Global Issues through a Female Eye

[isha]

Couple of things happening now that illustrate theimpact of idiotic gender ideology on reality.

Lia Thomas just took first place at the 2022 NCAA Division 1 Women's Swimming & Diving Championships in the 500 freestyle in the US.

20220318_075722.jpg (89.36 KiB) Viewed 8352 times

That's bad, but a story from the UK that emerged yesterday is immeasurably worse.
A woman was raped in hospital. The NHS employees told the police that there was no male present in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened. The police refused to investigate. The woman who was raped spent ONE YEAR trying to get the police to believe her and investigate/prosecute. She suffered mental health issues due to the denial. CCTV footage finally proved she had been raped.
A clause in legislation had instructed the NHS staff to say no male is present if the person is a trans woman, thus implying rape could not have occurred.

See what happens when things are idiotic? Bad things happen. Worse still is that the bad things can be foreseen, are the predictable and logical inconsistencies that will arise where ideological possession is given precedence over reality. And yet anyone pointing towards the likely issues that will arise are deemed problematic people/ bigoted.

[isha]

It's unfortunate that the source is a person who is transphobic and has used pretty ugly language to describe trans people in the past. Which is not to say she is lying, but it's possible she may be focussed on certain aspects and completely overlooking the obvious. Because surely the issue, the 'idiocy', the "bad thing" is that it took over a year to look at CCTV?

When all ya got is shoot the messenger...

No. The idiocy is pushing the harmful falsehood that humans can change sex. We cannot. Full stop.

[isha]

No, pointing out that she is transphobic was rather obviously not all I said. In fact as you proceeded to respond to the point I made about CCTV, that comment makes no sense.

As for the CCTV, are you saying you're fine with them not checking it? That's not idiocy right there? Checking CCTV is incredibly quick and simple, much more so than, say, repealing the legislation that the Baroness is attacking.

As far as I can make out so far, the police did not investigate the matter because they were told at the outset by NHS staff, when the victim reported the rape, that the crime could not have been committed because no male was present.

In the UK, again as far as I can make out, rape can only happen when a male assaults a female.
Access B, which is either part of UK law or part of NHS regulations, sorry I don't know which, directs NHS staff to account for a trans woman on a ward as being female, to all intents and purposes.
So, this declared absence of a possible crime by staff on the ground may have caused police not to look at CCTV. This is my understanding.

It seems to have taken a year for the victim to persuade police a crime was committed and apparently then the police became very co-operative.

I don't know exactly when the CCTV was looked at or when witnesses were interviewed, because there were also collaborating witnesses.

I have asked people reporting on the matter why the hospital has not been named. The outline of the story is all I have at the moment and those are the facts I have posted. And it does seem both bad and idiotic to me that all this has happened.

[DeletedUser]

So this is where progression has got us - telling a rape victim that she was not raped as her rapist now believes he’s a woman.

Ffs.

[isha]

"It is appalling, as is" ....this red herring that has nothing to do with this case.

[isha]

You are loaded with fallacies when it comes to discussion.

I got it the first time when you said you don't much like Baroness Nicholson. And my response to that is consistent throughout - yeah, and so what?


Point number 2 is the red herring fallacy. Trans women in danger of rape in US prisons has nothing to do with THIS story of a woman being raped in hospital and facing enormous stress and delay in investigation because NHS staff, using NHS Annex B policy regulations, insisted to police that no male was present to rape the victim.
The policy which impeded justice is a direct result of a nonsensical ideology insisting that a human literally changes sex upon declaration. We humans cannot change sex. We can change gender expression, and all are welcome to do so. All gender diverse people have the same rights as anyone else, and properly so. But sex-based reality remains untouched by changing gender expression or gender identity

If you want to talk about unrelated matters like your red herring, sure thing, post a thread on it and I will chat there with you about that.

[isha]

I completely disagree.

What impeded justice is no one looking at CCTV, or treating it as sexual assault, or the limited definition of rape in the UK.

You are going back to definition of rape under UK law as being the problem here. It is certainly a problem. But the directly-related first cause of the problem here was the denial by NHS staff, as per regulation requirements, that a male was present.

As a matter of interest, would you be among those who would have the crime recorded now as committed by a woman, enter criminological statistics as female crime, and have the victim refer to their rapist in court as a woman?

[DeletedUser]

Your men v women crime stats competition fails your own "unrelated red herring" test.

Once again you don’t answer a question, you insult.

[isha]

Your men v women crime stats competition fails your own "unrelated red herring" test.

Fair point. I will bring it up here in the through a female eye thread if and when the crime is recorded as female crime, and/or the victim is compelled to describe her rapist as a woman. Both of which have UK precedence.

[isha]

If you are insulted by the application of your own test that you raised in your previous post, you'll have to take it up with yourself.

Plane and I are much different people.

In the red herring case above I was actually refering to the fact that in your example of trans prisoners at risk of rape in US jails, there are no females involved at all. It's not relevant to the case or the thread.

I am a proponent of sex realism, not anti transgender. In fact I am fairly regularly on the side of actual real life trans women in debates on Twitter, for which I am fairly regularly piled upon rather meanly by people who would deny their very right to exist. One favourite insult is that I must be a man

[isha]

Obviously we will disagree on whether there are females involved.
But even if you insist that trans women are men,

I didn't say trans women are men. They are not men. They are trans women. They are male.

All the rest you mention is off topic.

[DeletedUser]

Women are women - we are not an “umbrella” term for any autogynephillic male freak who fancies trying on a Norman Bates outfit.

[DeletedUser]

You don't know any trans people, do you?

You couldn’t give two fcks about women and our rights could you ?

[DeletedUser]

I’m not addressing this at that patronising tool but for reference, I do know a male to female transsexual.

Lovely woman tbf, she went through years of psychotherapy, living as a woman, surgery, more therapy both physical and psychological and now lives happily as a woman.

She acknowledges she is biologically, genetically and chromosomally male and attends for prostate PSA screening without complaint or “how dare you !!”

Transsexuals like her I will defend to the hilt.

Idiots who grow their hair and think they’re a woman in every way - they can feck right off. And that bloke in the swimming and tuck all he likes and feck off.

[isha]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/maga ... raine.html

This is a very long article about surrogacy and the mothers in Ukraine, who are being moved around often against their will, and away from their own families. It's worth a read.

[isha]

Surrogacy is an absolute disgrace.

It is in my opinion also.
But I am amazed to see that to think this seems to be controversial. Stories of how longed for are the babies, free choice of surrogates, how many unwanted babies suffer, etc are all thrown at one for having the opinion that women's wombs should not be commodified, and especially in what is almost always a commercial transaction between people who are not of equal economic power.

When noticeable numbers of well to do women start renting out timeshares on their wombs, endangering their health with the inevitably onerous occupation of gestation and childbirth, then maybe I will look again at my assessment of substantial economic inequality being part of the foundation of this practice.

No one has a right to a baby.

[isha]

Interesting few days in the UK re gender theory ideology.
Stella Creasy, Labour MP, came out and said women can be born with penises, and is participating in the final hurdle of actual sex change occuring IE transubstantiation from male to female (or vice versa, though God knows those gals are quiet in the arena)..

I am somebody who would say that a trans woman is an adult human female.

https://archive.ph/3xUqI

What is good is that the ensuing back and forth resulted in 2 good articles, worth a read.

Dr Kathleen Stock

https://unherd.com/2022/05/stella-creas ... ism/?=frlh

It was in the middle of all this that I started to see Stella Creasy as cutting a somewhat Flaubertian figure. Whereas Emma Bovary’s head was turned by reading too many romantic novels, Creasy’s formative influence seems to have been overexposure to books about Girlboss feminism. Her preferred flavour of feminism is liberal, and the name of the game is personal empowerment: every performatively feminist intervention she makes could be taken straight from the Spice Girls’ Big Book of Leaning-In with Hillary Clinton. She wants to have the rules of parliament changed so women MPs can bring their babies into the debating chamber; she is the face of a campaign to make misogyny a hate crime; she wants to ban catcalling in Walthamstow; she is pro-breastfeeding in public, and so on. And she crowdfunds her political campaigning like a true #mumtrepreneur.

Also a bit like Emma Bovary, Creasy’s grip on practical detail can get lost and her grand gestures misfire. Earlier this month, she weighed in on the overturning of Roe v. Wade by bizarrely comparing the UK’s laws to those in America, where women could soon be imprisoned for terminating a pregnancy that isn’t the consequence of rape or incest. Meanwhile, her well-publicised campaign to make misogyny towards “sex or gender” a hate crime seems to have foundered: women’s groups have rejected the proposal for making serious crime against women harder to prosecute, and the government rejected the amendment last week. And her attempts to make parliamentary hours more compatible with motherhood have reasonably been criticised for being overly skewed towards London-based MPs like herself: for female MPs with constituencies elsewhere, cutting late sittings would prolong the number of days they would have to spend away from their kids.

PS The Spice Girls Big Book of Leaning In With Hilary Clinton should definitely be written

And the other article is by Jon Pike

https://thecritic.co.uk/language-truth-and-logic/

Which I particularly like, as it speaks of the importance of language having meaning. He speaks of the trend for Conceptual Engineering.

So far, the term (and concept) “female” has seemed relatively immune from such attempts (at conceptual engineering). The term “female” is straightforward. It’s generally accepted as an ordinary scientific and biological term. You can see that it is unambiguously a sex term rather than a gender term by realising that it applies across species: we don’t have woman squirrels, but we do have female squirrels.

It’s a good thing that we have some fixed and simple terms that apply to regular and important features of the world. It enables us to describe those features of the world in straightforward ways. To have the term “female” is a help in describing features of the world that matter — sexed features. That there are such features of the world seems to me important, and obvious. You only need to look at the work of Caroline Criado-Perez to see why, and the emergence of organisations like Sex Matters is part of a political move to focus on those features of the world where, well, sex matters.

The term “female” then, applying to biological features of the world, offers a benefit to democratic, public discussion. Re-engineering it away from a biological term into an identity term is a harm to such discussion. If that happened, the term would need replacing. Maybe the harm would be temporary, because we would get used to using terms like “generators of large static gametes” and “generators of small motile gametes” or “Possessors of Homeostatic Property Cluster 1” and “Possessor of Homeostatic Property Cluster 2”.
........
What Creasy is doing is a power move. De-sexing the word female is to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. It is a further step — after pushing the slogan “Trans Women are Women” — to move on, establish a new bridgehead and open a new front. These moves are not just statements about the meanings of words. They are, as Alice Sullivan explains here, demands. Creasy is making a big point — look at her statement: she doesn’t just say: “a transwoman is an adult human female”, she says “I am someone who would say …” She is identifying herself with the project, planting a flag, standing up to be counted.

This is a kind of linguistic colonialism. One big problem with “conceptual engineering” is called the “problem of implementation”. Even supposing that you have managed to make a case for the re-engineering of the term female (and no such case has been made), how do you get everyone to go along with it? Something that might seem necessary is the consent of those who are referred to by the terms: do currently-called-females consent to the re-engineering of the term “female”? Should there be a vote? Should representative females have a say? What about people on the sidelines, like me, for whom this creates, at the minimum, some intellectual hassle? Critically, this re-engineering does not take place through consent. Rather, it happens through illocutionary acts — doing by saying, asserting, demanding, not by giving reasons. This is what Creasy is doing.

So it's useful in a way that Creasy says stupid things because it encourages smarter people to write about it.

[Cyclepath]

I can't help thinking we're seeing the decline of western civilisation. When words themselves are rendered meaningless we lose our ability to frame and solve any issue. We'll just slide down this helter skelter of doubt, obfuscation, ambiguousness, and confusion having completely lost the facility of logic and clarity.

[isha]

I'm not sure if it is a decline or a controlled demolition.

The ideas that have been allowed to come into ascendancy can only lead to incoherent outcomes. When I see or hear a trans woman speak I do not feel like trampling on their rights, I respect their life and choices. Some I feel great affection for, and others empathy as so many suffer so much with dysphoria.

Nonetheless the idea that an inner sense of one's gender creates an effect on biology or the reality of sex is not a correct idea. Humans cannot change sex.

There is a tension between female rights and transgender rights which is logical to anyone who is not completely sold on the gender theory ideology. Safeguarding issues first and foremost. Privacy. Rights to a level playing field in sport.

And there must be interrogation of the crazy be kind childhood "affirmations" of gender identity because of the enormous health implications, including sterility and sexual impotence. Plus confusing children with ridiculous ideas that the sex of their bodies is mutable has to stop.

Since a very long time the transhuman body has existed in science fiction. The real girl versus the girl who once was other. The different treatments of the two. The endless future possibilities for bodily modifications. There was always going to be an issue as science advanced. We have to engage with the morality and implications of the capabilities of advancing science. Just because something is possible, should it be done?

For example, this week I saw a trans woman in Australia was prescribed Domperidone and produced a substance they called milk from their breasts and fed their newborn infant substantial amounts of this. This substance is not the same as milk from a female who has given birth. It's also full of chemicals. It should not be allowed to feed helpless newborns with such an emission and pretend this is kindness.

I am not in the gang who reacts with hatred to the people who are caught up in all this, (although I don't feel warm to that person feeding their chest emissions to their infant). Usually I think any people no matter what just want to live a regular life, and they should be allowed to as much as me.

But I think terrible things are being done out of promoted stupidity. I follow a young man on twitter who identified as a woman in his teens, had full estrogen treatment and sex reassignment surgery in early 20s. Then realised he had made a mistake. So now he takes testosterone to try and keep his body healthy. But he has no penis. Which of course could have happened due to illness or accident, but what kills him is he had it removed by apparent choice.

He was far too young, in my view, to be allowed to have such surgery. Young people should have to wait until past maturation of frontal lobes at 25.

There's just too many reasons all this is terrible.

[isha]

I really admire this woman - Masih Alinejad. She has been speaking out for years. Recently there was an attempt on her life. In the light of what has happened to Salman Rushdie I would like to acknowledge her work and courage.

People familiar with the investigation said there is evidence now that Iranian officials played a role in the alleged targeting of Alinejad.

Federal prosecutors in New York charged a man in late July with driving around Alinejad's Brooklyn neighborhood with a loaded assault rifle (AK 47) and dozens of rounds of ammunition. Alinejad previously said Monday that authorities told her the man was looking for her, and that a home security video had caught him skulking outside her front door.

“It is shocking that someone came to my house with a loaded assault rifle,” Alinejad told The Associated Press in an email. “Last year, the FBI foiled a kidnap plot. Now a killer is dispatched to deal with me.”

[isha]

Trigger warning - this may not be a subject some people want to hear about. So do not read further if you don't want to hear about anal sex and the significant health consequences that may be potentially experienced by especially young women because of anatomical differences between the sexes.
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A long while ago there was an active discussion on planks about a young woman who was debating having anal sex with her partner. There was an undeniable amount of pressure coming from him, I would even class it as coercion. Anyway at the time I mentioned the physical health implications that I had read about eg leakage, incontinence, fistulas etc. This was not a popular message at all, and in more general contexts pointing out significant health issues is seen as being a Debbie Downer kind of thing to do.

Anyway that's why I was interested to see this report just published from two UK surgeons in the BMJ, a prestigious medical journal. One of the authors is a colorectal surgeon. There were some things I did not know or had not factored in, even though I knew the basics re hormones and their effects on female physiology.

For example female hormones work cyclically to soften ligaments. That's how we can push out babies. Our whole pelvic structure has been worked on over our lifetime to make it amenable to such an extraordinary stretch. Every menstrual cycle involves this softening effect. It's beginning to be recognised that the increased laxity of tissues that happens at specific points of the menstrual cycle can contribute to general injuries like higher likelihood of knee injuries etc. The highest point of ligaments and tissue laxity in a menstrual cycle is at ovulation which corresponds with higher point of libido also. You can look this stuff up.

The other I didn't know at all, which is that the female anal canal has lower pressure than the male colon which makes it much more susceptible to damage from anal sex compared to male colons. Also the female anal sphincter is less robust than the male sphincter. More susceptible to incontinence.

The wholesale normalisation of anal sex seems to not have taken the biological science into consideration. I think it is useful for females to know about the facts.

And the surgeons talk about coercion being a considerable factor. Anyway, if interested...

https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1975

(Anal sex) is also associated with specific health concerns. The absence of vaginal secretions, increased traumatic abrasions, and less common use of condoms increase the risk of sexually transmitted disease and anal malignancy. Anal pain, bleeding, and fissures also occur as a result of anal intercourse.

Increased rates of faecal incontinence and anal sphincter injury have been reported in women who have anal intercourse. Women are at a higher risk of incontinence than men because of their different anatomy and the effects of hormones, pregnancy, and childbirth on the pelvic floor. Women have less robust anal sphincters and lower anal canal pressures than men, and damage caused by anal penetration is therefore more consequential. The pain and bleeding women report after anal sex is indicative of trauma, and risks may be increased if anal sex is coerced.

Effective management of anorectal disorders requires understanding of the underlying risk factors, and good history taking is key. Without it, patients are likely to present repeatedly with the same symptoms. Asking about anal sex is standard practice in genitourinary medicine clinics but less common in general practice and colorectal clinics. Clinicians may shy away from these discussions, influenced by society’s taboos. However, with such a high proportion of young women now having anal sex, failure to discuss it when they present with anorectal symptoms exposes women to missed diagnoses, futile treatments, and further harm arising from a lack of medical advice.

Lack of awareness

More widely, public health education is lacking. NHS patient information on anal sex considers only sexually transmitted diseases, making no mention of anal trauma, incontinence, or the psychological aftermath of the coercion young women report in relation to this activity. A plethora of non-medical or pseudomedical websites fill the health information void. Rather than helping young women make informed decisions, some sites may increase societal pressure to try anal sex.

[isha]

This just breaks my heart.

I also don't understand how what happened in Afghanistan with that ill planned retreat, leaving people, and especially females, to suffer as they do now under the rule of medieval warlords armed to the teeth with the best of modern weapons, is not brought up time after time to bash world leaders like Biden over the head.

[isha]

The women of Iran are protesting in huge numbers right now. It's due to the death of Mahsa Amini. She was 22 years old and was taken into custody for not wearing her scarf correctly. She died after going into a coma. There's evidence she was hit on the head, but police say it was a heart attack. Women are burning their hijabs in public squares.

Once again I would say to Western women, especially politicians, who like to LARP as submissives for regimes who imprison and murder women for not wearing what the western woman can remove at will - now is not the time for your silly signalling. Better to uncover your hair in front of Imams and government figures from these countries, in support of the ones who are suffering.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62967381

[Hairy-Joe]

The women of Iran are protesting in huge numbers right now. It's due to the death of Mahsa Amini. She was 22 years old and was taken into custody for not wearing her scarf correctly. She died after going into a coma. There's evidence she was hit on the head, but police say it was a heart attack. Women are burning their hijabs in public squares.

Once again I would say to Western women, especially politicians, who like to LARP as submissives for regimes who imprison and murder women for not wearing what the western woman can remove at will - now is not the time for your silly signalling. Better to uncover your hair in front of Imams and government figures from these countries, in support of the ones who are suffering.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62967381

From looking at social media, the protests in Iran are still ongoing. What's interesting is that there's a LOT of young men on the protests protecting the women from the police. Iran is forgetting that they have a huge population under 30 (50% I thought I heard) and that to a lot of them, wearing the scarf is a political thing, not a religious thing.

I can see this being a spark for something bigger

[isha]

It seems to be a spark indeed. But reports of young people being shot dead on the streets are coming in.