Strip searching laws ‘should be clearer’, says NSW Deputy Coroner

The inquest into six deaths at NSW-based music festivals has found that there should be limitations on strip searching, and that its legality “should be carefully reviewed”.

RLC head of police accountability Samantha Lee said: “We know strip searches are causing great harm to the community and now we have the Deputy State Coroner confirming that this invasive practice is having a devastating impact on young lives.”

“The proposed changes recommended by the Deputy Coroner are far from radical, but merely reflect parliament’s original intent that such an invasive procedure be only utilised in the most exceptional of legal circumstances.

Source: Strip searching laws ‘should be clearer’, says NSW Deputy Coroner – Lawyers Weekly

Ignite Her Curiosity: 75 Children’s Books About Girls and Women Who Love Science

A Mighty Girl’s top picks of children’s books about real-life women of science and fictional stories about girls who love science!

Source: Ignite Her Curiosity: 75 Children’s Books About Girls and Women Who Love Science | A Mighty Girl

How we are failing victims of Family Violence

[ed: or How to maximise your compensation payout in a patriarchy]

Tip 1

[I]f you want to maximise compensation for personal injury you should ensure you are injured at work, or in a car accident, or at least in circumstances where you can bring a public liability claim against an insured organisation. Even for sporting injuries in NSW, the maximum amount payable as a consequence of a single incident is $171,000 which exceeds what is available to you as a victim of crime.

Tip 2

If you must be a victim of a criminal assault, you should avoid being assaulted in NSW, where the financial assistance available is the lowest in Australia.

Tip 3

The next tip is to ensure that your assailant is a stranger rather than someone who is well known to you, such as an intimate partner or other family member.

[S]tudies indicate that intimate partner violence is the leading contributor to death, disability and illness in Australian women aged 15 to 44.58 It would therefore appear that compensation schemes which are skewed to assist victims of crimes committed by a stranger are skewed to assist male claimants rather than women.

Tip 4

Ensure its a one-off assault with visible physical injuries, not ongoing abuse over years causing psychological injury.

Tip 5

The final tip is to ensure that you are a capable adult rather than a child or person with a disability or other vulnerability and that you, or those who care for you, have the capacity and presence of mind to report the crime to police and health services and lodge a claim within the prescribed time limit. Of course, if they are the perpetrators of the violence against you, this is particularly problematic.

 

Rather than empowering women to leave violent and abusive relationships by providing an effective compensation scheme or at least adequate welfare payments and supported accommodation, avenues of financial and practical support for women are being increasingly restricted. Meanwhile, the government is instead backing microfinance arrangements to assist women to leave abusive relationships, knowing full well that these will leave women further indebted into the future despite being touted as life-saving. This systemic refusal to fairly compensate women for the impact of male violence on their lives or to provide them with any viable means of escape is truly the patriarchy at work.

Source: Printed-Final_Kerr.pdf

Courageous, inspired a generation

Dr Beatrice Faust, AO (1939-2019): Founder of the Women’s Electoral Lobby

Dr Beatrice Faust (known as Bea), feminist, political campaigner, journalist, author and academic, died on October 30 at the age of 80, after becoming ill at her home in Churchill, Gippsland.

Bea was one of the first women to campaign for civil liberties, abortion law reform and sex education. In 1966 she co-founded the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, mainly to campaign against censorship laws. She was best known for being the founder of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) in 1972.

Beatrice Faust with her novel "Women, Sex and Pornography" in 1981.

Source: Courageous, inspired a generation

‘Parental alienation’: the debunked theory that women lie about violence is still used in court

Parental alienation is wielded by fathers’ rights groups and continues to have credibility in the family law system, writes Zoe Rathus.

Source: ‘Parental alienation’: the debunked theory that women lie about violence is still used in court

If the government tracks women’s periods, why not track male ejaculation, too?

Missouri, which has a population of over 6.1 million people, has only one abortion clinic. For rightwing zealots, however, that is one too many. An administrative hearing was held this week to decide whether the state can revoke the license for Planned Parenthood’s St Louis clinic; a ruling is expected in February. If the license is revoked Missouri will become the first state without a functioning abortion clinic since 1974.

As it turns out, the DHSS is so concerned about women’s health it has been keeping spreadsheets tracking the date of Planned Parenthood patients’ periods, in an attempt to figure out which of them “had undergone failed abortions”. Let me just repeat that: American government officials are tracking the menstrual cycles of thousands of women. But, you know, it’s for their own good so don’t worry about it.

Source: If the government tracks women’s periods, why not track male ejaculation, too? | Arwa Mahdawi | World news | The Guardian

Microsoft women greeted by sceptical court in unequal-pay case

Women engineers who claim Microsoft Corp. discriminates against them for pay and promotions faced tough questions from a federal appeals court weighing whether their ground-breaking lawsuit should become a class action.

The lawsuit against Microsoft is the first in a series of gender-pay-disparity cases against big technology companies to reach an appeals court over the question of class-action status.

The three plaintiffs want to represent about 8,630 peers who have worked for the company since 2012. Pursuing the case on behalf a large group would give the women much stronger leverage in settlement negotiations before a trial.

Women employees at Twitter Inc. lost their bid for class-action status in July 2018 in San Francisco state court. Similar cases against Oracle Inc. and Google are pending.

Source: Microsoft women greeted by sceptical court in unequal-pay case

Co-founder of Stonewall calls for calm

Fanshawe believes that the Stonewall of today is undermining the rights of lesbians and putting women and girls at risk by “unthinkingly” merging the rights of lesbians and gays with those of trans people  . . .

“I have never seen a feminist placard that says, ‘Death to trans people’ but I have seen many placards that say, ‘Death to Terfs’ [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] or ‘Punch a Terf’. The violence coming towards lesbians is completely staggering.” …

“And what is absolutely awful about this is the way debate is being shut down. There is a group of people who are also actively trying to get people out of their jobs.   . . .

One of the problems with self-identification becoming the basis for law is that it affects women. Negatively. Because it creates confusion between biology, social identity and the law. So firstly, you can’t change sex. I mean, that is really clear and intersex people are really fed up with being thrown under the bus about this.

So transwomen are not women, transwomen are transwomen and I respect them for that. When I went out to campaign for gay equality, I didn’t campaign to be heterosexual. I went out in the streets and I said, ‘I’m gay’. I am different, I may be a minority, but I want equal treatment under the law. I want trans women to have equal treatment under the law. I want them to be free from bullying and harassment and violence, but I absolutely can’t accept that they are women.

And if you allow self-ID to become the basis for the law, which means that a man on his say so can be treated legally as a woman, it then means that men can claim discrimination against them as women. There are implications for a whole set of things around that and bad law drawn up around self-ID ends up with the famous wax my balls case in Canada, where a man with male genitalia is legally saying he’s a woman.sment and violence, but I absolutely can’t accept that they are women.

What we are saying is that we will not support a law that defies biology and defies the history and importance of women’s-only spaces and rights.”

Source: Co-founder of Stonewall calls for calm

Gay parents to get both names on child’s birth cert in Ireland

Same-sex parents will be able to legally register both their names on their child’s birth certificate from next May under new regulations to be signed by Health Minister Simon Harris today.

(ed: Complete erasure of mothers increasingly viable)

Source: Gay parents to get both names on child’s birth cert – Independent.ie

Andrew Sullivan: Questions About Youth Gender Transitions

EEarlier this week, I met a group of women in their early 20s who are not supposed to exist.

They’re women who, in their teens, realized that they were actually men, socially transitioned to the other sex, and then underwent hormone therapy to change their bodies, faces, and voices to become transgender men. After varying amounts of time, however, they all realized they had made a big mistake, stopped testosterone therapy, and “detransitioned” back to being who they were before.

By their own accounts, they had been adamantly trans in their teens. “I was the student trying to get a professor fired because he wouldn’t allow they and them to be used for a singular person in my papers … I threatened my parents and friends with suicide. It became part of my identity to be suicidal. I screamed at my parents about this, even though I knew I wasn’t going to kill myself.” One went by the pronouns xe and xer and flew into a rage if she was misgendered. Once they had transitioned, and felt miserable nonetheless, they felt that this too was just part of being transgender.

How typical are these responses? We can’t tell, because in the U.S., it’s close to impossible to get an empirical grasp on it. The Reddit group for detransitioners has over 6,000 members, which might be indicative — but certainly some of that number includes observers and people merely questioning their transition. Clinical research on this topic is scant and tenuous. Even in Britain, where the NHS keeps statistics, and where there is only one center devoted to treatment of transgender kids (the Tavistock Centre), there’s no data on detransitioning.

The pressure on parents to give puberty-blocking drugs or cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric kids or teens is also intense. “Do you want a happy son or a dead daughter?” is the usual formula, deploying statistics on suicide among transgender people.

All the women I spoke with who detransitioned now date women or don’t date at all. Their transition was based entirely on how they felt at the moment, which they now regard as a false signal about their long-term identity. Which prompts the question: How much of the extraordinary surge in transgender girls is related to their discomfort with being a lesbian? What role does homophobia play in enabling transition?

Source: Andrew Sullivan: Questions About Youth Gender Transitions