When The Day Of Battle Is Ended...Part 3

Update 336

Whoa, what a marathon this has been! Here is Part 3! Please push all these three parts around as best as you can, dear readers.

Still with Elizabeth: The Golden Age - let’s bring in Sir Walter Raleigh ( played by Clive Owen).

“Potato - you eat it!”

Transgender People and Nazis

In case you missed this, EDI Jester reports on a marvellous piece of deconstruction by Malcolm Clarke of Pink ( Pr…. no I won’t do it, Pr…) News’ claims that transgender people were persecuted by the Nazis.

Women’s Prisons in the USA

Thanks as ever to Feminist Legal Clinic for this piece on wonderful Amie Ichikawa.

Amie’s Story | Cruel & Unusual Punishment | Independent Women’s Forum (19 March)

When California’s “Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act”—Senate Bill 132—was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021, it set the stage for male prisoners to be housed with female prisoners. The male prisoners do not have to be in the process of “gender-affirming” treatment.

Amie Ichikawa, 42, now free after serving nearly five years at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, said that some male prisoners claim non-male identities because female prisons are, as a general rule, less violent than men’s prisons. “There was a male prisoner who had single-cell status in his all-male prison because he assaulted his bunkmates,” Ichikawa said. “He had been isolated in the male prison but they put him directly into the general population here in a room with seven ladies right off the bus.”

When former California inmate Amie Ichikawa returned to the free world, she began sounding the alarms about women being harmed as a result of males gaining access to female prison. Her desperate pleas for help, however, were met with the cold-shoulder by organizations that traditionally serve as advocates for female inmates.

These advocates dismissed her concerns and instead told her to “be careful” and “learn the language.” But Ichikawa doesn’t view what’s happening to female inmates under new prison “transgender” policies as political; to her, it’s a human rights issue, and she’s refusing to be silent.

Source: Amie’s Story | Cruel & Unusual Punishment | Independent Women’s Forum

Scottish Non-Widows?

Jack Walters in GB News ( 'Woke' Lloyds chief 'bans' the word 'widows' in new 'inclusive language' guidance despite owning Scottish Widows 18 March) reports:

Banking giant Lloyds has been branded a laughing stock after its boss banned the word 'widows' in new inclusive language guidance.

The company appears to have opened itself up to further criticism as Lloyd’s Banking Groups owns the high-profile insurer Scottish Widows.

Lloyds, which holds the crown of Britain’s biggest lender, was accused of adopting a “nanny-state approach” after issuing a long list of everyday terms for its 57,000 workers to avoid in case they cause offence.

“Headless chicken”, “lost in translation” and “sold down the river” were all identified as phrases or colloquialisms deemed unacceptable.

A Lloyds Bank branch in London© GB News

The term “guinea pig” might even upset vegans because it is associated with “experimentation on non-human animals”.

Lloyds' decision to ban the use of the word “widow” comes as the banking group suggested it was “unnecessarily vivid” and may “trigger unwarranted personal memories or trauma and upsetting situations”.

The full article is here:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/woke-lloyds-chief-bans-the-word-widows-in-new-inclusive-language-guidance-despite-owning-scottish-widows/ar-BB1k5PMj?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=48a5d5ca327946c0b5a29ca5e5505886&ei=76

The Football Association

Thanks once again to Feminist Legal Clinic for this piece.

FA urged by government to consider banning transgender women from playing women’s football (20 March).

The Football Association should consider banning transgender women from playing women’s football to remove any “unfair” competitive advantage, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has told Sky News.

The FA’s current transgender policy is that “gender identity should not be a barrier to participation in football” but eligibility is determined on a case-by-case basis.

Ms Frazer was discussing the transgender policy in light of issues that the football regulator could be asked to intervene on – if the change to football governance passes through parliament.

Asked further if she was urging football to follow other sports who have restricted women’s sport to those female at birth, Ms Frazer said: “I would encourage competitive sport to consider this very carefully.”

The FA had no immediate comment but its chief executive, Mark Bullingham, said earlier this month that they were waiting on international football bodies to decide on any changes to the policy.

World Athletics last year decided to prioritise sporting fairness over inclusivity by excluding those assigned male at birth [ Dusty - unfortunate phrasing here but I think FLC are quoting] from competing in female world ranking competitions.

The International Cricket Council also changed its policy last year so male-to-female players who have been through any form of male puberty will not be eligible to take part in the international women’s game regardless of any surgery or gender reassignment treatment they may have undertaken.

Source: FA urged by government to consider banning transgender women from playing women’s football

Times Roundup

Thanks as ever to my mate, Fingers for cuttings from The Times.

James Beale (Artist was ‘reported to police for gender views’ 18 March) reports:

An artist was allegedly told she needed to give 24 hours’ notice to attend her own exhibition, and was reported to the police after saying she believed it was harmful for children to try to change sex.
Victoria Culf, 43, was setting up her exhibition at Watford Museum when a council employee began talking to her about transgender ideology.
Culf claimed that she politely revealed that, because of her beliefs and her experience with children and young people, she believed transitioning them was harmful.
She also told the employee that the Gender Identity Development Service clinic at the Tavistock Centre, which has been criticised for its treatment of children with gender dysphoria, should be shut down. It is closing at the end of this month.
After the conversation, Culf said she received a call from the council telling her of “harassment” allegations and saying she could not enter the exhibition without 24 hours’ notice.
She was allegedly told that police were investigating her for a “hate crime”– though Hertfordshire police later judged no crime had been committed. Watford borough council said it had not reported her to the police.
Culf, who is now taking legal action against the council on the grounds of breach of contract, discrimination and harassment, said: “I was afraid that the police were going to turn up on my doorstep at any moment.
“We are now living in a culture where for just expressing opposition to transgender ideology, even politely, can lead to you being reported to the police.”

Eleanor Hayward and Lucy Bannerman (Call to ban private clinics 14 March) report:

The director of a “busy” private gender clinic has insisted he will continue to prescribe cross – sex hormones to teenagers despite mounting concern over medicalising young people with gender issues …
Dr Aidan Kelly is one of several clinicians, who left roles at Gids, the NHS gender clinic that was rated inadequate by inspectors, to set up a private clinic in Hackney, east London.

The article continues:

Reacting to the NHS England decision to ban puberty blockers, due to lack of evidence of their safety , he said: “This is a sad yet unsurprising development where NHSE have significantly departed from international and national expert consensus on the use of this treatment in a small select group of young people.
“The treatment is used in other areas of healthcare and is viewed to be both safe and effective.”

Please bring Liz Truss’ Bill back, Government!!!

Lucy Bannerman (Gender clinic staff payouts are ‘reward for malpractice’ 16 March) reports:

Dr Heather Wood, a psychologist who rose up through the ranks of the Gids satellite clinic in Leeds, is also believed to be among among the staff who will be receiving payments when the service close closes down at the end of this month.

The article continues:

Heather Wood is anything but neutral in her opinions on social media…

Wood started working in the NHS in 2014 and became a psychologist at Gids’ clinic in Leeds. She was among the staff responsible for deciding which of the vulnerable young people who came into the consultation room should be referred for hormone therapies to halt puberty and usually lead to irreversible cross-sex hormones.

On social media, Wood likened gender-critical feminist to racists and feminists’ calls for single-sex spaces to apartheid.
A former colleague raised concerns after Wood allegedly cited a teenager’s early childhood interest in a Thomas the Tank Engine train as a reason that she was a good candidate for puberty blockers. They told The Times: “After only two, maybe three sessions, Wood suggested the girl would be a good candidate for puberty blockers. When I challenged this, I was called transphobic.”

Sarah Ditum (Who’s afraid of Judith Butler? 10 March) writes, with regard to the latest book from Judith Butler Who’s Afraid of Gender?, as follows:

The last time I had to read Judith Butler it was as an undergraduate, and the experience affected me so profoundly that I left my university (Manchester) and moved to a new one (Sheffield) in the hope of never doing it again. A pointless gesture, because 20-odd years on, while Butler remains a professor at Berkeley, her theories have thoroughly escaped it.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an elaboration on her big idea as laid out in the 1990 book Gender Trouble, that gender is “performative“ – that is, whether you’re a man or a woman is determined by whether you act in a manly or womanly way, not by your physical body. This is the intellectual ballast in the now-common claim that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. (Butler identifies as nonbinary, but generously tolerates being called “she”).

The insight that men and women’s behaviour is at least partly socially constructed wasn’t new, but Butler pushed it further. Not only gendered behaviour but sex itself was socially constructed. Female, she wrote in Gender Trouble, “no longer appears to be a stable notion.” The proper job of feminism, therefore, was to ask “what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity.“

The article concludes:

In all the verbosity you could almost miss how insulting Butler is to female victims of male violence. But it’s there. After a section on J. K. Rowling, Butler writes: “Living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality.” In other words, women who have been abused (which includes Rowling) cannot be trusted. No wonder Butler doesn’t want to identify as a woman: she doesn’t seem to like them very much.

There’s another interpretation of the pushback against gender identity. Trans campaigners overreached: they imposed a medical pathway of “affirmation” that has harmed probably thousands of young people. It is not damning of feminists that they are on the same page as Vladimir Putin about there being two sexes. That is just how many sexes there are.

Butler condemns feminists for being fellow travellers with the politically unspeakable, but never questions who she might be aligned with. In her world there are no homophobic parents turning their effeminate sons into acceptable little girls; there are no men declaring themselves women simply to commit violence (Or, if there are, Butler will only concede to a “few instances”, and what’s a rape or two?).

It is insulting to have to treat a book like this seriously, when it treats the subject as a game. Butler flatters herself if she thinks there’s anything to be afraid of in her work. The only terror is that anyone would find it impressive.

Sall Grover

In case you miss it, an excellent mid-week Queens’ Speech with Sall Grover interviewing her about the case brought against her women’s only app Giggle by a Mr Tickle which begins on 09 April. Best of luck, Sall.

https://clivesimpson.substack.com/p/queens-speech-extra-with-sall-grover

Irish Hate Crime Bill

Excellent discussion about the Bill on The New Culture Forum with Irish barrister, Lorcán Price. I have reported a lot on this awful Bill - for example here:

https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/thought-crime-irish-style

Stop Press - Mona’s Lounge

Just came across this care of FLC - this is great:

Artist behind Mona’s ladies-only lounge ‘absolutely delighted’ man is suing for gender discrimination | Mona | ( 21 March - Australian time!)

The creator of an art installation that has become the subject of a formal anti-discrimination complaint says she is “absolutely delighted” that the case has ended up in Tasmania’s civil and administrative tribunal.

Kirsha Kaechele’s installation Ladies Lounge opened in Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in 2020, and sees women who enter the space being pampered by male butlers and served champagne while being surrounded by some of the museum’s finest pieces of art. Those who do not identify as women are not permitted entry.

On Tuesday, the performance piece expanded beyond the subterranean halls of the museum on Tasmania’s Berriedale Peninsula, with New South Wales man Jason Lau seeking justice in the tribunal over the museum’s alleged discrimination against some visitors.

Kaechele, whose husband David Walsh owns Mona, said she was an “artist who works in the world and I tend to engage life as a medium”.

The opportunity to extend the performance aspect of Ladies Lounge was embraced by the artist and 25 female supporters, who entered Tuesday’s tribunal hearing wearing a uniform of navy business attire. Throughout the day’s proceedings, they engaged in discreet synchronised choreographed movements, including leg crossing, leaning forward together and peering over the top of their spectacles. Apart from the gentle swish of 25 pairs of nylon clad legs crossing in unison, the support party remained silent. When the proceedings concluded, the troupe exited the tribunal to the Robert Palmer song Simply Irresistible.

During her defence, Kaechele ran through a timeline of Australian women’s lived experience of discrimination and exclusion, including being barred from working in the public service sector once married, and receiving lower pay than men for the same work – something Mona’s own management had engaged in up until 10 years ago, the artist pointed out in her evidence.

Lau argued that denying men access to some of the museum’s most important works (there is a Sidney Nolan, a Pablo Picasso and a trove of antiquities from Mesopotamia, Central America and Africa in the women-only space) is discriminatory. Kaechele said that was the point.

“The men are experiencing Ladies Lounge, their experience of rejection is the artwork,” she said.

An experience in a pub on Flinders Island several years ago, when Kaechele and a girlfriend were advised by male patrons that they would feel “more comfortable” retiring to the ladies lounge, inspired the work.

Kaechele admits the museum has amassed a “large file” of complaints over Ladies Lounge. But apart from the current case, only one other complainant has sought formal redress.

Mona’s lawyer Catherine Scott told Guardian Australia the case was an unusual one because the artwork was both a physical entity – a lounge – and a piece of performance art.

“There is the participatory element of allowing women and denying men,” she says.

Mona’s legal team will be relying on the tribunal’s interpretation of section 26 of Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act, under which a person is permitted to discriminate against another person in a situation designed to promote equal opportunity for a group of people who are disadvantaged or have a special need because of a prescribed attribute – in this case gender.

The tribunal is expected to hand down its decision within a month.

Source: Artist behind Mona’s ladies-only lounge ‘absolutely delighted’ man is suing for gender discrimination | Mona | The Guardian

Endpiece

Hold on, there’s a call coming in from Sir Walter Raleigh:

Hopefully the next update will be on Saturday or Sunday, Terven.

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