A Week in the War on Women: Monday 28th February - Sunday 6th March
Monday 28th February - “No Debate”
Last month Grace Lavery pulled out of scheduled discussions with both Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel. Now an online event about pregnancy and birth has been cancelled after Freddie McConnell refused to appear alongside someone with differing views.
Milli Hill is a mother, pregnancy and birth specialist, tireless campaigner for women’s reproductive rights, journalist, bestselling author, psychotherapist and founder of The Positive Birth Movement. In 2020 she was in the news after objecting to the use of female-erasing language around issues of maternity.
Freddy McConnell is a trans-identified female journalist who has given birth to two children. She tried to have herself recorded as the father of her first baby on its birth certificate. She was unsuccessful but still refers to herself as her children’s father.
Yoga Birth UK is an association of professionally trained teachers of antenatal and postnatal yoga and childbirth educators. It offers yoga classes and workshops to women who are pregnant and who’ve recently given birth. Last week it announced a virtual study day around gender and birth to be held in April. The speakers invited were Milli Hill, Freddy McConnell and Claire Vigot (‘they/she’), a newly qualified midwife who wants to specialize in ‘trans and gender queer pregnancies’.
What a great opportunity for those on both sides of the gender debate to talk about pregnancy and childbirth, you might think. Except McConnell refused to appear on the same bill as Milli Hill. (Remember, this was not a discussion panel and, being a virtual event, contributors would not even have been in the same location.)
McConnell insisted that YBUK change the line-up so that only those shilling for gender identity ideology could be involved. She mispresented Milli Hill’s views, accusing her of being ‘discriminatory’ and ‘trans-exclusionary’, and claimed that she believed the event - called Gender & Birth - was purely about yoga.
Consequently, YBUK felt compelled to cancel the entire event.
Tuesday 1st March - A Fox In The Henhouse
EVENING STANDARD: Parents have contacted an MP over concerns that an 18-year-old male is sharing sleeping accommodation with their teenage daughters.
Worried parents contacted Caroline Johnson, MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham, concerned that their teenage daughters were having to share sleeping quarters with an 18-year-old trans-identified male at their boarding school.
Will Quince, Minister for Children and Families, described the issue as ‘a bit of a minefield’ but agreed that he ‘wouldn’t be overly happy’ were his daughters in the same situation.
Dr Johnson called for better guidance to help schools navigate this issue, commenting that they fear getting caught up in ‘legal wrangles’.
Wednesday 2nd February - The Wrong Sort Of Lesbian
THE TELEGRAPH: A veteran lesbian rights campaigner has been excluded from the debate around gender law reforms in Scotland for having the ‘wrong’ opinions.
Dr Shereen Benjamin is a lecturer at Edinburgh University and a former school teacher. She has been a campaigner for lesbian and gay rights since the 1980s.
In December she applied to join the Scottish Parliament’s cross-party LGBTI+ group to represent feminist organisation, For Women Scotland. Her application explained that she wanted to contribute to ‘respectful, evidence-based dialogue’ in the debate around gender reform and ‘come together in good faith’ with those of opposing views. It also detailed her decades of campaigning for lesbian rights.
However, her request was refused. She was told that ‘there was no indication from any member present’ to support her application. Four other membership requests were approved unanimously by the same meeting.
Those members present included representatives from Stonewall, the Equality Network and Scottish Trans, all vociferous supporters of the Scottish government’s plans to implement self ID.
Dr Benjamin told The Telegraph, “It seems the only lesbians the Scottish Parliament wants to work with are those who deny the materiality of sex. As same-sex attracted women, it appears that we’re the ‘wrong sort of lesbians’ and can be excluded from the political process, with no reason given”.
Also Today - RIP Women’s Sport
It has been confirmed that Lia Thomas will compete in the forthcoming National Collegiate Athletic Association swimming & diving championships on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s team.
Thomas was interviewed in Sports Illustrated this week. It is a gushing and one-sided piece which describes Thomas as ‘female’, talks of his ‘authentic self’ and ignores all the scientific evidence proving his numerous physical advantages. It paints those protesting the unfairness of his inclusion in women’s sport as right-wing and hateful.
Thomas had the audacity to tell Sports Illustrated, “I’m a woman, just like anybody else on the team”.
Sall Grover summarises the situation perfectly.
As the NCAA championships begin in Atlanta on 16th March, we send our thoughts and solidarity to all the talented female swimmers who’ve sacrificed much and trained unconscionably hard, only to lose out to this shameless cheat.
Thursday 3rd March - Under His Aye
SCOTTISH EXPRESS: Women’s rights are under threat as the Scottish government introduced its controversial Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
If passed, this legislation will allow people to legally change their sex without any medical diagnosis or treatment and after just a three month period of ‘living in their acquired gender’ (whatever that means).
The implications for women’s sex-based rights and spaces and women’s safety are devastating, as Fair Play For Women detail in this thread.
It would allow people to change the sex on their birth certificate without the current gatekeeping of a medical diagnosis, increasing the number & changing the type of people who are able to legally change their sex.
Furthermore, it would make it a criminal offence for an official to reveal a GRC holder’s status, allowing birth sex to be hidden. This would make it impossible to guarantee a space specifically for those of one birth sex. It would also affect the service providers who use the Genuine Occupation exception to reserve a job (such as in a rape crisis centre or medical environment) for females only.
How can decisions based on birth sex not be affected if birth certificates can be altered on demand and any man can conceal the fact that he was born male?
“This bill is about SEX not transgender status. But the word "sex" doesn't appear even once. Trans people can already self-ID as trans. The question now is whether they should be able to self-ID their birth sex too. Transwomen no longer want to be just transwomen. They are now asking to actually BE female, and for their trans history to be a secret… It is now being demanded that all transwoman are literally the female sex too.
If we can’t talk freely about the material reality of sex we can not discuss, monitor or uphold our sex-based rights. This is why GRA reform is bad law and why it is right why demedicalisation of the GRA must be opposed. Trans people already have a mechanism to change legal sex status. A robust medical gatekeeping process is in place. Unregulated access to birth certificates is a step too far.”
Furthermore, the bill lowers the age at which a person can apply for a GRC from 18 to 16 which, as Transgender Trend points out, is a huge safeguarding issue.
To vulnerable and impressionable teens, already influenced by social media platforms, this bill reinforces gender stereotypes and sends the message that there is a ‘right’ and, indeed, a ‘wrong’ way to be male or female.
“The most vulnerable teenagers – girls, lesbian, gay and autistic children and those with mental health problems, previous trauma and unstable family backgrounds – will be further convinced that the reason for their distress is being ‘born in the wrong body’ and that ‘changing sex’ is the answer to all their problems.
The Scottish government will be promoting to teenagers the idea that biological sex is so irrelevant you can just legally change it with a certificate…
Without fully examining what is driving the vast increase in the number of teenagers identifying as ‘transgender’ over the past decade, the Scottish government may just have provided a way for confused and bullied gay teens to become legally ‘heterosexual’ before they have grown up and learned to accept themselves.”
Friday 4th March - Mansplaining Lesbianism
A heterosexual male was a keynote speaker at this year’s Lesbian Lives conference.
The University of Cork hosted the 2022 Lesbian Lives conference this weekend. Trans-identified male, Susan Stryker, was a keynote speaker.
Stryker is an academic and teaches Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. He is currently taking a sabbatical to hold the appointment as Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at the supposedly female-only Mills College. He clearly believes he is entitled to speak for, about and over women.
He has previously described himself as a "Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell". He has also spoken against women-only spaces, even rape crisis centres, calling them ‘separatist’.
The Equality Network, ‘a leading Scottish LGBTI equality and human rights charity’ (which is heavily funded by the Scottish government), gushed over this heterosexual male speaking at a lesbian conference.
Similarly, Ireland’s LGBTQ+ media outlet, Gay Community News, applauded this lesbian erasure and homophobia.
Saturday 5th March - Shame On Shona Robinson
THE SCOTSMAN: The courageous Susan Dalgety shared her story of childhood abuse in response to Shona Robinson’s shocking statement about predatory males.
During her ministerial statement on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, Social Justice Secretary, Shona Robinson, made the breath-taking claim that, “There is no evidence that predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour.”
Susan Dalgety’s heart-breaking personal testimony demonstrates how false and offensive Robinson’s hollow claim really is. She described how, for several years from the age of eleven, she was sexually abused by a predator who hid in plain sight.
“Throughout history, abusive men have used their positions of power, their uniforms, their standing in society to pretend to be something they are not…. There are young girls this morning who, last night, will have endured abuse at the hands of an abusive man masquerading as a family friend, as a step-father, as a man of the cloth.
I have no idea why Shona Robison and her close friend and boss, Nicola Sturgeon, refuse to believe women when we say we fear the consequences of a law that redefines what it means to be female… What I do know is that on Thursday, two of the most powerful women in Scotland betrayed every other woman and girl in the country. All 2.7 million of us.”
If she weren’t so determined to ignore those trying to defend women’s rights and safety, Shona Robinson might be a bit more familiar with the wealth of evidence she claims does not exist.
She should read up about Karen White, Katie Dolatowski, Jessica Winfield, Hanna Tubbs, Christopher Hambrook, Davina Ayrton, Lisa Hauxwell, Jessica Brennan, Johanna Wolf, Wolfgang Schmidt, Dakota Nieves, Kim Marie, Steph Ricciardi, Chloe Thompson, Laura McCann, Kristen Lukess, Tarah Jo Morgan, Marie Dean etc etc… violent, dangerous and predatory men who have claimed a trans identity.
Under this bill, they would all be legally female after a bit of paperwork.
Sunday 6th March - Meet The New Priests
IRISH INDEPENDENT: Women’s rights have been given away by Irish feminists.
On Saturday the National Women’s Council Ireland (NWCI) held a rally in Dublin to celebrate International Women’s Day. The intention was to ‘Call for political leadership and action on women’s equality’ using the slogan ‘No woman left behind’.
Breath-taking hypocrisy from an organisation that wants to silence the women defending their sex-based rights from the harms of gender ideology.
As Eilis O’Hanlon writes, “Last year the NWCI - which pockets huge amounts of taxpayers money every year - signed a letter from the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, which called upon the government to ensure that gender critical women were ‘denied legitimate political representation.’”
The fate of gender critical women in Ireland came into sharp focus at Saturday’s supposedly ‘empowering’ event when a woman expressing her views was hounded out.
Here a young woman is celebrating the silencing and intimidation of the attendee who was so bullied she had to leave. Does she honestly believe this is feminism?
This was the ‘transphobic’ sign in question.
Of course, the crowd which forced this woman to leave with its aggressive and intimidating tactics ‘included a large number of forceful men’.
The stewards were well aware of the situation but did not take any action.
As usual, the ‘male feminists’ on Twitter were revelling in a woman being silenced and bullied.
As O’Hanlon asks, “What is the point of an International Women’s Day if people are now too afraid to say what a woman even is?”.
See you next week.
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Milli Hill is always very diplomatic in her use of language around transgender people - the idea that she is being called a bigot is laughable. It just shows how fragile Freddy McConnell's sense of reality is, that she is not willing to even share the same billing as Milli. It seems a very insecure and juvenile response.