A Week in the War on Women: Monday 9th October - Sunday 15th October

Monday 9th October - Witch Burning To Music

REDUXX: A female musician has suffered harassment, threats and mass cancellation after speaking out against gender identity ideology.

Ewa Justka is an award-winning Polish-born electronic and noise musician who, until recently, was based in London. In July, in a post on her Instagram account, she spoke out against the dangers of gender ideology and expressed her support for JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock. She also asked other concerned women to contact her.

Soon after making this post, Justka had a number of professional engagements cancelled. For example her work was removed from a forthcoming compilation album recording and a venue in Glasgow, The Old Hairdressers, cancelled her scheduled gig there. Another Glasgow venue, Stereo, even refused to serve her, claiming that her presence would make other customers feel ‘unsafe’.

Stereo is hosting a night of ‘Trans Excellence’ this month but doesn’t seem concerned that female patrons might be made to feel ‘unsafe’ by males performing offensive and overtly sexualised parodies of womanhood.

The Oram Awards seek to elevate “Women, Trans and Non-Binary music creators in electronic music”. They are open to ‘women and gender expansive artists’. Despite being named after Daphne Oram, a founding member of the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop who was a pioneer of women working in this field, and despite acknowledging that “It is still not a level playing field for women innovating in sound and music”, The Oram Awards awards are inclusive of males.

Justka won the Oram Award in 2017. She had been scheduled to perform earlier this month at an event associated with the organisation. Concerned about the campaign against her, she contacted the Oram Awards, hoping they would support her and reassure her that they would not cancel her appearance.

Initially, she received an email which read, “We are an organization fighting for women’s rights in the music industry by providing a much-needed platform for their work and supporting their creative development. Our position on trans rights is that trans women are women and we hope that everyone we work with responds to that respectfully”. Justka requested clarification, asking if the Oram Awards believes that males can identify into womanhood. She received a reply condemning her ‘negative emails’ and stating, “It has become clear that we can no longer work with you”. Her invitation to participate in the event was rescinded.

In addition to losing work and professional engagements, Justka also received numerous abusive and threatening messages. One was sent by music journalist, Peter Kirn. “We’ll beat you. I’ll do my best to absolutely make sure no one works with you. So you want to see the power of this patriarchal system you’re so upset about? Watch me.”

Trans activism is a men’s rights movement.

Tuesday 10th October - The Clocks Were Striking 13 On Campus

HOLYROOD MAGAZINE: An academic union has been criticised for trying to stifle free speech after calling for a book launch at Edinburgh University to be cancelled.

Published by Routledge, ‘Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader’, is an important new book about the relationships between sex, gender and gender identity.

It is edited by Professor Selina Todd and Professor Alice Sullivan and its 15 chapters are all original contributions from authors who are leading experts from the fields of science, social science, the humanities, biology, neuroscience, medicine, law, sociology and English literature.

To celebrate the release of the book, a launch event was held at Edinburgh University on Wednesday this week, despite the best efforts of the University and College Union (UCU) Edinburgh branch committee.

Ahead of the event, UCU Edinburgh wrote to the university’s principal, Sir Peter Mathieson, saying it had “Concerns about the launch of a transphobic book on campus” and calling for the event to be cancelled. The letter urged the university's management to show “Its support for its trans staff and students” and to demonstrate a recognition that trans people are a ‘vulnerable minority’.

The committee also mass emailed approximately 2,000 staff members and research students and, according to The Times, urged them to protest the event.

The university’s Staff-Student Solidarity Network supported UCU Edinburgh’s exhorting a protest of this book launch. On social media the SSSN accused the university of spreading ‘transphobic hate’ by hosting the event and promoted the demonstration, advising protestors to ‘wear face coverings’.

As we have reported previously, UCU Edinburgh has twice participated in the cancellation of screenings of Adult Human Female, a documentary film which examines the clash between women’s rights and trans activism.

An academic union, the very organisation which should be fighting with every fibre of its being to defend freedom of speech and expression, is campaigning to supress books and documentaries. What a time to be alive.

The book launch went ahead at a lecture theatre on campus. About 70 trans activists, heeding the instruction of UCU Edinburgh and encouraged by the Staff-Student Solidarity Network, descended on the event.

IMAGE CREDIT: Ross Paterson

Attendees described being intimidated and even assaulted by the demonstrators who chanted ‘shame on you’ at each person entering the building.

IMAGE CREDIT: Generic Eddie

Marion Calder of For Women Scotland reported that some trans activists sat on the floor by a security barrier and attempted to prevent attendees from entering the building. “Women who came along for a book were crying because their legs were being grabbed by people as they tried to get by the barrier”, she said. “It’s incredible to think you can be assaulted at a book launch.”

Wednesday 11th October - This Never Happens

REDUXX: A trans-identified male nurse has confessed to the brutal murder of an elderly man in his care.

A 24-year-old trans-identified male has admitted to killing his 82-year-old patient in the victim’s home in the Braunau district of Austria. Due to Austria’s privacy laws, the victim cannot be named. It has, however, been revealed that the nurse used the name ‘Paul’ when working and was active in various LGBT groups in Vienna.

Paul had been providing on-call care to the bed-ridden elderly man at his home on 5th October. Using knives he took from the kitchen, Paul stabbed his patient numerous times in the chest and head. He then telephoned the victim’s stepdaughter and she immediately alerted the police. The victim died of his injuries at the scene.

When arrested, Paul demonstrated extreme aggression and ‘massive psychological abnormalities’ so was taken to the psychiatric unit of a nearby hospital. During a police interrogation, Paul confessed to the brutal murder, claiming the victim had teased him about his ‘gender identity’. He has now been transferred from the psychiatric ward to regular detention where he awaits a murder hearing.

ORF, Austria's public broadcaster, reported this crime by referring to Paul with female pronouns. Although the article did make a brief mention of his transgender identity, it described him throughout as ‘a woman’.

Similarly, Austrian daily newspaper, Der Standard, referred to Paul as ‘a woman’ or ‘female’ throughout its coverage, failing to mention his true sex and trans status.

Thursday 12th October - Men Make The Best Women #1

Attitude Magazine has named cosplayer, Dylan Mulvaney, the winner of its inaugural Woman of the Year Award.

25-year-old Dylan Mulvaney is a TikTok celebrity who posts social media videos charting his so-called ‘days of girlhood’. He performs a gross parody of womanhood which is reliant on stereotypical femininity, often highly sexualised, and he refers to female anatomy as a ‘barbie pouch’.

Only a few years ago Mulvaney was performing in his underwear in a band called The Skivvies.

He also used to be ‘non-binary’ and used they/them pronouns. Now he’s in his ‘girlhood’ and belittling women with an offensive caricature of our sex.

Last year, when appearing on Ulta Beauty’s podcast, Mulvaney talked about learning how to apply eyeliner being a ‘lesson’ of womanhood, said he ‘absolutely can’ be a mother and declared “Mr Hollywood, I’m right here!” while pointing his ‘breasts’ at the camera. (It’s like Harvey Weinstein never happened.)

And now Attitude Magazine has named him its Woman of the Year, an award supported by Virgin Atlantic. A magazine aimed primarily at gay men, this is the first time in its almost 30 year history that the Attitude Awards have included a ‘woman of the year’. It’s almost as if they created this award for women specifically in order to present it to a man.

When X users pointed out what a slap in the face this is to all of the phenomenal lesbian and bisexual women they could have chosen, Attitude hid their replies.

And then blocked them.

Friday 13th October - Museum Piece

THE DAILY MAIL: A museum in Somerset has been forced to remove a ‘defamatory and homophobic’ exhibit which denigrated the LGB Alliance.

The Weston Museum in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset, displayed an exhibit which described the LGB Alliance as an ‘anti-trans hate group’ with ‘ties to American white supremacist organisations’.

After the LGB Alliance accused it of publishing false and defamatory information, the museum was forced to remove the offensive piece of text. However, it has yet to offer the charity a public apology. Meanwhile, on his Facebook profile, the exhibit artist, Aaron Lock, is claiming to have been ‘censored’.  

Also Today - Witch Burning In Glasgow

UNHERD: Trans activists tried to sabotage a feminist conference by bullying its venue and harassing attendees.

FiLiA is a female-led volunteer organisation which works to promote and defend women’s rights and wellbeing. Its annual conference was held in Glasgow this week and focused on sex-based injustices and male violence against women.

You may remember that, two years ago, we reported on trans activists descending on and trying to sabotage the FiLiA conference in Portsmouth. The now familiar aggression and insults were in evidence; placards threatening sexual violence outside the venue while women spoke of rape and domestic abuse inside.

Nothing has changed and, yet again, an event centred on female rights and issues is unconscionable to trans activists who, with their usual misogynistic vitriol, tried to have it cancelled.

An organisation called Glasgow Trans Rally posted endlessly on its Instagram account, describing the FiLiA conference as ‘transphobic’ and encouraging followers to bully the venue and harass the organisers. 

It also tried to involve venue staff.

Only two days before the conference, the venue gave into the bullying of the trans activists and informed FiLiA that it would be cancelling the event. Legal advice determined that to cancel the event would risk contravening the law. Consequently, as per FiLiA’s statement made on the eve of the event, the conference went ahead.

Glasgow Trans Rally still couldn’t stand the thought of women meeting to talk about male violence and female oppression and organised a demonstration at the venue on the first morning of the conference.

Lesbian rights activist, Jenny Watson, posted on social media that the drag performer in Glasgow LGBTQ venue, The Polo Lounge, was encouraging patrons to join the demonstration against the FiLiA conference. The drag performer in question is Tom Harlow, self proclaimed ‘Cabaret Against Hate’ who regularly tries to derail feminist events and meetings with his song-mangling karaoke routine.

In a video posted by Jenny, Harlow states that “Transphobes, bigots and TERFs are not fucking welcome in Glasgow” and then proclaims, “We fucking hate Joanna [Cherry]” while miming a punching action with his fist.

The venue doesn’t seem like a safe place for the lesbians as Jenny also reported. She was surrounded, harassed and, eventually, thrown out. “This is the new homophobia and lesbians are at the bottom of the hierarchy.”

At the conference, trans activists protested outside the venue from 8.30am in the morning.

They intimidated women attending the event (as well as upsetting commuters).

Over 1,000 delegates from around the world gathered at FiLiA to discuss issues such as femicide, male violence against women and girls, sexual exploitation and FGM. Meanwhile, outside the event, Tom Harlow lead the trans activist mob in singing “Fuck you very, very much” at them.

Standing right behind Harlow, protesting a feminist conference, was Scottish Greens councillor, trans-identified male, Elaine Gallagher.

Meanwhile, another Glasgow City Councillor, Roza Salih of the SNP, was addressing the conference. Salih was an asylum seeker from Southern Kurdistan who fled to Scotland in 2001 after three members of her family were executed for their opposition to Saddam Hussein. She is a human rights campaigner who advocates for asylum seekers and was on a panel talking about migrant women and poverty.

Both sides, eh?

Saturday 14th October - It’s a Cult

THE TELEGRAPH: A young woman wrote about her sister’s indoctrination by the gender cult and the devastating effect on their family.

The anonymous author explained that her sister, to whom she was extremely close in childhood, struggled to fit in at school and had issues with her appearance. As her mental health deteriorated, the girl was bullied over her gender non-conformity, started to self-harm, refused to go to school and began receiving counselling at the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). Unbeknown to her family, she had already started telling her friends that she was trans.

During the Covid lockdown, the young girl, by then fifteen years old, spent much of her time online. Her parents believed she was just keeping in touch with friends but, in reality, she was immersing herself in transgender ideology and obsessing over trans influencers. Eventually, she sent her mother a message saying “I’ve known since I was born that I am in the wrong body”. She wanted to be known by a boy’s name and change her pronouns, demanding puberty blockers and a double mastectomy.

Her distraught parents were reticent to affirm their daughter’s ‘gender identity’, resulting in extreme family tension and the girl making the threats of suicide, as she’d be taught to do online. “There was something weirdly robotic about it, as if she had been indoctrinated and was following a script.”

When the girl returned to school after lockdown, she collapsed and was rushed to A&E. Already taking antidepressants and anxiety medication, she had overdosed on paracetamol. When CAMHS were informed, she told them her parents had refused to accept her ‘gender identity’, resulting in an ‘extremely upsetting’ visit from a social worker. Furthermore, the CAMHS therapist was later discovered to have encouraged the girl to attend a support group for ‘trans children’ run by trans-identified adults.

Last year, the girl, then aged 17, was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. She finally understood the cause of her gender issues and realised how she had been influenced online. “She told us she had felt vulnerable and isolated going into lockdown, and had completely immersed herself online and found this ready-made support system of trans people. The way she described it, it was more like a cult than a community. She recognises she was sucked into thinking she was someone she wasn’t.”

The girl’s sister wrote about her own experiences of this traumatic time: “I couldn’t tell my friends about any of this. I was afraid I would be labelled transphobic and unloving for refusing to blindly accept that my sister was really a boy. I badly wanted to support her, but I knew my sister so well, and knew this wasn’t who she was… There are strict rules my generation is expected to follow when it comes to trans, and I know I’d be breaking them if I told the full story and how it made me feel.”

Sunday 15th October - This Never Happens

REDUXX: A trans-identified male convicted of beating a woman to death has been deemed ‘vulnerable’ by a US court and will receive special privileges and protections.

Zera Lola Zombie, formerly known as Daniel Lee Smith, is currently serving a 35-year sentence for the brutal killing of Samantha Brown in 2014. 24-year-old Brown, the mother of four young children, was Smith’s girlfriend at the time. Her dead body was discovered in the trailer where he had been living. She had been beaten and bludgeoned and her cause of death was recorded as blunt force trauma to the head. Smith pleaded guilty to manslaughter and assault to avoid a potential murder conviction which could have seen him jailed for life.

In 2020 Smith began identifying as transgender. He altered his legal sex on official documents and started taking cross-sex hormones. In September 2021, now calling himself Zera Lola Zombie, he filed a lawsuit against the state of Oregon, alleging discrimination on the basis of his gender identity. He argued that the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) had violated his rights by housing him in a men’s prison and placing him in a cell with a man convicted of violence against women. He alleged that he was sexually assaulted by his cellmate and then that he was ‘deliberately and maliciously misgendered’ by prison officers.

At this time, Smith was transferred to the Coffee Creek Women’s Correctional Facility. He was retuned to a male prison almost immediately. Reduxx contacted the ODOC for further details of this hasty return to the male estate but Media Manager, Amber Campbell, could not provide any information.

Last month, Smith’s lawyers filed a motion seeking his designation as a ‘vulnerable person’ and requesting that he be housed in a private cell, accommodated on a unit with no sex offenders and transferred to a women’s facility as soon as possible. On 8th September, just one day after the motion was filed, an Oregon Court designated Smith a ‘vulnerable person’ and ordered the ODOC to comply with a number of his demands, including private accommodation. The court rejected his request for a transfer to the female estate, however.

On 30th September, the court issued a follow-up order extending the motion. It affirmed Zombie’s ‘vulnerable’ status and granted him an ‘extraordinary remedy’. Among the special protections Zombie will now receive because of his ‘gender identity’ are a fully private cell where he cannot be ‘viewed while nude by male inmates and staff’ and separate meal and medication times so that he can avoid inmates against whom he has previously filed complaints. Furthermore, he will be permitted to shower and dress in private, suggesting that female prison staff will now be responsible for his cell inspections and physical examinations.

Also Today - Men Make The Best Women #2

THE LONDON ECONOMIC: Trans-identified male, India Willoughby, is a Women of the Year nominee.

The Women of the Year foundation was established in 1955 by Antonella Kerr, Marchioness of Lothian (‘Tony’), to celebrate the achievements of women in all walks of life. Each year it hosts an awards lunch for the 450 nominees who are “Carefully handpicked in recognition of their achievements and contributions to society and the wider world”. Each guest is regarded and honoured as a ‘Woman of the Year’.

This year one of the nominees to be honoured at that annual lunch is a man.

India (formerly Jonathan) Willoughby

58-year-old India (formerly Jonathan) Willoughby is a trans-identified male who has fathered a son. He enjoyed an unremarkable career as a regional TV reporter until, aged fifty, he announced that he ‘identified as a woman’ and embarked on transition. His new gender identity temporarily helped to boost his career and he became a regular panellist on ITV’s Loose Women and presented Channel 5 News.

In 2018 he appeared, briefly, on Celebrity Big Brother. In one memorable scene, believing that he had been ‘misgendered’, a raging Willoughby screamed at and bullied the female contestants. Singling out 80-year-old actress, Amanda Barrie, he yelled at her, “I’m a real woman, Amanda! I’m glad that’s sinking in. I’m going to say it one more time so it really penetrates! I am a real woman!”

As is so often the case with this ideology, what constitutes a ‘real woman’ to Willoughby relies on the damagaing stereotypes of conventional femininity to which he so desperately tries to cling.

He appeared on Woman's Hour a few years ago to discuss a news story about the Dorchester Hotel insisting that female employees having to shave their legs when wearing hosiery. Willoughby said that hair removal is a 'grooming standard' to which women should adhere & implied that they are ‘grubby’ if they don’t. Host, Jenni Murray, asked him how he would have reacted if he had been required to shave his legs when ‘living as a man’, he responded, “What a bizarre question, Jenni. Why would I shave my legs when I was living as a man?”

His attitude is hardly a surprise. Willoughby has demonstrated his misogyny on countless occasions and constantly vents his anger at the women who refuse to play along with his cosplaying of their sex.

Because she speaks up in defence of women’s rights and spaces, Willoughby has likened JK Rowling to Hitler.

He also urged legal action against JK Rowling when she objected to a children’s charity appointing a paedophile apologist as a trustee. (For a former journalist, Willoughby doesn’t seem overly concerned about facts.)

He attacks Sharron Davies because she speaks out in defence of women’s sport.

He tried to sabotage Amelia Strickler’s sponsorship deals and training opportunities when she did the same.

His rampant lesbophobia is frequently in evidence.

Without a trace of irony, he describes gender non-conforming lesbians as dressing and behaving ‘like blokes’.

He can be shockingly homophobic, too.

On one occasion he expressed the view that the UK needs ‘a barbed wire fence like Trump’s’ to prevent migrants from entering the country.

And this is how talks about another trans person.

The Women of the Year foundation claims, “We are still upholding [the founder] Tony’s vision and still recognising and applauding all the women who play their part in making our world a better place for everyone”.

So they’ve nominated a venomous, misogynistic male who bullies women, sneers at lesbians and would gleefully strip females of their sex-based rights and spaces?

I doubt that’s what Tony had in mind.

See you next week.