New Zealand’s connection to WPATH, and a few other things that went on this week in NZ's cockeyed world of woke.
An extremely disturbing exposé of WPATH - World Professional Association for Transgender Health – was published in a report this week by Mia Hughes. In it, WPATH comes under fire for “clinicians who shape how “gender medicine” is regulated and practiced around the world consistently violate medical ethics and informed consent.”
In New Zealand, we have PATHA – Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa. On the executive of PATHA is Jaime Veale, a man who identifies as a woman, and originally hails from Canada. Veale says in his PATHA profile that he is “a member of the Global Board of Directors of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), and I am one of the authors of the latest revision of the WPATH Standards of Care”.
New Zealand’s Ministry of Health endorses PATHA’s guidelines, but has never assessed them. Jan Rivers, an ex-public servant, and now a citizen researcher, has herself done an assessment of the PATHA guidelines, and found them “not written to comply with the requirements of commonly used Clinical Practice Guideline standards”. Jan gives a jaw-dropping evidential breakdown of this both in writing and on video in the above link.
More can be read here, as well, from The Ministry has Fallen about the shortcomings of WPATH’s and PATHA’s guidelines.
A 21-year-old man, who savagely punched 71-year-old woman, Judith Hobson, several times at the Let Women Speak rally in Albert Park, Auckland, on 25th March last year, escaped conviction and got granted name suppression. The attack was captured on video by Simon Anderson, but the young man’s lawyer convinced the judge he’d become a changed man since then. The judge granted him a discharge without conviction and permanent name suppression, saying that “a conviction would be out of all proportion to the gravity of the offence”.
In the hearing, the young man’s lawyer said he had autism, been diagnosed with ADHD since punching Judith, and been caught up in the frenzy of the protest against Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker). The inference appeared to be that he had diminished responsibility due to his neurodiversity, and therefore wasn’t functioning properly as an adult.
That doesn’t, however, make him blind. There was no mention of his eyes not working on that day, so he would have been perfectly able to see who he was punching, and he still did it. Notably, he wasn’t stupid enough to punch any of the men who intervened, even though he would have still been in a rage. I opine that there was no way he was so caught up in the ‘frenzy’, or so neurodiverse, that he didn’t know what he was doing. Neither did he look like a novice when he was punching the hell out of Judith. He only stopped because he was dragged off her. But he’s a changed man since then, and he’s sorry. Although the young man may have been given a pass by the judge in the courtroom for what he did, the trial by social media is being less sympathetic.
Judith has now told her side of the story in mainstream news media articles, and a video interview, as below.¹ It’s a remarkable turnaround that the unbiased reporting of Joseph Los’e got past the NZ Herald editor, seeing as the mainstream media took part (with relish) in stoking up the vitriol prior to Kellie-Jay Keen’s visit here to New Zealand. Let’s hope it’s more than just a flash in the pan.
What could have been a good article for young women about menstruation got the woke-tard treatment from its authors. It made it rather less than engaging, to put it politely. The only time they mentioned women and girls was in the first few words of the article, and then didn’t mention them again.
Conversely, the authors almost fell over themselves in their rush to assure us of their woke credentials by opening the article with “New Zealand girls and young women, as well as nonbinary persons who bleed every month, have a limited understanding of menstruation”. [my emphasis in bold]
They then went on to tell us “in this article the term “female” is used to refer to individuals with the reproductive organs and hormones that enable menstruation. However, the authors do acknowledge that sex is not binary”. [my emphasis in bold]
The remainder of the article is then peppered with the words ‘female’ and ‘people’ throughout, with girls and women left behind. Technically, the word ‘female’ is correct, but I dispute that it evokes the same wealth of meaning, imagery, association, and engagement in the reader as the words ‘girls’ and ‘women’.
So, on one hand the authors want to encourage girls and women to know more about menstruation, and then use disassociative language, for the most part, to reach them. A somewhat wasted opportunity.
Not to be outdone in the disassociative language competition, an article appeared in The Spinoff telling us why removing the words ‘mother’ and ‘baby’ from the NZ Midwifery Council’s revised Scope of Practice is actually very good for women. Not only that, the authors are sure that the removal of the words ‘mother’ and ‘baby’ will improve equity for Māori and Pasifika in particular.
Removing those words also honours the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi, we’re told - the mental gymnastics enacted to back that up are quite the performance. However, despite all the obvious benefits to removing the words ‘mother’ and ‘baby’, nasty “trans-exclusionary” groups are unfairly giving the revised Scope of Practice a bad rap.
If you can get to the end of this article and not only understand what it said, but also understand how removing the words ‘mother’ and ‘baby’ from the Midwifery’s language is actually wonderful for women, especially Māori and Pasifika, that will be a feat, indeed.
¹Nana bashed at Posie Parker rally upset at punishment handed to her young attacker - NZ Herald
McBLOG: Meet the grandmother who was punched in the head (youtube.com)
Lundy Bancroft's book _Why Does He Do That?_ is *really* good on the magical ability of supposedly traumatized subfunctional poor dears to distinguish very clearly between safe targets (old ladies) and hard targets (other grown men) and "safe" spaces (rallies devoted to shouting women down, the privacy of the home) and "dangerous" spaces (the workplace, the grocery store, the gym -- places where somehow they can magically control their "bad tempers" and their "outbursts" and their "lashing out")
Shame on that judge.
Thanks Katrina...good points re 'mental capacity' and regarding needing 'to be dragged off' by men whom he did not feel he had to assault.