Woman dead after Parramatta balcony plunge, man in custody | SMH

The partner of a woman seen “hanging” from a seventh-storey balcony in Sydney’s west moments before her death on Thursday morning has been released without charge after spending several hours in custody.

Speaking outside Parramatta police station on Thursday afternoon, Detective Superintendent Barry Vincent said the death was being treated as suspicious but that details were “complex”.

The man had an apprehended violence order in place for his protection. He was arrested on Thursday before being released without charge pending further investigations into his partner’s death.

Police were called at 11.45pm by someone in the apartment on River Road West in Parramatta, where only background noise, including raised voices, could be heard.

The phone number from which the call was made did not belong to the man.

Police called back twice and spoke to the man, who provided his name and address. They told the man they would attend the apartment later that evening.

At 1.40am, police received calls from a passerby that a woman was “hanging” from her balcony. Police arrived within minutes and the woman was found lying in the driveway with multiple serious injuries.

Despite the efforts of police officers who performed CPR on the woman, she died at the scene.

Vincent said a strike force had been established to investigate the circumstances of the fall and the police response. He said the two-hour delay between the first call and their attendance would be investigated, but the initial call didn’t warrant an emergency response.

[Ed: Another case demonstrating the failure of the AVO system to keep women safe.]

Source: Woman dead after Parramatta balcony plunge, man in custody

How having a baby makes it more likely Australian couples rely on the man’s income | The Conversation

Australian women are better educated than men but still face poorer job prospects and lower incomes.

We see this in Australia’s stubbornly persistent gender pay gap – estimated at nearly 22%.

Our research shows how having children plays a significant part establishing and maintaining these inequalities.

[H]ouseholds where men earn the most still dominate. In 2019, they accounted for 54% of Australian households – compared to 29% of those where earnings were equal and 17% where women were the biggest contributors.

Our research found the transition to parenthood is a key cause of this gender imbalance. Having a child increased the likelihood couples relied on the male partners’ income and reduced the chance of equal-earnings arrangements.

Importantly, we found little evidence of a return to pre-parenthood arrangements a decade after couples had their first child.

Fairer paternity leave schemes, tax incentives for two income households and tougher legislation protecting working mothers against discrimination would help ensure women’s job prospects do not worsen upon motherhood.

[Ed: How about just paying women a fair wage for the job of having and raising children rather than pressuring them to return to the workforce in priority to focusing on parenting?]

Source: How having a baby makes it more likely Australian couples rely on the man’s income

Long-term risks of Depo-Provera drug ‘never mentioned’, patients claim – ABC News

More Australian women have come forward with concerns about serious side effects from the popular contraceptive Depo-Provera, with many claiming they were not made aware of the risks of the high-dose hormone.

Yesterday, the ABC reported on a possible class action looming over the increased risk of benign brain tumours caused by long-term use of the drug.

However, several women claim their health has been significantly impacted due to other serious side effects including osteoporosis — and their treating doctors never made them aware of the risks.

Depo-Provera is a high-dose injection of a specific synthetic progesterone known as medroxyprogesterone acetate, given to women every three months for contraception.

In Australia the official product information leaflet in the box for Depo-Provera does include the osteoporosis risk.

It also warns about vision disorders, headaches and thinning hair as well as a link to types of breast cancer.

However, many women, including Ms McLean said because the contraceptive is given as an injection administered by a doctor or practice nurse, they never saw this leaflet as it was thrown away by the surgery.

Many relied on their doctor or nurse to talk through the risks, but most said their GP or gynaecologist never mentioned the two-year recommendation.

he Depo-Provera injection has been prescribed more than 3.5 million times since 1992 but has been in use dating back to the seventies.

It’s an injection given at a doctor’s office and lasts for three months, meaning women return for shots four times a year.

Depo-Provera has long been mired in controversy with it being prescribed to drug users, the homeless, prisoners and those in psychiatric hospitals who struggled to take a daily pill.

It was also used to sterilise women with intellectual disability who found periods distressing.

In the nineties it was even touted as a therapy for paedophiles via chemical castration.

Calls for it to be banned date back to 1980 when the ABC reported women who were on it suffered long-term infertility long after injections had worn off — a claim still being made today.

Source: Long-term risks of Depo-Provera drug ‘never mentioned’, patients claim – ABC News

Solicitor punished for trying to trade settlement for silence on rape claim – Lawyers Weekly

A solicitor has been reprimanded for telling a woman the settlement of her matrimonial dispute was contingent on her making a “no complaint” statement to police in respect of a historic rape allegation.

Prakash Raniga agreed with the Victorian Legal Services Commissioner that he engaged in professional misconduct and should be reprimanded for acting on “inappropriate instructions” he received from his client, the husband, in family law proceedings.

Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) senior member Jonathan Smithers said the case has illustrated “how issues concerning the fundamental duties of legal practitioners” can arise in the “daily conduct of a family law practitioner’s practice”.

While Victoria Police did not charge the husband with any offences, the VCAT noted the conduct was still likely to be prejudicial to any criminal investigation or charges laid by police.

Raniga admitted his conduct was likely to be “prejudicial to, or diminish the public confidence in, the administration of justice”.

Source: Solicitor punished for trying to trade settlement for silence on rape claim – Lawyers Weekly

America’s best-known practitioner of youth gender medicine is being sued | Economist

JOHANNA OLSON-KENNEDY is among the most celebrated youth gender medicine clinicians in the world.

“I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin,” she told the Atlantic in 2018. In her published research, Dr Olson-Kennedy has reported prescribing cross-sex hormones to patients as young as 12, and referring patients as young as 13 for double mastectomies.

Now, however, Dr Olson-Kennedy is being sued by a former patient, Clementine Breen, who believes that she was harmed precisely by a lack of gatekeeping.

Ms Breen is a 20-year-old drama student at UCLA whose treatment at Dr Olson-Kennedy’s clinic included puberty blockers at age 12, hormones at 13 and a double mastectomy at 14. She stopped taking testosterone for good about a year ago and then began detransitioning in March.

The lawsuit’s defendants are Dr Olson-Kennedy, the gender therapist to whom Dr Olson-Kennedy referred her, the surgeon who performed the double mastectomy and 20 as-yet-unnamed “Doe Individuals” who were agents, servants, and employees of their co-defendants.” Ms Breen’s attorneys accuse them of medical negligence on a number of grounds, including an alleged lack of psychological assessment, poor management of Ms Breen’s mental health and a lack of concern about the effects of puberty blockers on Ms Breen’s bone health.

Ms Breen’s story starts early in the 2016-17 school year, when she turned 12. She felt depressed and sought help from a guidance counsellor. “I mentioned that I might be trans,” she recalled in the interview, “but I also mentioned that I might be a lesbian and that I might be bisexual, like I wasn’t really sure about my identity at all.” In retrospect, she said, she believes that her unsettled feelings about going through puberty stemmed from a violent situation at home involving her older brother, who has severe autism, as well as sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of someone outside the family when she was six years old, which she did not disclose to anyone until much later.

Source: Economist article on JOK – Google Docs

The Shameful Secrets of Stephen Fry | Malcolm Richard Clark

Stephen Fry’s recent comments criticising Stonewall have been seized upon by many as a welcome sign the mood has changed on trans issues.

For years Fry has offered uncritical backing to both Stonewall and to trans extremism. In 2018 he denounced women who protested at Pride about lesbian erasure as “pretty damned sick” and dismissed their defence of lesbian identity as “some screwed up contempt for the rights of trans and intersex people.”

In 2015 Fry also joined Graham Norton in funding a deluded woman’s double mastectomy.

As for Stonewall itself as recently as seven months ago Fry headed up a video tribute to mark the organisation’s 35th anniversary.

Fry’s career has been nothing if not notable for his willingness to express his opinions, no matter how controversial or unpopular.

[I]f loudmouth misogyny is a theme of Fry’s career as a self-styled public intellectual there is another that is just as disturbing. His careless attitude to the safeguarding of children.

Fry goes on to applaud the “courage” of children who tell their school they are the opposite sex even though the Cass Review concluded social transition like this should be avoided.

This claim is, naturally, always expressed in terms of children’s rights. This makes it sound liberating and progressive. Yet the demand for so-called “bodily autonomy” for children also just happens to have been the central argument of the paedophile lobby for decades. They too made sure to dress up their argument that children should have the autonomy to “decide” to have sex with adults as progressive.

Fry’s comments in his Triggernometry interview do not come out of a vaccuum. They have an important context that is very different from that of the average deluded parent or trans activist who cites the notion of ‘being born in the wrong body’. That context is his long track record of minimising the seriousness of adult-child sexual contact.

Fry’s attitude reached its apogee in his play ‘Latin!’ which took the Edinburgh Fringe by storm in 1980 despite its celebration of….paedophilia.

The play, set in a private boys’ school, depicts the “relationship” between Dominic Clarke, a Latin teacher and one of his pupils Rupert Cartwright. Cartwright is 13 at the time. He is also an orphan. So not vulnerable at all then.

The point is that nowhere in the play is there a hint that adult men having sex with children is ….problematic.

“Pleasure lies between the thighs of a young boy“, declares Clarke unapologetically.

The only thing more startling than the fact this play was ever put on never mind won the Fringe First Prize is that it has been continually revived and reviewers keep uncritically applauding it.

This despite the fact in the play Clarke ends up running away with Cartwright- a 13 year old orphan- to Morocco. There they live in something approaching sexual and emotional bliss and write to the school to reveal young boys and men can live together in Morocco as sexual partners. This triggers the pupils to demand they be allowed to go there.

Written years before we were told to believe in the trans version of “born in the wrong body” the paedophile teacher Clarke sighs,

“When I was a boy, I thought, slept and played like a boy. Then nature began to drop hints about a change in status: a cracking voice, hairs about the buttocks, acne … I never asked to be a man. I never wanted to be man. I want to be a boy. If when nature starts thrusting pimples and hairs through the skin, a boy could be kept from school and the world of men and just carry on behaving as a boy, then perhaps nature would give up and the pimples and hairs would recede. The permanent boy could be found.”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that for some gay men who have what we might call flexible attitudes to the age of consent the notion of “born in the wrong body” may be highly sexualised. The permanent boy is a sexual ideal.

All this is complex and rather sinister for it implies that for some gay men who have convinced themselves that 12 or 13 year olds can consent to and even benefit from a sexual “relationship” with an adult the prospect of trapping a child in an infantile state may be seen through a highly eroticised filter.

The child’s trauma ends up dismissed in the same way Fry waved away his own sexual abuse as “if that is abuse, to hell with it: it’s fine.”

Fry should not be allowed to walk away unscathed from the mess he helped create. If Stonewall is in a quagmire it was his misogyny, cowardice and deeply dodgy views about children and their “sexuality” that helped put it there.

Source: The Shameful Secrets of Stephen Fry.

Brad Battin ousts John Pesutto as Victorian Liberal leader as Moira Deeming returns to fold | Victorian politics | The Guardian

John Pesutto has been ousted as the Victorian Liberal party leader after a successful challenge by Brad Battin during a meeting of MPs on Friday.

A snap vote to re-admit Moira Deeming to the party room on Friday morning morphed into a referendum on Pesutto’s future.

Emerging from the meeting as leader, Battin said he was now focused on cost-of-living issues and crime – along with roads, reducing taxes and the state of Victoria’s finances.

Asked about the lack of women in the leadership team, Battin referenced his support for Deeming but declined to say whether he agreed with her views.

“I fought to bring a woman back into the party room,” he said.

Deeming said Pesutto had shaken her hand and said sorry to her in today’s party room meeting.

“He has apologised to me today, and that’s the end of it,” she said.

Pesutto’s job had been on shaky ground ever since he lost a defamation case brought against him by Deeming. He walked into parliament alone ahead of Friday’s party room meeting.

Source: Brad Battin ousts John Pesutto as Victorian Liberal leader as Moira Deeming returns to fold | Victorian politics | The Guardian

Transgender people who hide biological sex from partners may not be committing crime | The Telegraph

Transgender people who hide their biological sex from romantic partners may not be committing a crime, prosecutors have said.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has published new guidance for the crime of sex by deception, which includes where someone tricks a partner into sleeping with them by pretending to be a different sex.
Critics say it could give a “get out of jail free card” for predators to escape rape charges by claiming they are trans.
The new document makes it clear that rape or sexual assault charges may be brought if a victim was not aware of the suspect’s birth sex and therefore did not consent.
But it also sets out a long list of reasons why transgender people may choose to keep their birth sex hidden, which campaigners fear could be exploited by men to avoid being prosecuted.
Maya Forstater, co-founder of the women’s rights group Sex Matters, said: “[The guidance] still suggests that people may avoid a conviction for sexual assault based on deception if they say they are transgender.”
“A person who fails to be clear and honest about their sex when seeking a sexual relationship is behaving in a way that is at a minimum creepy and may, at worst, be engaging in deception and assault.

Source: Transgender people who hide biological sex from partners may not be committing crime

Stephen Fry: A coward and a hypocrite | Julie Bindel

How can we tell the tide is turning against the crazed gender ideology that has engulfed society for so long? Maybe it’s when lovies like the actor Stephen Fry appear to criticise Stonewall – an organisation he enthusiastically supported even very recently.

In response to a question submitted by gay rights activist Levi Pay: “I’m a gay man who used to work for Stonewall. I watched as this organisation, which I used to love, shifted to arguing for the medicalisation of gender non-conforming children. It now portrays lesbians who wish to exclude male people from their dating pool as being equivalent to racists. How can Stephen Fry, in all conscience, continue to support them?”

“Do I? I’m not sure I do support them,” Fry responded on the Triggernometry podcast, released yesterday. “I have no interest or support of this current wave of nonsensical… It’s shameful and sad… It has got stuck in a terrible quagmire”.

Fry’s weasel words come only now – when it has finally become safe to speak out, as a result of all the work put in by men and women who have shouldered all the risk, and been exposed to all that hatred, over a very long period. Too little, too late, Mr Fry.

His backtracking is a sure sign that the gender war is all but won. His career won’t be adversely affected by a little soft condemnation of Stonewall – but plenty of others in the arts have lost careers because they spoke out.

Countless lives, careers, friendships have been ruined, and some have paid with their mental health. The price has been extremely high. Now, as the rats leave the sinking ship, rather than dishonestly denouncing the likes of Stonewall, let’s encourage others to just be honest about how captured they were, and admit that they chose the coward’s way, rather than standing up for those harmed by gender ideology.

Source: Stephen Fry: A coward and a hypocrite

NSW cop sacked over topless waitress party, domestic violence case failures | SMH

A NSW police officer who hosted a team Christmas party featuring a topless waitress and failed to adequately investigate domestic violence allegations has failed in a bid to overturn his dismissal.

The NSW Industrial Relations Commission last week upheld an order by Police Commissioner Karen Webb to sack Andrew Herring, a senior constable with 13 years’ service, based on concerns about his integrity and performance.

By 2022, the Lake Illawarra Local Area Command officer had received several warnings for not using body-worn video and failing to adequately respond to domestic violence complaints.

In September that year, he met with a woman who alleged her ex-partner had posted intimate images of her online, including advertisements that made her look like a sex worker.

Herring did not provide an email address when the woman asked if she could send the video to police, did not perform a risk assessment and failed to mention the intimate images when he later typed up her complaint.

The next month, Herring visited a woman who complained her ex-partner had breached an apprehended domestic violence order with a flurry of 35 phone calls and 11 intimidating voice messages.

“Until it reaches a criminal element, there’s nothing the police can do,” Herring told her. He took no notes and failed to record the incident in the police database for two weeks.

Toward the end of 2022, Herring hosted a “Yellow Team Christmas Party” at an apartment, which he described as “a fairly loose affair”.

The police commissioner’s lawyers argued that allowing the waitress to remain at the party amounted to sexual harassment.

Source: 12ft