Gallipoli
Update 446. Let Women Speak Special. #BeMorePorcupine
Lord Justice Sedley in Redmond-Bate v Director of Public Prosecutions [1999] EWHC Admin 733:
'Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. What Speakers' Corner (where the law applies as fully as anywhere else) demonstrates is the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear.
From the condemnation of Socrates to the persecution of modern writers and journalists, our world has seen too many examples of state control of unofficial ideas.'
Back to the Aussie Heroes season with Peter Weir’s classic Gallipoli.
The film revolves around several young men from Western Australia who enlist in the Australian Army during World War 1. They are sent to the Gallipoli peninsula. SPOILER ALERT: The climax of the film occurs on the Anzac battlefield at Gallipoli, depicting the futile attack at the Battle of the Nek on 7 August 1915. The song The Band Played Waltzing Matilda sung by Liam Clancy which I featured in a recent update is about Gallipoli. https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/crocodile-dundee?utm_source=publication-search
You will spot a young Mel Gibson as Frank Dunne.
Thanks as ever to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces
My wife, our friend and myself were at Reformer’s Tree yesterday. The rain held off albeit it was very chilly. There were no bawling trans rights activists which was lovely! There were excellent speeches as ever. After the speeches we all walked to Speaker’s Corner to do a kind of symbolic reclaiming of a space there for a short time. There we met lots of men bawling about various things. Below are some photos from Reformer’s Tree including Tania from New Zealand who was the woman who welcomed Kellie-Jay on to the bandstand at Albert Park, Auckland shortly before the larping man threw tomato soup over both of them ( an offence which recently resulted in him not being given any penalty!!).
Then there are KJK’s two videos and a piece by Stella aka Radical Cartoons who unfortunately could not make it due to being unwell but who is normally there. This piece is on her substack.
Speaker’s Corner
Tania
Tania, KJK and Mary
Return to the Corner!
After three years at Reformers Tree - WE'RE BACK, BOYS !
Sep 30, 2024
Yesterday (29 September 2024) Kellie-Jay Keen led her followers from Reformers Tree back to Speakers Corner, for the first time in 3 years.
Here they are, walking over to the corner, with, (so perfectly), one of the regular Evangelist men shouting in the foreground! (pic credit, StreetMic livestream).
“The march of the Terfs"!
I've been attending KJK's Let Women Speak since they were called “Standing for Women" back in 2020, and she called herself Posie Parker.
Her stated intention was to allow women back into the public square, from where so many of us were being cancelled - from our jobs, from friends and family, from public life, from online spaces, from Universities, even from so-called feminist organisations.
“Taking back the Public Square, one corner at a time" was our rallying call, starting with Speakers Corner in London, the most famous Free Speech spot in the world.
Since then, Let Women Speak has been on tour, throughout Britain, and to Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand, in support of our sister Terfs everywhere.
I published my book at the end of 2020 recording my own accidental introduction to the new Women's Rights movement. And a short video, “A Record of My Dissent”:
Here's my book, still available on Amazon and other online bookstores:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=2020+the+year+we+were+all+cancelled&i=stripbooks&crid=1JKZTHTVIFGFS&sprefix=2020+the+year+we+were+all+cancelled+%2Cstripbooks%2C109&ref=nb_sb_noss
I have spoken at Speakers Corner and Reformers Tree several times, in the company of many others (men and women) who come every month, and to the events held in other cities.
Unlike the infants who turn up to protest our right to free speech, (INFANTifa!) we are unafraid to show our faces.
KJK's stated aim was to bring politics back to the Corner, because it has been overtaken in recent years by religious extremism. After Hatun Tash was stabbed in 2021, we moved over to Reformers Tree, which is part of Speakers Corner.
We are by far the biggest group regularly meeting there. We left the Corner mainly because the noise of the fundamentalists shouting made it hard for the (often traumatised) women who attend LWS to be heard.
They found it very intimidating in those early days. And back then, the Met police were seemingly unable to protect women at the Corner. (Hatun has won two payouts from them for wrongful arrest and imprisonment)!
In June 2021 I wrote “The Bravest Women in Britain” for Uncommongroundmedia.com, comparing Hatun and Kellie-Jay. Here it is, (if you can read it through all the adverts)!
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/the-bravest-women-in-britain-speakers-corner/
Here's Kellie-Jay's announcement:
https://www.youtube.com/live/f5B9cSTgAEQ?si=dmn52Fv5-X5SiQbP
Yesterday at the Corner there was a speaker holding a sign saying “The Vagina is A Trap”, and there is another regular who claims that more violent crime is committed by women than men, so you can guess the resident misogynists are not going to be happy!
Especially since the next LWS is our Halloween one, so women will be dressed up as ACTUAL WITCHES!
I hope you will come - it's going to be such fun!
Free Speech
Free Speech Union report on an event in Brighton in their latest newsletter ( 30 September) which I first reported on here ( at the end of the piece on Robinson’s Bar):
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/buffalo-bill?utm_source=publication-search
FSU threatens legal action after sister group kicked out of pub
A sister group of the FSU was kicked out of a Brighton pub by security staff after the landlord objected to a talk by a retired teacher arguing that children should not be taught gender ideology in schools.
From a legal point of view, this is no different to kicking someone out because they’re black or gay – it’s unlawful discrimination, plain and simple.
The FSU has written to the owners of the pub threatening legal action unless the group receives an apology and is allowed to rebook the meeting.
We’ve fought several similar cases on behalf of our members and, where those cases have reached a conclusion, the pub has backed down and apologised.
Full details here.
‘Gender Affirming Care’
Bernard Lane on his substack Gender Clinic News provides reports on health discussions from the Genspect Conference in Lisbon and I am picking out one of the best ones here ( plus a good video round up by Travis Brown):
Primed for regret
Youth with neurodivergent brains cannot be expected to make safe decisions about irreversible gender medicalisation
Sep 30, 2024
Lisbon | Young people with ADHD and autism, already over-represented in gender clinic caseloads, are at higher risk of poor decisions and treatment regret because their capacity for mature judgment is delayed, the US paediatrician and medical scientist Dr Julia Mason has warned.
She pointed out that the brains of adolescents generally are still undergoing development towards the age of 25 and that “when conditions like ADHD or autism are present, full maturation can be delayed even past age 25, more like 30.”
Dr Mason, who observed in her medical practice the failure of transgender-identifying patients to accomplish the tasks of adolescence, was addressing Genspect’s third annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Friday.
In her presentation, she noted that the brain was the last organ to mature, doing so under the influence of sex hormones, and developing “somewhat unevenly” from back to front.
“The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, important for controlling impulsive decisions, is among the last brain regions to mature, and it doesn’t reach adult dimensions until the 20s,” she said.
“Teens process information with the amygdala, and this is the emotional core of the brain. Young people feel things more intensely and are sometimes immune to logic.
“They will make a different decision when their emotions are running hot than they would when they are calm, cool and collected. This can lead to regret.
“Mature adults lean on the prefrontal cortex for making decisions, which gives them better awareness of things like the potential long-term consequences of a particular decision.
“The implications for pursuing a medical pathway with permanent bodily changes and potential loss of fertility are obvious.
“Human societies have restricted access to adult activities—such as marriage, voting, buying alcohol, tattoos, renting a car and adopting a child—to various ages between 16 and 25. It’s generally recognised that young people can’t always be trusted to make good decisions, particularly on hot-button issues.”
Dr Mason, a founding board member of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine who has campaigned for scientific honesty from the “affirmation-only” American Academy of Pediatrics, had some advice for the troubled parents of trans-identifying young people.
“You have to be quiet enough in your very legitimate concerns, so that your child can hear their own niggling doubts about what is the best course of action,” she said.
“If you are trying to stop them with all your might, then they will apply their usually formidable intellect towards the problem of getting past you, instead of taking ownership of their own decisions.”
Video: The (missing) evidence for paediatric gender medicine
Gender panacea
In her Lisbon presentation, Dr Mason explained that the dilemma of legal adulthood arriving before a mature brain was compounded for young people with ADHD or on the autism spectrum.
“Just about everyone agrees that in ADHD, maturation of the prefrontal cortex is delayed, some say by about 30 per cent compared to same-age peers. The development of the prefrontal cortex was delayed five years in one study,” she said.
“This implies that young people with ADHD may not be making their best decisions until they’re around 30 years old. And because our lives aren’t complicated enough, up to 20-25 per cent of children with ADHD fall on the autism spectrum, and as many as 50-60 per cent or more of children on the autism spectrum have ADHD.
“Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that changes the development of the brain in more ways than just the timing. Executive function [necessary for complex decision-making and self-control] is impaired in autism as well as in ADHD, but it is not necessarily happening in the same way.
“Both types of neurodiverse kids can be drawn into gender ideology, either via ‘hyper focus’ or a ‘special interest.’
“Gender promises to explain why a young person isn’t fitting in with their peers, and it seems to have a plan to fix everything—if only you believe.
“I’m not the only one who was struck by the over-representation of autism in young people and adults in the trans community.
“It’s easier for me to understand how a girl with undiagnosed autism can discover trans and feel like it explains everything that has gone wrong for her and her life up to that point.”
I am not, of course, a medical expert but I have read an awful lot about this area of medicine. It seems to me that, following the WPATH Files and the Cass Review, there is not even any justification for carrying out so called gender affirming care with adults let alone children ( ‘do no harm’). Certainly it should not be done under the National Health Service or any other publicly funded health service in another country. All thoughts gratefully received, of course.
The full piece is here:
https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/primed-for-regret?publication_id=627677&r=1v403b
UK - The Tory Leadership Contest
On Matt Goodwin’s substack James Esses analyses how the four candidates for the leadership will cope with the woke madness. He concludes:
In my opinion, Badenoch is the only candidate that has demonstrated a clear and coherent position against woke ideology.
Once again, all thoughts gratefully received.
The full piece is here and is behind a paywall:
UK - Indoctrination In Schools
I reported on the paper by Joanna Williams here (Teachers or Parents?):
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-skywalker?utm_source=publication-search
EDI Jester looks at a piece Ms Williams has written for Spiked:
Ireland -Whistleblowing Teacher
Shocking revelations from teacher Mary Creedon ( well done, Mary!) in a video interview by Jana Lunden of the Natural Women’s Council ( a new Irish group for me!). Not to be confused with the National Willy…sorry, Women’s Council.
DCU is Dublin City University.
OIDE is Irish for ‘teacher’ and is a support service for teachers in Ireland.
Non-Contact Sexual Offences
Women’s Rights Network in their latest newsletter (29 September) report:
Non-contact Offences are Criminal
WRN is supporting the campaign launched by the mother of Libby Squire, a student murdered by a stranger with a history of non-contact sexual offences.
Lisa Squire is urging the public and police to understand the seriousness of indecent exposure, upskirting and voyeurism, and no longer minimise or dismiss them. Lisa said, “I completely understand why people aren’t aware that these things should be reported, because I wasn’t aware until I'd been forced into this world.”
We’ve known for a long time that these acts are indicative of a pattern of criminal behaviour that leads to more serious crimes. It is hard to reconcile that knowledge with current police policy that tells female officers that any man who identifies as a woman, non-binary or gender fluid can use their facilities.
Police policy seems to be that if a man exposes himself on the streets it’s a crime, but in a changing room it’s all fine – which goes against the Equality Act 2010’s provisions for single-sex facilities where users are physically exposed or vulnerable.
The nurses in Darlington have fallen foul of the same issue. The male nurse who used female changing facilities wasn’t arrested for indecent exposure. Instead, his female colleagues have been moved out of the female changing room to accommodate the male.
Indecent exposure in public is frightening enough, but it is even more so when you are more vulnerable in a state of undress.
Schoolgirls are being told that if they see a naked teenage boy in their facilities they should just “be kind”. The West Glamorgan Safeguarding Board schools guidance, standard in many UK schools and academy chains, makes the claim that someone with a “boy’s body” can be “in every other respect a girl”. There is no explanation of those “other respects”, but the accommodations are clearly demanded of girls, not boys.
Girlguiding now has a policy of allowing any male to identify as female and attend or even supervise girls’ residential events including sleeping and showering facilities. When parents complained about men attending as women, it was the parents who were visited by police.
From schools to libraries, Girlguiding to youth sports clubs, girls are being given clear instructions to ignore their own needs and comfort. These institutions are grooming girls to dismiss their own feelings of security and privacy and remove their boundaries whenever a boy claims to feel like a girl. This goes against the provisions of the Equality Act 2010, which allows for single-sex spaces that have demonstrable benefits for women and girls.
It is a serious problem when the police are supporting policies that stand against both the law and the safety and dignity of women and girls.
Women are fighting this on many fronts, and it’s costly both to our pockets and our mental health – here is one case against David Lloyd Clubs. We want to keep women and girls safe wherever they are but especially when they are vulnerable and in a state of undress.
All we ask is that the protections for single-sex spaces already provided for in the Equality Act are upheld and that the police follow their own advice about non-contact offences.
‘Women’ means adult human females and women-only spaces are for women only. The alternative is a predator’s charter.
The States - Women’s Prisons
Thanks to Feminist Legal Clinic.
America’s growing row over policies for transgender prisoners (29 September)
In the spring of 2023 Jennifer Barela returned to her cell at the Central California Women’s Facility (ccwf) in Chowchilla to find “a large man” sitting there. Her new cellmate had been sentenced to life in prison in 1982 for murder, had changed name, self-identified as a woman and been transferred to ccwf.
Other female inmates have had similar experiences since California passed law sb132 in 2020, allowing prisoners to be housed according to self-defined “gender identity” not biological sex. The law does not require them to change their body before transferring, and then lets them request their cellmate.
But some female prisoners claim that inmates from men’s prisons are gaming the new system and that a small but growing number of men convicted of violent and sexual crimes are being locked in cells with women. Some women’s groups warn that other proposed laws could turn this initial trickle into a flow. A bill at committee stage in New York state would “presumptively” house inmates based on their self-declared “gender identity”.
Cdcr [ California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] responds that all requests “are reviewed by a multidisciplinary classification committee chaired by a warden”. It adds that “cdcr has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse.” But the inspector’s report admits that, if a person with a history of raping women applied to transfer to a women’s prison, the wording of the law “may prohibit the department from denying the person’s transfer request” based solely on their “history of raping women”.
A freedom-of-information request in May by Keep Prisons Single Sex, another campaign group, found that 48% of the 1,433 inmates in federal male prisons who identify as women are there for sex offences, nearly four times the share in the general prison population. (The share is also high in Britain, where 74% of those in male prisons who identify as women are in for sex offences or violent crimes; and in Canada, where, in 2017-20, 86% of “gender diverse” inmates were violent offenders and 33% had a history of sexual crimes.) Furthermore, inmates identifying as women in federal male prisons are three times as likely as the general prison population to be classed as high-security.
The women’s groups point out that women are vulnerable, too, and should not be put at risk in order to protect vulnerable inmates in men’s prisons. Studies in 2016 and 2017 found that nearly 90% of women in American prisons are victims of previous sexual assault. Help from civil-rights groups is scarce. In response to an inquiry about inmates moving from male to female prisons in Washington state, the aclu [ American Civil Liberties Union] sued to block release of the data.
Source: America’s growing row over policies for transgender prisoners
New Zealand - Lesbians
I reported on the first part of this excellent article by Garwhoungle on her substack The Ministry has fallen here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-skywalker?utm_source=publication-search
Here is the second part:
The curious case of Pride vs the Lesbians: Part 2
Lesbianism: patriarchy's final frontier.
Sep 29, 2024
Lesbianism is a women-only space. Lesbians carry it with them everywhere they go.
In societies that grant women the right to autonomy, and where homosexuality isn’t against the law, patriarchs, those men who wish to control women, have no legal power to overcome lesbianism. It’s infuriating to them that women can make and hold an entirely personal decision to exclude men from their intimate lives. With laws upholding lesbian rights, patriarchs resort to rape, social pressure, stigmatisation, ridicule and making or watching male-centric pornography that involves woman-on-women sex. Lesbianism diminished to a performance for the titillation of men.
In recent decades patriarchs have landed the ultimate coup. They have persuaded their long-time enemy, the progressive left, that every women’s space including the all-pernicious one—lesbianism—are unholy attacks on human rights.
I am by no means saying that every person caught up in gender ideology is motivated by the patriarchal urge to violate women’s spaces, but the net result is the same. The gormless go-alongs, the genuinely compassionate, the distressed parents, the biologically bewildered, the gender-soul worshippers, the self-hating teens and the nice-people-are-saying-it-so-it-must-be-true lot have been persuaded that this century’s civil rights movements involves standing on street corners yelling that men must be allowed to invade women’s spaces and those who would stop them are Nazis.
Transgender rights activists demand that society accepts that every man who calls himself a woman is literally a woman. They demand that such men are given access to all women-only spaces. Lesbianism is, under these rules, open to men. The patriarchs, those determined to deny women the rights to autonomy and who wish to control all aspects of women’s lives, win.
This patriarchal, anti-women, anti-lesbian wet dream is bad enough. That it has been lobbied for by organisations that were set up to protect women and rainbow rights is heartbreaking.
In New Zealand, there’s the homophobia of InsideOUT, the fall of the Ministry of Women, and this example (one of many) of National Council of Women’s persistent defence of male rights to violate female boundaries. And, of course, there’s the tragedy of Wellington Pride. Its mantra of celebrating Wellington rainbow whānau does not extend to the OG lesbians, those whose sexuality excludes males. Explicit declarations of female sexual independence are the most sinful of all things now, “anti-trans”. Hey, Wellington Pride, the patriarchy is very, very proud.
The members of Lesbian Action for Visibility Aotearoa (LAVA) remain defiant. They don’t believe men can be either women or lesbians. They’ve been kicked out of Wellington Pride for saying such things. But the LAVA women think they too belong at Pride events. They’re taking Wellington Pride to the Human Rights Review Tribunal for discriminating against them because of their political opinion. In future issues, I’ll discuss other aspects of The curious case of Pride vs the Lesbians. Stay tuned!
No Pride without Lesbians
More about the case on LAVA’s dedicated page.
Donate
To help with LAVA’s legal expenses.
Best of luck to LAVA!!
Endpiece by Liz
At the end of each month I explain to new readers where our Porcupine theme comes from. Here are the (Terf) Porcupine parents defending their children from the (Gender) Leopard 😃
#BeMorePorcupine
#LetWomenSpeak
Gender affirming care is oxymoronic (and moronic) and is anything but care. Children are not considered mature enough to get a tattoo, never mind life-altering medical treatments. When are the politicians going to have the courage to take on the gender fruit loops? I’m pleased to note that Kemi Badenoch
has more bottle than most of the Labour, Libdem & Green parties combined. On the issue of indoctrination in schools, our MPs seem to be emulating the three wise monkeys; I think it’s called ‘plausible deniability’. I call it gutless.
Many thanks for another great update, Dusty.
Say hello to Fingers from us and I hope you don’t get too wet Dusty!