Welcome to the Dollhouse Episode 15: Take Your Medicine with Kit Kowalski and Edie Wyatt.
Edie’s 10k
We walk about the nature of being on Twitter
Are we all friends here?
Are we sisters? Is sisterhood powerful or is it all cups of tea and pillow fights?
The Age sacks Julie Szego
What did Julie do?
Wrote a piece commissioned by former The Age editor Gay Alcorn
When the new editor Patrick Elligett refused to publish, Julie released the work on her Substack,
Julie tweeted that this was to avoid “copy being rendered unreadable by a committee of woke journalists redacting words”
Elligett took the classy step of sending Julie a text message inviting her to rack off for good.
Interesting to read the coverage across the spectrum.
News.com.au
Quoted heavily from The Australian’s exclusive story and includes a 5 minute 45 second interview that Bernard Lane did with Peta Credlin on Sky News.
The Age has sacked one of its star columnists after she called out the newspaper over refusing to run her article on youth gender transition
Star Observer
Contains a trigger warning
Focuses on unprofessional workplace behaviour (the tweet) for the sacking
Misspells Szego’s name in a heading “Sego Slams Dan Andrews”
Centres Szego’s attendance at the Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne, with scare quotes - “Szego claimed that she attended the rally as a “journalist”.”
Quotes heavily from Szego’s own account and lightly from The Australian article.
SO uses the same story tagline as News.com.au but adds scare quotes and changes “gender transition” to “gender affirming care”:
The Age sacked one of its “star” columnists Julie Szego after her comments about “woke journalists” following the masthead’s refusal to publish her article about gender affirming care.
Find Julie Szego’s work here at Szego Unplugged
BDMR Passes in Queensland: Women Erased
Queensland brings in possibly the strangest self-id laws ever. Individuals will be able to change their designated and recorded gender to any word of fewer than 100 characters. There is no requirement to register the sex of a baby.
Get ready for cat-gender, chocolate-gender and skittles-gender.
The rights of men march ever-forward in Australia
Another green light on the wikipedia canvas … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights_in_Australia
Now men can identify as women in Queensland without “forced” sterilisation. Because gender medicine does cause sterility. Even ACON’s Teddy Cook says so.
Things are bad when your staff go over your head and ask an MP to call you out
Mr Daniel Purdie, member for Ninderry, spoke in parliament about the medical issues around transgenderism. He asked questions on behalf of psychiatrists in the QLD Children’s Gender Service and passed on their pleas for a review of the evidence and practices.
Dr Stephen Stathis is the Managing Director of the QLD Children’s Gender Service, who has ignored his staff’s requests for a review.
All about Steve…
In 2016 and 2017 Dr Stephen Stathis said “he had seen girls who had been sexually abused and wanted to identify as transgender” and kids “trying out” transgender to be cool (archive link). And then ‘clarified’ his remarks after they were picked up by Christian publications.
We have a listen to Dr Steve’s talk about sex and gender at Don’t Forget The Bubbles 18.
He puts forward some very confused messages such as “girls have more freedom in society” and puts forward the Genderbread Person model of gender identity. We hear that gender dysphoria is the same as wearing the clothes and performing the activities of an opposite-sex spouse. We wonder how many parents are taken in by this analogy.
He also doesn’t consider the involvement of sexuality and sexual development on gender identity and gender role confusion. This is despite knowing that gender role confusion in children strongly correlates to gay and bisexual adults.
Though he isn’t quite pursuing a “true trans argument, Dr Steve puts forward a “locked in by age 5 / girl germs” theory of gender-identity development. No, really. Watch the video.
Speaking of dissent
Dr Jillian Spencer works with Dr Steve
Dr Spencer is a senior psychiatrist with the QLD Children’s Gender Clinic. She has been stood down after she raised concerns about the way treatment is managed.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/senior-child-psychiatrist-stood-down-after-questioning-gender-medicine/news-story/b418333aa19de951acb98601bf4ca31d
If you’re wondering about the history of children’s gender medicine, the framework used in Australia and whether the evidence base is firm, watch this video.
Here is Jillian talking in NSW Parliament on 23 June 2023 about the lack of evidence for the affirmation model.
What’s the harm?
Call to action
Email the Queensland Children’s Gender Service and call for a review of the affirmation model.
Over to Tasmania
Being a woman or a lesbian is difficult in Tasmania. LGB Tasmania puts up a billboard declaring “LET KIDS BE KIDS”.
The Trans lobby, Equality Tasmania, respond with a massive freak-out at the idea that we should say ‘let kids be kids’.
Well-played, LGB Tasmania, well-played.
Need a job? ACON is hiring again
Join the A-team of policy capture. ACON’s Pride in Diversity have 10 relationship managers, dedicated academic consultant, 3 associate directors, 1 deputy director, 1 director. This is in addition to their support staff and the staff engaged with Pride in Sport and Pride in Health + Wellbeing.
Business must be booming.
Find us elsewhere and join us next week!
Edie Wyatt: Substack, Twitter, The Spectator
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Intro song: Bad Girls by MIA
Episode 15: Take Your Medicine