Jesus In The Barn
Update 478. Get Men Out Of Women's Spaces Special. #BeMorePorcupine
This is a long one, dear readers!
Next in the British Heroes season is the wonderful 1961 film Whistle Down The Wind. Three Lancashire farm children discover a bearded fugitive (the Man/Arthur Blakey played by Alan Bates) hiding in their barn and mistake him for Jesus Christ ( in fact, he is a killer on the run). They come to this conclusion because of their Sunday School stories and Blakey's shocked exclamation of "Jesus Christ!" when Kathy ( a young Hayley Mills), the eldest child, accidentally discovers him. Soon the belief that Jesus is in the barn spreads to other children in the village.
Also Kathy appears to be looking for me ( though I have turned into a cat it seems) 😎
Miaow!
Sorry, the video clip is not great quality.
Irish General Election
I went through the Manifestoes of the major parties in the last update looking at what they have to say about gender ideology and free speech. I concluded that the best party from a Terfy point of view was Aontú. Gript News analyse the Aontú manifesto here:
I failed to mention that Sinn Féin oppose the Irish Hate Crime Bill - but hold on a second! Over to Ben Scallan of Gript News interviewing Sinn Féin’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald - a masterclass in not answering the question!!
For Women Scotland
The Supreme Court case finally comes to final hearing this Tuesday and Wednesday and I hope to be there - if I can get a seat!! For a previous report on the case see here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/this-is-ripley-signing-off
Sex Matters are intervening in the case and Maya Forstater writes about the case in their latest newsletter ( 22 November):
This week I have been into the Supreme Court to count the chairs, find out the Wi-Fi code and generally calm my nerves by keeping busy in advance of next week’s hearing in the landmark For Women Scotland case.
Marion, Trina and Susan from For Women Scotland have been working with their lawyers, and we have been working with ours. Murray Blackburn Mackenzie has managed to make sure that all the parties publish their submissions. Dr Michael Foran at the University of Glasgow has been writing rapid legal commentary, and Dr Claire Methven O’Brien at the University of Dundee has produced an excellent analysis of whether Britain is in breach of the Istanbul Convention on male violence against women if the Equality Act doesn’t protect women-only services and women’s rights against sex discrimination.
Some people are preparing to come to court to watch the hearing, including a group of women travelling from Scotland. Many others will be watching online. Many have donated to For Women Scotland’s crowdfunder and to Sex Matters.
Outside the Supreme Court I stopped by Millicent Fawcett. I used to walk across Parliament Square past that statue holding up her sign “Courage Calls to Courage” every time I went to work, during the period when I was losing my job.
On the four sides of the square are politics, money, the law and the church. The Supreme Court sits directly opposite the Houses of Parliament. On the other two sides are the Treasury building and Westminster Abbey. This was all, until very recently, a world of men.
It wasn’t until 1870 that a woman’s earnings were her own. It took almost 50 years longer before women were allowed to stand for election as MPs, enter the legal profession or join the civil service. It was another 50 years before the first female judge took office. I was a baby when women got protection against sex discrimination at work. I was in secondary school when the first sexual-harassment case in the UK was won, and it wasn’t put on a statutory footing until 2010, when I was raising my children.
It is ridiculous, unjust and enraging that just a few generations after these rights were won, women are having to again organise, raise money, risk their safety and livelihoods, and face censure to defend those rights.
Laws against sex discrimination were always about addressing the discrimination that we face for being female. Did Parliament accidentally destroy these protections in 2004? Or did it just make them so ambiguous and complex that women could not rely on them when men in dresses wanted things their way? Either way, this is unforgivable. I hope the Supreme Court judges (two women and three men) will find a way to return the word “woman” to its rightful owners.
The four sides of the square represent not just four poles of power but four places where the ledgers of life are written. We are male and female because of our flesh and blood: we are mammals. But births, deaths, marriages and legal identities are administrative matters: recorded on paper registers and certificates, once by the church and now by the state.
Parliament sets rules so that mothers and fathers can be recognised, property and children protected, taxes paid, services delivered. And for that we all need facts about ourselves to be recorded accurately. In the 1960s, when officials started to allow people to change their sex on their passports, and in 2002, when the European Court of Human Rights ordered the UK to allow individuals to change the sex on their birth certificates, the integrity of personal identity records was tampered with.
The ECHR said it considered that society “may reasonably be expected to tolerate a certain inconvenience” to enable transsexuals to “live in dignity and worth”. But no one thought through what it would mean to remove the definition of woman from actual women, to impose a pretence of secrecy on some people’s sex, and to make all of this unspeakable. Nor how personal data can continue to link together when some bits are being falsified.
When the Gender Recognition Act was being debated most people, if they had an internet connection at home, were using a dial-up connection. The first iPhone was still to come. We were filing paper tax returns and storing medical records in manila folders. The Gender Recognition Act worked through a system of notes in the margin of the birth register. If it solved anything, it solved an analogue problem for a small number of people embarrassed by showing a paper certificate.
But it created problems for everyone else. And these problems are only getting worse. This is what the Supreme Court, the MPs and Lords and the civil servants now have to fix.
Free Speech
I have recently been following the Allison Pearson case and the Essex Police have finally caved in to pressure.
Athena Stavrou in The Independent ( Allison Pearson: Police drop investigation into social media post by journalist 21 November) reports:
GettyImages-124964411.jpg© Getty
Essex Police have closed an investigation into columnist Allison Pearson for alleged incitement of racial hatred over a social media post.
The force said it would be conducting an independent review [ which] will be launched into the force’s handling of the case which centred around a now-deleted X/Twitter post published last year.
The Daily Telegraph journalist said she was wearing her dressing gown when two constables from Essex Police knocked on her door on Remembrance Sunday.
News of the visit sparked a backlash, including from former Conservative prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, who both called the incident “appalling”, and X owner Elon Musk.
Essex Police had been carrying out an investigation under the Public Order Act but said on Thursday that it decided to take “no further action” after the Crown Prosecution Service advised that no charges should be brought.
The full article is here:
I have been following Linzi Smith’s case for some time. See, for example, here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/la-marseillaise-part-2-as-time-goes
Good interview with Linzi on Kelly Dougall’s channel:
The Darlington Five
If you thought that the recent ‘News Agents’ podcast was annoying ( https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/watership-down), try out the recent Man’s…sorry Woman’s Hour interview with one of the Darlington Five as reported in the Sex Matters newsletter ( 22 November).
Woman’s Hour presenter accused of bias
BBC presenter Nuala McGovern has been accused of bias by SEEN in Journalism following an interview on Woman’s Hour with Darlington nurse Bethany Hutchison, one of five nurses taking their NHS employer to tribunal after a male colleague who identifies as trans was allowed to share their changing rooms.
The nurses claimed that “Rose”, a male who says he identifies as a woman, behaved inappropriately in the women’s staff changing room. The NHS hospital trust responded to the nurses’ complaints by telling them to be more inclusive.
During the programme, McGovern told the nurse: “You use the word male but what you mean is a trans woman colleague.” The presenter then went on to question why the nurses hadn’t spoken directly with Rose and to ask whether Hutchinson’s gender-critical beliefs were based on her faith. Hutchinson replied that her opinions were informed by both Christianity and scientific fact.
SEEN in Journalism, which was co-founded by former BBC journalist Cath Leng, posted on X: “BBC Editorial Guidelines say we shouldn’t be able to detect presenter bias or personal beliefs. It has itself chosen to affirm self-identification – a politically activist stance at odds with accuracy and impartiality. Now it is trying to impose it on vulnerable contributors.”
BBC Children In Need
Talking of the BBC!! Thanks as ever to Feminist Legal Clinic.
BBC Children in Need chair resigns with angry broadside at chief executive | MSN ( 22 November)
The chair of the BBC’s Children in Need charity has resigned over grants given to a charity hit by child abuse scandals.
Rosie Millard, 59, told the board of the charity she was resigning over “institutional failure”, and accused chief executive, Simon Antrobus, of failing to take controversy around the grants seriously.
It comes after Children in Need gave £466,000 to LGBT Youth Scotland, with the grants starting seven months after its former chief executive, James Rennie, was convicted in 2009 of child sex attacks.
Another employee affiliated with the LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS) was also convicted this year of sharing indecent images of children, including some of newborn babies.
Source: BBC Children in Need chair resigns with angry broadside at chief executive
The Drug Peddler Award
In another brilliant piece of investigative journalism, Malcolm Clark looks at the prestigious Trans in the City awards funded by many large corporations including two leading law firms, Clyde & Co and Clifford Chance. And the main award went to? Former CEO of Mermaids, Susie Green!!
EDI Jester also deals with this:
Men in Women’s Spaces
I think of this as ‘The Revenge of KJK and Julia Long’ but I’ll just let you work through Kellie-Jay’s pieces and the Feminist Legal Clinic report below 😊
First trans Congress member is banned from using women’s bathrooms after Marjorie Taylor Greene declared war | Daily Mail Online (22 November)
House Speaker Mike Johnson has ruled the first transgender member of Congress cannot use the women’s restrooms in a decision that will shake the U.S. Capitol.
Newly elected Sarah McBride, who will become the first openly transgender lawmaker when sworn into office in January, will have to use the men’s facilities.
It follows a week of outrage from outspoken Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who have called McBride a ‘man’, a predator and accused her of being ‘mentally ill.’
Republicans were emboldened by Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election.
Trump has pledged to stop taxpayer funding for sex change treatments, block transgender people from entering the military, and ban trans athletes from women’s sports.
Gender Deforming Hormones
Exulansic reports on her substack on another risk arising from using wrong sex hormones.
Gender-Deforming Hormones Cause Preventable Cancers
Patients are not being warned!
Nov 18, 2024
There are myriad risks to gender-related medical interventions. I've reviewed as many gender clinic consent forms as I've been able to find. One consequence of taking these gender-deforming drugs has typically been omitted or downplayed in the forms I have reviewed: cancer. Sex hormones alter DNA and create inflammation. Many patients receiving this treatment for psychological distress will experience the suffering, expense and shortened lifespans as a result of tumors they did not need to develop.
Often the forms do not mention cancer at all; where it is mentioned, it is unjustifiably claimed that the risk that testosterone or estrogen will cause cancer is somehow not known, only associated with one or two organs, or only of concern to patients with a family or personal history of cancer already.
The full piece is here:
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/gender-deforming-hormones-cause-preventable
News From South Africa
Bernard Lane on his substack Gender Clinic News brings us news from South Africa.
Off-label drug alert
South Africa's health professions regulator issues a warning to doctors medicating minors for gender distress
Nov 21, 2024
The health professions regulator in South Africa has issued a warning about the off-label use of drugs for minors with gender dysphoria and says it may develop some form of guidance for practitioners.
On August 12, the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) published a statement on its website that one of its regulatory boards had “noted a concern … on the off-label use of drugs on children with gender dysphoria.”
It said the executive committee of the Medical and Dental Professions Board, which has the power to protect the public by de-registering doctors, had “issued an advisory to practitioners that the [use of off-label] drugs needs to be done with care, consent and be based on scientific evidence. Practitioners are advised to adhere to the above-mentioned advisory.”
In many countries, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, approved by regulators for other conditions, are prescribed off-label for gender-distressed minors, meaning without regulatory approval or clinical trials testifying to the safety and efficacy of that use.
Earlier this month, in response to questions put by GCN, the HPCSA said “it can be expected that a policy, guide or even a position statement will shortly follow to embellish on the [August 12] statement previously made.”
Mr Mpho Mbodi, head of division for professional practice at the HPCSA, told GCN that the August 12 statement was “not a direct response to a particular complaint, but it was [the medical board’s] general reaction to several enquiries received on the matter.”
The HPCSA had also given some clarification of the August 12 statement to the health professional watchdog group First Do No Harm South Africa (FDNHSA), which has kickstarted debate in the country about the weak evidence base for medicalised gender change of minors.
The group, whose members are predominantly doctors, was told by email that the August 12 advice was “meant as a holding measure whilst the [medical] board consults with practitioners who may be implicated in this practice. A definitive board position is yet to be developed and communicated to all interested parties.”
“Until recently, it has been very difficult to have open debate in South Africa. Some doctors who have expressed concern about the lack of evidence for ‘gender-affirming care’ have been reported to professional bodies and employers, forced to undergo hearings, had their concerns misrepresented and their character attacked in public.
“This has resulted in a climate of fear and extreme reluctance to discuss or debate or speak out in public—whether in the media, the healthcare environment, in academia or in schools.”—Drs Allan Donkin, Reitze Rodseth and Janet Giddy of FDNHSA, opinion article, Mail & Guardian, 21 July 2024
We knew it was coming
Although data is lacking, South Africa’s gender clinicians appear to be operating on a smaller scale than in Western nations, although they have been campaigning for a few years to increase the uptake of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transgender surgery.
South Africa is not the only place where the gender-affirming treatment model has landed as an import from a more affluent world, but the stakes are high for this black-majority nation of 60-plus million people. The health system is already under strain with inadequate budgets and the heavy burden of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, diabetes, kidney disease and injuries from chronic violence.
If costly puberty blockers are mostly limited to middle-class families with doctors in South Africa’s private health sector, there is a push in public and rural healthcare to promote cheaper cross-sex hormones for adolescents and young adults, including black and mixed-race patients thought to be gay or lesbian.
But Dr Allan Donkin, a general practitioner and one of the founding members of FDNHSA, believes South Africa has a chance to avoid some of the damage being done in the developed world because his country tends to be a late adopter of medical novelties.
“Usually, things in America follow on to South Africa a few years down the line. So, we get a heads up and a warning,” Dr Donkin told GCN.
Dusty - Let’s hope the warning is coming in time!
The full piece is here:
https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/off-label-drug-alert?publication_id=627677&r=1v403b
New Zealand - Still Ignoring Cass
Thanks to Katrina Biggs on her substack, A B’Old Woman for letting us know that the NZ Ministry of Health are still completely avoiding the full implications of the Cass Review.
Inspecting genitals is still being touted as the only way to tell females and males apart.
The battle between commonsense and nonsense continues; and, in news not entirely unrelated to genitals, NZ's Ministry of Health remains lame on puberty blockers.
Nov 22, 2024
After months of delay, our Ministry of Heath finally released their evidence brief and position statement on puberty blockers, albeit with a lot less fanfare.
Basically, a lot of words said that little would change with how they’re handled here. However, a consultation process has been opened up to determine if more regulation is needed, and some of the narrative in that seems clearer about the controversy surrounding puberty blockers. The Ministry of Health does request, though, that “In particular, the Ministry seeks input from organisations that represent people who may be affected by safety measures or that may be involved in how safety measures are used in practice.” So, it’s expected this will inspire transactivists and TQ+ lobby groups to swamp the consultation process with dire warnings about the terrible things that will happen to kids who can’t be freely prescribed puberty blockers.
Writer and journo, Yvonne van Dongen, whose articles I’ve shared here before, is putting together a more in-depth piece about the Ministry of Health’s news around puberty blockers, and I’ll share that here shortly. It will give a better analysis and understanding of the matter. In the meantime, Genspect NZ has written this.
Katrina goes on to (understandably) fangirl Congress Woman Nancy Mace and Argentinian Vice-President, Vicky Villarruel. The full piece is here:
Growing Up Woke
Joanna Williams on her substack looks at a constant topic in my updates, the indoctrination of children.
Growing up woke?
Childhood has been colonised by the promotion of progressive values
Nov 19, 2024
In many countries around the world, age and education are the best predictors of how people vote in elections. Qualifications correlate with voting intentions far more than social class, sex or race. In the UK, graduates were more likely to have voted Remain in 2016’s referendum on EU membership and to have backed the Labour party in recent general elections. In the US, those without a college degree turned out for Trump, just as in Hungary, Fidesz draws much of its support from regions where adults have lower levels of schooling. Almost everywhere today, left-leaning parties represent graduates whereas more right-wing parties have won the backing of those without higher education. This shift represents a fundamental political realignment but it has occurred without strikes, protests or petitions.
Neuroscientists argue that higher measures of intelligence correlate with socially and economically liberal views. But IQ tests, no matter how sophisticated, do not account for the transformation that has taken place in many countries, from left wing parties representing working class constituencies with low levels of formal qualifications in the recent past to representing an academic, social and cultural elite today. Clearly, the nature of political parties and, indeed, what it means to be ‘left’ or ‘right’ wing, have both changed. But so too has education. Whether measured through years spent in school and university or through numbers and levels of certificates, educational success means something different today than it did in the past.
A century ago, the primary focus of schools was the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and values grounded in tradition, religion and national identity which were shared by a majority of adults in a country. Over the course of many decades, schools have embraced a child-centred progressivism and an orientation towards the future, rather than the past. This means that teachers are focused not on passing on knowledge from the past but on cultivating the attitudes, values and skills that they assume will be required by citizens of the future. This shift opens the door to the politicisation of education.
Today, time is found within the school day for new subjects such as Relationships and Sex Education and citizenship classes that have no body of disciplinary knowledge and are entirely driven by a focus on promoting particular views on sexuality, gender identity and the nation state. At the same time assemblies are given over to celebrations of Pride or Black History Month; school rules and dress codes reflect changed ideas about gender and ceremonies and traditions are abandoned or replaced. Academic subjects such as literature, history and geography continue to be taught but have been ‘decolonised’ and updated to cover skills rather than knowledge or topics that reflect contemporary concerns with race, gender and environmental sustainability. Collectively, the impact of all of these changes is that education has morphed into indoctrination.
The full piece is here:
https://cieo.substack.com/p/growing-up-woke
Endpieces by Dusty and Liz
Thanks to JL on the Glinner Update for converting me to Olive and Mabel:
Upstaged by Liz, of course:
#BeMorePorcupine
#LetWomenSpeak
#Grassroots Army
#GenderIdeologyIsEvil
#VoteAontú
I shall look forward to the decision on the For Women Scotland’s case, too.
What I’m struck by today is that no matter how many jam packed updates you produce Dusty, there’s still a wealth of important information to report.
The Sex Matters intervention and the judgement is crucial 🤞.
Gript as ever, doing what the MSM fails to do.
And the Bernard Lane and Exulsanic pieces seem to go together because gender ideology is spreading like a cancer.
Love that KJK piece. 👏 ( with Julia Long) and the end pieces. Mabel and Olive are gorgeous. I love the way they look at their owner with puzzled expressions as much as to say “what the heck is he babbling on about now.”
Thanks Dusty, fantastic work.