Source: Banning transgender women from lesbian group could ‘undermine their dignity’, court hears – ABC News