Standing on the Shoulders of Women
Update 137
Welcome back to Dusty’s Substack’s inspiring Gender Critical Month and this time a marvellous speech from a Reformer’s Tree LWS event. I’m afraid I don’t know the name of the wonderful speaker ( can anyone help?) and I am sorry about the bawling in the background from the anti-women activists (AWAs) - but, in a way, that makes the speech even more powerful. I loved: ‘Do I look like a middle aged white woman?’ ( a wag in the crowd responds: ‘You could identify as one’).
Please keep the suggestions as to songs or speeches or poems coming in. Any more singers out there?
Pearl's Story: How an arts festival cancelled a woman for using her voice
Recently I have been in correspondence with Pearl Red Moon, a wonderful Australian artist, who was accepted as a finalist for the Australian Wearable Art Festival (AWAF) but who was then cancelled when the organisers found out that she had attended two of the Let Women Speak events in Australia and had spoken at one of them. I have been in correspondence with her recently and attempting to provide some advice and assistance. I was anxious that we should try and get JL on the Glinner Update to publicise what had happened and I am delighted that JL has now done this. Thank you, JL. I was anxious that this should happen because, of course, Glinner has an enormous audience…as opposed to me, a minor member of the Terf Press Corps 😎
If she was in this country she could rely on the cases of Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey ( gender critical beliefs are a protected characteristics under the Equality Act) to take action against AWAF.
I don't know Australian law, of course, but I would imagine that there is some protection and certainly freedom of speech and expression are protected in Australian law.
I have suggested to Pearl that she might like to contact the Feminist Legal Clinic ( who are based in Australia) - even if she does not take legal action it will be useful for her to know the legal position.
Some people have tried to complain to the AWAF but have been blocked. Thanks to Zerena for pointing out that if you go into ‘buy tickets’ on their website you will find a contact address and I managed to get a complaint in via that route. Please send in a complaint.
Her art is beautiful. Thanks again to JL and Glinner for publicising this and I trust they don’t mind if I copy the whole article here for those who may have missed it.
A female artist in Australia has been expelled from an arts festival after organisers discovered she had spoken at a Standing For Women event.
Pearl Moon is a mixed-media artist who works in textiles and creates beautiful clothing for women.
Pearl was born in New Zealand in 1959. Her childhood was extremely traumatic, involving male violence, alcoholism and sexual abuse. Pearl moved to Australia in 1986 and worked from home as a sewing outworker. This work dried up in the 1990s. A single mother with no training outside sewing, in desperation Pearl was forced to earn a living in the sex industry.
In 2000 Pearl discovered that she is on the autistic spectrum and finally understood a lifetime of anxiety, social challenges and obsessive thought patterns. Since then, she has worked and developed a public profile as a textile artist. She now runs her own business, Boho Banjo, selling pdf patterns of her wonderful clothing designs. She met her husband in 2008 and the couple married in 2011.
Having been chosen as a finalist in the Australian Wearable Art Festival earlier this year, Pearl was subsequently expelled from the event due to her public defence of women’s sexed-based rights. She has detailed her experience in two blog posts which you can read here: Part One and Part Two.
I have also briefly summarised the situation below.
In February, Pearl applied to have her work showcased at the Australian Wearable Art Festival (AWAF) 2023 which is being held on the Gold Coast in August. She was delighted to be selected as one of the 40 finalists only a few weeks later and she immediately began work on the garment she intended for exhibition, a piece entitled, “Wedding Gown for a Woman Marrying her Garden”.
In March, Pearl attended two of Standing For Women’s Let Women Speak rallies in Australia; those in Sydney and Canberra. She spoke at the Sydney event, describing her concerns that gender ideology is debilitating women’s rights.
On 23rd May Pearl received an email from Wendy, one of AWAF’s organisers, indicating that she had issues with some of Pearl’s beliefs. Extremely worried, Pearl sent several emails in response but they went unanswered. When she was finally able to speak to Wendy by phone, Wendy talked about the Let Women Speak events, describing them as ‘anti-trans’.
On 4th June, Pearl received another email from AWAF stating that she had been expelled from the festival and could no longer take part.
So thrilled to be chosen as an exhibitor, Pearl spent tremendous time and energy working on a garment for the festival. It is cruel and unfair that she has now been robbed of her opportunity to display her beautiful creation.
It is shocking that Pearl has been kicked to the kerb so callously because organisers don’t approve of her feminist beliefs. She is a 64-year-old autistic woman who has survived hardship, trauma and adversity and worked incredibly hard to achieve her goals. Pearl understands only too well the consequences of being born in a female body. She has every right to talk about her experiences and to defend the safety and wellbeing of her sex.
Mermaids
KFP on the Glinner Update has got hold of a Mermaids’ training course!!! Appalling stuff. Come on, Charity Commission, why are they still running?
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/spreading-insanity-like-a-cold/comments
More Glinner
Great interview by Graham with Stephanie Winn, one of the people behind the documentary ‘Affirmation Generation’ which has now been re-named ‘No Way Back.’
I reported on this documentary here: https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/affirmation-generation
I was also following the chat and liked Dennis Kavanagh saying that gender ideology was like ‘turbo charged Lord of the Flies.’ For those who don’t know about Lord of the Flies I reported on that here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/lord-of-the-flies
The discussion of ‘sunken cost fallacy’ was very interesting. You invest so much in something that, even when you begin to doubt it, you keep on ploughing on.
Write to your MP
I have written to our (Conservative, sitting on the fence) MP about Monday’s Equality Act debate, the NHS guidance and sex education. Always best to use your own words but, in case it helps, here is my e-mail. Please feel free to use it:
I am writing to you concerning three things.
Firstly, there is a debate in Westminster Hall on Monday which resulted from a petition presented by the gender critical group, Sex Matters. It needs to be made clear that sex in the Act means biological sex.
The Equality Act is ambiguous, with legal experts unable to say with certainty whether it means a person’s actual sex, or whether it means sex as modified by a gender-recognition certificate. Leaving this ambiguity to fester makes it hard for organisations to draw up clear policies and more likely that they will end up in court.
Women who want the act clarified will end up spending more of their hard-earned money taking test cases to try to win back their rights. But being a claimant is hard. You have to be willing to commit yourself to a lengthy conflict with your employer or service provider. It can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and years of your life. You lose your privacy and your peace of mind.
Neither individual women nor transgender people, nor the businesses and public services they interact with, should be forced into litigation just to work out what a law means. When it comes to the Equality Act, they should be able to rely on guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the statutory regulator whose job it is to explain precisely this. It has a mandate to do so and a budget of several million pounds a year, but it has been unable to – not for lack of trying, but because the law is ambiguous.
The meaning of the protected characteristic of “sex” and what it means for single-sex services, associations, schools and charities should fit on a postcard. It is up to the Government, using its lawful powers granted by Parliament, to solve this.
Instead businesses, schools and public bodies are having to spend thousands of pounds on bespoke legal advice to try to answer a simple question. The overall bill for this needless legal activity will be in the millions, if not billions, and will only rise as more people seek clarity. The conflict is taking up hours and hours of management time, and is souring the culture of businesses and charities.
The internal conflict within the EHRC itself, which has spilled out into the media, is a demonstration of this. An organisation whose job it is to understand the law has fallen out with itself over what it means. How can a small business or school be expected to manage?
And when cases get to court, the judges flounder. When asked to decide on questions that relate to the definition of sex, they are at pains to point out that they are not ruling on wider questions about women’s rights and transgender people’s rights: they are only able to judge the facts of the specific case put before them, and the particular part of the Equality Act it engages. They are only ever able to consider the interests of the claimant and the respondent.
But the questions about rights matter, and litigation is no way to decide the meaning of a term that has such wide-ranging implications across society.
· Should lesbians be allowed to have their own organisations without men who are sexually attracted to women joining if they get a government certificate?
· Should sports organisations be able to consider fairness to female athletes not only in competition but also in training, funding and outreach programmes?
· Should a woman paid less than a male colleague lose the right to make an equal pay claim if that colleague gets a gender certificate?
· Does a young woman who feels like a man lose her right to sex-discrimination protection related to pregnancy if she has been awarded a gender certificate?
· Whose rights must an organisation consider when deciding whether a job that involves strip-searching women can be undertaken by someone who is male but has a certificate that says female?
· When considering how their policies affect men and women as required under the public-sector equality duty, must public bodies work on the understanding that some women have a penis?
These are just some of the questions that require answers. They were not debated in Parliament when the Gender Recognition Act was passed: instead, the GRA was created with a mechanism on the face of the act for future governments to solve these problems by clarifying how the Gender Recognition Act interacts with other laws.
The responsibility now rests with government to use its lawful powers to clarify the intent of the legislation.
Please ensure that NHS Guidance re transgender employees and Annex B are withdrawn. Women don't expect to be sexually assaulted when accessing medical care that they have paid for through their taxes, nor berated by NHS staff for objecting to such sexual assault. Ditto regarding our daughter and our granddaughters. The Gender Recognition Act needs to be repealed; it underpins all of this outrageous nonsense. Legislation that allows a lie and falsification of legal documents does not 'strike the right balance'. Please pass this on to Steve Barclay and confirm that you have done so. No party who stands by whilst women and children are intimidated to pretend to believe that men are, or ever can be, women, will ever get my vote. At this stage that excludes all the major parties. The Conservative party occasionally making the right noises isn't going to cut it. Decisive action is required, which should include getting gender ideology out of schools ( see further below) . Women are already self excluding from vital medical care because of the knowledge that this barking mad ideology has taken hold across the NHS; lives will be lost as a result. EDI positions in NHS and all our public institutions need to be abolished, and the money put to use rather than being spent putting women and children at risk of sexual assault.
Further info here;
https://twitter.com/legalfeminist/status/1666199916153036816
I am very concerned at what is happening in schools with regard to sex education. Your colleague, Miriam Cates MP has provided a comprehensive dossier of evidence as to what is happening in schools: https://www.newsocialcovenant.co.uk/RSE%20BRIEFING%20FINAL%201631%20(IS)_small.pdf
I am pleased to see that a panel of five experts has now been appointed by the Government to complete a review of the guidance. However I am disappointed that it has taken so long to appoint this panel. Please press the Government to ensure that the new guidance is in place as soon as possible since children are being harmed by this nonsense on an ongoing basis. Certainly new guidance must be in place by the end of the year.
Thank you for considering these matters and I look forward to hearing from you.
Let me be honest:
Point 1 was copied from the Sex Matters website.
Point 2 was copied from what my wife wrote.
Point 3 mainly relied on Miriam Cates’ marvellous report.
Why re-invent the wheel 😎
Let’s Have Surgery!
Amazing exposé by Matt Walsh as to how easy it is to get on the path to surgery ( leave aside the misleading of the insurance company!!):
https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1666496308150951954
Let Women Speak
Great event today in Vienna. I presume the speeches in German ( I don’t speak German) were equally good given the reaction of the audience. Good job, KJK and the stewards…and also the police who kept the bawling AWAs at bay. I loved the speech by the young Somali woman!
Queens’ Speech
Good episode as ever by Dennis Kavanagh and Clive Simpson:
On the subject of Pride ( which is discussed), I do think that Pride is a lost cause and don't quite understand those gays and lesbians who are still participating given that it is now all about the T & Q !
EDI Jester
Barry reports on Oxfam and the JK Rowling cartoon ( see above!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FLAjF0oYr4
He also reports on great news from Iceland that they have shelved their gender ID Bill. Well done, Eldur and all:
Oh wow! Hope you’re watching Free Speech Nation. Sarah Phillimore and Harry Miller. Superb.
Great letter Dusty, well done.