A Week in the War on Women: Monday 28th October - Sunday 3rd November

Monday 28th October - Leave The Kids Alone

THE TIMES: Former Mermaids CEO, Susie Green, is flouting the ban on puberty blockers and remains determined to medicalise vulnerable children.

We have reported previously on Susie Green. She was the Chair of disgraced charity, Mermaids, from 2011 until 2015 and then the CEO of Mermaids from 2016 until her sudden departure in November 2022. She famously took her young son to Thailand to undergo ‘sex reassignment surgery’ on his sixteenth birthday, circumventing the age limit of 18 for such surgeries in the UK. She would later give a TED Talk in which she openly admitted that having a feminine little boy who ‘was probably gay’ and liked ‘girls’ toys’ made her husband extremely uncomfortable.

There is also video footage of Green laughing about the fact that the puberty suppressants taken by her son in childhood meant there ‘wasn’t much to work with’ when he underwent genital surgery the moment he turned sixteen.

After leaving Mermaids, Green went on to work for the notorious GenderGP, an offshore private gender clinic of very dubious reputation which has been caught out supplying hormones to minors online without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

In July we reported that Green had launched a new private gender clinic of her own. Anne Healthcare supplies puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones “To transgender people of all ages”. It has no lower age limit.

Green had intended that the clinic would “Exploit a legal loophole” to bypass the government’s ban on puberty blockers in England, Scotland and Wales by routing them through Northern Ireland. However, only a few weeks after the clinic opened, the government not only renewed the ban on puberty blockers, it extended the embargo to Northern Ireland, scuppering Green’s plans.

This week, The Times reported that Green’s new clinic still offers access to puberty blockers for children having ‘secured a legal route using a network of families’ outside the UK. The clinic’s website states that the drugs can be prescribed by doctors outside the UK and will then be despatched to an ‘EU destination’ for collection.

It should be remembered that Green has no training or background in any medical or clinical field. Prior to taking up her paid appointment as Mermaids’ CEO, she worked in IT. Yet, despite the recommendations of the Cass Review, she still seems determined to push vulnerable children into becoming lifelong medical patients.

As Transgender Trend point out, “Susie Green is free to reveal her true self now she's no longer CEO of Mermaids… To go to such lengths to get children onto puberty blockers, against all evidence, shows someone who is a danger to children”.

Also Today - Within These Walls

THE TELEGRAPH: A woman with so-called ‘masculine features’ was housed overnight in a maximum security men’s prison.

An investigation has been launched after a dangerous error meant a female prisoner was placed in the male estate.

The woman in question had appeared at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court and was remanded in custody. She was then inaccurately processed as a man and taken to HMP Perth, a maximum security men’s prison. According to a prison source, an assumption of her sex had been made based on the woman’s ‘masculine features’. It was only later, when a more thorough search was carried out by prison staff, did it become clear that the inmate is a woman, not a man.

By the time the error came to light, it was too late to move her. Emergency measures had to be put in place to keep her in segregation at HMP Perth overnight. She was transferred to Cornton Vale, Scotland’s women’s prison, the following day.

HMP Perth - IMAGE CREDIT: The Daily Record

The prison source told the paper, “This is a complete embarrassment for everyone involved. Taking a female to a male prison and leaving her there is a shocker. An assumption was made, based on someone’s appearance and not much else. Gender in the prison system has become such a hot topic that management will be mortified by this”.

For Women Scotland told The Telegraph that this incident demonstrated the danger of the ‘sloppy recording and reporting of sex’ thanks to gender identity ideology. “They have to stop being frightened of recording a person’s sex. Sex should be recorded on every sheet the police give to the prison service and the prison service should also be asking for that. This woman has definitely been put at risk. It’s incredibly dangerous for any woman to be in a male prison.”

Tuesday 29th October - Fox in the Henhouse

REDUXX: A trans-identified male was admitted to a female rehabilitation unit where he sexually harassed and physically assaulted vulnerable women.

‘John’ (a pseudonym) is a rehabilitative specialist who was formerly employed at the Behavioural Health Network (BHN) in Massachusetts. He worked with clients on an all-female unit which is intended for women who have been placed under a mandatory rehabilitation order.

In August 2023, a group of women newly admitted to the unit included a trans-identified male whom Reduxx refers to as ‘Kelly’ (a pseudonym). John says that it was immediately obvious Kelly is male, especially as he had visible stubble.

Kelly was a multi-substance addict whom John described as having erratic and ‘jumpy’ behaviour. “It was almost like…extreme pent up male sexual frustration mixed with withdrawals and the stress of treatment on top of clinical anxiety and whatever other psychiatric diagnoses he had.”

Soon after Kelly’s arrival at BHN, there were numerous incidents of his sexually and physically harassing women on the unit. Reduxx were provided with an email chain showing internal BHN communications regarding Kelly’s behaviour to female clients.

One of the counsellors wrote in an email, “It was reported to me by a client that they overheard [Kelly] making inappropriate sexual comments to [Jennifer]. I brought [Jennifer] into the office to ask her if anyone has been causing an issue or making her feel uncomfortable. She was hesitant to say at first but then said it seems like you already know. I told her I needed to hear it from her. She then told me that [Kelly] has been making inappropriate comments and that is why she has been staying in her room.” The counsellor added that Kelly had asked Jennifer to meet him in the single-stall bathroom.

A BHN supervisor responded to the counsellor’s email saying that the issues were not just isolated to Kelly’s behaviour towards Jennifer, but that he had also been ‘aggressive sexually and physically’ with other women on the unit.

John reports that, despite this behaviour, Kelly was permitted to complete his treatment on the women’s unit. He added, “The risk of allowing any males onto an all female unit is too much. Most of these women were on and off the streets, had to resort to sex work, and a decent amount of them, I hesitate to give you an exact percentage,  had sexual assault trauma. It is completely unfair to them to be forced into treatment with males against their will. They should have the right to opt into all-female treatment”.

Tragically, Jennifer died of an overdose shortly after leaving the unit. John told Reduxx, “One of the last experiences of this young woman’s life was being sexually harassed on an all-female unit by a man who shouldn’t have been there”.

Wednesday 30th October - This Never Happens

REDUXX: A ‘non binary’ and ‘genderqueer’ male who is ‘curious about being a female’ has been arrested for possession of child sexual abuse images.

It’s always the ones you least suspect.

Cody Dillon Emmerson is a 38-year-old man from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who identifies as ‘non-binary’ and ‘genderqueer’. On his social media accounts, he uses they/them pronouns and has posted about being under the ‘transgender umbrella’.

On 10th October, Emerson was arrested after law enforcement officers linked him to a Google account in which 600 child sexual abuse images had been stored. According to an arrest report obtained by Reduxx, he admitted to police officers that he had knowingly downloaded child sexual abuse images and pointed them to a laptop and an external hard drive which contained further material. Emerson told officers that he sought out child sexual abuse materials of girls, some as young as nine, because he was ‘curious about being a female’ and it ‘sexually stimulated’ him.

Thursday 31st October - Leave The Kids Alone 2

THE NEW YORK SUN: Boston Children’s Hospital reduced by eightfold the time psychologists spend assessing dysphoric children for medical interventions.

Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) houses a gender clinic called the Gender Multispecialty Service, or GeMS. It has been revealed that, over the last decade, the BCH gender clinic drastically reduced the time allocated to mental health clinicians for determining whether to medicalise so-called ‘transgender children’.

During the early 2010s, administrators at the BCH gender clinic usually allocated at least 20 hours, if not more, for their in-house psychologists to assess gender-distressed children before referring them to endocrinologists to be treated medically. By the late 2010s, however, this time had been cut in half.

The assessment time was then reduced further still. By around 2018, the clinic’s assessment policy meant that gender-distressed children received only a one-hour appointment with a psychologist. The patient would then spend a further hour with that clinician together with their family. Just two hours spent with a child before deciding whether or not he or she should be referred onwards to be prescribed puberty blockers or even cross-sex hormones.

Dr Amy Tishelman

Dr Amy Tishelman is widely regarded as a leader in paediatric gender medicine and began working at BCH gender clinic in 2013. In 2020 she filed a law suit against the hospital, alleging age and sex discrimination and retaliation. BCH fired her the following year, claiming that she violated a patient-privacy law. Dr Tishelman’s case is currently being heard in Boston’s Suffolk County Superior Court and it is from the witness box there that she made these shocking revelations about the time allocated to ‘trans children’ by hospital psychologists. She described the policy as ‘reckless’.

In 2019, the hospital stripped Dr Tishelman of her right to see patients in the gender clinic. By doing so, she claims that BCH compromised her vital research into the care of gender-distressed minors. When she was fired two years later she says that the hospital terminated her other research, including her attempt to establish a database of all the children treated at the gender clinic and to follow up with those who had reached adulthood. 

Dr Yee-Ming Chan, BCH Medical Director, was Dr Tishelman’s supervisor when she worked at the hospital. He is described as ‘a pillar’ of paediatric gender medicine. Last week we reported on Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an influential gender clinician who suppressed the results of a multi-million dollar puberty blockers study because it found no evidence that the drugs improved the patients’ mental health. Dr Chan is a co-principal investigator on this very same study.

Friday 1st November - A Dark Day in Deutschland

THE SPECTATOR: Germany’s new self-ID legislation will not only devastate the rights of women there, but it is also deeply concerning for women everywhere.

On Friday, Germany’s Self Determination Act came into effect, erasing the rights and safety of women in the country. The law enables German citizens to change their name and legal sex - even having the gender marker removed altogether - by making a simple declaration at a registry office. There are no formal requirements and neither medical diagnosis nor physical alteration are necessary.

Allowing legal sex to be based purely on self-identification, removing the previous judicial and medical requirements, means that any man in Germany can now fill out a bit of paperwork and be legally regarded as a woman. (If he changes his mind, he can go back to being male in a year’s time.) Furthermore, the law prevents any disclosure of his true sex. Those intentionally disclosing a trans-identified individual’s ‘dead’ (ie former) name and/or their true sex will face fines of up to €10,000 (around £8,000).

The new law also allows children as young as 14 to change their legal sex and name, even against their parents’ wishes if their application is approved by a family court. Parents can apply to legally change the sex of children under the age of 14. What an absolute gift to the homophobic parents of gay and/or gender non-conforming kids.

Reem Alsalem, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has expressed her alarm at the enacting of this legislation. “The Gender Self-Determination Act lacks the needed safeguards to prevent abuse of the process by sexual predators and other perpetrators of abuse and violence, including in single-sex spaces”, she said.

She emphasised that the new law has serious implications for the safety of women and girls in spaces such as shelters, bathrooms and changing rooms and warned that it does not take into account the female victims of male violence who could be re-traumatised or feel compelled to self-exclude if forced to share spaces with males.

She added, “These challenges are further exacerbated by the Act’s ban on disclosing without consent, investigating, or inquiring about a person’s previously recorded legal sex and name. This would have a substantial impact on freedom of opinion and expression, as well as on freedom of thought, conscience and religion, respectively.”

This law is not just devastating for our sisters in Germany; it also has alarming implications for all women. As Julie Bindel writes in The Spectator, “The Self-Determination Act is a worrying moment for women everywhere because there is a risk that other countries may find inspiration in this law. Germany has a lot of influence over what happens in the rest of Europe”.

Saturday 2nd November - This Unsporting Life

QUILETTE: It is alleged that a trans-identified male volleyball player targeted one of his own team mates after she protested his inclusion in women’s sport.

The San José State University (SJSU) women’s volleyball team has been much in the news recently over its inclusion of trans-identified male, Blaire Fleming. The 6ft 1in tall outside hitter/right side player has helped his team achieve a huge level of success on the court this season. He is only second from the top of the SJSU Spartan’s leader board in sets played, blocks, or ‘kills’ (powerful offensive shots that are unreturnable by the opposing team). Unsurprisingly.

However, a number of female players are not standing for this outrage and they are protesting Fleming’s inclusion in their sport. Thus far, five women’s college volleyball teams - Southern Utah, Boise State, Wyoming, Utah State and Nevada - have forfeited games rather than play against the SJSU squad.

One of Fleming’s own team mates - the SJSU co-captain, Brooke Slusser - is also making her feelings known and speaking publicly against Fleming’s inclusion on her team. Furthermore, she has joined a lawsuit filed earlier this year against the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) over its Title IX inclusion of trans male athletes in women’s college sports.

Blaire Fleming - IMAGE CREDIT: Toronto Sun

This week, Quillette reported that another woman is raising her voice in defence of female sport. The Associate Head Coach of the SJSU women’s volleyball team, Melissa Batie-Smoose, has also spoken up to protest Blaire Fleming’s inclusion on the team for which she is responsible.

On 29th October, Batie-Smoose filed a 33-page sworn declaration with officials at SJSU, the Mountain West Conference, and the NCAA, asking them to investigate ‘the overt favouritism’ she believes the college has shown to Fleming and the measures she alleges that SJSU officials have taken to suppress the voices of those players who have tried to express their opposition.

Among her allegations are that head coach, Todd Kress, ‘bent over backwards’ to accommodate Fleming on the squad, allowing him to take liberties with the team’s dress code, training schedule and even basic standards of behaviour expected of all other squad members. Batie-Smoose believes that Kress is acting on the direct orders of the school’s Athletics Department. She describes a ‘toxic’ atmosphere of fear and self-censorship and says that the SJSU team’s female players are pressured into silence by allegations of bigotry and warnings to keep quiet.

Melissa Batie-Smoose

Batie-Smoose has chosen to make public her concerns due to the growing evidence that Fleming’s inclusion in the team is not only unfair but also dangerous. She described two different incidents during which Fleming downed female players with a ‘kill shot’ to their heads. She alleges that even Fleming’s own team mates are concerned about their safety on court with him.

Shockingly, Batie-Smoose also maintains that Blaire Fleming planned an attack against Brooke Slusser in revenge for her opposition to his playing on the women’s team.

It is alleged that Fleming conspired with Malaya Jones, a member of the Colorado State University women’s volleyball team with which SJSU had a game the following day. The pair reportedly engineered a plan which involved Fleming leaving the centre of the court open so that Jones could target Slusser with powerful spikes, or ‘kill shots’. Their clandestine meeting appears to have been witnessed by another SJSU player who confessed to what she had heard after the match had taken place.

In her complaint, Batie-Smoose states that during the match against Colorado, Fleming’s playing style was bizarre; he defied his coach’s instructions and allowed Jones an unhindered diagonal hitting lane that exposed Slusser to her ‘kill shots’. Batie-Smoose maintains that, at one point, “Blaire sent an over pass, perfectly setting up Malaya to kill the ball again in the direction of Brooke Slusser, after [which] Jones blew a kiss toward Fleming and mouthed ‘thank you’”.

SJSU lost that game in straight sets. It was the team’s first defeat of the season.

Writing in Outkick, sports journalist, Dan Zaksheske, notes, “If these allegations are true, they are incredibly serious. Not only would Fleming have thrown a match, Fleming would have knowingly and purposefully endangered a teammate”. Quite.

Only days after the Quillette article was published, San José State University suspended Melissa Batie-Smoose.

Sunday 3rd November - Misogyny in UNISON

THE TIMES: The president of the UK’s biggest trade union described the nurses fighting for women’s rights and privacy in the workplace as ‘anti-trans bigots’.

UNISON is the UK’s largest union with over 1.3 million members. Representing those who work in public services and utilities, UNISON is the biggest trade union for NHS staff. Unsurprisingly, more than two thirds of UNISON members are women.

We have written previously about the group of courageous nurses who have taken legal action against the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust after being robbed of their single sex changing facilities.

The nurses are all employed at Darlington Memorial Hospital. Since August 2023 they have been forced to share their changing room with a 26-year-old trans-identified male who calls himself ‘Rose’. By his own admission, ‘Rose’ does not take cross-sex hormones as he and his female partner are trying to conceive a child. His one concession to his self-declared ‘gendered identity’ is, apparently, long hair. Otherwise, ‘Rose’ still presents as very obviously as male. But the trust’s policy advocates that staff with a trans identity can self-identify into any changing room they choose.

The nurses say that ‘Rose’ stares openly at their breasts when they are in a state of undress, walks around in his boxer shorts and lingers in their changing room ‘longer than necessary’. The changing room is open plan and does not have individual changing cubicles so the women have no escape from ‘Rose’ when they are undressing Obviously, they have found this situation ‘intimidating and upsetting’.

One nurse spoke to The Daily Mail about being forced to share a locker room with ‘Rose’. Sexually abused as a child, this woman has PTSD and struggles to be alone around males. She described an incident during which ‘Rose’ repeatedly asked her if she was going to get undressed, leaving her upset and traumatised.

“I was rummaging in my bag trying to find my lanyard and keys for the locker when a man’s voice behind me said, ‘Are you not getting changed yet?’. He stood there, two metres away from me, with a scrub top on and with tight black boxer shorts with holes in them and asked a third time whether I was getting changed yet. Flight or fight mode kicked in but I felt glued to my seat, I could not move. My hands started to sweat. I was petrified and felt sick and began hyperventilating.”

Another nurse told the paper that many of her colleagues are women from different faiths and cultures and, for them, undressing in the presence of a male is impossible. “They've found this extremely difficult and they don't really want to come forward because they're frightened they're going to lose their jobs”, she said.

When the nurses tried to complain to the hospital’s management about this intolerable situation, they were ignored. However, they did suddenly find themselves in an ‘impromptu meeting’ at which an HR manager told them they ‘need to compromise’. They had no choice but to take legal action against the NHS. When the nurses lodged their initial complaint, they contacted their trade union, UNISON, for advice. They did not receive a response.

This week, Steve North, the president of UNISON made comments on social media about the nurse’s case. Instead of supporting their right to safety and privacy in the workplace, he described their legal case as ‘anti-Trans bigotry’ (his capitalisation). He added, “In our year of LGBT+ workers, I stand, as UNISON President with the Trans community”. But not for the rights of women, presumably?

The head of a trade union with one million women members is supporting a fully intact heterosexual man to use a female locker room in the workplace. Furthermore, he has vilified the courageous women defending their legal sex-based rights.

Following North’s social media outburst, Times journalist, Janice Turner, contacted UNISON and asked if the union will defend its female members who are forced by managers to undress with trans-identifying males. She was told, “The union is not involved in the [Darlington] case and it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to comment”.

Steve North - IMAGE CREDIT: Facebook

Ironically, when social media users responded negatively to Steve North’s comments about the Darlington nurses, he protected his X/Twitter account.

Perhaps Steve does understand the importance of privacy after all?

See you next week.