Remember, the most important thing when seeking help for your sexual assault is that people can’t *like* the way you were sexually assaulted.

By: Lisa Selin Davis and LGB Courage Coalition

Published: Apr 25, 2024

“Every major medical association supports gender-affirming care.” You’ve likely heard this talking point from activist organizations defending gender medicine for children and adolescents: puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sometimes surgery to treat gender dysphoria.

I don’t deny that American medical associations—advocacy groups that support clinicians—take this position. But I do argue that the position is not rooted in science or reality, and that it can harm the very patients it purports to help—especially gender nonconforming and gay and lesbian young people. 

Now, a nearly 400-page report, commissioned by England’s National Health Service, backs these assertions up. 

The Cass Review, which took four years to complete, comes in response to complaints about the only public youth gender clinic in England and Wales, Gender Identity Development Service, or GIDS, which was shut down last year—that they were fast-tracking kids into irreversible medical interventions, and that the culture of fear prevented concerned clinicians from speaking up. Cass and her team needed to understand the current landscape to come up with a plan to fix it. So they listened to trans people, detransitioners, therapists who feel pressure to affirm, doctors who passionately support these treatments, and many others with differing opinions. They also commissioned systematic reviews of the evidence about both psychological and medical interventions.

Here’s just some of what they found: 

• No one had followed up with the 9,000 children who’d gone through the service—and, shockingly, the adult gender clinic would not share the data about how they fared later. 

• There was no clinical consensus about how to treat them. “Clinicians who have spent many years working in gender clinics have drawn very different conclusions from their clinical experience about the best way to support young people with gender-related distress,” Cass wrote.

• The evidence to support medical transition for youth was “remarkably weak.” “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass admitted. That includes the evidence around the use of puberty blockers, which the NHS has now largely banned, and their effects on bone health, brain development, and fertility.

• Of great importance is what some of that stronger evidence showed: a correlation between child-onset gender dysphoria and later homosexuality. “The majority of these children [in the studies] became same-sex attracted, cisgender adults,” Cass writes. In the one Dutch study upon which all gender medicine is based, 89 percent of the young people who transitioned “were same-sex attracted to their birth-registered sex, with most of the rest being bisexual. Only one patient was exclusively heterosexual.” 

Some parents had told Cass that their children had “been through a period of trans identification before recognising that they were cisgender same-sex attracted. Similar narratives were heard from cisgender adults.” Among the studies cited in the Review is one of almost 3,000 adolescents, whose high amount of “gender non-contentedness” in early adolescence had declined by early adulthood—but that non-contentedness “was also more often associated with same-sex attraction.” 

LGBT Courage Coalition co-founders Jamie Reed and Aaron Kimberly both experienced gender dysphoria as girls and adolescents. Both grew up to be same-sex attracted. Aaron went on to transition as an adult; Jamie went on to marry a trans man. My child is as gender nonconforming as Jamie and Aaron were—but no one can predict her future based on that. And perhaps her lack of gender dysphoria is related to growing up in a time and place and family in which that gender nonconformity is completely accepted, without anyone trying to make meaning from it.

Of great import to me as a parent is that most kids in the original cohort studied in the Netherlands were likely gay. But the medicines they received were the same as those once given to gay adults to punish them or cure them of their sexual proclivities. Somehow, these treatments are touted as being safe and effective for “LGBTQ+ kids,” but the reality is that they can sterilize and remove sexual function from same-sex attracted people—something they’ve been fighting for decades to stop.

Instead of talking openly about these hugely important issues with youth gender medicine, those who advocate for it have insisted on “no debate.” But debate we must. Because today, many more kinds of kids seek these interventions. There has been an “exponential change in referrals over a particularly short five-year timeframe,” Cass reports, with girls quite suddenly making up the bulk of patients, instead of boys—a shift that cannot be explained by increasing social acceptance. Meanwhile, children and adolescents “are on a developmental trajectory that continues to their mid-20s”—that is, it’s hard to make grand decisions during this long period of growth and change.

The youth cohort sheltered beneath the umbrella of “trans” is actually a heterogeneous group, and the inconvenient truth is that no one knows the best way to help them thrive. No one knows who they will grow up to be or how they will identify in adulthood. Nor does anyone know the benefits or harms of social transition, in which children adopt the gender identity that doesn’t correspond with their sex. “However, those who had socially transitioned at an earlier age and/or prior to being seen in clinic were more likely to proceed to a medical pathway,” Cass notes. That is, it is not a neutral intervention, but rather an active one that seems to increase the likelihood of medicalizing later. 

Cass states clearly that “For the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way” to achieve self-actualization. She supports expanding psychological support for those young people, and strict and standardized evaluations, in line with what several other European countries are doing. She demands long-term follow-up not only of anyone who will transition in the future, but of those who already have.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an advocacy and activist organization that appointed itself the generator of “standards of care”—and which England and other European countries are increasingly rejecting—directed people toward an opinion piece called “The Cass Review: Cis-supremacy in the UK’s approach to healthcare for trans children.” In other words, they dismiss the whole thing as bigotry. But Cass dismissed their own standards of care as lacking “developmental rigor.”

The NHS thanked Cass for her work and suggested that it may have international influence. I hope so, too. The report makes clear that the American affirmative model was a departure from a more cautious approach, and that even the cautious approach was based on substandard evidence—that modifying secondary sex characteristics in adolescents, or transitioning children to live as the opposite (or neither) sex was never fully supported by any high-quality research and became more about social justice than evidence. But medicine, Cass reminds us, is in fact evidence based. The issue is “about what the healthcare approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children” with gender distress. It is not about ideology.

We don’t have the same system in America. We don’t have the kind of centralized healthcare and state agencies to craft guidelines that all must follow. Here, we battle it out in the legislature, state by state, red against blue, based on moral worldviews more than evidence. So how will the Cass Review influence our toxic gender culture war? How will they affect the medical associations that craft guidelines and create policy statements?

I queried the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recently reaffirmed its commitment to the affirmative model; the American Psychiatric Association; and the American Psychological Association, which have pro-affirmation models statements of their own. Only the latter responded, and I spent over an hour talking to APA Senior Advisor, Psychology in the Public Interest, Clinton Anderson. He admitted to the low quality of evidence and said that there’s a fundamental tension between those who view transition as a social justice issue and those who advocate for a more cautious, evidence-based approach. Where does the APA land? “Our concern has been largely about a human rights issue, and the way this is treatment has become politicized in our system and used as a punishment against people for being different,” Anderson told me. “And that I think has to be seen as the biggest issue.”

I disagree. But I will say that Anderson listened to my points more than anyone at these institutions ever has. I urged him to take a closer look at the Cass Review, and to listen to those who’ve been hurt, not just those who feel they’ve been helped. Maybe, just maybe, he heard me. Maybe, just maybe, these associations hear the science-minded and nuanced words of the Cass Review.

A more accurate version of that lesbophobic comic making the rounds

Guys, intent isn’t magic. This matters when we talk about males in female spaces regardless of what they are for. I’ve talked about it before, but when I was in my dv survivors group, I had male cofacilitators that led or helped lead the group. I’m sure these men believed they had good intentions. But their actions and their presence had the same result as any other male in female space. It stunted discussions, stunted growth and stunted solidarity. I lost count of how many of us would talk more before and after group than during. So I’m sorry, but I don’t care what a males intentions are or what their thought process is. This is actually still entitlement and males don’t belong in female spaces

Separatist Lesbrarian Post

As if my Goddess research book pile isn’t big enough.. I’ve decided to make a post of my work-in-progress separatist booklist; there’s essays, feminist sci-fi, lesbian novels, all-female societies, herstories, etc. Some I’ve read but most are TBR on the Storygraph. If any women know anything that would be a good fit, or praise or criticism of anything here, feel free to add suggestions.

Fiction:

Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein (only 11 pages and I love it so much)

The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women by Sally Miller Gearhart

Womonseed by Sunlight

Daughters of a Coral Dawn trilogy by Katherine V. Forrest

Return to Isis trilogy by Jean Stewart

Journey to Zelindar, Hadra Archives series by Diana Rivers

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith (this one made me want to go to the all female planet so much!)

The Demeter Flower by Rochelle Singer

The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper

A Door Into Ocean, Elysium series by Joan Slonczewski

*Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (I read this, cw for shameless racism)

Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light, and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, by James Tiptree Jr. (pen name of Alice Sheldon)

When Women Were Warriors trilogy by Catherine M. Wilson (too many men in last book, some weird scenes but good otherwise, would reread)

*The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley (read this, overall liked it but for the love of Goddess check reviews for content warnings bc idek how to warn for this)

The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall (read, off-putting scenes esp gross het scene but interesting other aspects)

Banner of Souls by Liz Williams, added by suggestion! This looks interesting.

Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen, thanks to @violetssunsets for the addition! unfortunately was warned about het content but also a society of warrior women.

Celaeno series by Jane Fletcher, thanks to @unified-multiversal-theory for the suggestion! Has an all-woman society so I need it in my life.

Herstory and Nonfiction:

Separatism and Women’s Community by Dana R. Shugar (got this recently and excited to read this herstory)

Lesbian Land by Joyce Cheney

Sinister Wisdom #98: Landykes of the South: Women’s Land Groups and Lesbian Communities in the South (have this, many listed are of the past)

La Luz Journal by Juana Maria Paz (actively seeking this one atm, racism and esp colonization issues wrt women’s spaces on occupied land are something I want to see addressed)

Country Lesbians: The Story of the Womanshare Collective by Sue Deevy, Nelly Kaufer, Dian Wagner, Carol Newhouse, and Billie Miracle. (Billie gave me a copy of this when I visited Womanshare a few years back)

Weeding at Dawn: A Lesbian Country Life by Hawk Madrone

Amazon Acres, You Beauty: Stories of Women’s Lands, Australia, edited by Sand Hall

Circles of Power: Shifting Dynamics in a Lesbian-Centered Community by La Verne Gagehabib and Barbara Summerhawk

For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology, edited by Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Julia Penelope. (70 essays! I haven’t finished it but I’m trying)

Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life by Dianna Hunter

*Herlands: Exploring the Women’s Land Movement in the United States by Keridwen N Luis (language in synopsis seems to favor male invasion of Female Sovereign Space so my expectations are low)

If any women here have read any of these please let me know your thoughts! I don’t have anon on but I’ll redact asks if you want to write in anonymously, just say the word. Hoping to find more knowledgeable lesbrarians on our beloved hellsite than myself :)

Two men hit on lesbians and get mad that they don’t reciprocate back, then proceed to shoot the music venue up.

How are we supposed to feel safe?

When the pulse shooting happened in 2016, I was only 12 years old. I still remember watching the news of what had happened at my grandmas house while she was watching me for the day. I was filled with fear. I didn’t know that so much hate existed towards gay people and this was my first time ever witnessing it. My family was pretty accepting of gay people, and so was everyone else I knew. It was the first time I realized that there were people out there who hated me enough to kill me.

I was only 12, but I vowed to myself then that I’d never go to a gay club or event, and I still haven’t to this day (due to a mix of fear and general laziness)

It’s just a bitter reminder that these spaces will never be truly safe. My mind will wander every time I step foot into one of those organizations about the possible threats.

Stupid question but how does google maps work…it looks like the Mercator projection but you can just zoom in on each area and it seems to scale. What’s going on with google maps???

In their defence, a lot of it is sand.

By: Max Eden

Published: Apr 26, 2024

The Biden administration’s new Title IX rules mean that all American public schools must operate on the fundamental falsehood of gender ideology.

Earlier this month, the U.K.’s National Health Service released the Cass Review, a report that urged Great Britain to pump the breaks on the experimental, sterilizing treatments marketed as “gender affirming care.” By contrast, earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education issued its new Title IX regulations, which require public schools to facilitate a school-to-sterilization pipeline.

According to the Biden administration, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act now requires schools to treat students who suffer, or claim to suffer, from gender dysphoria as though they were the opposite sex. As the Cass Review argues, this is essentially a medical intervention. If you require teachers and students to treat a girl who thinks she is a boy as though she were a boy, you increase the likelihood that she will persist in that belief. The longer she does, the more likely she is to seek sterilizing hormone treatments and mutilating surgical interventions.

This is what Moms for Liberty called “grooming” back in 2021. At the time, the media compared this reaction with QAnon accusations of elite pedophile rings. But parental-rights activists pointed out that the description fit the stated position of major educational organizations. The National Education Association, for example, had passed a resolution declaring that teachers could influence children’s gender identity and ought to have total legal freedom to do so. And the organization behind the CDC-endorsed National Sex Education Standards is named SEICUS: Sex Ed for Social Change. If influencing children’s gender and sexuality to advance a social agenda isn’t grooming, what is it? Last weekend, Bill Maher offered liberals another term for this practice: entrapment.

Whether you call it entrapment or grooming, the Biden administration is now requiring all American public schools to affirm that children can be born in the wrong body. How exactly will that work?

For starters: a boy who says he’s a girl must be granted access to the girls’ bathroom or locker room. Because the Biden administration requires no documentation to affirm gender identity, and indeed because it refused to define gender identity at all, a boy could identify as a girl “fluidly.” The federal government protects his right to be a girl only when he enters a girls’ bathroom.

In addition, teachers and students must refer to a gender dysphoric child by her preferred pronouns and alternative name. The Biden regulation magnanimously allows that a “stray” “misgendering” doesn’t automatically violate Title IX. But by logic—and by the administration’s own past enforcement practice—if several people “misgender” a student, or if someone “misgenders” a student several times, then the school risks losing all federal funding if it doesn’t remedy the situation.

The policy of secretly socially transitioning students will spread even further. Currently, more than 10 million students attend schools that will socially transition them without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The regulation says that Title IX doesn’t strictly require that transitioning be concealed from parents. But it does say that in the event of a conflict between Title IX and the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, Title IX overrides. If a child says she doesn’t want her parents to know, the Biden administration insists that the school will be totally compliant with federal law by keeping it secret.

This regulation will essentially help facilitate the sterilization of gay and autistic children in blue states on a scale that nineteenth-century eugenicists could only have imagined. Parents in red states that have outlawed these experimental medical interventions can’t necessarily rest easily, however. California has passed a law that would effectively strip parents of their custodial rights if their child travels there to access puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. And any parent who enrolls a child in a U.S. public school is now sending them to an institution required to operate on the premise of a fundamental falsehood.

Republican politicians have been conspicuously quiet about the new Title IX regulation. Perhaps because they’re uncomfortable stating flatly that gender ideology is false, congressional Republicans are not actively fighting the new Title IX mandate on gender-affirming schooling. They would prefer to battle the Biden administration on its plan to use Title IX to mandate that men can participate in women’s sports, but the administration has denied them that debate until after the election, relegating the sports issue to a separate regulation that it waited nine additional months to propose. 

The fight over the new gender standards for schools will instead play out in the courts. In the weeks to come, state attorneys general will file suit. The regulation will almost certainly be enjoined, and then eventually overturned by the Supreme Court. But not before transitioning the default social setting of American public schools to embrace gender ideology.

In the interim, parents should ask school board members whether they plan to comply with Biden’s Title IX regulation. If the answer is yes, then traditionalist parents should look into transitioning their children—to private schools. Parents should also ask Republican state lawmakers if they support universal school choice. If the answer is no, then parents will know that these lawmakers essentially endorse teaching students that gender ideology is true.

Read this in “stats & curiosities from HBR”

I guess it really depends where you live as well, eh? What your life is like and all that. Like, for me it’s completely different. I live in Canada. We have a range of weather between dry and wet, and very hot and very cold. I don’t own a car and walk many places - this directly affects what I wear. I do any sort of maintenance on my own - and I pick the clothes I need to do that. My work calls for me to wear certain things - although the rules are quite loose. What I wear to go out with friends will be different than what I wear around that house and to work. I do not really wear dresses or skirts, so pants are the norm for me where wraps, skirts and dresses might be the norm for others.

this does not apply if you wear exclusively leggings. Those things tear all the time you need like a million on standby

In France a woman has been sentenced to 2 years and 9 months in prison for taking away her daughter after she revealed her father was raping her.

Alain Chauvet, already a father of four, married Priscilla Majani when she was only 18 and he was 45. They had a daughter and a few years later they were divorcing. Upon learning that the father might get shared custody, Priscilla reported him to the police for violence and rape on her daughter. The 5 years old was interviewed by the police three times, said her father was violent and had raped her. The policemen chose to believe the girl had been coached by her manipulative mother into saying that. The case was dismissed and the father got shared custody. The day the mother was supposed to drop the girl at the father's place, she refused and was arrested. After that she took her daughter to the hospital. The medical reports written after examining the girl said it was very probable she had been raped and they even filed a report themselves... and were ignored. So the mother took her child and ran. They hid under a fake identity for 11 years. The woman was on an Interpol list. She was caught in March 2022 in Switzerland and sentenced in January 2023 not only to prison but to pay the father 30 000€ for "moral prejudice". Her daughter (now 17) has filed a complaint against her father for sexual assault and uploaded a video praising her mother. She also said her father would lock her in a dark room, punch her in the face and burn her with hot water as punishment when she was a child. She said she was relieved when they left and that she wished more people would have believed her, instead of just her mother. She said that during her interview with the police as a kid, the policeman kept laughing as she described what her father had done. The court had no compassion for the mother however, blaming her for thinking she was "all powerful and above the law" and having no consideration for "father's rights", even saying that she's the one who caused trauma to her kid by taking her away. The court said that making the daughter grow up without a father must have created "defiencies" in the girl. The mother maintained that she did it to protect her daughter and that it remained the most beautiful thing she'd ever done. The court took it as further proof that she wasn't repentant and that she didn't care about the law. The daughter is still refusing to see her father. On french twitter the hashtag #Iwouldhavedonethesame is trending, in support of the mother.

speechless. the pose. the expression. this should be a painting.

this person needs to be put on a fucking list.

like i'm sorry, there's slim to no chance this timoid is not a sexual predator of some sort.

How can you debunk who is more Devine between Jesus and god… how does one do that? Not like you can double blind that shit.

Why do religious people talk like their texts are to be taken literally and scientifically?

People on this website will be like "oh I love this take on Christianity it's so spicy it would piss off all the Christians" and then it's literally an interpretation like 90% of us take for granted.

some of my favorite replies to this tweet. happy lesbian visibility week!