Down and Out in Beverly Hills Part 1
Update 364
I am splitting this into two to make it more digestible, dear readers.
Sticking with gay icons, No 31 in the Leading Female Season is Bette Midler in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
The plot is convoluted so, if you haven’t seen it, you’ll just have to watch it 😊
Nick Nolte is Jerry Baskin
Bette Midler is Barbara Whiteman
Richard Dreyfuss is Dave Whiteman
Elizabeth Pena is Carmen the Maid
Little Richard is Orvis Goodnight
Possibly the only film ever stolen by a dog! Apart from Lassie, of course!
Thanks to two wonderful readers for suggesting some of the pieces below.
Local Elections
So, as expected, Labour did very well and the Tories collapsed. Doesn’t augur well for the general election. However, I am concentrating here on the five Party of Women candidates and, in all the circumstances, I think they did really well. This is taking into account:
POW was only very recently registered, they had very little time to prepare and they had limited funding;
They had no national coverage whatsoever in terms of people finding out about POW;
People tend to avoid voting for minor parties, even if they support them, because they don’t think they stand a chance.
Here are the results:
Wolverham, Ellesmere Port
Labour 576
Greens 73
Independent 64
Sally James(POW) 42
Lib Dems 35
Tories 31
Fallings Park, Wolverhampton
Labour 1299
Tories 716
Charlotte Hawkins(POW)161
Lib Dems 113
Minster, Lincoln
Labour 816
Tories 457
Reform 129
Greens 89
Lib Dems 85
Esther Knight(POW) 84
Park Ward, Lincoln
Labour 672
Lib Dems 343
Greens 152
Tories 107
Reform 92
Sarah Freeman (POW) 83
Davenport and Cale Green , Stockport
Labour 1923
Lib Dems 548
Greens 425
Reform 283
Tories 266
Tara Hughes (POW) 139
All thoughts gratefully received.
Here is Kellie-Jay’s take on it all.
In our constituency, three Conservatives were elected. I will be writing to them about:
The local school;
The local library;
The unisex toilets in the local park.
Simon Foster (Labour) was re-elected as Police and Crime Commissioner for the West Midlands. I will be contacting him about:
Strip searches by men larping as women;
Collection of data re offenders;
The policing of any women’s rights events in the West Midlands;
Non-crime hate incidents.
Watch this space!
Gender GP Judgment
I reported on this important judgment here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/nine-to-five-part-1
Rachel Roberts in The Epoch Times ( Court Rules Autistic Anorexic Teenager Cannot Be Given Cross-Sex Hormones 02 May) reports:
In a potential legal landmark, a judge has ruled that doctors who administer cross sex-hormones to under-18s with private prescriptions from gender clinics could be in breach of the law if they have not obtained permission from a court.
Judge Sir Andrew McFarlane was presiding over the case of an anorexic, autistic 16-year-old girl with complex mental health problems who was prescribed both puberty blockers and a “dangerously high dose” of testosterone injections when she was just 15, following a one hour consultation with a private gender clinic based in Singapore.
The child’s mother had allowed the testosterone to be injected by an NHS GP who accepted the private prescription, but her father did not agree and argued that his daughter lacked the mental capacity to consent to such life-altering treatment and took legal action under the Children’s Act of 1989.
The girl, known as J in the family court proceedings, had begun to “identify” as a boy at 12, using a male name and pronouns, before she was diagnosed as autistic and anorexic at 13.
She had gone through bouts of self-harming and was detained in a psychiatric unit under the mental health act for nine months from September 2021, suffering from malnutrition.
In October 2022, after her release from psychiatric care, the girl sought treatment from an online, Singapore-based clinic known as Gender GP, which charges patients an initial “set up fee” of £190 then a monthly subscription plus the cost of prescriptions.
Aged just 15, the teenager was given a prescription for both puberty blockers and testosterone injections after a short online assessment with a counsellor from Gender GP. She did not take the puberty blockers but the cross-sex hormone injection was administered every six weeks by her NHS GP.
In his ruling, handed down yesterday, the judge said that a child being prescribed high doses of testosterone from an “off-shore, online, unregulated private clinic” gave rise to “serious concerns as to the safety of patients.”
Gillick Competence Applies to Under-16s
The father, who separated from the mother when J was aged ten, appealed to the court in April 2023 to halt the treatment to his daughter on the grounds of consent and mental competence, arguing that under-18s should not be given cross-sex hormones outside of NHS gender services.
Since his application, however, there had been a degree of consensus by all parties involved—including the girl herself. She had stopped taking the testosterone, and her legal representative and both parents now agree that she should seek a more comprehensive assessment at a gender clinic in the UK.
The full article is here:
Really excellent analysis of the judgment here by Transgender Trend.
President of the Family Division issues warning against GenderGP (02 May).
A judgment was handed down on Wednesday by Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division, on a case in the family court concerning an adolescent girl (J) who had accessed testosterone from GenderGP at age 15, with support from the mother. The parents are separated and the case was brought by the father who also sought judgment on the wider issue of blockers and hormones being prescribed to under-18s. The full judgment can be read here.
[note: the judge refers to Child J as ‘he.’ We refer to Child J as a girl, for clarity of understanding]
The case concerns an autistic adolescent girl with significant mental health problems who was given dangerous levels of testosterone as a treatment by an unregulated private provider in partnership with a UK GP on the basis of an online questionnaire and a single online session with an unregistered counsellor, without the most basic medical checks.
The father’s concerns have been completely vindicated about what was described by the Court appointed expert as a ‘highly abnormal and frankly negligent approach’ offered by GenderGP, the online unregulated gender clinic operating out of Spain.
The ruling in this case is highly significant regarding:
That it may be legally appropriate for the court to override a child’s consent to medical intervention in the form of cross-sex hormones even over the age of 16.
The position of private gender clinics, specifically in regard to the warning issued by the President of the Family Division about the negligence of GenderGP.
Cases where one parent supports and the other parent opposes hormone medication for their child. Given the new NHS service specification restricting prescription of blockers and hormones, it is likely that future cases will involve private providers.
It is also significant that the judge chose to go ahead with this case. He need not have taken the case further once Child J had backed down on the issue of continuation with testosterone injections, and reached an alternative agreement to undergo a six month assessment at new private clinic Gender Plus.
The Court ruling was essentially that there was an acceptance of this way forward between the parties so there was no need at present for further action. However, the case may be reopened if the option of Child J resorting again to GenderGP for a further prescription is raised.
Given the shocking details of the ‘treatment’ administered by GenderGP, the judgment states:
‘Both parents, J, his guardian and the court now have significant concerns over the involvement of Gender GP to date.’
The judge clarified that a court may overrule a child’s capacity to give consent for an over 16 year-old, even where there is no issue of mental capacity:
‘In Re W the Court of Appeal [Lord Donaldson MR, Balcombe and Nolan LJJ] held that the inherent jurisdiction remains available for a court to intervene and override consent given by an over 16-year-old where the consequences of the young person’s decision are of sufficient gravity to justify the court’s intervention. Examples of the level of gravity necessary are where the young person is likely to suffer severe permanent injury or irreversible mental or physical harm.’
The final draft of the judgment had been largely completed before the Cass Review final report had been published, and the judgment is based only on the evidence and submissions that were before the court at the conclusion of the February hearing. The judge notes that:
‘In the circumstances, other than summarising the father’s wider legal case for the record, it is neither necessary nor appropriate to analyse and determine the issues he raises in any detail in this judgment.’
And concludes:
‘Finally, and in the knowledge that the court’s approach to the determination of issues relating to gender dysphoria in children and young people under the age of 18 years is still developing, the court has been asked to provide some guidance in the light of lessons that may have been learned during the present proceedings.’
The evidence presented in the judgment of this case is highly disturbing. The teenager at the centre of the case fits the picture of one of the most vulnerable cohorts identified in the Cass Review, a girl with significant mental health issues who began to identify as a boy at age 12:
‘Since 2020, he has been diagnosed with anorexia and autistic spectrum disorder. There have been bouts of self-harming and, in September 2021, J was detained under the Mental Health Act 1983, for treatment pursuant to s 3 for 9 months. As a consequence of his difficulties, J did not attend mainstream schooling in 2021 and 2022 but returned to school in early 2023.’
The revelation that GenderGP thought it appropriate to prescribe testosterone to a child experiencing such severe mental health problems should be cause for urgent investigation. But what is truly horrific is that this decision was made based only on a self-completed online form and an online consultation (described as ‘extremely poor quality’ in the judgment) with a counsellor who is not registered with the Health and Care Professions Council regulator.
There was no medical examination, blood testing or other clinical evaluation and Child J had not had any direct communication with a doctor at any stage during the referral to GenderGP.
The judgment has exposed the extent of the medical malpractice by GenderGP in this case. It is striking that no UK-based endocrinologists could be found who were willing to be expert witnesses. Details were given by expert witness Dr Jacqueline Hewitt, a consultant paediatric endocrinologist based in Melbourne, Australia:
‘Dr Hewitt’s principal criticism of Gender GP’s intervention, however, relates to the dose of testosterone that was prescribed. She explained that the dosage of intra-muscular injection of testosterone [Nebido] at 1000mg/4ml every 6 weeks was at the level that one would administer to an adult only after a course of treatment that would have started at a much lower dose but built up to 1000mg/4ml over the course of two or three years.'
‘Not only did Gender GP prescribe this top-end dosage to a testosterone-naïve child, but they did so by directing a ‘loading’ (double) dose at the commencement of the treatment. Dr Hewitt advised ‘with confidence’ that ‘there is no professional society of paediatric endocrinologists internationally who would consider this anything other than a highly abnormal and frankly negligent approach’. She stated that ‘in Australia, the treatment provided by Gender GP would be unlawful’.’
Dr Hewitt continued to be concerned about the very high level of testosterone registered during regular testing of Child J’s blood:
‘In October 2023, Dr Hewitt advised that the level of testosterone in the blood was ‘dangerously high’ and that, apart from the potential for adverse long-term consequences of such a level, J was ‘presently at risk of sudden death due to thromboembolic disease’, meaning the potential for the hormone to cause thickening of the blood.’
Yet, despite the risk of sudden death, there was no gender emergency service nationally that could offer urgent assessment and treatment other than basic blood testing. This represents a dangerous gap in NHS provision for young people put at risk from unregulated private gender clinics.
During the course of these proceedings, particularly after receipt of Dr Hewitt’s worrying advice that J may be at risk of imminent death, concerted attempts were made to engage the NHS in offering assessment and, if advised, treatment for J. These efforts were unsuccessful in achieving more than basic blood testing. The reality, reluctantly accepted by the parties and the court, is that, currently, there is no relevant NHS service available for J.
Subsequently, Dr Russell Keenan, a consultant paediatric haematologist at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool, advised that blood results were effectively normal when ‘compared to reference points relevant to an adult male.’
The judgment notes that Dr Keenan considered that an adult male is the appropriate comparison with an adolescent girl. Alder Hey is the site for one of the new gender clinic hubs for children. Can we expect safe treatment for children when paediatric doctors do not recognise the difference between adolescent female and adult male bodies? Would a doctor normally compare a teenage girl’s blood results with those of an adult man?
It is noticeable throughout the judgment that, with the exception of her father, all adults around Child J, including professionals, have failed to safeguard her.
Dr Richard Eyre, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, judged that Child J’s diagnosis of autism, anorexia and social anxiety disorder did not impact on her ability to make a decision about treatment for gender dysphoria. It would be interesting to know just how serious a child’s mental health issues would have to be before he would consider a child incapable of consent to powerful hormonal medication with serious life-changing and irreversible effects.
Child J’s guardian, Sarah Gwynne, is clear that it is in Child J’s “best interests to access further hormone treatment for gender dysphoria” having been in the role of guardian for less than a year and without any basis, before the child has even been assessed.
The testosterone prescribed by GenderGP was dispensed and administered through Child J’s local NHS GP who must have been fully aware of her troubled background and physical health condition after suffering anorexia.
This girl has been spectacularly failed. She is lucky that she has a father who has tried to protect her, a legal team fully briefed on the issues and a judge who clearly recognises the importance and implications of this case and the need for continued caution:
‘Before concluding this judgment, it is right to record (by way of preliminary indication, albeit firmly given) that, on the basis of the evidence currently available, if the option of J resorting once again to Gender GP for a further prescription is raised, then there will be a need to consider very carefully (a) his capacity to consent to that particular option and (b) whether the circumstances are such that the court should exercise the inherent jurisdiction to prohibit him from doing so.’
On the subject of GenderGP the judgment concludes:
‘There must be very significant concern about the prospect of a young person such as J accessing cross-hormone treatment from any off-shore, online, unregulated private clinic. The evidence relating to Gender GP that is currently available, as analysed by Dr Hewitt, gives rise to additional serious concerns as to the safety of patients accessing cross-hormone treatment from that particular clinic. If a further referral to Gender GP is to be proposed by any party, the court will expect a detailed account from the clinic setting out their proposed course of assessment and treatment.
‘Whilst further evidence may, of course, alleviate the concerns that I have described, on the experience in these proceedings thus far, I would urge any other court faced with a case involving Gender GP to proceed with extreme caution before exercising any power to approve or endorse treatment that that clinic may prescribe.’
In light of this damning criticism and the disturbing facts recorded in this judgment, it is time for the Secretary of State to intervene to stop the operation of unregulated private clinics like GenderGP that recklessly risk the lives of vulnerable young people. A teenage girl could have died.
But NHS failings also played a part in this case and must not be overlooked: from the failure of the service to provide emergency assessment, to the actions of the various NHS medical professionals involved, there appears to be a reverence towards ‘gender’ that precludes normal standards of judgment. Urgent action is required before any more children are harmed. What will it take?
https://www.transgendertrend.com/president-of-the-family-division-issues-warning-against-gendergp/
The Cass Review
The ripples continue to spread as evidenced by Bernard Lane in Gender Clinic News:
Dutch doubt (02 May).
Two excerpts:
Australia | An article in the journal Australasian Psychiatry by academic psychiatrist Andrew Amos has noted the rapid expansion of youth gender clinics in Australia without high-quality research, external scrutiny or regular reporting of data—apart from (sometimes incomplete) responses to Freedom of Information requests. Dr Amos argues that, at the very least, public gender clinics should report “the number of new referrals and ongoing patients, relevant clinical characteristics such as natal sex and gender identity, and number of newly initiated and ongoing treatments by type.” Citing potential legal liability issues following England’s Cass report, Dr Amos says it would be “prudent” for Australia’s health authorities to acknowledge the uncertainties of the “gender-affirming” treatment model and to engage with critical voices.
And:
Europe | The medical news magazine Medscape puts the Cass report in the context of a broader European “move away from medicalised care to placing more emphasis on providing psychosocial support for [minors]”. The Finnish psychiatrist and researcher Professor Riittakerttu Kaltiala is quoted as hoping the Cass review will exert influence throughout Europe and elsewhere. Alexander Korte, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, describes the situation in Germany as “still very confused” with draft “trans-affirmative” treatment guidelines emerging at the same time as attention is called to “the lack of scientific evidence for the early medical intervention” of puberty suppression. Professor Korte said promotion of this intervention was “irresponsible because of the unclear data situation. If opposite-sex hormones are used after the puberty blockers, which is known to be the case in over 95 per cent of children treated with [these hormone suppression drugs], this leads to permanent infertility in addition to permanent impairment of the ability to experience sexuality.”
The full piece is here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/genderclinicnews/p/dutch-doubt?r=7ogxh&utm_medium=ios
Hate Crime in Queensland
Edie Wyatt on her substack, Culture and State reports:
Queensland New Hate Crimes
The Copy & Paste of female erasure (01 May)
On the first of May, Queensland began living under the Criminal Code (Serious Vilification and Hate Crimes) and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2023. You know what they say about Queensland, beautiful one day, hate crime legislation the next.
I want to tell you what Queensland was like before we had hate crime legislation, long before. I grew up in Brisbane in a time when people were allowed to hate other people freely. My mother hated National Party voters, she hated the Queensland National Party, and most of all she hated the then leader of the Queensland National Party, and long-time Premier of Queensland, Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, or as he was known in our house “that f***ing old c**t” or just “Joh”.
In my formative years, I never heard Mr Bjelke-Petersen speak on the television without a stream of screaming obscenities barrelling from my mother’s working-class mouth. I now recognise I have a completely learned response to Joh, years after his death. The mere mention of the name of the former Premier, or the sight of a picture of him, still makes me involuntarily cringe with revulsion.
To be fair, I think my mother’s estimation of Joh was pretty accurate. The corruption that flourished under Bjelke-Petersen was astonishing. When I started work in the Queensland Government in the mid-nineties, public servants told of the roaring of the shredders vibrating from George St when the National Party lost power just a few years earlier in 1989, after having reigned over Queensland since 1957. The National Party maintained power with an electoral gerrymander, and presided over a single house of parliament, Queensland having abolished the upper house under Labor in 1922.
Queensland Police Commissioner from 1976 to 1987 Terry Lewis, was later sentenced to 14 years in prison on a string of corruption and forgery charges. Brisbane was a much smaller city in those days, and I knew many people who had experienced the violent and corrupt behaviour of the Queensland Police first hand.
The weaponisation of the police for political purposes, my mother had told me many times, was a violation of the separation of powers under the Westminster system. I remember saying this in political debates, before I even knew what it meant.
This week, as I trawl through the new hate speech legislation, wondering if I should anticipate a visit from the Queensland Police Service for my outspoken gender critical stance, it is feeling a bit like the days of old in the deep north. When introducing the new progressive legislation to the media, we were led to believe that the objective of the Queensland legislation would be the banning of the Nazi symbols like the swastika. I’m not sure why this is necessary almost 80 years after our forebears defeated the Nazis with massive national sacrifice, but it has no real bearing on my life as I don’t intend to display such a symbol.
I’ve lived in Brisbane all my life and I’ve never met a Nazi, nor have I seen a swastika displayed in a public place. In addition, I see the Labor Party do little to tackle real and rising anti-Semitism in the currently political environment.
However, the legislation doesn’t ban the swastika, it bans “symbols” that the government deem to be representative of an ideology responsible for the persecution of historically oppressed groups like the “Jews, Roma people, the disabled and LGBTIQ people”.
Given that LGBTIQ people have only just been invented in the last few decades, it seems the suspicious standout in the list. Among gender critical activists there has been conjecture if the female symbol may be banned because we use it to indicate the prominence of sex over gender identity. Maybe, the double female symbol used by lesbians to indicate same sex attraction for female people, will get you put on a list? Maybe not, but the mechanism will be there in the criminal code, ready to use.
For me, the most troubling part of the Criminal Code (Serious Vilification and Hate Crimes) and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2023, is the “relocation” of a section from the Anti-Discrimination Act directly into the criminal code. The section in question is 131a of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991, and covers threats of physical violence towards an individual or group on the basis of a protected attribute.
The new law in the Queensland criminal code relates to “serious vilification”. Serious vilification is essentially threatening to harm someone or their property, because of a protected characteristic (which I actually thought was illegal already).
I have no intention of seriously vilifying anyone, protected characteristic or not, but the way of making legislation through the copying and pasting from the Anti-Discrimination Act into the criminal code, should worry anyone who has been taking notice of the movements of the Australian Human Rights Commissions (AHRC), and the tribunals over which they exercise influence.
I have recently been in a courtroom in the Federal Court of Australia where the AHRC argued that recognising human sex over gender identity is unlawful under Anti-Discrimination legislation. [ Dusty - I presume this is the Tickle v Giggle case] In a tribunal in Tasmania, it was ruled that lesbians who seek to excluded trans identified males from their space, do so because they find them “irksome”, and therefore seek to discriminate on the basis of gender identity against them. Both of these positions impute hateful motives on women who are acting in the normal course of exercising internationally recognised human rights as women and lesbians.
With the “hate crime” aggravator in the new legislation, additional time can be placed on the sentencing of crime when it is determined the crime was motivated by a hate toward the protected characteristics of a person or group.
This will mean if a trans identified man assaults me because I’m a woman, it just common assault, but if I assault a trans identified man, because he is in the ladies’ room (for instance), a hate crime aggravator is added to the assault, making it a much more serious crime. This is because gender identity is a protected characteristic, but sex is not. Only “sex characteristics” are covered in the legislation. “Sex characteristics” is not sex, but characteristics that come from sex like genitalia, reproductive parts, chromosomes and hormones related to the person’s sex.
So, a woman’s vagina or XX chromosome is a protected characteristic, in the same way a man’s genitals and XY chromosomes are, but those things are equally weighted, they are not placed in a historical oppression framework, like being Jewish is. A “female” is no longer protected as a fully embodied person or as a class that is subject to historic discrimination or bodily vulnerability in the same way that a “trans person” is, and this is quite deliberate.
In fact, a female as a type of body does not exist in Queensland legislation anymore, for such a thing to be protected. This outcome is from a suite of legislation recommended by LGBTIQ lobby groups including the recent self ID legislation in Queensland, giving a man the ability to become a legal female with a simple administrative process. The aim of TQ lobby groups is to erase sex protections for women in law completely, this is well documented and clearly stated.
Removing “female” as a category of person who can be targeted with violence, because of her sex, seems like the wrong messages to give in an increasingly violent society where almost all violent and sexual crime against women and girls is committed by men.
Janet Fraser, speaking in the New South Wales Parliament for Women’s Rights Network Australia against Alex Greenwich’s proposed Equality Bill this week, pointed out a similar fault in the proposed omnibus bill, that the bill erases sex as “as a characteristic worthy of protection”. Ms Fraser makes the point that “in a country where men have murdered almost two women a week so far this year, we would say that that’s unacceptable”. This must be the understatement of the year.
https://msediewyatt.substack.com/p/queensland-new-hate-crimes?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true
Sacked Teacher
I previously reported on Joshua Sutcliffe’s case against the Teaching Regulation Authority here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-big-sleep?utm_source=publication-search
Joshua’s case has just concluded and he is interviewed here by Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News:
Endpiece
I used to love them but I have not time any more for the captured BBC…but I still enjoy this moment:
Amazing results for PoW after so short a time. KJK is rightly proud. I’m looking forward to seeing what she does during a general election. Lisa Townsend, our Terfy PCC, has been re elected and I wrote to congratulate her. I haven’t even looked at any other results although I must do because it could affect what happens at Surrey CC.
I hope something can be done about GenderGP. No comment required here methinks!
I hope you’re right about the ripples from Cass. We’ve all had enough of this nonsense and want to see it gone.
Thanks Dusty. 😁