April 4 - 10: Canadian Women FIGHT BACK for Women in Prisons
And did John Oliver just die on the hill of "Let transwomen play"?
Top News: Canadian Women’s Group Launches Charter Action To Get Men Out Of Women’s PRISONS
The grass-roots, entirely-volunteer organization, Canadian Women for Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar), is taking on the federal government for housing men in women’s prisons.
On April 7, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) launched a Charter challenge on behalf of caWsbar. The challenge asserts that the federal government is violating the Charter (constitutional) rights of incarcerated Canadian women, stating that the practice is cruel and unusual punishment and violates the Charter rights of female inmates, including “their right to be protected from mental, physical, and sexual abuse…”
The challenge has been developed in close collaboration with caWsbar co-founder Heather Mason. Mason was once incarcerated in Canadian prison and has since been a strong advocate for the rights of women in prison (see WAHF: March 21-27).
The JCCF issued a press release, “Lawsuit takes aim at forcible confinement of female inmates with trans-identifying males”:
(CAWSBAR’s) lawsuit references an extensive list of physical and psychological harms female inmates have suffered as a result of being forcibly confined with trans-identifying male prisoners, including sexual assaults, sexual harassment, beatings, stalking, and grooming.
Many female prisoners come from disadvantaged backgrounds that often include past physical and sexual abuse from males. The current practice of having both males and females attend the same group therapy sessions makes it difficult for female inmates to fully participate in the treatment they seek. In advancing CASWBAR’s claim, lawyers will provide the court with evidence of psychological and physical harms that often lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, flashbacks of stressful violent and/or emotionally disturbing events involving men, anxiety, anger, depression, hopelessness, and suicidality.
CAWSBAR is not the first organization to report on the risks associated with forcibly confining female inmates alongside trans-identifying males. According to 2023 research from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, “More than 90% (55 of 61) of [trans-identified male] prisoners were incarcerated for violent offences. Of the group, nearly half (25) had a most serious offence that was homicide related and a third (18) had a most serious offense that was sexual in nature. In comparison, fewer than three-in-10 (6 of 21) [trans-identified females] were convicted of homicide related offences. This proportion of [trans-identified males] incarcerated for sexual and homicide-related offences is extraordinarily high compared to the general female prison population.”
CAWSBAR’s lawsuit argues that the current practice violates the constitutionally protected rights of female inmates. Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees female inmates the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. Section 12 guarantees the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment. Section 15 guarantees equality before and under the law as well as the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex.
Their lawsuit also references section 28, which reads, “Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.”
Further reading:
Apr. 9 - Justice Centre announces lawsuit over female inmates being forcibly confined with trans-identifying males (Rebel News)
Apr. 8 - Lawsuit challenges fed policy on housing trans-identifying males in women’s prisons (Western Standard)
Commissioner's directive 100: Gender diverse offenders (Correctional Service Canada)
The Prison Letters (Gender Dissent, Nov 2021)
Reclaiming Women’s Safe Spaces
Apr. 8 - Pam Bondi and DOJ Say “No More” to Males in Women’s Prisons
Attorney General Pam Bondi said her Department of Justice (DOJ) cut more than $1 million in federal funding to Maine’s Department of Corrections for putting “a giant, six-foot-one, 245-pound guy who committed double murder with a knife” into a women’s prison, contrary to the Trump administration’s policies.
Getting Males Out of Female Sports
Apr. 7 - 9: Follow-up from Woman Taking Knee Instead of Competing Against Male.
Last week’s WAHF round-up included the story of Stephanie Turner taking a knee in protest of being paired against a male opponent in a women’s fencing competition. Turner stated to the trans-identifying male “I am sorry. I have a lot of love and respect for you, but I will not fence you.” She then was given a black-card for “her decision to decline to fence an eligible opponent, which the FIE [International Fencing Federation] rules clearly prohibit.”
There have been interesting developments over the week:
Apr. 9 - After Kneeling Incident, Wagner College Says Trans-identifying Fencer No Longer On Women’s Team
When asked why Sullivan will no longer compete on the women’s fencing team, Wagner College Spokesperson Jim Chiavelli said, “We are in full compliance with NCAA and NEC rules and regulations. The fencer is not a member of our fencing team.”
Turner’s protest put USA Fencing’s transgender-athlete policy into the spotlight and now officials are looking into whether the organization broke Texas state consumer protection laws.
XX-XY Athletics, which calls itself 'the only athletic brand that stands up for women's sports,' awarded Turner with the Courage Wins Award and announced she would receive a $5,000 prize as well as admittance into a leadership program.
Apr. 8 - Shocking reason John Oliver is so fixated with defending trans athletes on his woke HBO show
The April 7th episode of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight has been garnering a lot of negative attention on social media. Oliver went on a 42-minute rant in defence of trans-identifying athletes being able to play on teams of their preference, which of course primarily means being cool about males on girls’ and women’s teams.
(I watched it in its entirety — it was painful. The rant was in true hyper-woke fashion: repeating words ad naseum in an aggrieved yet self-righteous tone, citing compassion for those who are highest on the “oppressed” spectrum and eschewing compassion for the “oppressors” [who in this case are the girls and women hogging the underresourced athletics their foremothers worked so hard to win for them].
There was gaslighting aplenty about facts and stories. If I wasn’t so firmly rooted in my reality-based knowledge and understanding of the larger picture of the harms caused by playing along with the gender-wang fiction, I fear that I might have been at risk of being numbed into ideological submission. I would try to provide more concrete analyses of the piece, but honestly, by the end it seemed a blur and my teeth hurt from feeling so annoyed. Thankfully, others have had lots to say about it.)
It turns out that a fact-checker for Oliver’s show, DM (Dee) Brent is a trans-identifying male, and he was leading the charge on constructing this segment. We know this because Brent sent a strongly worded comment request to the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), and WoLF in turn has made the exchange public.
The show is scheduled to air on Sunday, April 6, although it is unclear if this segment will actually make the cut. In the interest of transparency, we are publishing the full correspondence between Dee Brent and WoLF.
We will leave it to the audience to decide if the show appears to be fair and impartial.”
WoLF’s Executive Director, Sharon Byrne, opened her response to Brent with, “We'll answer you openly, as we have the other requests. We note the tone of your questions is fairly accusatory, as though you feel we did something wrong by looking at the stats available on shewon.org and submitting input to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls regarding women's sports.”
Since Brent was focusing heavily on calling into question sources of stats about men in women’s sports, Byrne went into detail explaining their value and vailidity:
SheWon.org and HeCheated.org provide something incredibly useful that women globally had been looking for: tabulation. Over the past few years, story after story has broken of male 'transgender' athletes taking wins in women's sport. Both sites are repositories for the record of lost titles and medals taken from women by men…
We're incredibly grateful to women out there volunteering their precious time and efforts to keep the record straight. We don't know who they are, but we sure appreciate them…
The framing of your questions indicates you seek to discredit SheWon.org because volunteers put it together. You question its accuracy and some of the ways it calculates the loss to women and girls. But you missed that sports authorities and organizations like the NCAA and IOC aren't compiling that data, as they've obliterated sex with gender identity. There is an implied sense of outrage in your questions - how dare women keep track of stolen sports titles!
That smacks of Progressive Misogyny.
Byrne noted that Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, also utilized statistics from SheWon.org in her Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences: Violence against women and girls in sports. Lo and behold, it turns out that Alsalem had also been corresponding with Brent about the segement and was feeling the air of contempt from him. Alsalem responded directly to Oliver on X.com, posting her two-page correspondence with Brent.
Shewon.org also reponded to the accusations from Oliver. Since WAHF includes the Shewon.org and Hecheated.org buttons in *every* edition, it is worth sharing Shewon.org’s detailed description of their steadfast commitment to fact-elucidation.
She Won recently made an appearance on Last Week Tonight. John Oliver stuck to his tired recipe: dishonest sanctimony wrapped in a thick coating of self-deprecation (all the easier to swallow), this time about male athletes in women’s sports and specifically about our org.
First, John Oliver leads viewers to believe that the content on is directly published by random people on the internet. This is totally false. We encourage people to submit tips, and our team of volunteers reviews each entry before we publish anything.
We only publish what we can verify from primary and secondary sources. We state this methodology clearly on our website, so check one off for deliberately misleading viewers.
Second, John Oliver also suggests our data is stale, mentioning that it dates back to the year 2001. This is extraordinarily misleading. 97% of our data is dated no earlier than 2014. 86% is from 2019 and onward. Check another off.
Third, John Oliver attacks our org to discredit the idea that a significant number of women are displaced by male athletes in women’s competitions. This is absurd because She Won does not purport to provide a comprehensive list of every woman denied a medal to male athletes.
On the contrary, She Won is a tiny organization run by volunteers. The database we compile is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg. We frequently exclude submissions, many coming directly from individual athletes, because there aren’t enough sources to verify against.
In fact, She Won came into existence as a response to the disturbing lack of data on this topic, and as a response to the disingenuous refrain “this isn’t happening.”
The sad truth is that no media outlet has seriously investigated the scope of the problem, and sporting organizations are more often than not hostile to providing any data about males in female competition.
John Oliver now attempts to undermine one of the few organizations documenting this problem, and suggests that if our data is flawed, the problem simply doesn’t exist.
Fourth, Oliver quibbles with our tally: one male winner displaces second, third, and fourth-place women, which counts as three medals lost. We see no issue with this methodology; three medals were lost.
Our focus is on the women who are affected by unfair male competition, not on the male athletes displacing them. Every single woman, from gold to bronze, suffered an injustice. We discount none of them.
The unfortunate truth is that we’re severely undercounting the number of affected women. Outside of the podium, women are denied placement on a team (like would-be Olympian Tania Edwards), or denied placement in a finals event (like NCAA swimmer Reka Gyorgy).
In a recent hearing, a high school girl recounts how she was deliberately and explicitly replaced by a male athlete on her cross country team.
There’s another silent toll: women who never enter the game, knowing the game’s rigged or unwilling to undress beside a naked man in the locker room. Oliver never mentions these women. He does give generous airtime to two women who are “chill” and “happy” about losing to men.
John Oliver makes an extraordinary effort to paint this issue as left versus right. He goes out of his way to frame the young advocates he’s chosen to focus on as far-right conservatives, showing countless clips of them being interviewed on Fox News (when he’s not ridiculing their athletic ability). This is an appeal to tribalism. It is an appeal for viewers to switch off their mental faculties - to think uncritically. But this isn’t a left versus right issue. It is a women’s rights issue.
And, of course, the Queen herself was not to be left out. JK Rowling also burned Oliver with her trademark authoratative bite:
Apr. 7 - Women’s final between two biological men shatters defence for transgender athletes
On the same night John Oliver tanked the last bit of respect normies might have had for him and his show, another comedic tragedy was playing out in the UK at the Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series Event 2, where two trans-identifying males competed in the final round to see who would take first and second place.
As Oliver Brown put it, “Viral rants by comic based on bad logic and morals cannot hide injustice of females always bearing impact of ideological drive for inclusion.”
As reported by Spiked.com, in 2023, several UK pool groups instituted bans of trans-identifying players, after Lynn Pinches caused a row by refusing to compete against TiM Harriet Haynes. Pinches explained why competing against males feels unfair even in pool, ‘(men) have a longer reach, and a lot of them are taller than us’, making it easier for men to make shots with greater power and speed.
Paul Thompson, chairman of the English Blackball Pool Federation (EBPF) - one of the orgs that instituted the ban, demonstrated his ability to “read the fucking room” (unlike some people, JOHN), stating he had to take into consideration the feelings of female-born players who had objected to competing against trans women. The Ultimate Pool Group was another group that implemented the ban, but later reversed the ban.
Harriet Haynes, the trans-identifying male professional pool player who walked away with the status and prize money for first place at the Ultimate Pool competition, is ALSO currently suing the EBPF for its ban that keeps him out of their women’s events. The EBPF is a volunteer-run organization and must now seek donations to cover costs of its legal fee. If there is an answer to the riddle of “How low will a trans-identifying male sink to force everyone to play along with his fiction and enshrine his entitled claim to things that don’t belong to him?”, I do not know it.
Amid a “staggering volume of Title IX complaints”, the U.S Department of Education and the Department of Justice announced the “Title IX Special Investigations Team” (SIT) to “ensure timely, consistent resolutions to protect students, and especially female athletes, from the pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities.”
And now we know Law & Order’s next spin-off.
🎶Dun-dunh.🎶
Pornography, Sexual Harassment & Sexual Assault
Apr. 9 - Australia and Canada pull rape and incest game that tells players to be 'women's worst nightmare'
Rape culture just leveled up. A comupter game called “No Mercy” launched on the Steam platform last month, in which players act as “every woman’s worst nightmare” and “never take no for an answer” in scenes of violence, blackmail and “unavoidable non-consensual sex”.
Canadian and Australian officials quickly made the game unavailable for download, but in the UK, even though Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, demanded Steam take it down, it remains available.
Pepe Di'Iasio, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders told LBC: “Just copy Australia. Australia seems to have got a grip on this, they seem to have acted swiftly… Let’s get the legislation doing what it should do and let’s make sure we can protect the young people who are most at threat from this right now.”
Soma Sara is exposing that even girls in primary school are experiencing misogynistic rape culture. Sara founded the website Everyone's Invited in 2020 to record the experiences of teenagers at schools in the UK, but was herself surprised at the plethora of stories the site received detailing girls as young as four being subjected to sexual name-calling, harassment, blackmail and threats, molestation and even penetration.
Everyone’s Invited published the names of 1,664 UK primary schools whose former pupils anonymously shared their experiences. The accounts are shocking, and so is the realization that the perpetrators are small children as well — “little boys who've been indoctrinated by an explosion in online misogyny against women, which they're being exposed to at far younger ages than perhaps any of us previously let ourselves imagine.”
The most recent National Police Chief's Council report shows there has been a 400 per cent increase in child sexual abuse and exploitation from 2013-2024 –and 52 per cent of alleged offenders in cases of sexual violence in primary schools are children themselves, compared to 33 per cent just a decade ago.
Sara is advocating that adults get serious not just about preventing children from stumbling across dehumanising sexual content online, but intervening in their lives to teach kids about how to counter the violence, hate and misogynistic pornography.
More than 50% of people who admitted watching online child abuse said they were not seeking that content when they were first exposed. Of the people who reported “accidentally viewing” child sexual abuse online, over two-thirds were youth under 18, and almost half of those youth were under 13. (By my rudimentary calculation, that means the study demonstrates that around 15% of people witnessing child sexual abuse online are children themselves.) The UK, along with other countries, is bringing in tighter control, including age verification processes by July, under the new Online Safety Act (OSA).
Sheath says his decades working with offenders has made him incredibly concerned about the way children are growing up with access to porn. “This is an experiment we are doing as a society and I think we can agree it’s going pretty badly. Before the smartphone, most people’s first experience of sex was with a living person and that included resistance, pushback, romance. Now young people are growing up with unfettered access to porn, and porn norms are not about consent. They are about ‘strangle the bitch’, ‘have sex with your stepmum’. It’s shaping their erotic templates.”
The new OSA does not aim to regulate the violent and harmful nature of porn content, such as strangulation, violence and sexual fetishisation of incest or child abuse. Baroness Bertin recently conducted an in-depth review of porn and concluded that depictions of strangulation are not banned by case law — she is advocating for tighter regulation of harmful, violent pornography.
News Impacting Society and Children
Journalist Megyn Kelly has obtained over 1,000 pages of writings left behind by Nashville Covenant School shooter and trans-identifying female, Audrey Hale, and read out portions on her morning show.
Kelly said the pages revealed "clear insight into the depraved mind of a killer,” including passages about Hale’s terrible delusions and desires:
wanting to kill in order to be remembered in “the most horrific way possible that no one will ever forget”;
spending years meticulously planning the mass shooting / suicide;
craving “black love” and acceptance and hating her own whiteness and all white people. Hale wrote, "Black people should rule. White people should fall, every white person who lived and died. I hate you all."
Testosterone is a helluva drug.
Beyond the West
Apr. 6 - Rifts growing in the Taliban over the ban on girls' schooling
In January, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, Afghanistan’s acting deputy foreign minister, left Afghanistan after he spoke out against the 2021 ban on girls in school, which has denied education to more than 2 million girls since the Taliban returned to power.
Now NBC has spoken with three more senior members of the Taliban, who described that there is a growing divide between ultra-conservative Taliban members from the southern city of Kandahar where the group’s leader lives, and more moderate ones from the capital city of Kabul who are calling for some of the extreme repressive restrictions to be rolled back, including returning to allowing girls to go to school.
Some Taliban officials “openly expressed their views in support of girls’ education, believing that it will have some impact on the leadership,” an official told NBC News this year. “Unfortunately, rather than welcoming their suggestions, some people took it negatively as if they were against the top leadership.”
Apr. 5 - Afghan rights defender told she faces ‘no risk’ from Taliban as Home Office denies asylum
Despite the intensely anti-woman Taliban regime and horrendous consequences for women who step out of line, the UK is rejecting more asylum claims from women who worked with foreign governments before fleeing. The success rate of Afghan cases has gone down from 98.5% in the last quarter of 2023 to 36% in the last quarter of 2024.
One woman described her startling rejection:
“I assumed my asylum claim would be granted – I am from Afghanistan, I’m a woman, I worked with western governments. The refusal was an absolute shock. Now every day I fear being sent back to my home country. Having a normal life here looks like a dream for me. I’m really suffering mentally.
“When I was working with western government projects I received security training about how to respond if I was caught up in a bombing or a kidnapping. Every day I was a few minutes or a few seconds away from bomb blasts.
“My heart beat so fast when I had to pass the checkpoints. Every morning when I said goodbye to my family to go to work I thought it might be the last time I saw them,” she said. “Some of my colleagues just disappeared. The Taliban changed the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to the Ministry of Vice and Virtue – proper, systematic elimination of women.”
Op-Eds of Interest
Campaign Club (Women’s News Network): 20 Women Who Have Been Sued for Saying Men Aren't Women
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Thanks, this is a very thorough summary. I despise hacks like Oliver, who just become craven in their pursuit of continued status and will stoop to any lies in the process.
Unfortunately the cultural left, Hollywood etc is still blasting this bullshit with both barrels and sadly they still have a lot of influence. Somehow the established cultural production system need to die.
Dare I hope that the tide is turning?