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me (saw it posted by @trueheartberry on this post)
Title:
Biography of Roberta Lynn Bondar
Image:
Publishing date:
March 6th, 2026
Author:
Not listed
Website published:
asc-csa.gc.ca
Article length:
1519 words
~ 6 minute read time
Date of Birth: December 4, 1945 From: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario
Background: Physician, Neurologist, Scientist
Education: Bachelor of Science, Zoology and Agriculture; Master of Science, Experimental Pathology; PhD Neurobiology; Doctor of Medicine; Board Certified Neurologist, Subspecialty Neuro-ophthalmology
Certification: Professional Nature Photography; Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD.D) Languages: English and French
Mission: Payload Specialist 1 on STS-42 aboard Discovery
Career highlights
1968 She earns a double Bachelor of Science (BSc Agr) in zoology and agriculture from the University of Guelph. Obtains Canadian Private Pilot's License.
1971 She completes a Master of Science (MSc) in experimental pathology from Western University, London, Ontario.
1974 Dr. Bondar earns a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in neurobiology, University of Toronto.
1977 Bondar earns a Doctor of Medicine (MD), McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, and obtains her License, Medical Council of Canada.
1981 She becomes a Board Certified Neurologist, Canada.
1981–1982 She holds Neuro-ophthalmology Fellowship at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and at Toronto Western Hospital.
1982–1984 She is appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University.
1983–1984 Bondar is selected in 1983 in the first group of the Canadian Astronaut Program from a field of 4,300 and is the only woman selected in the final group of six. She begins astronaut training. She develops taste experiments with colleagues at NASA to fly on STS-41G and supports the flight crew during pre-flight training in Canada.
1988–1990 She is selected and trained as a Payload Specialist Candidate for the first International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-1) Space Shuttle flight.
1990–1992 Dr. Bondar trains as the Prime Payload Specialist for IML-1.
1992 From January 22 to 31, Dr. Bondar flies as Payload Specialist 1 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery Mission STS-42 as the first female Canadian astronaut and world's first neurologist in space, conducting over 40 physical and life science experiments.
1993 Dr. Bondar is granted her medical license in the state of New Mexico, where she researches brain blood flow in simulated spaceflight bedrest studies.
1993–1998 Bondar leads an international research team working with NASA on the effects of microgravity on astronauts returning from spaceflight and similarities to human diseases on Earth. She accomplishes this while holding positions as Distinguished Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University); Visiting Research Scholar, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Visiting Research Scientist, Universities Space Research Association, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas; and as a CIBC Distinguished Professor, School of Kinesiology, Western University, London, Ontario.
1994 She publishes Touching the Earth, her book about her spaceflight (Key Porter).
1996 She is an honours student in Professional Nature Photography at the Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, California.
1997–2000 Dr. Bondar serves as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Panel in the Health Protection Branch of Health Canada.
1998 She establishes a sole proprietorship, Roberta Bondar Astronaut Enterprise (a nod to the Star Trek ship), and begins her entrepreneurial initiatives in professional nature and landscape photography, writing, professional speaking and environment education.
1998–2000 Dr. Bondar spends two years in the field photographing all of Canada's national parks. She curates a travelling exhibition of her large fine art landscape photographs from this project that travelled to many arts and culture organizations across the country to celebrate the millennium, which included the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
2002–2003 She serves as a member of the National Police Services National Advisory Committee, and continues her writing and photography.
2003–2009 Bondar is installed and serves as the ninth Chancellor of Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. She publishes The Arid Edge of Earth in 2006, a catalogue of her black-and-white and colour fine art photographic prints of the deserts of the world, including Arctic aerial and surface landscapes, and UNESCO world heritage sites in Libya.
2007 Roberta chairs the Working Group on Environmental Education of the Curriculum Council for the Ontario Government, which accepts all the recommendations of the report for implementation in the Ontario public school system's curriculum.
2009 She co-founds the Roberta Bondar Foundation, a registered Canadian charitable organization where she volunteers as its President and Scientific Advisor.
2008–2017 She photographs and produces privately commissioned exhibitions, and six publicly presented travelling exhibitions of her fine art photography for the Roberta Bondar Foundation.
2011–2014 Dr. Bondar is a member of the Governing Council of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, Kenya.
2011–present Roberta is the Patron of the Hoopers Africa Trust that develops and delivers educational programs and opportunities for at-risk young women in the Masai Mara, Kenya, inspiring them to pursue education and to care for their natural heritage.
2012–2016 She serves as a member of the Board of Directors of COM DEV International Ltd.
2016–present She focuses her work primarily on the project Space for Birds, exploring the flyways of endangered, near-threatened and declining avian species. She serves as a Principal Investigator with NASA (migratory birds), Earth Observation Team, International Space Station. Partners for this work also have included UNEP, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Parks Canada, Canadian Wildlife Service, Birds Canada and the Canadian Space Agency.
2022 Dr. Bondar is invited to be part of Visual Voices: Artists & the Environment art installation in the Senate of Canada. She chose her iconic large, fine art aerial photograph, Endangered Shadows (2018), about endangered Whooping Cranes staging in Saskatchewan, which is now part of the Senate's permanent collection.
2023–present From the Space for Birds project, Bondar curates a travelling exhibition fusing art and science, Patterns and Parallels: The Great Imperative to Survive, which continues to travel across Canada.
2024–present In 2024, Dr. Bondar publishes Space for Birds: Patterns and Parallels of Beauty and Flight (Figure 1 Publishing), the culmination of over a decade of her research and photography. She pursues her writing, professional speaking engagements, photography and research on migratory birds with the Roberta Bondar Foundation.
Education
She attended elementary and secondary schools in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and received her first degree, a BSc, in zoology and agriculture in 1968 from the University of Guelph, in Ontario, followed in 1971 by an MSc in experimental pathology from Western University in London, Ontario. In 1974 she earned a PhD in neurobiology from the University of Toronto followed by an MD from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1977, and was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in neurology in 1981. During her various careers, she has held many certifications including scuba diving, parachuting, instructor level: basic and advanced disaster life support, spaceflight surgeon, and governance as a ICD.D.
Honorary degrees (honoris causa)
L.L.D Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia (2017); D.Sc. The University of British Columbia, British Columbia (2016); L.L.D Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario (2015); D.Sc. Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia; D.Sc. University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba (2001); D.Sc. Niagara University, Niagara Falls, New York (1997); D.Sc. Western University, London, Ontario (1995); D.Sc. University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec; D.Sc. University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (1994); D.Sc. Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario; D.Sc. Laval University, Quebec City, Quebec; D.Sc. Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland; D.Sc. Royal Roads Military College, Victoria, British Columbia; D.S.L. Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario (1993); Honorary Fellowship, Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), Toronto, Ontario; D.Sc. York University, Toronto, Ontario; D.Sc. McGill University, Montreal, Quebec; D.Sc. University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario; DUniv. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario; L.L.D University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta; LL.D. University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan; D.Sc. McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario; D.Sc. Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (1992); D.Sc. Algoma University (formerly Algoma College of Laurentian University), Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario; D.Sc. Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario (1991); D.Sc. University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario; D. Hum. L. Mount St. Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (1990); D.Sc. Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick (1989).
Special honours
King Charles III Coronation Medal (2024); Companion, Order of Canada (2018); Key to the City of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario; Honorary Vice-President, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society; Commemorative 25th Anniversary Coin, Roberta Bondar (2017); Honorary Fellow, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (2015); Gold Medal, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (2014); Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012); Star on Canada's Walk of Fame (2011); International Women's Forum International Hall of Fame; Tetelman Fellow, Yale University; Roberta Bondar Astronaut Stamp, Canada Post (2003); Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2002); Specially Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1999); Canadian Medical Hall of Fame (1998); Star on Sault Ste. Marie's Walk of Fame (1995); The Order of Ontario; Honorary Colonel 22nd Wing, North Bay (1993); NASA Space Flight Medal; Officer, Order of Canada; Canada 125 Medal; Dr. Bondar represented Canada for the year 1992 in presentation to Queen Elizabeth II, Rideau Hall, Ottawa, Ontario (1992).
Schools named in honour of Dr. Roberta Bondar
Dr. Roberta Bondar Elementary School, Abbotsford, British Columbia; Roberta Bondar Public School, Ottawa, Ontario; Dr. Roberta Bondar Public School, Ajax, Ontario; Roberta Bondar Public School, Brampton, Ontario; Roberta Bondar Public School, Vaughan, Ontario; Dr. Roberta Bondar School, Calgary, Alberta.
Trans is not the new gay: How psychoanalytic elitism and the rejection of science are creating a repetition of the past
Publishing date:
January 12th, 2026
Author:
Roberto D'Angelo
Website published:
tandfonline.com
Article length:
8978 words
~ 33 minute read time
ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has a troubled history with regard to sexual minorities. Throughout much of the twentieth century, prominent analysts endorsed a highly pathologising and coercive approach to homosexuality, which was essentially a form of conversion therapy. This departure from accepted analytic technique persisted for decades due to psychoanalytic elitism and the rejection of mounting empirical science contradicting the psychoanalytic position. Today, a pressing concern for psychoanalysis is to avoid repeating this history when theorising about and working with transgender people. Psychodynamic explorations of trans identity formation are being framed as new iterations of conversion therapy, wrongly implying coercion and falsely conflating psychodynamics with pathology. Furthermore, the author cautions that unquestioning gender affirmation shares an important conceptual similarity with gay conversion therapy, in that it can collude with a wish to eliminate a shame-filled or hated part of the self. In our haste to avoid repeating the past, psychoanalysis is deploying the very same tactics that insulated its stance on homosexuality from revision and course correction, but now with regard to trans. The author argues that if we are to avoid causing further harm to our patients and our profession, we ignore the science at our own peril.
“We may believe that we are currently on the moral high road; but it is well to remember that psychoanalysts of past generations who were well trained, intelligent, diligent and empathic believed the same”. (Friedman and Downey Citation2016, 340)
Introduction
Psychoanalysis has a troubled history with regard to homosexuality. Schwartz (Citation2022) asks the most important question in relation to this issue: how can we prevent a future repetition of the “moral and intellectual debacle” of the psychoanalytic approach to homosexuality?
perhaps the most obvious [way]: teach our history as part of training, including its shameful moments. The telling of history is part of the present – we must know it correctly to go forward cleanly. To know it in its ugliness may immunize us against its easy repetition. (Schwartz Citation2022, 16)
And, perhaps most importantly: “where relevant data and scientific findings exist, grapple with them. Psychoanalytic data is special, unique; but its conflicts with controlled, scientific data must always be examined” (Schwartz Citation2022, 16). This history is often invoked in relation to current discussions about trans issues in both clinical and lay communities. It serves as a warning that any perspective diverging from the position that trans identities are universally an expectable manifestation of human gender diversity risks repeating the injustices and harms that were inflicted on gay people in the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis, and in fact most of mainstream medicine, is fighting for the full depathologisation of trans and for widespread access to gender-affirming interventions. Clinicians who seek to explore the psychodynamic formation of trans identities are accused of promoting conversion therapy – a trans version of the coercive treatment administered to homosexuals. Similarly, scientific data questioning the safety and effectiveness of medical and surgical gender reassignment is framed as misinformation deriving from an inherent, pathologising bias against gender diversity and trans people. Psychoanalysis is taking the moral high road and claims to be on the right side of history this time, demonstrating our collective desire to protect sexual minorities from another round of harm.
Our collective guilt about the past, coupled with our anxiety to avoid repeating it, is in fact fuelling a repetition of the very thing we are trying to avoid. While the history of the “intellectual and moral debacle” of our attitude towards homosexuality is now widely known, psychoanalysis has yet to fully confront the full ugliness of that history. Perhaps the single most significant reason this harmful chapter of our history continued for many decades was psychoanalytic arrogance: elitism regarding the superiority of psychoanalytic understanding of human experience, coupled with a relentless rejection of empirical science. To truly immunise ourselves against its repetition, we must confront these uglier aspects of the psychoanalytic enterprise and, by extension, ourselves. Otherwise, we may fail to see that these very same defensive manoeuvres are operating in our profession’s current engagement with gender, gender dysphoria and transgender, once again exposing our patients to potential harm.
This paper will explore the pathologising approach to homosexuality that dominated psychoanalytic publications during the twentieth century, what ultimately led psychoanalysis to revise its position, and why it took so long. Psychoanalytic authorities rejected emerging scientific evidence that directly contradicted mainstream psychoanalytic thinking about homosexuality, defending their pathologising formulations and their coercive treatment approach for decades – even after homosexuality was officially removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM). Founded by Charles Socarides, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) operated from 1992 to 2014 and was arguably the last remaining bastion of psychoanalytic conversion therapy for homosexuals, becoming increasingly isolated (Drescher Citation2023). Much harm was done to gay people as well as to our profession, as a result of psychoanalysis’ refusal to engage with empirical science. This refusal was grounded in the elitist belief that psychoanalysts had privileged access to human experience.
Through exploring coercive psychoanalytic approaches to homosexuality, it becomes apparent that contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to gender dysphoria bear no resemblance to problematic conversion therapies for homosexuality. Mapping the phenomenology of internalised homophobia and gender dysphoria further distinguishes between the psychotherapeutic approaches to each. Many patients experiencing distress about same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria can be understood as being internally divided. They are both struggling with and may be trying to work through an ambivalently held, feared or hated part of the self. Viewed through this lens, a fundamental difference between these two problems emerges. Most psychological therapies work towards integration, helping patients to accept feared, hated or “not-me” parts of the self, and this is indeed the approach taken with patients who struggle with homosexual desire. However, for patients with gender dysphoria, unquestioning affirmation risks rigidifying this internal division and colluding with attempts to distance from or eliminate a part of the self.
Numerous factors contributed to the decades-long persistence of pathologising approaches to homosexuality. These factors combined to insulate idiosyncratic psychoanalytic theories and their proponents from any challenge or revision. Firstly, people who disagreed, or theories that offered a different perspective, were dismissed as not being psychoanalytic. Secondly, empirical science was considered irrelevant to psychoanalysis because it failed to take the unconscious into account and was therefore ignored. Today, we are witnessing a repetition of these phenomena in relation to trans issues. Those who question the prevailing, permissible understanding of trans are devalued as unanalytic. Scientific data that questions the wholesale acceptance of gender medicine is either ignored or misrepresented as misinformation. Once again, psychoanalysts are fighting to defend their positions despite what the science says.
Psychoanalysis and homosexuality
In contrast to Freud’s cautious views on the issue, the approach to homosexuality outlined in psychoanalytic publications from the mid-to-late twentieth century was unequivocally pathologising. This aspect of the history of our field has been extensively documented (Chiang Citation2008; Drescher Citation2008, Citation2015; Friedman and Downey Citation1998, Citation2016; Isay Citation1985; Isay and Friedman Citation1986; Newbigin Citation2013; Schwartz Citation2022). The pathological perspective was accepted by the majority of American psychoanalysts (Bayer Citation1981). It was based on the views of prominent psychoanalysts of the time, including Edmund Bergler and Charles Socarides, who argued that homosexuality was always the result of psychopathology. The most influential of these was Sandor Rado (Friedman and Downey Citation1998). He believed that homosexuality could only be understood as a “reparative adjustment”, a consequence of fear and guilt acquired during childhood, which inhibited heterosexual desire (Rado Citation1940, Citation1949). As well as being viewed as a fear of heterosexuality, it was also generally accepted that homosexuality involved a failure to identify with the father, thereby leading to abnormal psychosexual development (Friedman and Downey Citation2016).
One does not have to look too deeply into the psychoanalytic literature of the time to note the obvious contempt and moral judgement that underpinned these pathological formulations. In the opening chapter of his book Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?, one of the most prominent clinicians arguing for the pathological nature of homosexuality, Edmund Bergler, describes homosexuals as “essentially disagreeable people … the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression and whimpering … the only language their unconscious understands is brute force” (Citation1957, 28–29). He claimed that all homosexuals displayed certain pathological unconscious dynamics. These included: psychic masochism and injustice collecting, a mortal fear of women, constant dissatisfaction and hence constantly being on the prowl, an unfounded megalomaniacal conviction of the homosexual’s superiority, inner depression and exorbitant malice, inner guilt arising from the perversion, irrational jealousy, and unreliability as a manifestation of psychopathic trends. Socarides (Citation1968) noted that half of homosexuals have “concomitant schizophrenia, paranoia, are latent pseudoneurotic schizophrenics or are in the throes of a manic depressive reaction”. The remainder are neurotics, or suffer from “character disorders, psychopathic personality or some variety of addiction”.
Early studies of the use of the Rorschach to detect homosexuality powerfully illustrate the intellectual bias in relation to homosexuality. In the 1940s, the Rorschach was used to distinguish a “genuine, chronic homosexual” from someone feigning homosexuality to obtain discharge from the army. It was also used to help psychiatrists identify the homosexual who is “hiding behind a conversion symptom”. Bergmann (Citation1945) concluded that while not infallible, the Rorschach may be “of practical value to army psychiatrists who may be confronted either with simulators or soldiers accused of homosexuality which they deny”. Wheeler (Citation1949) studied the Rorschachs of 100 male patients at the Los Angeles Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic, developing what would subsequently become known as the “Wheeler signs” of homosexuality. Patients were identified as homosexual by their therapists based on any of the following: the patient's own reports of homosexual experience, the patient’s report that he had masturbated at some time in his life, the therapist’s opinion that the patient had a somewhat effeminate appearance or manner, or an indication that the patient felt hostile towards the mother. The 20 signs he identified, which were associated with these therapist-reported findings, included human or animal oral detail, human or animal anal detail, feminine clothing, dehumanised or animal-like figures, humans or animals described as “back to back”, and a human female with a derogatory specification. Based on these findings, Wheeler concluded:
If it is possible to accept the rationale for each item in terms of the aforementioned results, a combined picture of the male “homosexual” would be: A somewhat paranoid individual with derogatory attitudes toward people, especially women, which is accompanied by a feminine identification. There are indications of anal interests and interest in physical relationships between like beings. There is apparently some preoccupation with sex in general and some autoerotic concern. (Wheeler Citation1949, 123)
Psychoanalysis had a powerful influence on mainstream psychiatry, with at least one-third of American psychiatrists in the 1950s being psychodynamic in their perspective. Unsurprisingly, then, the early versions of the mainstream diagnostic manual, the DSM, were shaped by psychoanalytic thinking. The DSM-I listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disorder (Friedman and Downey Citation1998). The link to psychoanalysis is clear: identification with the father was considered essential for superego development. Without this paternal identification, homosexuals were deemed to have a defective conscience. The revised DSM-II listed homosexuality alongside other sexual deviations. This edition continued to be used by all psychiatrists until 1980 (Friedman and Downey Citation2016). However, in 1973, The American Psychiatric Association’s Board of Trustees voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM-II’s list of mental disorders, replacing it with “sexual orientation disturbance” for individuals distressed by their sexual orientation. Homosexuality was completely removed from the DSM-III, which was published in 1980 (Bayer Citation1981).
This radical change in the conceptualisation of homosexuality was largely a consequence of emerging empirical science that challenged the prevailing pathological view of homosexuality. Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues had published their groundbreaking Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male 32 years earlier (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin Citation1948). Kinsey’s research revealed that homosexuality was far more prevalent than was generally acknowledged. However, these findings had no impact on psychoanalytic theorising and practice; in fact, they were met by hostility in the US, particularly from psychoanalysts (Chiang Citation2008; Lewes Citation1988). Subsequent research that further challenged the notion that homosexuality was a mental illness also had little impact.
One of the most important pieces of research was that of Evelyn Hooker, who debunked the earlier work of Wheeler and others. She found that blind expert Rorschach raters were unable to distinguish between the Rorschach results of non-patient homosexual and non-patient heterosexual men (Hooker Citation1957, Citation1958). In the 1980s, Richard Friedmann replicated this finding, showing that homosexual men were comparable to heterosexual men in terms of their psychological profiles (Friedman and Downey Citation2016). A detailed review of psychological testing concluded that no tests could differentiate homosexual and heterosexual individuals and that there was no evidence of greater pathology in homosexual samples (Riess Citation1980).
The kind of analytic authority that dominated the field for much of the twentieth century meant that ideas which challenged this hegemony were rejected. The refusal to consider new thinking about homosexuality is perhaps one of the most striking examples of this phenomenon. Despite the mounting evidence, psychoanalysts remained sceptical and hostile towards objective scientific data, dismissing it because it failed to take unconscious and dynamic factors into account (Friedman and Downey Citation2016). Empirical findings were rejected on the basis that statistical data had no relevance to how analysts understood homosexuality in the consulting room (Chiang Citation2008). Psychoanalysts and dynamically-oriented clinicians led the opposition to the American Psychiatric Association’s deletion of homosexuality from the DSM-III (Isay Citation1985). Therefore, the mainstream psychoanalytic view of homosexuality remained unchanged for decades, even after it was removed from the DSM, despite a growing body of empirical data contradicting this position. Psychoanalysts were among the last to abandon their position (Chiang Citation2008). Psychoanalysis was dealt a crushing blow to its elitist claims to superior knowledge: when it came to homosexuality, we were wrong. Ultimately, it was science that forced psychiatry and psychoanalysis to change course and stop causing harm.
Conversion therapy
Treatments intended to change sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual are collectively termed conversion therapies or sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) (American Psychological Association Citation2009). These include medical, behavioural, psychoanalytic, religious and spiritual techniques, which were all used at different times during the twentieth century to cure what was generally considered a mental illness or sexual perversion. Early behavioural treatments used aversive techniques, such as electric shock or nausea-inducing drugs, while later attempts employed fantasy modification, in an attempt to extinguish homosexual behaviours and desire. Other methods included gender role coaching and abstinence training. Masters and Johnson claimed a high success rate after two weeks of treatment; however, they did not detail their method. All studies reporting successful conversions have poor designs and follow-up. Religious conversion programmes involved therapy by clergy, prayer, unspecified group processes, coercion to relinquish same-sex attraction, exorcism and, in some cases, sexual boundary violations (Beckstead Citation2012; Davison and Walden Citation2024; Haldeman Citation1991; Przeworski, Peterson, and Piedra Citation2021).
Medical and surgical treatments included the transplantation of testicular tissue from heterosexual males, hypothalamotomy, testosterone or estrogen therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) (Silverstein Citation1991). Oestrogen therapy in males usually resulted in a complete suppression of sexual desire (chemical castration), while surgical castration was also performed in some centres in the USA and Europe. Many centres provided multiple treatment modalities, so that if psychotherapy failed, the treatment could progress to psychotropic medication, insulin shock therapy, ECT, and finally lobotomy (Weston Citation2016). Thankfully, the treatment of sexual orientation with irreversible medical and surgical procedures, or aversive therapies, appears to be a thing of the past. The rest of this paper will focus specifically on the use of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as conversion therapies.
During the mid twentieth century, psychoanalysts believed that the defences repressing heterosexual desire could be undone, so the treatment goal was to achieve a heterosexual orientation. At the time, psychoanalysis was believed to have the power to totally reorganise the personality (Friedman and Downey Citation1998) – an assertion which now seems exceedingly ambitious, if not grandiose. This was coupled with the pervasive certainty with which psychoanalysis felt it had the authority to pronounce the truth about human nature and the mind. This applied not only to theoretical explanations, but also in the consulting room, where analysts believed they were in a privileged position to know what was going on in the patients’ minds. Interpretations contained truths that patients might accept or resist (Mitchell Citation1998). A prominent theme in mid-twentieth-century psychoanalytic writing about homosexuality was that analysts should use their authority to actively discourage homosexual behaviour and encourage heterosexual behaviour (Mitchell Citation1981).
Mitchell (Citation1981) was the first analyst to draw attention to what he termed the “directive-suggestive” approach to homosexuality. He noted that this approach violated fundamental analytic principles, which require the analyst to approach all material with openness, neutrality and curiosity.Footnote1 Prominent analysts who advocated this approach included Irving Bieber, Lionel Ovesey and Charles Socarides. Ovesey (Citation1969) describes the features of technique that are specific to the treatment of homosexuals. The overarching approach is that the therapist should encourage heterosexuality and discourage homosexuality. The therapist should apply pressure to date women or to experiment with kissing and petting and each attempt should be praised. If the patient procrastinates unduly about dating women, he should be threatened with termination. Homosexuality should be interpreted as a symptom and a defence each and every time it occurs. If the analyst is silent in response to homosexual behaviour, this may be taken as tacit approval. He recommended explicit education for patients about the pathological nature of homosexuality, with interpretations focusing on its defensive and pathological functions. Importantly, “with shaky patients … the therapist should commit the magic omnipotence with which he is unconsciously endowed in the transference, and guarantee ultimate success, contingent, of course, on further efforts by the patient” (Citation1969, 123). Like Ovesey, Socarides emphasised that patients should be educated that the lack of interest in women is due to a fear of women rather than a lack of desire. He recommended the outright prohibition of homosexual behaviour and the dismantling of any rationalisations that attempt to frame homosexuality as normal. He also recommended utilising identification with the analyst to encourage heterosexual behaviour (Mitchell Citation1981).
All of these treatment approaches involved coercion and the analyst’s overt influence to change the patient’s behaviour. This was not simply a modification, but a significant a departure, from accepted analytic technique. Coercion and influence arguably form the basis of all conversion therapies, including the misuse of psychanalysis to change sexual orientation. Alongside this departure from analytic technique, the mid-twentieth-century analytic stance positioned the analyst as an expert who, through repeated interpretations, could reveal the truth about the patient’s deepest struggles and psychopathology. Patient objections to these interpretations were considered to be a form of resistance. This stance was increasingly problematised in the latter part of the twentieth century, with critics highlighting the sadomasochistic quality and persecutory effect of this kind of “all-knowing”, authoritarian approach to psychotherapy (Hoffman Citation1992; Meares Citation1977; Mitchell Citation1978, Citation1998). Such an approach risks enforcing and exploiting compliance,Footnote2 shutting down thinking and foreclosing curiosity, and inducing shame. Contemporary analytic theory now views the kind of analytic authoritarianism on which this approach hinges as problematic and antithetical to an evolving analytic process. Meaning is now considered to be mutually constructed, with the analyst’s “asymmetrical” participation being to safeguard the process of unfolding curiosity and enquiry, rather than delivering authoritative interpretations (Mitchell Citation1998).
Psychoanalysis and trans
One of the most pressing concerns among psychoanalysts regarding the growing visibility of transgender people in our communities and consulting rooms is ensuring that we do not repeat how medicine and psychoanalysis treated homosexual men and women in the twentieth century. Consequently, psychotherapeutic approaches that attempt to explore the psychodynamics and unconscious organisation of gender dysphoria and trans identities are condemned as a contemporary version of the kind of approach recommended by Socarides, Ovesey and Bieber. Vocal analytic clinicians warn that such approaches are not only transphobic, but also covert forms of conversion therapy, that seek to eliminate transness and gender diversity altogether (American Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Gender and Sexuality Citation2023; Ashley Citation2022; Drescher Citation2023; Saketopoulou Citation2022, Citation2025; Saketopoulou and Pellegrini Citation2023).
In the preceding section, I outlined how the psychoanalytic approach to homosexuality, as promoted by analytic authorities at the time, violated fundamental principles of psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic technique, drawing on Mitchell’s (Citation1981) observations. Similarly, any psychotherapeutic intervention that seeks to change gender identity through coercion or undue influence exists outside the bounds of accepted psychotherapeutic practice. I have not been able to find any contemporary psychoanalytic writing that advocates this kind of coercive approach to working with gender distressed or trans people. More problematic, however, is the assumption that exploring the psychodynamic shaping of transgender experience necessarily means rooting out pathology with the express purpose of making gender non-conforming people conform to conventional gender norms. Mitchell (Citation1978) addressed this issue in relation to homosexuality almost 50 years ago. He highlighted two opposing views of homosexuality: (1) that it was a pathological state caused by problematic childhood experiences, and (2) that it was not pathological, but simply a spontaneous expression of sexual diversity.
Mitchell’s paper was prescient, as these opposing and seemingly irreconcilable points of view also exist today in relation to trans people. He argues that this binary is based on the mistaken assumption that psychodynamic causation implies pathology – a historical artefact of the evolution of psychodynamic thinking. Freud worked backwards from the symptoms his patients were burdened by to uncover their unconscious psychogenic roots. Psychodynamic explanations were causal mechanisms that explained the development of psychopathology (Mitchell Citation1978). However, contemporary thinking has changed substantially due to subsequent developments in psychoanalytic theory.
The application of psychodynamic understanding has provided a complex interpretive system of meanings for viewing the textural fabric of human experience. “The interplay of forces in the mind”, to use Freud’s phrase, is now viewed as the underlying context for all mental phenomena, including thinking itself. Psychodynamic origins and processes from all developmental levels are understood to be inextricably woven into healthy as well as pathological functioning. (Mitchell Citation1978, 256)
Those of us who work with transgender patients continue to learn as we accompany them on their developmental journeys, which necessarily traverse a wide terrain through and beyond gender. Most clinicians would agree that trans is not a monolithic entity and that the history, formation, shape and texture of trans identity are unique to each individual patient. Over time, some identifiable patterns may emerge in this diverse group; however, no universal formulation can encompass everyone in this clinical population. Rather than seeking pathology, psychodynamic understanding can be enriching for our patients, adding texture, nuance and complexity to individual trans experience, in the same way that it does for heterosexual, gay, lesbian and bisexual patients. Some are calling for a radical revision of psychoanalytic thinking, implying that our current understanding of the mind is necessarily pathologising to trans people. However, we seem to have forgotten Mitchell’s important reminder that equating psychodynamics with pathology reflects a profound misunderstanding of psychoanalytic theory.
Every experience, thought and behaviour is inextricably underpinned by multiple psychodynamic processes and forces. This is the principle of overdetermination. In addition to psychodynamic conflicts, it is crucial to note that human experience is also shaped by adaptive aspects and strivings for psychological growth, including the satisfaction of needs, and the formation of meaningful interpersonal connections (Mitchell Citation1978). Furthermore, behaviours originating from conflict do not have to be forever grounded in psychic difficulty:
What isn’t allowed for is the possibility that the homosexual [transgenderFootnote3] orientation may be determined by early psychodynamic factors, including conflict and anxiety, but that as the later relationships of the person develop, the original conflicts and anxieties may no longer be the salient motives for the behaviour, which has now become secondarily autonomous. (Mitchell Citation1978, 258)
Not all established psychoanalytic thinking is pathologising or anachronistic. For example, I have become increasingly interested in understanding gender dysphoria through an interpersonal-relational, dissociative model of the mind. I have found it helpful to view the disgust/shame/horror evoked by the natal body/gender as heralding the imminent emergence into consciousness of a “not-me” state (Stern Citation2010; Sullivan Citation1953). Through this lens, it is not that gender is the problem: gender has been recruited to deal with intolerable states that have formed an amalgam with the intolerable gender, creating a powerful way of maintaining the unbearable in an unformulated state. A dissociative process has become structuralised through the unique assembly of “me” and “not-me” that constitute individual gender experience. “Not-me” does not necessarily signify pathology: contemporary dissociative models of mind consider these processes to be universal to the human experience. The aim of treatment is to bridge the internal divisions between self-states and to help transform “not-me” into “feels like me” (Stern Citation2022). It is important to note that this does not mean that the patient no longer identifies as transgender. Rather, it means that the patient has greater access to themselves, is less threatened by the self-states that have haunted them and no longer needs strong dissociation to maintain internal equilibrium. The result may be that transition is no longer felt to be necessary or, if it is, that the patient will be psychologically more resilient and therefore better able to face the challenges of transition. Both outcomes and their many variations are legitimate.
Psychotherapeutic work with homosexuality and trans
In this paper, I argue that contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy for young transgender people or those experiencing gender dysphoria bears no relation to the coercive, “directive-suggestive” approach recommended for homosexual patients in the twentieth century. Psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic approaches have changed dramatically, particularly with regard to the democratisation of the therapeutic relationship and the erosion of the analyst’s authority. The kind of analytic authority that coercive conversion therapies hinged on is becoming increasingly rare, and patients expect a more collaborative therapeutic relationship. The argument that therapies which explore the unconscious formation of trans experience are conversion therapies rests on the false assumption that exploring psychodynamics is inherently pathologising. Contemporary analysts argue that all gender, whether conventional or trans, is a manifestation of something else, including, in some cases, trauma. Thinking about the constitutive role of trauma and other dynamic factors can help articulate the textures and complexity of individual transgender subjectivity and need not imply psychopathology (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini Citation2023).
There is a widespread assumption that homosexuality and trans identities are similar, as they are both considered to be part of the spectrum of human sexual and gender diversity. This assumed similarity is perhaps best illustrated by the widespread penetration of the abbreviation “LGBTQIA+” into our cultural psyche. Given this presumed equivalence between gay and trans, it would seem that the general therapeutic approach should be similar for both groups: treatment should affirm the patient’s authentic self, whether this be their sexual orientation or gender identity. However, while both groups experience marginalisation and stigma, when it comes to the phenomenology and psychotherapeutic exploration of gay and trans experience, it turns out that they are both similar and different.
The socialisation of proto-gay youth frequently involves an internalisation of negative cultural attitudes and hostility towards homosexuality and gender non-conformity, particularly in the context of peer relationships. This is otherwise known as internalised homophobia and can be understood as a form of identification with the aggressor (Friedman and Downey Citation1995). Many gay men have wanted to change their sexual orientation to heterosexual but have been unable to do so (Friedman and Downey Citation2016). Gay patients may experience feelings of self-hatred relating to their same-sex attraction or to other characteristics associated with being gay, such as gendered and temperamental traits. Gay men often feel that their experience of masculinity is deficient or that they are not masculine enough (Corbett Citation1993; Friedman and Downey Citation1999). For those with a favourable developmental history, this self-hatred may be “layered over” earlier self-acceptance (Friedman and Downey Citation1995). In their seminal paper, Friedman and Downey argue that for others, this self-hatred is actually a condensation of ambivalent relational experiences that occurred in early childhood. They write that these experiences “may be packaged as it were in the conscious mind under the rubric that therapists term “internalised homophobia”” (Citation1995, 91). They argue that individuals with adverse developmental experiences, or primary psychological difficulties, may ultimately attribute all negative feelings about the self to being gay or lesbian. This provides a way to make sense of lifelong experiences of alienation and psychic pain. In short, gay patients may experience their sexual desire as a hated and shame-infused part of the self - a carrier for other, earlier relational and developmental complexities. They may try to eliminate this part of the self, which is experienced as holding painful self-experience, by adopting the heterosexual behaviours and role that they understand to be acceptable in our culture.
The therapeutic approach to homosexual patients today involves helping them accept and own a part of the self that is ambivalently held, hated or infused with shame. Some patients may simply require support, while those with more complex internal difficulties may need a more exploratory psychotherapeutic approach. Friedman and Downey (Citation1995) observed that some patients deteriorate when attempts are made to help them accept their same-sex attraction and ameliorate internalised homophobia. They argue that affirming responses threaten the patient’s symptom – internalised homophobia – which is needed to keep more painful feelings and deeper self-hatred at bay. They suggest that therapists ask, “What is it about giving up these particular symptoms that patients find threatening?” and that the symptoms may be a way of maintaining a needed tie to childhood attachment figures. Ultimately, psychological integration involves transforming the patient’s conflicted same-sex desire into “feels like me” but also the capacity to bear the more complex and painful experiences that have formed an amalgam with the unwanted sexual orientation.
Many patients with gender dysphoria or trans identities describe an internal struggle with a gendered part of the self that is infused with painful negative affects. They may experience distress about their sexed body and/or the gender role/identity with which they feel they must comply. Many report experiences of horror, disgust, shame and rage when they become aware of any reminder of their natal sex/gender. For example, a natal female with gender dysphoria may feel shame, disgust and hatred towards her primary and secondary sex characteristics and/or may experience the social norms she believes she is expected to conform to as a female as degrading and highly aversive. Gender-affirming interventions, such as social transition, and hormonal and surgical interventions, can alter, conceal or eliminate the aspects of gendered embodiment and role that evoke these painful feelings. Most clinical guidelines for treating gender dysphoria recommend that clinicians affirm the patient’s experienced or desired gender (Coleman et al. Citation2022; Endocrine Society Citation2024; Telfer et al. Citation2018). This necessarily means helping them distance themselves from the natal sex/gender. However, this could work against integration, fortifying internal divisions and dissociation. Similarly to how Friedman and Downey (Citation1995) observed that complex developmental (psychodynamic) processes may be folded into internalised homophobia, it is highly likely that for some patients, the unwanted sex/gender is a carrier - for and an attempt to manage - yet-to-be-formulated psychodynamic complexities. If we follow Friedman and Downey’s approach, to help our patients find relief from the distress of gender dysphoria, it is necessary to explore what is condensed into or amalgamated with gendered experience. While affirmation should ideally not preclude exploration, detransitioners’ experiences suggests otherwise (Littman Citation2021; Vandenbussche Citation2022). Reflecting on when we are colluding with an attempt to eliminate a part of the self is crucial in this work, as it is in all psychoanalytic treatment.
One of the most profound differences between homosexuality and gender dysphoria in a psychotherapeutic context is arguably this. With homosexuality, we help the person to accept a hated or feared part of the self. However, when it comes to gender dysphoria, without adequate psychotherapeutic exploration, we essentially collude with the elimination of the hated part – i.e. the natal sex/gender and everything it might represent or carry. Following this line of thought, homosexuality and trans experiences are not equivalent, despite what popular discourse might suggest. While both involve an internal struggle with a part of the self that is ambivalently held, hated or feared, our response to each is diametrically opposed. In terms of internal dynamics, gender dysphoria is closer to internalised homophobia or ego-dystonic homosexuality.
In the past, gay men sought treatment to rid themselves of their “gay” self. Are some trans patients not doing the same when they seek our assistance to get rid of their natal gendered self? If we collude with this, are we not in fact doing what conversion therapists did to homosexuals? Is gender affirmation, in its simplistic but widely practised form, actually akin to gay conversion therapy? While it might indeed turn some gay people into straight trans people, this is not what I am referring to. The problematic similarity is that gender-affirming care may facilitate an attempt to erase a part of the self. By colluding with the erasure of a part of the self, patients are deprived of an opportunity to explore and work through the unformulated, sequestered components woven into their gendered experience that will likely continue to be ongoing sources of symptoms and suffering if left unaddressed. Outcome studies appear to support this: when it comes to youth, researchers have noted that gender-affirming interventions on their own are insufficient to improve functioning, relieve psychiatric problems or reduce suicidality (Kaltiala et al. Citation2020; Ruuska et al. Citation2024).
In essence, just as homosexuality or internalised homophobia may be a way of making sense of, defending against, and attempting to work through psychodynamic complexities, so too is gender dysphoria. News of the availability of sex-reassignment technologies in the 1950s was rapidly followed by a spike in demand for these interventions (Mumford Citation2023). It is possible to speculate that the availability of sex-altering interventions provided a way of making sense of somatic and unformulated distress, whilst also offering a concrete way of attempting to work through these issues, promising profound transformation and relief. How many gay men would have taken a drug that made them straight to relieve them of their internal struggle with same-sex attraction, if such a drug had been available? Such a drug is not available, so trans and gender-dysphoric patients differ from those with ego-dystonic homosexuality in one very important way: their attempts to metabolise and work through conflicts via gender potentially expose them to serious medical procedures with irreversible effects and significant risks. Gozlan (Citation2025) suggests this kind of argument is based on a hierarchy of identities in which homosexuality is preferable to transgender. However, this obfuscates the main point.
The issue at hand is maintaining a healthy, functioning body that is not exposed to pharmaceuticals with known risks (such as cancer and heart disease) or surgical complications (such as urinary incontinence, impaired sexual function and death) (see D’Angelo Citation2025). Further compounding the problem is the fact that there is evidence that patients and clinicians are being misled about the benefits and safety of these interventions (Block Citation2024; McDeavitt Citation2025; McDeavitt, Cohn, and Kulatunga-Moruzi Citation2025a; McDeavitt, Cohn, and Levine Citation2025b; The Economist Citation2024) with the Federal Trade Commission now investigating possible consumer fraud (Holyoak Citation2025). I believe that we have an ethical responsibility to offer our young trans patients alternative approaches to increasingly disputed, irreversible medical and surgical interventions, safe and effective alternatives that may relieve their suffering and therefore the need for these procedures. This is particularly important at a time when the benefits of these interventions for this population are increasingly being questioned worldwide (Cass Citation2024a; Drobnič Radobuljac et al. Citation2024; Kozlowska et al. Citation2024).
Psychoanalytic arrogance: Ignoring empirical science
In my recent paper “Do We Want to Know?” (D’Angelo Citation2025), I began to consider what might be happening within our profession that has led to the marginalisation and persecution of certain clinical voices in relation to gender. The paper examines how the current wave of political activism, infusing psychoanalytic theorising, determines the allowable discourse in relation to gender and trans identities. Asking “why” in relation to transgender identity has become off-limits, and doing so puts clinicians at risk of breaching conversion therapy legislation in many jurisdictions. I explore how this shapes clinical interaction, mirroring and reinforcing the prohibitions on knowing and resistances to exploration that patients with gender distress bring to treatment. I also discuss the controversial nature of the evidence base for paediatric gender transition, which increasingly raises questions about whether the potential benefits of these interventions outweigh the known risks. In light of this uncertainty, I argue that sensitive, detailed and nuanced psychoanalytic exploration is essential to enable young people to make a decision that is as fully informed as possible, considering the range of potential conscious and unconscious motivations at play. Much of the paper outlines the bias pervading the psychoanalytic literature on the subject, which generally ignores the risks of harm. I document numerous examples of analysts challenging the mainstream approach to gender dysphoria and demonstrate how their work is misrepresented and distorted to discredit it. Finally, I suggest what might be going on unconsciously in the analytic community to account for these observations.
As both a psychiatrist and a scientist, as well as a psychoanalyst, I recognise the power of psychoanalysis to explore individual subjectivity and also value the real-world hard data of science that can inform our clinical decisions. My respect for evidence-based medicine and the value of high-quality research data leaves me no choice but to argue for caution regarding the current medicalised treatment model for young people with gender distress. This position has led to multiple attempts to discredit my work either through misrepresentation, arguing that I am a conversion therapist, or by claiming that I am a eugenicist seeking to eliminate trans people (D’Angelo Citation2025). My cautious approach is informed by my extensive reading of the outcome literature on gender transition. In particular, the growing body of systematic reviews concludes that the evidence for benefits is weak and uncertain, while the risks are established and real (Baker et al. Citation2021; Hall et al. Citation2024; Ludvigsson et al. Citation2023; Miroshnychenko et al. Citation2024; Miroshnychenko, Ibrahim, et al. Citation2025; Miroshnychenko, Roldan, et al. Citation2025; National Institute for Health and Care Excellence Citation2021a, Citation2021b; Taylor et al. Citation2024a; Taylor et al. Citation2024b; Zepf et al. Citation2024). I see this data from clinical populations as an important part of the overall situation in which our clinical work with trans patients takes shape.
Two of the most problematic psychoanalytic attitudes that have led to our field becoming increasingly marginalised and irrelevant are: (i) psychoanalytic elitism about what constitutes “real” psychoanalysis, and (ii) rejection of the sciences and the scientific method. These attitudes have insulated psychoanalysis from debate and have blocked the consideration of new information that could have led to theoretical revisions and safer, more effective ways of practising our craft. With regard to our profession’s history with homosexuality, these attitudes have caused significant harm to our patients and our profession by perpetuating unhelpful theories and harmful therapeutic approaches. Many gay analysands reported not only that they were not helped, but that they were harmed by psychoanalytic treatments which attempted to change their sexual orientation (Davison and Walden Citation2024). Stoller noted that one of the tactics that allowed the prevailing views about homosexuality to persist for as long as they did was to suggest that “colleagues we disagree with are not practising analysis, or are not analysts” (Isay and Friedman Citation1986, 199).
A recent critique of my work (Gozlan Citation2025) demonstrates how these tactics can be deployed to constrain psychoanalytic discourse and to discredit “colleagues we disagree with”. Firstly, the author claims to know what constitutes “real” psychoanalysis with trans people, and claims that my ideas constitute a simplistic and naive simulacrum of psychoanalysis. Secondly, he claims that referring to the scientific outcome data when working with trans patients is a “category error” and that outcome data is not relevant to the practice of psychoanalysis. Consistent with this stance, the author completely sidesteps one of the most significant issues raised in the paper he is critiquing: the growing number of systematic reviews that increasingly highlight the uncertainty of the benefits of medical and surgical gender transition for young people. He claims that psychoanalysis is concerned with individual subjects, not clinical populations: science and empirical evidence should stay outside of the consulting room.
This conspicuous absence of any attempt to engage with the outcome data is apparent in most of the contemporary psychoanalytic literature on this topic. For example, in a recent 180-page publication on transgender experience, Gender without Identity (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini Citation2023), medical interventions warrant only the scantest of mentions. The word “hormone” appears twice, and “surgery” appears once in the entire book, both mentioned casually in a section exploring the “mix and match” “embodied possibilities” of non-binary genders. There is no engagement whatsoever with the hard data of science: outcome studies and systematic reviews examining the medical technologies frequently sought by transgender young people are ignored. Similarly, in a recent volume of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child featuring six papers on transgender children, not a single one engages with the medical realities, in particular the outcome data for medical interventions (Gozlan Citation2022; Gozlan et al. Citation2022; Osserman and Wallerstein Citation2022; Silber Citation2022; Watson Citation2022; Wiggins Citation2022).
A recent paper, “Transgender – A Challenge for Psychoanalysis” (Gullestad Citation2024), only mentions medical interventions in the context of clinicians’ inability to predict future regret, because psychoanalysts “are not fortune tellers”. The dismissive quality of this statement is troubling given the serious implications of medical and surgical gender-modifying interventions. The author seems to believe that attempting to study outcomes to help identify who will benefit, and by how much, and who will be harmed, is a fool’s errand. As with the other references cited above, what the data actually tells us about the likely benefits of these interventions is omitted. The absence of any acknowledgement of, or reflection on, empirical outcome data so prevalent in most psychoanalytic writing on the subject can only be interpreted as evidence of psychoanalysis' ongoing negation and rejection of empirical science. This attitude, coupled with elitist posturing, is precisely what shaped our shameful history in relation to homosexuality.
It is particularly troubling to observe this defensive dynamic at play in relation to gender. Medical and surgical interventions are often integral to the lives of trans people. Whilst psychoanalytic exploration attempts to illuminate the hopes, meanings and affects that infuse the need for these interventions, medical and surgical procedures do not exist solely in the psychological realm or the world of intrapsychic fantasy. They have very real impacts on the body, health, sexuality, reproductive capacity and longevity. Especially today when the majority of psychoanalysts are no longer medically trained, surely engagement with empirical data is an essential component of ethical practice if we are to help our patients navigate how they will ultimately live and embody their gendered experience.
In my work, awareness of the outcome data becomes part of my internal process of reflection as I think about the actual steps and interventions my patients may take or seek as a result of their psychic distress. While some may disagree, concern about a young person seeking body modification or genital surgery is grounded in reality and is not simply transphobic countertransference. It is misleading to suggest that such caution cannot coexist with detailed analytic exploration. In his critique, Gozlan (Citation2025) creates an artificial and false distinction suggesting that our ability to listen to patients can be quarantined from the realities of the real world by a cordon sanitaire. He is implicitly claiming a kind of neutrality that he believes I lack, which is a variation on his main claim that I am not psychoanalytic enough. We now fully accept that the analyst’s subjectivity can never be quarantined from the clinical interaction and always contributes, to a greater or lesser extent, to the shaping of any intervention. Undoubtedly, our personal understanding of the benefits and harms of gender transition profoundly impacts how we hear and respond to clinical material from our gender-distressed patients. The clinical responses of analysts who wholeheartedly believe that gender-affirming medical interventions are “life-saving” will have a different quality and tone to the responses of analysts like me who have carefully read the outcome studies.
I reiterate that there is no reliable evidence that these treatments are life-saving (Cass Citation2024b, 187). It would be disingenuous to argue that any analyst can prevent their own position on medical gender-affirming interventions from influencing the analytic interpersonal field. Similarly, it is implausible to suggest that anyone working with trans-identified youth could be neutral on the incredibly polarising and emotionally saturated issue of medical gender-affirming interventions. Adopting the position that gender-affirming interventions are proven, established, safe and life-saving is not a neutral position. Refusing to reflect on whether these interventions are safe and beneficial, or harmful, is certainly not neutral either.
Yet I believe there is an even more compelling argument that analysts should engage with empirical science when it is relevant to their clinical work and their patient’s specific circumstances. Whilst the power of psychoanalysis derives from its focus on the unique intersubjective process occurring within a specific analytic dyad, for this process to be helpful, it requires the presence of a third position. Without a third position, patient and analyst may remain endlessly mired either in collusion or repetitive enactments and projective processes that do not lead to expanded awareness, greater freedom or clinical change. Stern (Citation2004) has referred to this rigidity of relatedness as “the grip of the field”, a development on Wolstein’s “transference–countertransference interlock”. While there are many ways of understanding and constituting an analytic third, including the analyst’s relation to theory (Britton Citation1989), or a shared, intersubjective third (Benjamin Citation2004) or via the fostering of mentalisation (Fonagy et al. Citation2002), loosening the dyadic collusion/interlock by introducing a third position is essential for analytic progress.
The hard data of science, which exists outside of the analytic dyad, can arguably be considered a different kind of third. The exploration of gendered experience can involve the dismantling of existing ways of thinking about the self, the body and what it means to be human. Whilst this presents us with an exhilarating portal to heretofore unimagined possibilities, it also potentially facilitates a world underpinned by a form of omnipotent thought in which anything is possible. When applied to child development, the metaphor of the swimming pool captures captures how the child cannot explore the new experience of swimming without a bottom or edges to hold onto (Koener and Lebrun Citation2024). Outcome data can function in the same way – providing “edges” constituted by reality that can serve as a counterpoint to the imaginative and associative process of psychic exploration. The edges might support what is occurring in the dyad, or they might frustrate or challenge it. By keeping the cutting-edge outcome data alive in his mind, the analyst can help ensure the dyad does not drift off into a collusive denial of reality. This is particularly essential in work with gender distress as what is wished for and what exists in fantasy is not always consonant with what is possible in reality.Footnote4 Refusal to engage with objective reality whilst privileging only psychic reality, as seen in much psychoanalytic literature on this topic, is not only arrogant, but arguably reckless.
Psychoanalysis rejects science at its own peril
One of the most polarising and urgent questions facing our field and healthcare more broadly is whether body-altering, sex-trait-modifying endocrine and surgical interventions are safe and effective, particularly for young people. Psychoanalytic writing, and indeed most mainstream publications in the field of psychiatry and psychology, fail to acknowledge that the evidence base for gender-affirming medical interventions is weak and controversial. Instead, the benefits of medicalised gender change are assumed to be an open and shut case. Analysts who unquestioningly support transition misrepresent the evidence base and distort the work of those with different perspectives (D’Angelo Citation2025). Discrediting the work of those with whom we disagree as not being analytic was a strategy employed by analysts defending their position on homosexuality for decades after it was removed from the DSM. The same tactics are being used today against those who question the gender-affirming medical approach or who seek to explore the psychic organisation and psychodynamics of trans identities (see, for example, Gozlan Citation2025; Saketopoulou Citation2022). Like the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association has made clear that it fully supports medical transition (American Psychiatric Association Citation2020; American Psychoanalytic Association Citation2023; American Psychological Association Citation2015). In an email circulated to the entire membership of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2024, the Committee on Gender and Sexuality claimed that groups raising concerns about gender affirming medical care are circulating “disinformation and misinformation”. In a striking reversal, so-called attempts to address misinformation have become weaponised as part of a relentless attack on what science is increasingly telling us about adolescent gender transition, and on clinicians who dare to draw attention to the risks.
In an earlier publication, I noted that the harm done to gay people by our profession continued for an extended period, in large part because we psychoanalysts ignored the emerging science (D’Angelo Citation2023). Psychoanalysis was, and still is, the only medical specialty that relied on case studies rather than science (Friedman and Downey Citation1998). Psychoanalysis developed its own speculative theories, extrapolated from individual cases, which were essentially unfalsifiable because they were never tested by the scientific method. The point is not to discredit the centrality of the case study in psychoanalysis, but to question the tendency to privilege it over empirical data, especially when that data could challenge our favoured theories. The elitist protectionism of the psychoanalytic profession and psychoanalytic institutes meant that any ideas challenging the mainstream were discredited and rejected before they could gain traction. For instance, there was enormous resistance to the notion that psychotropic drugs could be beneficial, with analysts contending that their use would contaminate the unfolding of the transference (Friedman and Downey Citation1998).
Similarly, psychoanalysis clung to its own idiosyncratic theoretical formulations about homosexuality for decades after Kinsey and other sexologists published their groundbreaking research. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin's Citation1948 publication challenged psychoanalysis’ pathological view of homosexuality by finding that it was far more prevalent than was generally acknowledged (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin Citation1948). As mentioned previously, Kinsey's empirical findings were met with hostility by psychiatrists in the US, particularly psychoanalysts (Chiang Citation2008). Psychoanalysts insisted that their clinical experience trumped empirical data, which they considered inferior because it did not take unconscious factors into account.
We are now at another crucial point in the history of psychoanalysis. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory has embraced transgender issues and is committed to protecting transgender people from the pathologising attitudes that homosexuals faced in the twentieth century. Psychoanalytic theorising has aligned itself with political activism, which increasingly determines how gender can be understood and discussed. Exploring the unconscious dynamics of trans identities and gender dysphoria evokes anxiety and guilt regarding how gay patients were treated in the past. Clinicians who advocate psychological exploration, rather than immediate affirmation, are cast as conversion therapists, harming their patients rather than protecting them. Contemporary writers (Gherovici Citation2017; Gozlan Citation2011; Hansbury Citation2017; Harris Citation2022; Saketopoulou and Pellegrini Citation2023) are proposing new theoretical models that eschew pathologising formulations. These new psychoanalytic models of trans subjectivity largely incorporate and normalise medical and surgical transition as an integral aspect of trans experience. Determined to avoid a repetition of our history with homosexuality, they engage only superficially with the outcome science, if at all, and gloss over the real risks of harm associated with these interventions, instead foregrounding the liberating possibilities of trans life.
As we speak, contemporary psychoanalytic theorising is colliding with emerging science which suggests that the benefits of these interventions do not outweigh the risks for young people. Yet psychoanalysts remain silent on the issue, or attack those who raise the alarm. These findings should give us pause to consider what this means for our patients and how can we help them to navigate their gendered experiences. Instead, we are witnessing a repetition of history: scientific ideas that challenge the psychoanalytic orthodoxy of the day are consistently discredited and dismissed. While analysts who challenged psychoanalytic orthodoxy in relation to homosexuality received hate mail, including from prominent educators (Downey and Friedman Citation2008), those who challenge the psychoanalytic hegemony on trans face accusations of right-wing bias, transphobia and even genocidal intent (McGleughlin Citation2024; Saketopoulou Citation2022; Saketopoulou and Pellegrini Citation2023). Our refusal to seriously consider empirical data means that we are in serious danger of participating in a repetition of our history of harming sexual and gender minorities. If history has anything to teach us, it is that we avoid science at our own peril.
Disclosure statement
The author is president of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.
Notes
1 Mitchell (Citation1981) argues that while this approach dominated analytic writing about homosexuality, it was not reflective of the practice of the majority of psychoanalysts who, when working with homosexual patients, continued to adhere to fundamental analytic principles.
2 See Mitchell (Citation1981) for a detailed description of the exploitation of transference compliance to promote behavioural change, ultimately a transference–countertransference enactment, by proponents of the “directive-suggestive” approach.
3 Mitchell was not writing about transgender; however, his overall thesis applies equally to trans as it does to homosexuality, as my insertion of the word [transgender] shows.
4 Failure to grapple with reality prior to transition may result in psychological breakdown because the desired bodily changes do not bring about the hoped-for internal transformation (D’Angelo Citation2020; Lemma Citation2018).
me (saw it posted by @laziestgirlintown on this post)
Title:
Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, the new name for polycystic ovary syndrome: a multistep global consensus process
Image:
Publishing date:
May 12th, 2026
Author:
Helena J Teede, Mahnaz Bahri Khomami, Rachel Morman, Joop S E Laven, Anju E Joham, Michael F Costello, Madhuri Patil, D Aled Rees, Lorna Berry, Melanie G Cree, Han Zhao, Robert J Norman, Anuja Dokras, Terhi Piltonen
Website published:
thelancet.com
Article length:
7183 words
~ 26 minute read time
Summary
Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), previously named polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), affects one in eight women. However, the term PCOS is inaccurate, implying pathological ovarian cysts, obscuring diverse endocrine and metabolic features, and contributing to delayed diagnosis, fragmented care, and stigma, while curtailing research and policy framing. Building on an international mandate for change, we outline an unprecedented, rigorous, multistep global consensus process for the name change. Funding and governance were established with engagement of 56 leading academic, clinical, and patient organisations. Using iterative global surveys (with responses from 14 360 people with PCOS and multidisciplinary health professionals from all world regions), modified Delphi methods, nominal group technique workshops, and marketing and implementation analyses, we identified principles prioritising scientific accuracy, clarity, stigma avoidance, cultural appropriateness, and implementation feasibility. An accurate new name was prioritised over retaining the PCOS acronym or a generic name. Implementation approaches prioritised evolution rather than transformation. Preferred terms were polyendocrine, metabolic, and ovarian, reflecting the condition's multisystem pathophysiology, and polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome was the consensus new name. Accuracy was improved by omitting cysts and by capturing endocrine, metabolic, and ovarian dysfunction. A co-designed global implementation strategy, including a transition period, education, and alignment with health systems and disease classification, is under way.
Background and rationale
Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) affects 170 million women during their reproductive years alone.1 Following exclusion of other disorders, the condition is diagnosed based on adults (aged ≥20 years) meeting at least two of the following International Guideline criteria: (1) oligo-anovulation, (2) clinical or biochemical hyperandrogenism, and (3) polycystic ovaries on ultrasound or elevated anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH).2,3 Adolescents (aged 10–19 years) require the presence of the first two criteria.4 PCOS has long been primarily perceived as a gynaecological or ovarian disorder; however, mounting research, evidence synthesis, and International Guidelines have shown that PCOS is underpinned by endocrine disturbances in insulin, androgens, and neuroendocrine and ovarian hormones.2–5 Features can be metabolic (ie, obesity, dysglycaemia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, cardiovascular disease, and sleep apnoea), reproductive (ovulatory disturbances, irregular menstrual cycles, infertility, pregnancy complications, and endometrial cancer), psychological (depression, anxiety, poor quality of life, and eating disorders), and dermatological (acne, alopecia, and hirsutism).2–5 BMI is generally higher in people with PCOS than in those without the condition, and contributes to its severity.6 Overall, PCOS has multisystem health impacts and represents a growing health and economic burden.1,7
However, the broad clinical features of the condition are not captured in its current name, as although arrested follicular development is common, pathological ovarian cysts are not increased.8–10 These factors delay diagnosis—with up to 70% of affected individuals remaining undiagnosed—and also contribute to widespread knowledge gaps and patient dissatisfaction.11–13 In 2012, the US National Institutes of Health Office of Disease Prevention Evidence-based Methodology Workshop on PCOS highlighted the challenges and inaccuracy of the current name, and recommended a change to better reflect the condition.14 Despite the strong rationale (panel 1) and long-standing recognition that PCOS is an inaccurate and misleading term, efforts to change the name have repeatedly stalled. Patient groups, alongside leaders in the field of reproductive medicine, such as Dr Ricardo Azziz, Prof Andrea Dunaif, Prof Bart CJM Fauser, Prof Robert J Norman, and Prof Helena J Teede, have persistently advocated for change.8,9,15,16 Expert commentaries, guidelines, and surveys have reaffirmed the limitations of the narrow reproductive focus and inaccuracies, noting ongoing confusion among people with PCOS and clinicians, fragmented policy and advocacy efforts, and downstream consequences for diagnosis, care, outcomes, and research.2,8,9,15 However, previous renaming efforts failed to gain traction, with barriers including a lack of inclusive global leadership and the need for a coordinated international consensus process, alignment between patient advocacy groups, agreement on an alternative name, and a comprehensive implementation strategy.8,9 The need for greater awareness, advocacy, education, and implementation, alongside international collaboration and resourcing, was also recognised.9 A longitudinal global study engaged people with PCOS and health professionals in serial surveys and workshops and highlighted ongoing confusion around the name.9 Overall, 84% of respondents endorsed a global consensus process to identify and implement a new name, alongside education and implementation strategies. An accompanying impact assessment indicated that the perceived benefits of a name change outweighed the risks.9 As a result of these data, the compelling evidence base, and strong patient advocacy and leadership by Verity, a UK-based charity and advocacy organisation, Monash University's Centre for Research Excellence in Women's Health in Reproductive Life and the Androgen Excess and PCOS Society launched a global initiative with a clear mandate for a name change.9
Panel 1
Context and the case for a new name
The term polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) has long been recognised as inaccurate and potentially harmful. The following evidence-based considerations informed the need for a new name:
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The term polycystic ovary implies the presence of pathological ovarian cysts, which are not a feature of the condition. This misnomer contributes to misunderstandings among patients, clinicians, policy makers, and the public.
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PCOS encompasses diverse endocrine, metabolic, reproductive, psychological, and dermatological features. The current name reflects only one organ and fails to capture the disorder's multisystem nature.
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Confusion arising from the current name can delay diagnosis and hinder effective communication between patients and health professionals, contributing to patient dissatisfaction with care.
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The reproductive focus of the name can reinforce stigma, particularly in sociocultural contexts where fertility carries high value. Many individuals report distress associated with the name itself.
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The misnomer complicates epidemiological classification, research comparability, and health system coding. A more accurate name is expected to improve scientific coherence, research funding, and policy alignment.
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International guidelines, expert groups, and patient organisations have repeatedly called for renaming, with serial surveys and workshops culminating in a mandate to change the name through a rigorous, global consensus process.
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A new name must support long-term clinical care, research, and global adoption, and enable a smooth transition from existing terminology.
Key messages
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Polycystic ovary syndrome affects more than 170 million women globally, yet its current name is inaccurate and misleading, obscuring the condition's multisystem endocrine and metabolic features, reinforcing stigma, delaying diagnosis, and hindering effective clinical care, research, and policy alignment.
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Through an unprecedented, rigorous global consensus process engaging patients, multidisciplinary health professionals, and organisations across world regions, a new name—polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome—was agreed, omitting the misleading reference to ovarian cysts and accurately reflecting the diverse features of the condition.
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Consensus for the new name was built by use of robust, transparent methods, including modified Delphi survey processes, nominal group technique workshops, and implementation and marketing analyses, ensuring scientific accuracy, cultural appropriateness, stigma avoidance, and feasibility of adoption. These processes optimised representativeness, legitimacy, and transparency, and served to enhance engagement to underpin implementation.
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Coordinated implementation is under way in health systems, research institutions, funding bodies, education providers, clinical guidelines, and disease classification systems (including ICD coding), and is supported by a global transition period and continuous evaluation.
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Aligning nomenclature with scientific evolution and improving accuracy will enhance awareness, diagnosis, care quality, research coherence, and patient experience, strengthening policy, advocacy, and health outcomes globally.
Throughout this process, we sought to obtain funding; establish governance; further engage people with PCOS, multidisciplinary health professionals, and their member organisations across world regions; and undertake global surveys and workshops through modified Delphi and nominal group techniques. We aimed to establish principles, approaches, preferred terms, a new name, and implementation priorities.9 Ultimately, this Health Policy initiative outlines both the consensus process and a pragmatic global implementation strategy to correct inaccuracies, recognise diverse clinical features of the condition, and strengthen research, education, and clinical care to improve health outcomes globally for people with polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS).
Global engagement and processes
The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council awarded funding to the Centre for Research Excellence in Women's Health in Reproductive Life, which provided leadership alongside the Androgen Excess and PCOS Society, an international multidisciplinary society focused on advancing education and awareness, and Verity, a leading patient charity and advocacy group. We established an international steering group with members from across lead agencies, and identified and engaged patient groups and professional societies from the International PCOS Guideline Network, with purposive extension to broader disciplines and world regions.2 In April, 2025, letters to organisation members were distributed to encourage participation in tasks such as survey dissemination, workshop representative nomination, and contribution to implementation and dissemination of the new name. Building on previous survey results, global surveys were co-designed and disseminated, and international consensus workshops were convened by use of robust methods aligned with the James Lind Alliance processes (panel 2).17–19
Panel 2
Overview of the consensus process
We conducted a structured, multistep global process to establish a new name for polycystic ovary syndrome, incorporating patient and professional perspectives across all world regions. Key stages included:
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Funding: we obtained resources for the name change process and translation (in September, 2024)
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Governance and stakeholder engagement: we established an international governance framework and recruited patient organisations, professional societies, and lived experience and multidisciplinary health professional experts (in December, 2024)
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Delphi surveys: building on 7708 previous survey responses, two further global surveys (launched in April, 2025, and January, 2026,) generated a further 14 360 responses from 10 411 patients and 3949 health professionals, that identified principles, approaches, terminology, and combinations for a new name
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Nominal group workshops: in November, 2025, and February, 2026, we held serial online workshops with participants from all world regions for systematic iterative testing of endocrine, metabolic, and reproductive terms, combinations, and acronyms, with prioritisation based on accuracy, acceptability, and cultural appropriateness
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Marketing and communication analysis: we applied branding and communication frameworks to assess feasibility, clarity, and transition strategies for candidate names in December, 2025
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Prioritised outcome: agreement among patients and health professionals on the new name (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome) occurred in February, 2026
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Implementation strategy: in 2025 and 2026, we developed a transition roadmap to support adoption across clinical practice, research, education, and public communication
Delphi surveys
The new surveys built on the results of two previously published surveys and workshops in 2017 and 2023, and were informed by literature review and consultation with health professionals and people with PCOS.9 We used a purposive, stratified non-probability sampling approach, recruiting participants via partnering professional societies and patient organisations, with targeted sampling to achieve multidisciplinary representation across world regions. Extended recruitment timelines and dissemination strategies aimed to maximise reach, including engagement with harder-to-reach populations through language translation and use of multiple online platforms. No formal sample size calculation was done; the sample size was guided by our aim of achieving broad global representation across regions and disciplines.
Survey A (appendix p 1) included a historical introduction and rationale, an outline of the mandate for a name change, a linked explanatory statement, ethics approval, and implied consent details. Demographic data included age, country, and participant type (ie, people with PCOS or health professionals). Questions were largely similar across patient and health professional surveys, other than the use of plain language and explanation of technical terms for people with PCOS. Likert scales and free text response options were provided. Additional naming principles included scientific accuracy, ease of communication, stigma avoidance, and cultural appropriateness. Approaches presented included adopting a generic name, an accurate name reflecting features of the condition, or a name that retained the acronym PCOS with different terms. Each proposed approach included a list of terms and name options. The principles, preferred approach, and related options for this approach were carried forward to subsequent stages. Participants could opt to leave their email addresses for future involvement.
Survey A was provided on multiple online platforms (ie, Qualtrics, Google Forms, and WeChat) in English, Chinese, German, Persian, and Malaysian to optimise global reach. These languages were pragmatically selected and provided based on the most common spoken languages globally and the availability of workshop participants for translation, validation, and dissemination. For many other world regions, English proficiency was considered sufficient. All languages were accepted in free text comments. The survey link was disseminated via engaged societies and patient groups (through newsletters, dedicated email communication, and conference announcements), social media (ie, X and LinkedIn), and steering committee networks, and was open from April 1 to Oct 1, 2025. Survey results guided preparatory work for the workshops, including background research on naming options.
Survey B was generated to address specific controversies emerging from workshop A, including the reproductive term and final preferred name (appendix p 15). This survey was disseminated by email to survey A participants who had provided their email address, and to workshop A attendees, and was open from Jan 20 to Jan 31, 2026.
Workshops
Recruitment of attendees was rigorous and purposive, as we aimed for engagement across world regions. People with PCOS included leaders in patient advocacy organisations and community-based participants. Health professionals included representatives from key disciplines and leading world experts. Recruitment sources included members of the steering committee, lead agency governing bodies, and single nominees from each engaged society or patient advocacy group. To engage broadly across world regions and disciplines, additional representatives were identified via networks and self-nomination in survey A. All participants were invited to complete an online expression of interest form on workshop availability, country, ethnicity, nominating organisation, and disciplines; health professionals were also asked about their experience in clinical care for PCOS, and people with PCOS were asked for their time since diagnosis. The steering committee approved the final workshop invitation list, with invitations then sent by email. No financial incentives were offered for participation, other than reimbursement for time and contribution from lead patient representatives on the steering committee. Independent observers were recruited and trained to facilitate.
Before workshop A, participants had to complete a code of conduct (appendix p 20) covering expected behaviours, confidentiality, and agreement to respect publication embargo and streamlined communication and messaging with signed agreement. The workshop agenda and a 15-min video presentation on the history of the name change, purpose, workshop processes (including transparent participant recruitment), consensus methods, and participants’ roles and responsibilities, were disseminated to all participants. Principles and approaches generated from survey A were presented to underpin the workshop's structure and activities. Preparatory sessions and guiding documents were provided for breakout group chairs (ie, people with PCOS), co-chairs (health professionals), and independent observers. The workshop was conducted via Zoom with dedicated IT support provided by Monash University. Workshop A involved a brief introduction, outline of the code of conduct, presentation of survey results on principles and approaches, and presentations of the most accurate and supported terminology. Participants then engaged in breakout discussions, followed by individual online voting on preferred terms. The process was repeated after combining the terms to form the new name. Breakout groups were preassigned to ensure balanced representation across people with PCOS, disciplines, and world regions. All groups included participants from three to five world regions, three to four people with PCOS, and at least three disciplines. Each group was co-chaired by a patient and a health professional, with independent observers present to oversee adherence to the code of conduct. Each participant had a timed opportunity to raise any clarifications, concerns, or considerations. After breakout discussions, feedback was shared broadly by co-chairs and confidential online individual voting was conducted to rank priorities.
Patient involvement
Verity, a UK patient charity and advocacy group, led the reinvigoration of the renaming initiative in 2023. The Australian Health Research Alliance guidance on patient involvement was followed throughout the name change process, supporting an active, respectful partnership in which people with PCOS were valued for their lived experience, and were involved as active contributors with shared power.20 This involvement captured patients’ real-world needs and values from global and multicultural perspectives to foster relevant, inclusive, and impactful outcomes. People with PCOS were integrally involved in all stages of governance, survey co-design, workshop development, presentations, dissemination, and communication. Survey results were disaggregated by participant group.
The implementation strategy was co-designed by implementation science experts in partnership with people with PCOS. These were based on the principles derived from survey A, the previous survey's impact assessment,9 the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research21 and the Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change strategies,22 professional marketing input, and workshop feedback. Ethics approval was obtained from the Monash Health Ethics Committee (project numbers 07070C and 78892).
Outcomes and consensus
The steering group comprised a Chair (ie, author HJT), two people with PCOS (authors RM and LB), and seven multidisciplinary health professionals (authors HJT, JSEL, AEJ, MFC, RJN, AD, and TP) from three continents, and an academic project lead (MBK). The Androgen Excess and PCOS Society Board was an advisory body and included health professionals and academic leaders from multiple world regions and disciplines. Organisations were from across world regions and diverse health professional disciplines, including obstetrics and gynaecology, fertility, endocrinology, paediatrics, dermatology, imaging, primary care, nutrition science, and psychology (appendix p 23).
Survey and workshop reach and participant characteristics
Survey A included responses from 9358 people with PCOS and 3656 health professionals. 27 people with PCOS and 63 health professionals participated in the workshops, and 1053 people with PCOS and 293 health professionals in survey B, with broad global representation (appendix p 24). Given the extensive, multichannel dissemination strategy, a response rate for survey A could not be determined. Health professionals represented a wide range of disciplines (table 1). Workshop A was held in November, 2025, with 90 attendees from multiple world regions (table 1). Survey B was distributed to participants who had consented to recontact (n=2733), with 1346 responses received (response rate 49%). Participant characteristics for surveys A and B, including age distribution, duration of PCOS in patients, and years of PCOS-related experience among health professionals, are shown in table 2.
Principles
The guiding principles presented in panel 3 were affirmed in the survey results and endorsed at workshop A (table 3), with most people with PCOS and health professionals supporting the principles. Patient support was strongest for stigma avoidance, and health professionals for accuracy. These principles were carried forward throughout the consensus process (table 3).
Panel 3
Summary of naming principles
Principles guiding the development of a new name for polycystic ovary syndrome were established through global Delphi surveys and multistakeholder workshops.
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Support for clinical care, research, and improved health outcomes: the name should facilitate diagnosis, improve awareness, optimise care, and enhance research and understanding of the condition to improve health outcomes
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Scientific and medical accuracy: the name must reflect the underlying endocrine and metabolic pathophysiology and avoid inaccurately including ovarian cysts.
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Clarity and communication: the terminology should be readily understood by patients, clinicians, researchers, and the public
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Avoidance of stigma: terms perceived as potentially stigmatising—particularly those linked directly to reproduction or fertility—should be avoided
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Cultural and linguistic appropriateness: the name must be acceptable and interpretable across diverse cultural, linguistic, and regional contexts.
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Feasibility of implementation: the name should allow for a practical transition in clinical, research, and policy environments
Approaches
The approach prioritised on survey was to adopt a new, symptom-based name (as voted for by 86% of people with PCOS and 71% of health professionals). The second ranked approach was adoption of a generic name, such as diabetes or asthma (favoured by 45% of people with PCOS and 54% of health professionals), and the third was retaining PCOS as the acronym (20% of people with PCOS and 40% of health professionals; table 3). This approach was endorsed in workshop A. Prominent themes in the free text comments highlighted long-held patient frustrations over the need for a name that was accurate, enhanced understanding of broader features, and included a focus on recognition that this was a female condition. Some responses noted the need to be aware of implications for individuals of diverse genders. Concerns were also expressed that if no change to the PCOS acronym occurred, the consensus process's impact would be diminished. Based on these results, only the approach for a new, accurate, symptom-based name was explored in the workshops and carried forward in subsequent steps.
Key terms
Survey A's results, presented in table 3, show that endocrine and polyendocrine, metabolic and cardiometabolic, and ovulatory, ovary, and reproductive were terms supported by most participants. In workshop A, after presentation of the survey results, preferred approach, principles, and evidence summaries for accuracy, breakout groups confirmed support for a name change. Only two workshop participants were unsupportive of a name change, citing evolving science related to the genetic component of PCOS, the potential for a male phenotype, and concerns around rebranding and marketing.
Endocrine and metabolic terms were supported; however, consistent concerns arose around the reproductive term. Although accurately aligned to genetics, pathophysiology, and clinical features, the potential for the reproductive term to cause social stigmatisation and harm in some cultures or world regions was recognised. Alternative terms such as ovulatory were felt to be less stigmatising but did not encompass broader reproductive features or extend beyond menopause. Workshop A voting largely aligned with survey A's results, prioritising endocrine and metabolic terms. After discussions, ovulatory was preferred over reproductive, despite concerns that the term could be too narrow.
Potential names
In workshop A, the preferred terms were combined into candidate names (table 3) and assessed for duplication, pronunciation, stigma, and cultural implications. Some terms were excluded (eg, metabolic endocrine reproductive syndrome, as its acronym would duplicate that of Middle East respiratory syndrome). Endocrine metabolic ovulatory syndrome, although ranked top initially, was found to overlap with the so-called emo youth subculture, in which emotional expression—particularly melancholy, alienation, romantic despair, and anxiety—was central to identity formation. These issues, along with concerns on the most appropriate reproductive term, precluded consensus on a final new name and highlighted the need for further engagement processes.
Additional steps
Review of all survey responses and breakout discussions, and reconsideration of alternative terms with majority support, highlighted polyendocrine and ovarian as potential alternative terms. Pro bono assessment from leading experts in a global marketing agency, including the use of artificial intelligence marketing, did not identify any additional terms or names beyond those already considered. The recommendation was for evolutionary rebranding—which supports some continuity with an existing name or acronym and is framed as an update—rather than revolutionary rebranding, which implies a new condition. Survey B in January, 2026, yielded 1346 responses (from 1053 people with PCOS and 293 health professionals) from across all world regions. Terms presented included ovary and ovulatory, with ovulatory ranking the highest on surveys (table 3); thematic analysis of free text responses confirmed limitations of these terms, with incomplete representation of ovarian, endocrine, and follicular disturbances, and irrelevance after menopause. Polyendocrine was included as an option, alongside endocrine, based on majority support from survey A, workshop concerns on the cultural implications of the acronym EMOS, and because it offered an evolutionary marketing approach with similarity to the current acronym, PCOS. Workshop B presentations and breakout groups reviewed all survey results and free text comments for ovary-related terms (ie, ovulatory and ovary from survey A, and ovarian from previous surveys, with 62% of people with PCOS and 67% of health professionals supporting the latter on surveys). Ultimately, workshop voting prioritised ovarian (encompassing endocrine, follicular, and ovulatory disturbances), over ovary or ovulatory.
New name
The top ranked name on survey B was polyendocrine metabolic ovulatory syndrome. Workshop B revised this to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome. All participants supported the new name, except for two participants who also did not support a name change. The need for careful attention in language translation was also captured.
Implementation
The co-designed implementation strategy was presented and discussed in workshop breakout groups. Individual feedback was collected from breakout groups and in live online surveys to finalise the strategy (panel 4).
Panel 4
Eight stages for global implementation of the new name for polycystic ovary syndrome, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome
The implementation strategy was informed by considerations highlighted in survey responses, and was co-designed with consumers, marketing and implementation experts, and governance bodies (including health professional experts), and was based on implementation science frameworks.
Stage 1: publication and academic dissemination
Publication of this Health Policy, supported by accompanying commentaries, clinical reviews, editorial correspondence, and updates to textbooks and educational materials.
Stage 2: resource development
Co-design of patient and health professional resources in multiple languages and for diverse platforms and delivery modes.
Stage 3: global communication and engagement
Implementation of a structured communication strategy, including society toolkits, multilingual patient and clinician resources, multimedia dissemination, professional education programmes, and coordinated events for patients and health professionals worldwide.
Stage 4: integration within health care and health information systems
Incorporation of the new terminology into electronic health records, including within Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine—Clinical Terms, and engagement with major electronic medical record vendors and key stakeholders in health-care provider education (eg, universities and textbook publishers).
Stage 5: policy and research alignment
Engagement with governments, research funders, journal editors, regulators, and the health-care industry (including the pharmaceutical industry), to support adoption across research classifications, publication processes, and funding systems.
Stage 6: international classification and global bodies
Formal engagement with international bodies, including WHO, to progress integration into disease classification systems, including the ICD.
Stage 7: transition and future refinement
A managed transition period of 3 years with monitoring and evaluation, consideration of emerging evidence on subtypes, and refinement of terminology as scientific understanding evolves.
Stage 8: guidelines
Integration into the International Guideline, which is already used in 195 countries and will next be updated in 2028.
Implications
This unprecedented and comprehensive international health policy initiative was ultimately focused on implementation for global-level impact. The robust process generated representativeness, legitimacy, and transparency, with engagement of people with PCOS, health professionals, and 56 organisations across world regions. Building on a mandate for change, 14 360 survey responses and multiple workshops with around 90 representatives generated agreed principles, supporting better outcomes for people with PCOS, scientific accuracy, ease of communication, avoidance of stigma, cultural appropriateness, and optimising implementation. The preferred approach was evolution to a new accurate name that retained some similarity to PCOS to enable its implementation. Ultimately, prioritised terms were polyendocrine, metabolic, and ovarian, and the preferred name for the condition formerly known as PCOS was polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS). An implementation strategy was codeveloped and is under way.
A clear rationale and mandate for change underpinned this consensus process.9 The need to correct the inaccurate polycystic term (which implies pathological ovarian cysts)10 and recognise the multisystem features of the condition2 were prioritised by patient and health professional groups. and government agencies.14 Widespread delayed diagnosis, knowledge gaps, and patient dissatisfaction with information provision and care, are well documented.9,12,13 Although International Guidelines, evidence-based resources, and ongoing patient and health professional advocacy have contributed to improved awareness, confusion associated with the name has persisted, reinforcing the mandate for change (panel 1).9 Renaming a medical condition is a complex process that requires funding, governance, broad engagement, and adherence to robust methods and processes. Such a change also necessitates stakeholder engagement to ensure representativeness, legitimacy, and transparency, and to optimise implementation.9 Throughout this process, we built on a clear mandate for change, secured funding, established leadership and governance, delivered a coordinated global consensus process, obtained broad and inclusive engagement between people with PCOS and multidisciplinary health professionals, and achieved agreement on principles and approaches. We applied iterative Delphi surveys and nominal group workshop techniques that were linked to a robust implementation strategy.17,18,20–22 This approach addressed barriers and surpassed previous stalled renaming attempts to exemplify an inclusive, iterative process that could help guide future name change initiatives.
PMOS encompasses multiple interacting endocrine abnormalities, rather than an isolated ovarian disorder.5,23–25 Meta-analyses of large-scale genomic analyses and recent definitive studies confirm that PMOS has polygenic origins across neuroendocrine, metabolic, and reproductive pathways.26,27 Hyperandrogenism is a defining endocrine and diagnostic feature, with elevated ovarian—and often adrenal—androgens contributing to hirsutism, acne, alopecia, and metabolic features.2,28,29 Central neuroendocrine abnormalities include increased gonadotropin-releasing hormone pulsatility, with consequent elevations in luteinising hormone that drive excessive ovarian androgen.24 Insulin resistance and compensatory hyperinsulinaemia, present in 85% of affected individuals (75% of lean women [with BMI ≤25 kg/m2] with PMOS),30,31 amplify androgen secretion and disrupt steroidogenesis, highlighting the metabolic–endocrine interplay.30,31 Altered AMH concentrations, ovarian endocrine function, adipokine signalling, and gut–hormone interactions influence clinical features, including reproductive and metabolic manifestations.5,32 Furthermore, the combination of endocrine disturbances underpin pregnancy risks, which are compounded by metabolic features.33,34 Collectively, these complex endocrine abnormalities underscore the multisystem manifestations of PMOS and support reframing it as a polyendocrine condition that extends beyond ovarian pathology.
Metabolic abnormalities underpin PMOS, from genetic origins to clinical manifestations.2,5,26,35 Insulin resistance affects the majority of people with PMOS and contributes to androgen excess, which, together with low-grade inflammation and dysfunctions in adipokine signalling and the sympathetic nervous system, drives metabolic dysfunction.5,36 Obesity—particularly central adiposity—is increased in people with PMOS, implicated as causal on mendelian randomisation studies, and exacerbates symptom severity.2,37 Lifestyle, pharmacological, and surgical weight management interventions have shown clinical benefit.37–40 Cardiometabolic complications, such as impaired glucose tolerance, gestational diabetes, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, type 2 diabetes, dyslipidaemia, hypertension, and vascular dysfunction are increased in PMOS, exacerbated by obesity, and drive cardiovascular disease risk.2,5,35,41,42 Evidence from women who are predominantly premenopausal shows that the odds ratios of composite cardiovascular disease (1·68), myocardial infarction (2·50), and stroke (1·71) are increased in those with PMOS compared with those without PMOS.43 Collectively, this evidence shows that metabolic features are inherent in PMOS, which firmly endorses incorporation of the metabolic term in the revised nomenclature.
Ovarian dysfunction is a defining feature of PMOS, with genetic origins and disturbances in endocrine and paracrine function during and beyond reproductive life stages.5 Neuroendocrine abnormalities disrupt ovarian steroidogenesis and impair follicular maturation. Such dysfunction is exacerbated by hyperinsulinaemia-driven dysregulation of granulosa and theca cells, which worsens hyperandrogenism.5 These abnormalities disrupt folliculogenesis and result in accumulation of small antral follicles, as seen in the classic ultrasonographic appearance of this condition.44 Elevated AMH occurs with disordered folliculogenesis, and is now included in adult diagnostic criteria.2,32 Clinically, these abnormalities manifest as ovulatory dysfunction, menstrual irregularity, and infertility, endorsing the explicit inclusion of ovarian in the new nomenclature. Other features of the condition, such as psychological and dermatological changes, are important but are largely secondary to endocrine changes, and these terms were not supported for inclusion in the new name.9
The implementation strategy for the new name was generated through use of a structured, co-designed process grounded in the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research and Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change.21,22 Led by implementation experts and informed by implementation priorities identified from the surveys and workshops outlined here,9 patients’ and health professionals’ input, and marketing specialists, the multistage global implementation strategy aids transition to the new name and incorporates evaluation (panel 4). This strategy includes: publication and academic dissemination; development of multilingual resources for people with PCOS and clinicians; coordinated global communication and engagement; integration into electronic health records and health-care education systems; alignment with policy agencies, research funders, and journal processes; formal engagement with international classification bodies, including WHO, for adoption in the ICD; and a managed 3-year transition and planned integration into the 2028 update of the International Guidelines, which are already used in 195 countries.2 This implementation strategy is supported by an embedded evaluation plan. Key considerations include meaningful language translation and cultural appropriateness, especially where reproductive implications and infertility can be linked to the supposed value or worth of an affected individual. This approach creates the implementation architecture to support consistent global uptake of the new name for sustainable change across policy, research, health systems, practice, and outcomes.
This Health Policy initiative has both strengths and limitations. A major strength is the unprecedented partnership and involvement with stakeholders (ie, people with PCOS and health professionals) across all stages, including governance, conceptualisation, co-design, recruitment, interpretation of results, participation in consensus workshops, and implementation. Robust consensus methods were applied. The consensus process presents an exemplar to overcome barriers in name change processes as scientific understanding evolves. Limitations of this Health Policy initiative include disproportionate representation across world regions and disciplines, with lower participation from middle-income and low-income countries, and from Asia, Africa, and South America. Furthermore, the use of a purposive, non-probability sampling approach and voluntary participation could introduce selection bias and hinder generalisability. In addition, response rates could not be determined for survey A due to broad dissemination. Despite these limitations, analysis of survey results by region did not identify major differences in the final terms or name preferences. The overwhelming majority of participants in earlier surveys and workshops supported a name change, and the principles, approach, and terms used.
Conclusion
In this common yet historically neglected female condition affecting more than 170 million individuals worldwide, we led global engagement of people with PCOS and health professionals through a structured, multistep, robust process to generate a new name that avoids misleading references to ovarian cysts and accurately reflects the condition's diverse and multisystem features. The condition formerly known as PCOS now has a new name: polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome. This change has global implications for health-care systems, policy, and research, and for advancing understanding and treatment of the condition. Transition to the new name will occur over 3 years, supported by a multifaceted implementation strategy. Overall goals include greater awareness, enhanced diagnosis, improved care quality and patient satisfaction, and optimised outcomes across the broad features of the condition. The transition is underpinned by a global implementation and embedded evaluation strategy.
Contributors
HJT is the lead investigator and led this Health Policy initiative from funding to conception, engagement, analysis, interpretation, and drafting the publication. AEJ, RJN, and MFC are investigators of the Centre for Research Excellence in Women's Health in Reproductive Life. Authors included members of the Steering Committee and Androgen Excess and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Society Board who contributed to the concept, design, governance, and completion of this Health Policy. HJT, MBK, and RM led survey development, dissemination, and analysis, and workshop design and analysis. All named authors and those in the international network (appendix pp 25–27) engaged in the surveys and workshops, could access the data on request, and contributed to data interpretation in the workshops, and to editing and revising the manuscript. All authors had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication, and all provided their approval for submission.
Data sharing
We can share de-identified, individual participant-level survey data once all analyses are completed and after receipt of a request detailing the study hypothesis and statistical analysis plan. All requests should be sent to the corresponding author ([email protected]). The steering committee of this study will discuss all requests and decide, based on the scientific rigour of the proposal, whether data sharing is appropriate. All applicants will be asked to sign a data access agreement.
Declaration of interests
HJT is the primary investigator of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)-funded Centre for Research Excellence in Women's Health in Reproductive Life (APP number 1171592), and is supported by an NHMRC Fellowship (APP number 2009326). She is the unpaid President of the International Society of Endocrinology and lead on the International Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Guidelines and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guidelines Committee. RM has received grants from Waterloo Foundation and Verity for administrative support, the James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group. She has received support from Roche Pharmaceutical for travel and time to film patient story videos. She is an unpaid Trustee of Verity and a member of the International Guidelines Steering Group and the NICE Guidelines Committee (honoraria). JSEL has received grants and personal fees from Astellas, Ferring, Gedeon Richter, and Siemens. He is a member of the Androgen Excess and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (AE-PCOS) Society Board and a member of the Data Safety Monitoring Board of the LOCI trial. He is the Chief Executive Officer and owner of JSEL Consultancy. AEJ has received honoraria from Amgen, Novo Nordisk, and Eli Lilly for presentations. She served on the Board of Directors of the AE-PCOS Society and has received free continuous glucose monitoring devices (ie, Freestyle Libre, Dexcom G7, and OnePlus) for research or clinical purposes. DAR is the Chair of the steering committee for the LOCI trial, a topic adviser for the NICE Guideline Committee, a board member of the AE-PCOS Society, and participates in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. RJN reports support from the Centre for Research Excellence in Women's Health in Reproductive Life, consulting fees from Westmead Fertility and VinMec Hospital, is Chair of the Data Safety Monitoring Board for a Chinese natural therapies and miscarriage study (NCT02633878), and is Chair of the Clinical Advisory Committee at Westmead Fertility. AD serves as Executive Director of the AE-PCOS Society. TP has received project grants from Novo Nordisk, the Research Council of Finland, and the Sigrid Juselius Foundation; consulting fees from Exeltis and Astellas; honoraria from Exeltis, Gedeon Richter, Stragen, and Bayer; and travel support from Gedeon Richter. She is the unpaid President of the AE-PCOS Society. All other authors declare no competing interests.
Acknowledgments
The leadership of the Centre for Research Excellence in Women's Health in Reproductive Life, administered by Monash University, Verity, and the Androgen Excess and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (AE-PCOS) Society, was foundational. The support and broad engagement across 56 organisations were essential to optimise reach and participation. Patient organisations and individuals provided important input at all stages, including governance (Verity), survey co-design (Verity, PCOS Awareness Association, PCOS Challenge, and patient representatives across world regions), and cultural perspectives. Survey and workshop participants were fundamental to this process and are key to its implementation. Anna Clare, Andrea Dunaif, Priyal Ghandi, Anna Halminen, Gustavo Martínez, Yasmin Nicholas-Reid, Tiia Tuovinen, and Christine Updegraff contributed to the surveys and workshops. We also thank our independent workshop observers, Angela Damianopoulos, Angela Jones, Matthew Keath, Ashley Ng, Catherine Anne Pigott, Jenny Proimos, and Sandra Reeder, for overseeing adherence to the code of conduct and supporting equitable and respectful participation. This Health Policy was funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centre for Research Excellence in Women's Health in Reproductive Life (APP number 1171592) and HJT's NHMRC Investigator Fellowship (APP number 2009326). The Androgen Excess and PCOS Society supported a series of workshops and Verity provided support for marketing and communication.
Exchange between nurse Sandie Peggie and Jane Russell KC
“… the myth of care as an inexhaustible natural resource that we can reap from feminine nature is unshakeable. Because we need it to be.”
Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?
When feminists speak of the ‘invisibility’ of women’s work, what they usually mean is not labour that is literally unseen, but acts which are not classified as ‘work’. They’re things women are assumed to do naturally, out of love, out of instinct, just because they want to, hence there’s no need to reward them for it, and certainly no need to assign any economic value to them. Sure, there would be an enormous cost if all the mothers of the world downed tools, but as long as that unpaid labour keeps coming, it doesn’t have to be counted. As Katrine Marçal puts it, the housework and care work a woman provides can be written off as “just a logical extension of her fair, loving nature”.
There are some things, though, which cannot strictly be described as activities. They’re non-acts. Women’s work consists of the things we do, but also the things we don’t. It’s the things we don’t say, the complaints we never make, the fears we never express, the spaces we don’t take. If it is hard to quantify housework and care work, counting this ‘not doing’ is harder yet.
How do you keep track of things that never happened, things that, as far as anyone else is concerned, were never even possibilities? How do you assign a cost to something which, to the outside world, looks utterly effortless, a simple expression of your passive, contented nature?
In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin describes women’s response to the public censure that follows should we “speak without apology about the world in which we live”. Women, she writes, “lower our voices”:
“Women whisper. Women apologise. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back.”
All of this comes at a cost to women’s self-respect and emotional well-being, but it’s a cost that goes unnoticed by the beneficiaries of our silence. As with the housework, this labour is only really appreciated the moment it is no longer provided – the day the silent, unapologetic woman speaks and is no longer sorry.
Because it has already been decreed that her silence costs her nothing, she will be regarded as having no excuse for her rebellion. She cannot be doing it due to the unbearable cost of constant self-suppression, since none of this ever bothered her before (and plenty of other women don’t mind shutting up). She must therefore be doing it out of cruelty and spite.
I thought of this when reading the exchanges taking place at the employment tribunal of nurse Sandie Peggie. Peggie was suspended from her job at Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy, after complaining about having to share a female-only changing room with a man. I’m using the term “man” because that is Peggie’s perception (and mine, too), though the man in question claims to be a woman, and had wanted to be referred to as such by everyone, Peggie included. Peggie has had to fight for her right to refer to Dr Beth Upton as a man in her tribunal, arguing, quite rightly, that this is the very reason why she did not want him in the women’s changing rooms. This has not stopped Upton and NHS Fife positioning this request as harassment and bullying. As far as they are concerned, Peggie has two choices: call Upton a man and look like the kind of bigot who doesn’t respect other people’s identities, or call Upton a woman and look like the kind of bigot who thinks only certain women are allowed in female-only spaces. Essentially, anything other than Peggie shutting up, trivialising what she knows, shrinking, pulling back, is bigotry.
The barrister acting on behalf of NHS Fife, Jane Russell KC, has been unremitting in her attempt to position Peggie as acting out of malice as opposed to basic self-respect. This exchange in particular caught my attention, referring to Peggie’s choice to challenge Upton after encountering him in the changing rooms for a third time. Peggie explains that she is trying to make Upton understand why she wants a space of her own; Russell counters that Peggie “could have chosen not to say anything”. After all, she’d said nothing up to that point. She could have continued her nothingness work, which is apparently no work at all.
There is no credit given for all the times Peggie didn’t speak, all the times she stepped aside, allowing Upton’s self-perception to define reality. The male “power of naming”, writes Dworkin, “enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself”. Peggie’s nothingness work is only ever acknowledged to use it to claim that she could have carried on doing it indefinitely – that it is, in fact, her role, and not Upton’s, to make space for and absorb others. It is not cruel for Peggie to be denied the right to describe the world on her own terms – even when the maintenance of her own boundaries depends on it. It is, on the other hand, bullying and harassment for Upton to even have to listen to Peggie use the language she needs (at no point has anyone told Upton he must use the same words as her).
From Upton, there is no “thank you for saying nothing the first two times”. No “the fact you didn’t speak up at first must have cost you something”. No “I didn’t realise I was making you feel this way”. No “how many others feel this way, too, and are saying nothing just to please me?”
It’s not Upton’s job to think any of these thoughts. Just “you shouldn’t have said anything. You’ve done it before. How hard can it be? (For you, obviously. Never me.)”
***
When I was a child, the adult men in my family – and, learning from them, the younger ones, too – would frequently disparage the appearance of famous women. They’d discuss who was fat, who was ugly. Many a woman earned the designation “double bagger” (“you’d need to put two bags on her head in case the first fell off”). Very occasionally I would protest about this, whereupon I’d be told “it’s just the truth” (or some Northern bullshit “ah speak as ah find” version of this). As if that justified it. As long as it’s the truth – if the woman you are calling fat is not in fact thin, if the woman you are calling old is not young – you’re allowed to point it out, again and again. Of course, when I developed my own fears of being similarly disparaged, this was nothing to do with their comments, merely proof that I – like all girls – was frivolous and vain.
I don’t think the fact that something is true necessarily means it should be said. What matters is the purpose it’s serving. There’s that poster in many a primary classroom: THINK before you speak. Is it True / Helpful / Inspiring / Necessary / Kind? This has always seemed to me too high a standard. Speaking out can sometimes be necessary without it being inspiring or kind. I even think that sometimes, a lie can be justified. Facts might not care about your feelings, but we are surely sophisticated enough to make judgements about which facts matter, and the consequences of saying something as opposed to letting it go.
Another exchange from the Peggie tribunal:
Russell: - do you accept that calling [Upton] a man, that not a woman is likely to cause immense distress
Peggie: - when I'm in the situation, feeling intimidated and embarrassed, I needed to explain that he was a man
Russell: - did not answer my question, is it offensive
Peggie: - it's the truth
Peggie is saying something which, from Upton’s perspective, may not be kind but is entirely necessary. Otherwise how can she explain the cause of her discomfort and distress? It is not his ‘transness’ but his maleness. It is justifiable for women to want spaces away from men. It is not justifiable for women to want single-sex spaces which exclude a certain type of woman for nebulous reasons, which is what Russell would like to force Peggie into saying. If Peggie’s definition is offensive to some people, one might also ask whether it is it offensive to others to define women, not as adult human females, but a bunch of random feminine stereotypes. Is it offensive when the trans writer Andrea Long Chu writes “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”? Does anyone in that courtroom even care? (It would seem not.) When Peggie says “it’s the truth”, she is not aiming to cause hurt. Her access to a single-sex space in which to get changed at work depends on this truth being recognised.
Yet Russell treats it as though Peggie is behaving no differently to my male relatives plonked in front of the TV in the eighties, passing judgement on the width of a woman’s thighs or the state of her jawline. Why say it? Why say it, when you could just not? Why use the truth to be mean?
Russell: - the truth is it is profoundly offensive to call a TW a man, it undermines her dignity
Peggie: - my dignity was also undermined by DU being in the DR
Russell: - you've ignored by question about DU's dignity
Peggie: - my dignity as a female is important to me
Note that Russell pretends not to understand the point that Peggie is making with reference to her own dignity – that for hers to be respected depends on an acknowledgement of Upton’s sex. This is not ‘ignoring’ any displeasure caused to Upton. It’s saying that this is outweighed by the cost to Peggie of not stating the truth. Russell speaks as though Peggie’s “truth” is no different to the “truth” of mocking someone’s appearance, just for kicks. “My dignity as a female” isn’t a thing. It isn’t allowed to be. It would only get in the way.
***
In The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan is scathing about lesbians who do not wish to “share womanhood itself with the ‘wrong’ kinds of woman”. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? Until you realise she just means men. She’s having a go at lesbians who don’t want to sleep with males (she claims to find the “reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling”. One does not need to imagine where that sort of thinking leads). Srinivasan’s position seems to me politically unforgiveable, not to mention cruel, yet her choice to frame it as a refusal to “share” with the “‘wrong’ kinds of woman” turns the moral expectation on its head. Hey, aren’t those lesbians nasty? Couldn’t they just not object to sleeping with male people? Failing that, couldn’t they keep it to themselves and choose not to say anything? (In a world where corrective rape remains a thing, who needs a clear definition of lesbianism anyways?)
Elsewhere in her essay, Srinivasan complains that trans women “often face sexual exclusion from lesbian cis women who at the same time claim to take them seriously as women”. What hypocrites those lesbian cis women are! A similar point is made in Lorna Finlayson, Katharine Jenkins and Rosie Worsdale’s essay ‘I’m not transphobic, but …’, with reference to arguments for female-only spaces:
“When keeping women’s spaces for cis women only is held to be safest for cis women, or ‘females’, is the tacit assumption that trans women are not (‘really’) women, and hence not a population which feminism needs to represent? If so, it would certainly be good to have this claim out in the open, since feminist opponents of inclusivity sometimes claim either to regard trans women as women or to be ‘agnostic’ on that issue.”
Yeah, ‘feminist opponents of inclusivity’! Just say what you really mean!
What these arguments utterly fail to acknowledge (even though I doubt very much that their authors are unaware of it) is that these supposed ‘hypocrites’ may well not see trans women as ‘real women’. The fact is, they’re being kind. They’re doing precisely what everyone tells them to do. They’re making a sacrifice. They’re putting aside their own feelings and beliefs in instances where, as women, they can – and so often do – reason that their own dignity and self-respect can take a hit. They are only withdrawing their services – services to which no one should have any entitlement in the first place – when the stakes become too high. When it’s not a matter of flattering his ego, but ceding your space to him, undressing in front of him, fucking him. At that point, the woman becomes, not someone who’s been pushed too far, but a bitch who’s been lying all along.
This dynamic is everywhere (think of Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person), even if liberal feminism only wishes to acknowledge it in certain circumstances. We’ve all been there. Sod it, we think. I’ll indulge him. I’ll smile at him. I’ll laugh at his jokes. I’ll use his words. I’ll pretend I don’t mind. I mean, how important is it really? What does it cost me really? If it makes him happy, what kind of nonsense is ‘my dignity’ anyways? We are never, ever thanked for this, only punished when we reach the point of saying ‘no’. It costs nothing to smile – well, only a little self-respect – but that smile will be taken as a promise.
Another example from the Peggie tribunal:
Russell: - you would refer to DU using female pronouns while on the ward at work, and when other people were around
Peggie: - yes, when I could remember
Russell: - but when no one was watching you felt free to call him a man
Peggie: - it was appropriate in the situation I was in, I felt he could understand
Russell: - isn't that classic bullying behaviour - one way, when people around another in private
By that definition, every woman who has ever humoured a man who has made her feel fear, disgust or pity is a classic bully. Peggie’s choice not to insist on her dignity being respected at all times – her willingness to defer to Upton’s worldview in public, to not make a fuss, to “trivialise what [she knows]” – is not appreciated as generosity, or even as work that is expected of her but not of him. Instead, it’s treated as evidence that Peggie is dishonest and manipulative. The patriarchal dynamic forces women to lie – telling us that our truths, such little things, don’t matter anyways – then castigates us for being deceitful.
There is no way to win. Women can be kind but our kindness – that “logical extension” of our “fair, loving nature[s]” – will be unappreciated and unacknowledged until the moment it is absent, whereupon it will be used against us. We’re not meant to be ugly, but if we care, we are vain. We’re not meant to have inner lives, but if we reveal them, it only shows all those years of accommodation – all that silence – was a sham. It is often said that femininity is a double bind insofar as women must choose between being punished for not conforming to its standards, or conforming, which is a punishment in and of itself. The situation is worse than that. The moment we don’t conform, we receive an additional punishment for having ‘deceitfully’ conformed in the past.
It would be good to have things “out in the open”, Finlayson, Jenkins and Worsdale claim. Only it wouldn’t. You’d only say that proved you right.
***
We have all heard stories of nice heterosexual couples who have been together for a very long time when all of a sudden the man just “snaps”. It is then claimed by those who knew them – especially if both have died – that there was never any violence before. It is a mystery, a tragedy, poor them.
I tend to be doubtful about these claims. There is so much violence that goes unseen, and so many places men know to hit that won’t be seen by others. I don’t think it’s impossible, though, that in some cases the fatal blow was the first blow. In those cases, I can’t help suspecting that what others see as “peace” was actually just silence and compliance, of the sort that can go on for years. The nothingness work of letting him define the world, until one day, you can’t stay silent any more, or silence is no longer enough.
I think men who know your compliance is coerced can eventually get even angrier for it. They know you don’t mean it, and it shames them, and that shame has to be projected back onto you. I think there are dead women who spent their entire lives doing the work of keeping the men who killed them happy, soothing their egos, saying whatever words these men demanded, and this work will never be appreciated. No one knows they did it. At best, the man who “snaps” will be recalled as a tortured soul, his victim, a docile, simple, untroubled wife who happened to get in the way. What can she know about dark nights of the soul? Perhaps there will be another discussion of men’s mental health, and why he never gets to discuss his problems. Her? Well, she had nothing to say. She could have kept her mouth shut and look, she did.
The attitudes displayed in the courtroom during the Peggie tribunal are not, I think, unrelated to the way in which women’s privileging of male worldviews goes unseen until the moment we are punished for not doing it any more. Sometimes the truth comes out in arguments. “Now the mask is off!”, a man might say. “See, now we know what she’s really like!” And this will be understood, not as evidence that we have not been permitted to be what we are “really like” at other times – evidence that we have needs that are unrecognised, experiences that are ours alone. It’s just evidence that we are vindictive. We’re bullies. We’re spiteful. We “could have chosen not to say anything” yet here we are.
A final exchange:
Russell: No-one else complained?
Peggie: No one else has come forward and they don’t want to be in my position
Why can’t you be more like the others, the quiet ones? It doesn’t bother them. Not that we’re thanking them for this.
It’s just what they’re there for. It’s just the way they are.
The Link Between Pornography and Human Trafficking
Image:
Publishing date:
May 19th, 2017
Author:
Jacob Beck
Website published:
everaccountable.com
Article length:
715 words
~ 3 minute read time
Human trafficking is one of the biggest travesties that still exists in our world today. It is literally modern day slavery.
Sex trafficking (a subset of human trafficking) is the fastest growing criminal business in the world and the third largest criminal enterprise since 2010.
The International Labour Organization estimates that over 150 million dollars are illegally made through the exploitation of 21 million people in human trafficking. Of those 21 million, 5.5 million are children and 11.4 million are women and girls.
Ever growing, the portion of those forced into sex slavery is roughly 4.5 million men, women, and children (although the vast majority is comprised of young women and girls).
How Pornography is Linked to Human Trafficking
While pornography is not at the root of this heinous business, it is surely associated with it. After interviewing almost 900 women across 9 countries, researcher Melissa Farley says that “pornography is men’s rehearsal for prostitution.”
That is no subtle accusation—she is directly correlating her research to the epidemic of pornography and its impact on prostitution.
Some other startling statistics about pornography and human trafficking include:
Roughly half of the sample group (including men, women, and children) were used to make pornography films.
80% of those who have been freed from human trafficking were forced to re-enact specific acts of pornography by the people who enslaved them.
The majority of these victims are taught how to “perform” via pornographic material.
Thus we see that roughly 4.5 million men, women, and children are forced into sex slavery.
Pornography is directly forced on them as part of their enslavement, through either a “teaching aid,” or a tool to help buyers hire a sex slave.
Whatever way it is being used, pornography aids in the collecting of money for human beings.
As pornography - especially child sexual abuse materials - continues to grow in today’s culture, the desire for sex slaves will grow alongside it.
Pornography is a $97 billion dollar business. It is easy to conclude that those who are profiting from producing this content using trafficked men, women, and children will continue to tap into this monumental source of revenue.
And because this industry is so large, it is hard to imagine it going away anytime soon. Especially when we look at the affects of porn withdrawal and how difficult it is for an individual to quit watching porn.
A Disturbing Trend In Pornography and Human Trafficking
Perhaps the most disturbing part of human trafficking is that children and young adults are “worth” more than their adult counterparts.
So, there is a greater incentive to continually abduct and harm children over adults to make higher profits. The children used by traffickers are primarily those who are runaways, or who are easily manipulated by their abductors.
One in six children—endangered runaways—are pulled into sex trafficking. Often these youth are forced into child pornography.
Of those children, 86% of them come from foster homes or social services.
These children are running from broken lives, only to find a darker future in slavery. In fact, the average age of people trafficked into prostitution is 12-14 years old and 4 out of 5 will be female.
What then, does this mean?
Pornography is not only perpetuating human trafficking, but it is incentivizing the use of children in pornography and human traffic in order to draw in a larger profit. It is literally destroying the lives of children and adults.
There is a clearly definable link between pornography and human trafficking. Through viewing pornography, individuals are tempted to hire sex workers in order to fulfill the unrealistic scenes created in pornographic films.
Because of the high profitability of releasing pornographic material, many victims will be forced to create pornographic films and images that will be released to the populace (US!) for profit. This is not people who are wanting to create adult content, but young men, women, and children who are being forced to participate or potentially lose their lives.
As responsible citizens we have to protect kids from porn.
There is absolutely a link between pornography and sex trafficking. We need to take this seriously and take responsibility for our part in sex trafficking if we are viewing pornography, or if we can’t stop watching porn.
me (saw it posted by @adhighdefinition on this post)
Title:
Women with undiagnosed ADHD at risk of suicide, says US psychologist
Image:
Publishing date:
October 16th, 2017
Author:
Fiona Gartland
Website published:
irishtimes.com
Allsides bias rating is Center.
Article length:
710 words
~ 3 minute read time
Girls less likely to be hyperactive in class but suffer ‘internal chaos and restlessness’
Clinical psychologist Dr Ellen B Littman: Girls and women with undiagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are at risk of anxiety, depression and suicide, she said
Girls and women with undiagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are at risk of anxiety, depression and suicide, a leading American clinical psychologist has said.
Dr Ellen B Littman said because of societal expectations, girls with the condition tend to try to conform in class, so are less likely to demonstrate the hyperactivity seen in boys with the condition, but still have “internal chaos and restlessness”.
“Since they are not disruptive, they are more likely to be the girls in class that either are daydreamers . . . or they would be the chatty giggling girls,” she said.
“But in either case there would still be the issue of inattentiveness; they weren’t focused on the topic at hand, they would be forgetful and have to be told things many times.”
She said society has expectations for girls and women that involve listening, organising, co-operating and caring for others’ needs.
“Those are all things that girls with ADHD are not good at, so there is a lot of shame,” she said.
“What ends up being observable are feelings of anxiety and depression . . . so they often get misdiagnosed.”
Other red flags that could indicate the condition include constantly picking at cuticles, nails and scabs, and inconsistent achievement at school, despite ability.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects approximately 5 per cent of children and 3 per cent of adults, according to support group HADD Ireland. It is estimated to affect 200,000 people here, and is the most common condition diagnosed by Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.
Dr Littman said women with the condition may lose things, their home may be in chaos and they may be poor at managing finances
Dr Littman described it as a difference in brain wiring. She said for the ADHD brain to focus optimally, it has to be very stimulated and when it is, people with the condition focus as well as anyone and are as smart as anyone else.
Most people in a boring meeting or class will “power through”, she said, but people with ADHD cannot engage with things that are not stimulating.
“As a result you have a very inconsistent picture of achievement; in the things that they like, they are fabulous and in the things that don’t interest them, they cannot motivate themselves,” she said.
Managing finances
Dr Littman said women with the condition may lose things, their home may be in chaos and they may be poor at managing finances. They feel compelled to present a good facade, she said, but their internal experience is “I’ve left the water running at home and I forgot to pick up my child and I didn’t return those calls”.
They feel worse and worse about not being able to conform to basic feminine ideals, such as managing a family and children and organising a house.
“Their brains are just not wired to do that really well and they are struggling all the time and they are further ashamed,” she said.
Research shows women with ADHD are more likely to self-harm or attempt suicide, she said, and are also much more likely to die early of unnatural causes related to inattentiveness.
“Those are pretty scary public health statistics that none of us can ignore,” Dr Littman said.
The condition is also “one of the most heritable disorders there is”, she said, so if a child has it, at least one parent will have had it.
There are medications to treat the condition, though Dr Littman does not prescribe them. She said psychological education is needed for the whole family and once people know what is going on, they can find out what makes things easier or more difficult.
Dr Littman addressed a conference at Trinity last week as part of ADHD Girls and Women’s event, for ADHD Month, organised by HADD Ireland.
Also speaking at the event were Margo Wrigley, clinical lead for the National Clinical Programme on ADHD in Adults and Dr Hanni Kiiski, researcher at Trinity’s Institute of Neuroscience.
TJ Carroll’s recent conviction gave an insight into prostitution in Ireland, but the case did not reveal the full extent of his empire – brothels in almost every Irish county and an emerging business in South Africa – or the ruthless control he exerted over women who worked for him
BY THE TIME police in Wales arrested TJ Carroll on a December morning in 2008, the largely unknown Carlow man had amassed wealth that would have been the envy of even the biggest drug dealers in Ireland.
He’d built an international property portfolio and boasted seven-figure cash savings. Not for him the high-risk gangland world of drug trafficking and debt collection down the barrel of a gun. He specialised in exploiting the poor and vulnerable, and made tens of thousands of euro weekly from his many brothels across the Republic and the North.
He was aided by his wife, Shamiela Clark, a former prostitute from South Africa who is 16 years his junior and once went by the name of Carmen. He also introduced his daughter from his first marriage, Toma, into the business.
All three were jailed in Wales in February, but because they pleaded guilty, the full cruelty of their empire was never revealed in evidence in court. The Irish Timeshas since spoken at length to many senior security sources in the Republic, Northern Ireland and Britain whose investigation brought down TJ Carroll. They have revealed how foreign women were effectively bonded into near slavery in brothels in 48 locations across Ireland , and forced in many cases to hand up virtually all of their earnings.
Sources have also revealed that just before TJ Carroll was caught he was about to open brothels in South Africa especially for soccer fans travelling there for next month’s World Cup.
Born on March 26th, 1961, Thomas John Carroll was originally from St Mullins, by the river Barrow in south Carlow. He later settled in Bagenalstown, Co Carlow, married and had three children.
In the mid 1990s he established a business supplying bouncers to pubs and clubs in the southeast before branching into prostitution. At first, he joined forces with an established prostitution organiser in the southeast who later fled Ireland when a rape allegation against him emerged during 2004. Carroll quickly turned gang boss.
In 2005 he organised foreign prostitutes from apartments across Waterford, Wexford and Carlow, prompting a Garda raid when a number of women complained of being beaten by Carroll’s associates in rows over money.
Carroll fled to Galway where he quickly established himself again, targeting vulnerable women who wouldn’t go to the police.
He met Shamiela Clark, who was then in her 20s and working as a prostitute. The two became lovers, had a son and married after Carroll divorced his first wife. In September 2006, Carroll and Clark were arrested in Galway when €225,000 cash was found in properties linked to them. Under questioning they admitted controlling prostitution, according to Garda sources.
TJ Carroll told gardaí of his illegal enterprise: “It saves rapes and child molestations. It gives people somewhere to go.” Released from Garda custody pending criminal charges, the pair decided to flee to Wales.
A European arrest warrant was issued for Carroll as a major investigation led by the Garda’s Organised Crime Unit was intensified. But by late 2007 both he and Clark were in business again, this time from Pembrokeshire in south Wales, where they believed they were out of reach of the Irish authorities and under the radar of the British police.
It was here, from an old vicarage in the tiny hamlet of Castlemartin, that they built what is thought to be Ireland’s largest prostitution business, which at its height turned annual profits in excess of €1 million.
“The women used were commodities to them,” said one source. They came from Nigeria, eastern Europe, Venezuela, Brazil and other parts of South America. Some were experienced in prostitution. They had answered thinly veiled newspaper adverts for “domestic staff” and came to Ireland in the full knowledge of what they were getting into. Others, usually young, poorly educated or orphaned Nigerians, were much more vulnerable. They were trafficked into Ireland by African gangs on the promise of jobs or educational opportunities. Once here, they were forced to work in Carroll’s brothels on the pretence of paying off the massive cost of their passage to Ireland; sometimes up to €60,000 was demanded by their African traffickers.
ASSAULTS AND THREATS of violence were used by TJ Carroll’s agents in Ireland to control the women. They were constantly moved around between brothels North and South to disorientate them and to provide customers with “variety”.
Sources believe Carroll “did a deal” with major Dublin-based criminals involved in prostituting to stay out of the capital if they stayed out of his regional bases.
Carroll and Clark used two websites to advertise scantily clad “exotic babes” in brothels across virtually every county in Ireland. They were officially listed as escort agencies, but the sexual services listed clearly revealed the true nature of the enterprise.
Women were advertised in, to name but a few towns and cities, Cavan, Drogheda, Athlone, Sligo, Mullingar, Carlow, Kilkenny, Enniscorthy, Newbridge, Waterford, Newry, Omagh, Lurgan, Armagh and Belfast.
When prospective customers rang to contact a woman, the Irish mobile phones were answered in Wales by Shamiela Clark – up to 300 calls a day between 10am and 1am. She would direct the men to the brothels, often over a series of three or four calls in an effort to screen for undercover detectives. The men would be charged €160 for 30 minutes and €260 for a full hour, with “extras on request”. Women were not allowed to refuse a customer.
Most of the vast sums generated in the brothels – in apartments rented from unsuspecting landlords by well-dressed agents of Carroll’s using false names – were collected by Toma Carroll. The former law student was just 22 when she first got involved. She electronically transferred cash to her father’s account in Wales and money was also brought to Wales by Toma via car ferry. In 2007 alone, the authorities traced cash transfers of €1.13 million. At one point, TJ Carroll had €854,000 in a single Credit Union account.
Investment properties, nine in all, were traced in Wales, Cyprus, Bulgaria, South Africa and Mozambique – all are now the subject of assets confiscation proceedings. The South African properties, four in Johannesburg, were to be used as brothels that would be opened for the World Cup and kept in business thereafter.
THE FAMILY BUSINESS came unstuck when the PSNI’s Organised Crime Branch in late 2007 began studying internet prostitution advertisements for evidence of human trafficking, and an ongoing Garda operation simultaneously closed in.
A raid on one brothel in December 2007 struck gold. Paperwork for a cash transfer from one of the women to TJ Carroll was found with his name on it.
Two African women found on the premises agreed to be taken to a safe place by detectives and to be interviewed. “They genuinely believed they might be killed,” says one source.
When the PSNI contacted the Garda, it found TJ Carroll was under long-term active investigation by the force’s Organised Crime Unit, which had a wealth of information on the target. The UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) was brought in to aid the complex multi-jurisdictional investigation.
Garda and PSNI detectives continued their surveillance of TJ Carroll’s brothels, and questioned customers who were leaving the premises. Their statements confirmed that the mobile numbers on the websites were linked to the properties, and that they were being used as brothels.
Electronic surveillance also revealed that the scores of mobile numbers advertised on the websites were being answered in south Wales. Twelve women who worked for Carroll also gave statements to gardaí against him during the course of the joint Garda and PSNI investigation. Some of the women travelled around the country to identify exactly where brothels had been operating; some were open for just weeks before being closed and the women moved on.
All of the evidence was pooled and given to SOCA. It was decided that because TJ Carroll and his wife had controlled prostitution from Wales, they must be charged there, even though the brothels were in Ireland.
SOCA, with the help of the Welsh police, raided TJ Carroll and Shamiela Clark’s Welsh home on the morning of December 3rd, 2008. Clark was at home with her two young children – one fathered by Carroll and one from an earlier union. The police found 80 mobile phones – containing many incriminating texts to customers and women – two computers, receipts for rental properties and paperwork for the purchases of nine properties. Some €20,000 in cash was also found, along with rate cards and sample adverts for “leggy, flexible, kinky” women and their sexual services which were to be posted on websites.
TJ Carroll was arrested in his car a short distance from his home. “For a man with a known propensity for violence, he came quietly,” said one source.
At the same time, the Garda raided nine brothels in this country, taking a number of women to safety and arresting seven people suspected of running the logistics of the empire in the Republic. Criminal charges are imminent against at least two of Carroll’s close associates in the Republic.
TJ Carroll and Clark were jailed in February for seven and 3.5 years respectively for controlling prostitution and money laundering. Toma Carroll was jailed for two years for money laundering. Charges of trafficking against TJ Carroll and Clark were not pursued when they agreed to plead guilty to the other charges.
However, in his sentencing remarks, Judge Neil Bidder QC at Cardiff Crown Court noted: “It is more than coincidence that several of those Nigerian women tell stories of dreadful coercion and/or ended up working for you. You were willing to pay others to collect money from them, who were prepared to use threats and violence to keep them in prostitution.”
Violence and voodoo: why the women couldn't just quit
TJ Carroll used threats against family members and voodoo rituals to intimidate his sex workers
The most vulnerable and easy to control of the hundreds of women who worked in TJ Carroll’s brothels were the young Nigerians.
Their families, mostly in rural Nigeria, were approached by people known to them, with a promise of education or a job for a female member of the family in her teens or early 20s.
“The understanding would be that when they got to UK, Europe, Ireland, wherever, they’d need to work for a while to pay back the traffickers for their passage,” says one source whose investigative work helped bring down TJ Carroll.
Before leaving Nigeria, voodoo rituals were performed to “bond” the women to their traffickers.
One woman told Irish investigators that before leaving Nigeria a witch doctor had made her “swear that I will pay back the money or I am going to die”.
She was then forced to eat a heart taken from a live chicken and her hair and nails were cut as part of the ceremony. “It was very clear they had real fears as a result of the rituals,” says one source.
The women or girls – two Nigerians found working in a brothel in the Republic were aged just 15 and 17 years – were told on arrival in the UK or Europe from Africa that they owed their traffickers vast sums for their passage, sometimes up to €60,000. They were sent on the last stage of the journey to Ireland, usually by plane, and given a phone number to call on arrival.
This number was always answered by Shamiela Clark. She directed them by taxi to one of her and TJ Carroll’s many brothels. Prostitution was then presented to the women as their only way of paying their debts to their African traffickers.
The women had no idea where they were and, with no money, had nowhere else to go.
A number of men – Irish-based associates of Carroll – controlled the brothels, ensuring that no customers were turned away. If the women did not comply with customers’ requests during their 15-hour shifts in the brothels – from 10am to 1am – they were threatened and beaten.
If this did not force total compliance from the women, Carroll’s associates would make contact in Africa with agents of the original trafficking gang. The gangs would travel to the women’s families and assault them because of the “difficulties” their young female relatives were creating in Ireland.
One Irish security source says: “In some cases the women here were put on the phone to their relatives back home to be told, ‘we’ve been assaulted and it’s going to get worse for us’. The attitude was ‘you must work to pay this debt’.”
The women’s lack of education, poor English, illegal status in Ireland and limited life experience – plus the threats of violence here and voodoo curses from Africa – meant they were unable to extricate themselves from their situations.
The constant moving of the women between brothels around Ireland also disoriented them and made it difficult to develop deep friendships with other women, which could have empowered them in time.
France exonerates women convicted over abortions before legalisation
Image:
Publishing date:
December 18th, 2025
Author:
Not listed
Website published:
lemonde.fr
Article length:
508 words
~ 2 minute read time
Between 1870 and 1975, more than 11,660 people were convicted for performing or seeking an abortion, according to official estimates.
More than 3000 people demonstrate in Paris, on April 21, 1974 at the call of the MLAC (Movement for the Liberation of Abortion and Contraception), to claim sexual freedom, free contraception and freedom of abortion. AFP
French lawmakers on Thursday, December 18, unanimously approved a bill exonerating women punished for abortion before it was legalized in 1975, a move praised by feminist groups as a standard for reproductive rights.
A unanimous vote in parliament's lower house, the Assemblée Nationale, finalized the adoption of a proposal that was accepted by the Sénat in March and backed by the government.
Its text recognizes that enforcement of previous laws "criminalizing the use of, practice of, access to, and information about abortion" constituted "an infringement of the protection of women's health, of sexual and reproductive autonomy," as well as "of women's rights." The pre-1975 laws led to "numerous deaths" and caused "physical and moral suffering," it adds.
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This "is an act of justice toward those thousands of lives shattered by unjust laws," said Aurore Bergé, the minister-delegate for gender equality, during a speech in which she spoke of an abortion her mother had. "We have a responsibility to make amends, but above all we have a duty to sound the alarm," she added, highlighting attacks on women's rights "all around the world."
Between 1870 and 1975, more than 11,660 people were convicted for performing or seeking an abortion, according to official estimates. The law does not provide for reparations but stipulates the creation of a commission tasked with helping collect and share memories of women forced into secret abortions and of those who helped them.
On Thursday, lawmakers welcomed the presence in the gallery of Claudine Monteil, one of 343 women who in 1971 signed an open letter saying that they had had abortions and calling for legalisation.
France decriminalized the voluntary termination of a pregnancy with the 1975 Veil Law, named after women's rights champion and health minister Simone Veil, who championed legalizing abortion. Last year, it became the first country in the world to enshrine the right to terminate a pregnancy in its constitution.
Abortion remains a hot-button political issue in many countries, with some, including the United States, rolling back reproductive rights in recent years. "France is sending a clear message, at home and abroad: no one should ever be convicted for having an abortion," the Women's Foundation, a feminist group, said in a statement.
The European Parliament adopted a text this week urging the European Union to facilitate access to "safe" abortions for all women on the continent, where access varies markedly from one country to another.
me (saw it posted by @transagainstautogynephiles on this post)
Title:
‘NextGen Women’ Outperform (Men) in Business. And They’re Coming Into the Workforce
Image:
Publishing date:
December 10th, 2018
Author:
Not listed
Website published:
entrepreneur.com
Article length:
1139 words
~ 4 minute read time
A new report finds it pays to have younger women on business teams. Will you include them on yours?
Hero Images | Getty Images
We’re all looking for that competitive edge — from the new products we create, to the new talent we find, to the new markets we strive to dominate. But there’s another factor companies haven’t sufficiently explored as a means of driving growth and innovation: nextgen women, meaning those born between 1995 and 2010 and just beginning to enter the workforce.
You may have heard about those studies proving that women impact investment returns — for instance, First Round Capital’s analysis found that women founders impacted returns by as much as 63 percent, compared to all-male founding teams. And Catalyst, the research group focused on women in the workplace, found that having more women in senior positions leads to better corporate performance.
What’s new is a report just released by my nonprofit business training organization, Girls With Impact, in partnership with EY’s People Advisory Services. Its research, based on six years of data involving 1,454 participants on 535 college teams from UCLA, Rice University and the University of Connecticut, revealed why it pays to have women younger than millennials on your team.
While most business and HR leaders probably aren’t yet thinking about Gen Z, the data is a wake-up call for CEOs, HR leaders and venture investors: Pay attention to this “innovation generation” if you want to drive growth and reduce risk.
The report, titled Proving the Power of NextGen Women, focuses on women participating in college venture competitions, in which students pitch business plans to experts, in search of startup funding.
The report noted that these young women students made up just 22 percent of team members participating in the competitions. It pointed out that some teams were all male and that many with both genders had more men than women. What’s more, 51 percent of the ranking teams — those in first, second or third place — had a woman founder, and 32 percent had a woman “CEO.”
Therefore, it could be concluded that the women overall had an outsized impact on their teams’ wins than did the men. And that finding could have huge implications when you pay attention to the fact that the women on these teams were all still in college.
“What’s powerful is the comparison of the ’22 percent’ of women participants to the ’51 percent’ of ranking teams,” George Brooks, who was involved with the study, commented during a podcast. Brooks is in a position to know: He’s Americas Leader for EY’s People Advisory Services and advises top companies on how to transform their organizations.
Unleashing young women’s potential
Brooks joined leaders from NASDAQ, private equity firm KKR and the University of Connecticut (UConn) in a live briefing before 1,000 people to discuss the report findings (watch the briefing replay). “We need to do a 180,” Brook said, “and re-think organizations, to unleash the potential in these young women.”
One of the biggest obstacles to doing this, the panelists noted, is the culture that still exists in any companies — an area of huge risk, as the #MeToo headlines have underscored. “In order to unleash women, you have to have the right culture,” Brooks said. Some of the things that need to be in place, he said, are a sense of belonging, respect and safety — psychological and physical safety
“Once you have those baselines, it’s about aligning with purpose,” Brooks continued. “If you do the opposite, people don’t feel safe or that they have a voice … then, when they wake up and go to work, you won’t get value from them.”
Why women outperform men.
The question behind the data on young women’s power was, and is, why? David Noble, director of the Werth Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Connecticut who also participated in the report’s release, had a theory: “Women are less likely to get involved in entrepreneurial programming before they have a well-thought-out idea and team,” he said. “So, they’re waiting to a later point to show up and get involved.
“Women-led teams and diverse teams visualize markets that male-only teams don’t see and don’t know,” Noble added. “So, they’re getting more market breadth and building out solutions better for both men and women compared to male-centric teams and solutions.”
How do you harness nextgen women?
The data pointed to the obvious need for businesses to include nextgen women on teams. It’s not enough to have women in your company; you have to be sure they’re involved in innovation efforts and meetings. Women, after all, want purpose in their jobs, so their personal drive shouldn’t be overlooked. According to EY, 30 percent of the women-led companies studied had targeted growth rates of more than 15 percent for the next 12 months vs. a growth rate of just 5 percent in male-led companies.
In this context, Girls With Impact points to the need to invest in STEEM, not just STEM. STEM creates the doers, but with STEEM, the “E” for entrepreneurship will ensure the development of leaders with the mindset to navigate the future of work
Jody Bell, 16, is a case in point. A Girls With Impact grad, Jody developed a business plan, then launched her own nonprofit immigrant assistance venture, In Case of Deportation, giving her a giant leg-up for college and career. “I can guarantee you that there are other high schoolers equally as driven, and if we give them the skills, they will become the future leaders we need right now,” Jody said at the briefing discussing the report’s findings. (Watch Jody 11 minutes in)
The good news for business leaders is that, if they invest in next-gen entrepreneurship training, they’ll have new avenues to build their brands’ reputations, impact their local communities and ensure a pipeline of young, motivated leaders. That’s why these leaders need to :
Boost their recruiting ROI. According to a Payscale survey, a whopping 60 percent of companies say new hires lack problem-solving and critical thinking skills as well as “soft” skills, like the ability to compose professional emails or present an idea.
Consider partnering with organizations, like ours and other mentoring groups like Girls Who Invest, Girls Who Code and DigiGirls, to reach younger candidates and build a talent pipeline offering the skills companies need.
Include nextgen women on teams. It’s not enough just to have women in your firm; be sure they’re involved in innovation and meetings. They want purpose in their jobs. Don’t overlook their drive.
The need is now: As Noble put it at the briefing when he spokef the study’s findings, “This is another nail in the ‘business gender’ coffin. Companies that fail to turn to the next generation will miss out — pure and simple.”
AUS: Women’s Rights Activist Guilty of ‘Vilification’ for Calling Trans-Identified Males ‘Men,’ Facing Possible $200k Penalty
Image:
Publishing date:
September 1st, 2025
Author:
Genevieve Gluck
Website published:
reduxx.info
Article length:
1803 words
~ 7 minute read time
[L] Steph Blanch, [C] Kirralie Smith, [R] Riley Dennis
An Australian woman who has vocally opposed the participation of trans-identified male players in women’s football leagues has been deemed guilty of “vilification” after two of the men filed Apprehended Violence Orders (AVO) against her for referring to them as “men.”
Kirralie Smith, a spokeswoman with Binary Australia, a campaign group dedicated to advocating for single-sex sports in Australia, has been told by the local court of New South Wales that she “unlawfully vilified” the two men – Justin “Riley” Dennis and Nicholas “Stephanie” Blanch – by raising public awareness of their inclusion in women’s sports after learning of injuries sustained by female players.
Demands made by Dennis and Blanch that may be imposed upon Smith and Binary Australia include: two payouts to the trans-identified men, at a maximum of $100,000 each, for “damages” to their reputation; a further financial penalty requiring Smith and Binary to cover the men’s court costs; a requirement that Smith and Binary issue a public apology; and the expectation that they “develop a policy aimed at eliminating unlawful discrimination and transgender vilification in relation to any future public acts.”
The court’s final decision, which will outline the extent of the punitive measures, is expected to be handed down in November.
Reduxx has reviewed both of the judgements, which were decided by Magistrate Sharon Freund on August 26. The AVO judgements center around comments that Smith made on social media which highlighted the fact that Dennis and Blanch, by playing on women’s football teams, jeopardized the safety of female athletes.
The AVO lodged by Dennis was filed in March 2023. Police visited Smith at her home on March 30 and Smith was given the AVO requiring that she refrain from discussing or approaching Dennis – despite the fact that Smith lives over 200 miles from him.
link
Last week’s court decision laid out specific comments made by Smith between March 29 and March 31, 2023 that Dennis alleged were discriminatory against him. In particular, Smith discussed alleged injuries sustained by two female players which were said to have occurred during a match involving Dennis.
“I have cried a lot today,” Smith wrote on Facebook on March 27, 2023. “Last night I was contacted by people in Sydney. It is alleged that two female soccer players were hospitalised over the weekend after being forced to play against a male appropriating womanhood. Trying to get hold of the video. Football Australia have received more than 2000 complaints about the men in teams such as Wingham FC and some Sydney first grade teams,” she said, referencing both Blanch and Dennis.
“No one is excluding trans,” Smith continued. “We simply want female sex-based services and spaces. The trans can play according to biology or on a mixed or trans team.”
Smith also noted that “the top goal scorer in the NSW Women’s League One First Grade soccer is male,” referring again to Dennis. “Football NSW fail to safeguard women and girls for the sake of men’s feelings!”
In 2023, Football New South Wales (NSW) introduced a Gender Diversity Policy. The guidance states, “FNSW remains committed to supporting the inclusion of Transgender, Non-Binary and Gender Diverse people in Football. FNSW intends that Gender Diverse Players who are registered to play Football in the gender competition which best suits the Player’s Gender Identity shall be supported to play in a safe
and inclusive environment.”
Additionally, Football Australia’s Anti-Discrimination Policy defines “excluding people on the basis of their sex and / or gender identity status from participation in a competitive sporting activity” as a prohibited form of discrimination.
A letter-writing campaign was launched by Smith, out of concern for the safety of the female players, encouraging concerned individuals to contact Football New South Wales — which reportedly then received over 12,000 submissions. Yet after Smith had publicly identified Dennis as the top goal scorer in the women’s league, Football NSW scrubbed Dennis’ name from their website, replacing his name with “Inter Player” on their roster.
link
After being afforded protection by Football New South Wales, Dennis continued to play on women’s football teams. On May 21 of that year, Dennis was filmed injuring a young female athlete during a game between the Inter Lions and the St. George football clubs at the Majors Bay Reserve.
Reduxx published footage of the match, showing Dennis launch his smaller female opponent towards a metal fence using an aggressive tackle as the two chased down the ball.
Reduxx was told that the female St. George player was provided treatment from the club’s physiotherapist during the game’s half-time break, hoping to be able to return to the field. But, during the second half of the game, the woman was only able to play for “approximately 8 minutes” before she succumbed to the injuries she sustained and had to be replaced.
An anonymous source close to the situation explained to Reduxx that Dennis left the Inter Lions team following the controversy over the injured female players. The source stated that Dennis then submitted at least three applications of interest for other teams, which were not accepted. The Flying Bats, however, approved his application to join the team. The football club’s official website states it is “the biggest LGBTQIA+ women’s and non-binary football club in the world,” having been founded in 1985.
link
The Flying Bats, a football club for “self-identified women and non-binary people,” has drawn significant criticism due to its policies, and because there are at least five male players known to be playing on their Premier League women’s football team. The heightened scrutiny has led officials to increase security and implement prohibitions against filming at matches.
As critics such as Smith have attempted to sound the alarm regarding the risks posed to female players, as well as emphasizing the physical advantages that male athletes have over other women’s teams, The Flying Bats have dominated their competitors. During the 2024 season of the North West Sydney Football Women’s Premier Competition, The Flying Bats won all 17 games and scored 76 goals while only a total of 8 points were scored against them.
In 2022, the Flying Bats FC was presented with a Fair Play award, the same year that a female player had her leg broken in two places by an unidentified male player for their team. The female player was said to be “screaming in pain” due to the injury, and is now no longer playing football. At the time, her teammate was penalized for “transphobia” after she made a remark referring to the trans-identified player as a male.
link
The second AVO lodged against Smith was filed by Nicholas “Stephanie” Blanch, who plays against female athletes in the Wingham Football Club.
Blanch first applied for his AVO against Smith on March 22, 2023, but his complaint was rejected in January of 2024 after the Civil and Administrative Tribunal of New South Wales found that the scope of the request was out of their jurisdiction. But Blanch appealed the following month, arguing that Smith’s “conduct” had caused him to fear for his safety, and on March 21 of last year, Magistrate Greenwood granted him permission to pursue the matter in court.
In January 2023, Smith wrote an article for Binary which explained that Blanch was male and that he had been given a participation award for playing against women.
“Men of mid coast NSW [New South Wales], can you get in touch with me please? I need your help. There is a bloke playing on the women’s team in Wingham and many are upset about it. The federation is refusing to listen,” Smith posted to X on January 19, 2023.
The following day, Smith posted the article she had written alongside a photo of Blanch. Examples of statements highlighted as harassment in Blanch’s AVO include quotes from the article Smith authored.
“Wingham Football Club on the Mid North Coast of NSW published these photos on their Facebook page in December 2022. The bloke in a frock was receiving an award for playing in the women’s division.”
“The bloke in a frock can play either in the men’s competition or a mixed competition, there is absolutely no need for him to play in a women’s division,” Smith added. “No one is saying he can’t play. It is simply a matter of fairness, safety, and dignity. He is male and does not belong in a female division. Women and girls deserve to have the option of a female-only competition.”
The AVO further cites several instances wherein Smith referred to Blanch simply as a “bloke in a frock,” and a “man,” between January and February 2023. The court, in its judgement, stated that Smith – and by extension Binary Australia – “sought to evoke fear in the reader regarding the fact that [Blanch], who is described as a man / male / bloke is playing in a women’s team (and transgender women playing in women’s sport generally).”
Evidence provided in the judgement to support this statement included Smith’s comments: “How can girls, women, and families feel safe when they are not even permitted to question the presence of a man in their space or on the field?” and “Why should parents be put in the terrible situation of having to deal with an adult man in their daughter’s bathroom?”
In 2013, the Gillard government introduced legislation which amended Australia’s Anti-Discrimination Act to include provisions regarding “gender identity.”
Section 38S of the ADA states: “It is unlawful for a person, by a public act, to incite hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of a person [or persons] on the ground that the person is a transgender person.”
As a result of Australia’s national policies prohibiting public statements of “discrimination” on the basis of gender identity, Smith has been repeatedly censored online over the past two years.
link
On February 20, 2023, Smith’s public Facebook page was removed at the request of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. Smith had set up the page in 2016 and used the platform to advocate for the rights of women and girls being harmed by gender identity policies. At the time of its deletion, Smith’s page had over 47,000 followers.
Other instances of censorship have seen her posts made to social media taken down. In total, Smith has been required to appear in court ten times to defend herself for referring to trans-identified males as men.
On August 20, having just lost her appeal to have the AVOs against her dismissed, prominent news outlet The Sydney Morning Herald portrayed Blanch as a “vulnerable person” who had been the victim of “escalating abuse online.” Solicitor Karen Beashel, who represented Blanch, told the newspaper, “The decision confirms online harassment, even if dressed as ‘political commentary’, can and will justify the making of an APVO.”
me (saw it posted by @transgender-harms-women on this post)
Title:
The Rise of Femicide
Publishing date:
December 28th, 2010
Author:
Aaron Shulman
Website published:
newrepublic.com
Allsides bias rating is Left.
Article length:
1613 words
~ 6 minute read time
Can naming a deadly crime help prevent it?
During the last decade, Guatemala has experienced an epidemic of woman-killing. The bodies are everywhere: turning up in ditches on the side of the road, on the curbs of city streets, and in wooded ravines, often with signs of mutilation and rape. Over 5,000 women have been murdered in the tiny country during the past decade, giving it one of the highest female mortality rates in the world, according to the Central American Council of Human Rights Ombudsmen (CCPDH), and it has been labeled the most dangerous place to be a woman in all of Latin America.
What’s more, a jaw-dropping 98 percent of these killings receive no legal action whatsoever. The phenomenon is uniquely toxic, and surprisingly, the Guatemalan government has responded in a unique fashion: by passing a law to prohibit and prosecute the crime of femicide.
Femicide. What is that? The term has a relatively obscure origin, and it has made an unlikely journey into the political bloodstream of Latin America. It was popularized in 1976 by Diana Russell, a 37-year-old professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, who heard the term when a friend told her that Carol Orlock, an American feminist, was working on a book about it. Orlock’s book was never published, but, by using the term in her own work, Russell was able to give it life. That year, Russell was heading up a five-day global feminist speakout in Brussels called the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, which brought together 2,000 feminists from over 40 different countries at the city’s Palais des Congrès, in order to denounce violence against women and mobilize those present to fight it. In an opening address, Simone de Beauvoir called the event “the start of a radical decolonization of women,” but it quickly dissolved into an organizational disaster.
Russell, a co-organizer of the Tribunal, had helped devise a carefully scripted schedule for the event. But soon, radical activists were storming the stage one after another in an improvised free-for-fall, which culminated in the moderator turning off the microphone and the planning committee abandoning the platform. By the end of the second day, the program had been discarded entirely, and, on the third day, the proceedings were temporarily interrupted by a bomb threat.
Taking her own turn on the stage, Russell read off the names of 17 women who had been murdered in the San Francisco Bay area and described the macabre circumstances of their deaths. After reading off the last victim, she gave a brief eulogy: “The names of those who I have read out to you today will soon be obliterated. No demonstrations have accompanied them to the grave, no protests rocked the city, no leaflets were passed out, and no committees were formed. But today we have remembered them. And tomorrow we must act to stop femicide!”
Until recently, that chaotic moment was the term’s most dramatic appearance on the world stage. Russell returned to California, where she attempted to flesh out her idea in several academic papers and an anthology called Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. By using the term “femicide,” she intended to highlight and stigmatize a specific type of crime. Russell hoped to promote the idea that the killing of women—whether perpetrated explicitly because victims are female or simply because women as a class can be uniquely vulnerable to aggravated, lethal attacks by men—is a distinctive problem that must be stigmatized and combated. Dubbing the phenomenon with a unique name, she believed, would be the first step toward reducing the killing of women worldwide.
The idea did not catch on. After debuting femicide at the Tribunal in Brussels, Russell began using the word in her work, but its impact was minimal. “I did various things,” she tells me. “The books, organizing a speakout, making speeches around the country. Even right after talking about it in a keynote speech, nobody mentioned it, even though I stressed it. I really sort of despaired.”
Then, something surprising happened. Part of the problem with “femicide” was that it was difficult to explain in a way that the public could easily comprehend. While horrendous killings of women, motivated by misogyny, certainly occurred around the world, the concept was still slightly amorphous. The 1989 “Montreal Massacre,” a mass shooting of women at a technical school in Canada, for example, wasn’t necessarily identical to killings resulting from domestic violence, sex trafficking, or the deaths of women in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East. Nevertheless, it turned out there were societies that understood instinctively what Russell was referring to: Certain regions of Latin America had been torn apart by epidemics of woman-killing far out of proportion with the deaths of women produced by internal civil war or drug violence. For years, activists in those areas had been battling against their own crime with no name, and when Russell’s word made it into Spanish, they embraced her.
In 2004, Marcela Lagarde, a prominent Mexican politician and feminist, invited Russell to give a talk at a conference in the border city of Ciudad Juárez after reading her anthology. Lagarde considered “femicide” an apt description for the mysterious, macabre mass killings of women that had been going on in Juárez since 1993—a phenomenon which had attracted a great deal of international attention, inspiring numerous books and films. Lagarde wanted to turn Russell’s idea into a political crusade. She chaired a commission on femicide in the Mexican congress, and promoted the term at events throughout Latin America.
The idea soon spread to Guatemala. Activists there, in dialogue with their Mexican counterparts, grew enthusiastic about using the term to combat murders in their own country, which had become a kind of Juarez writ large. The country’s 36-year civil war, in which more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, had ended in 1996. But the settlement between guerrilla groups and the government did not wipe away the devastatingly casual attitudes that had developed toward human life, and it left the citizenry prey to widespread corruption, judicial impunity, drug trafficking, maras (or gangs), and a seemingly ineradicable culture of violence. Since 2000, the most distinctive feature of this situation had become the gruesome killings of women.
Thus, the idea of “femicide” struck a chord. In 2008, prompted by a domestic campaign and international pressure, the Guatemalan congress passed Decree-22, the Law Against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence Against Women, which listed in 28 articles a number of prosecutable types of violence against women, including economic and psychological violence, and declared the goal of guaranteeing “the life, liberty, integrity, dignity, protection, and equality of all women before the law.” Guatemala also set up the Office of the Presidential Commission Against Femicide, tasked with implementing the law and creating an anti-femicide unit in the national police, launching anti-femicide publicity campaigns, and standing up public prosecutorial offices that specialize in violence against women.
So femicide, an obscure and rather academic concept developed by a professor in Oakland, had been pressed into service by a nation at war with its own cultural demons. But it’s worth asking: Does a new term have the power to bring safety to Guatemalan women? On the one hand, the word has certainly affected Guatemalan culture, becoming a part of the national lexicon and entering the speech of everyday people as well as sensationalist tabloids like Nuestro Diario. And there has been a significant increase in reports of violence against women brought to the police—27,000 in the first six months of 2010, according to Alba Trejo, of Guatemala’s Presidential Commission Against Femicide. What’s more, the word has been a useful tool for people trying to roll back Guatemala’s culture of impunity, providing publicity and legitimacy to anti-femicide groups like the Survivor’s Foundation, which have found it easier to send offenders to jail. It has also increased punishments, helping to secure the previously unimaginable sentences of 163 years for each of the men who participated in a high-profile set of murders of three young girls by machete.
On the other hand, Decree-22 is a flawed tool. As it currently stands, Trejo says, many of the decree’s sentences are less severe than the already existing national penal code, and even if the law has changed the atmosphere surrounding crimes against women, few offenders are actually convicted for “femicide.” Indeed, implementation faces terrible obstacles. An aura of indifference still pervades the Guatemalan justice system, from the beat cop to the high judge. There are only three public prosecutor offices in the whole country to deal with these cases, according to Trejo, and, culturally, many judges sympathize with men who beat their wives, believing it is within their rights as husbands. So, in assessing the impact of the Law Against Femicide, one must ask: Will forensic specialists stop botching investigations and get proper DNA testing done? Will women found dead wearing, say, a skirt or a belly-button ring, receive true police work, instead of being written off as dead prostitutes unworthy of an investigation? Will judges stop sympathizing with men who use violence to discipline their wives? And is the government capable of providing the resources to make good on Decree-22’s commitment to Guatemalan women?
Ultimately, the success of Russell’s project will depend on political will. This is a question facing not only Guatemala, but all countries where a culture of woman-killing has taken root—an alarming proportion of the planet. “Femicide” could be a term that changes the way people think, and act, regarding gender-based violence worldwide, or it could simply remain an interesting footnote in the annals of linguistic and legal history.
Aaron Shulman was a 2009-10 Fulbright Fellow in Guatemala.
How One Woman Helped End Lunch Counter Segregation in the Nation’s Capital
Image:
Publishing date:
June 8th, 2016
Author:
Jackie Mansky
Website published:
smithsonianmag.com
Allsides bias rating is Center.
Article length:
2031 words
~ 7 minute read time
Mary Church Terrell’s court case demanded the district’s “lost laws” put an end to racial discrimination in dining establishments
A portrait of Mary Church Terrell in 1946 by Betsy Graves Reyneau Mary Church Terrell by Betsy Graves Reyneau in 1946; Oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Thompson’s restaurant once served up fast, cheap meals—everything from smoked boiled tongue to cold salmon sandwiches. Today, there’s nothing in downtown D.C. to show that the popular restaurant chain even had a location at 725 14th Street Northwest in the 1950s. The space is now filled by a CVS drug store. Across the street, there’s an upscale barbershop, and on the corner at the intersection of 14th and New York Avenue, a Starbucks is currently under construction.
The establishment's quiet fade into history parallels the little-remembered Supreme Court case that began there 63 years ago this week that forced an end to lunch counter segregation in Washington one year before Plessy v. Ferguson was repealed.
On February 28, 1950, 86-year-old Mary Church Terrell invited her friends Reverend Arthur F. Elmes, Essie Thompson and David Scull to lunch with her at Thompson’s. Only Scull was white, and when the four entered the establishment, took their trays and proceeded down the counter line, the manager told the group that Thompson’s policy forbid him from serving them. They demanded to know why they couldn't have lunch in the cafeteria, and the manager responded that it was not his personal policy, but Thompson Co.’s, which refused to serve African Americans.
The group left without their meals. But the ill-fated lunch date was no accident. As chairwoman of the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws, Terrell was setting up a test case to force the courts to rule on two “lost laws” that demanded all restaurants and public eating places in Washington serve any well-mannered citizen regardless of their skin color. Over three drawn out years, a legal battle followed, which ultimately took their case all the way to America’s highest court.
Mary Church Terrell oil on vanvas painting by J. Richard Thompson; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Phyllis Langston
Terrell had made her mark on history long before she turned her attention toward discriminatory dining practices. Born in 1863, the year President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the towering figure in social and educational reform was one of the first African-American women to graduate from college. An Oberlin College alumna, she not only gave a speech titled “The Progress and Problems of Colored Women” at the 1898 Annual Convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association, but also served as a delegate at the International Council of Women in Berlin in 1904. Decades before she took a tray and stood in line to pay at Thompson’s, her fight to end race and gender discrimination led her to become the founding president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), as well as a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
When Terrell first moved to Washington, D.C. in 1889, she began her career as a high school teacher, and soon after became the first African-American woman to be appointed to the D.C. Board of Education. While she stopped working soon after she married a lawyer named Robert Heberton Terrell, she never closed her eyes to the injustices happening around her.
Then again, how could she? In a speech she delivered at the United Women’s Club of Washington, D.C., in 1906, she explained the indignity of being denied the ability to purchase a meal in the capital.
“As a colored woman I may walk from the Capitol to the White House, ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money with which to purchase a meal, without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food, if it was patronized by white people, unless I were willing to sit behind a screen,” she said.
That hadn’t always been the case in the district. During Reconstruction, the D.C. Legislative Assembly—a mix of popularly elected officials and President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration appointees who governed the city—had actually passed two nearly identical laws, in 1872 and 1873, that prohibited restaurants, hotels, barbershops, bathing houses and soda fountains from refusing to sell or serve any “well-behaved” customer, regardless of race or color.
The short-lived assembly was abolished in 1874, and with the start of Jim Crow segregation laws three years later, the rules were disregarded, and then left out of D.C. Code laws. However, the “lost laws,” as the 1872 and 1873 pieces of legislation would become known as, were never repealed. Instead, they remained, mostly forgotten about, until after World War II, when President Harry Truman’s committee issued a 1948 report titled Segregation in Washington, highlighting the extent of injustices that African Americans faced in the nation’s capital. Civil Rights activist Marvin Harold Caplan’s first-hand account of the era includes the comments of Kenesaw Mountain Landis II, one of the authors of the groundbreaking study:
“Some people say that the time is not ripe for colored people to have equal rights as citizens in the Nation’s Capital and that white people are ‘not ready’ to give them such rights. But in 1872...the popularly elected Assembly of the District passed a law giving Negroes equal rights in restaurants, hotels, barber shops and other places of public accommodation. Stiff penalties were provided for violation. As late as 1904 this civil rights law was familiar to a correspondent of the New York Times."
Annie Stein, the chairwoman of the Anti-Discrimination Committee of her local chapter of the Progressive Party, noticed Landis' passage and devoted herself to learn more about this 1872 law. She enlisted the help of her friend, Joseph Forer, a lawyer and chairman of the District Affairs Committee of the D.C. Lawyers Guild, who began researching the law and its validity. Realizing she also needed public support to rally around the cause, she created the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws in 1949, and reached out to Terrell to see if she would become the chairwoman of the committee.
The timing was auspicious. As Joan Quigley, author of a new book on Terrell, Just Another Southern Town, explained in a conversation about the life of the civil rights activist on C-SPAN in March, Stein’s offer came just after Terrell had been denied water at a pharmacy that had served her in the past, and “noticed a hardening of racial attitudes in department stores." The year before, in 1948, a District of Columbia judge had also upheld the right for the local branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), a club of college-educated women, to reject Terrell's application for reinstatement based on her skin color, even though the national organization’s only requirement for membership was a college degree.
Terrell, who was finishing up one of her life goals, publishing her 1950 memoir, A Colored Woman In A White World, felt compelled to act. “She basically embraced the tradition of agitation going back to Frederick Douglass,” Quigley said. “She said, it’s my duty to send a message to the country, to the world that we are no longer patient with being pushed around.”
After the national convention of the AAUW used Terrell’s case as a rallying point to vote 2,168 to 65 to reaffirm that all university graduates, regardless of “race, color or creed,” had the right to join the club, Terrell turned her attention toward the Stein's Anti-Discrimination Committee coordinating committee.
As chairwoman, Terrell soon attracted over 1,000 supporters, who “rallied behind the spirited leadership of Mrs. Terrell,” according to Al Sweeney, a journalist for the Washington Afro-American.
The committee made noise by picketinig and boycotting dime store establishments throughout D.C. One of the leaflets they distributed, which asked citizens to “stay out of Hecht’s”, a department store with a basement lunch counter, featured a photograph of Terrell, and quoted the then-88-year-old chairwoman, saying: “I have visited the capitals of many countries, but only in the capital of my own country have I been subjected to this indignity.”
When faced with pressure from the petitioners, some stores desegregated on their own (including Hecht's, which changed its policy in January 1952, after a nine-month boycott and six-month picket line), but the committee came to the conclusion that to integrate the rest, legal action would be necessary.
That brought Terrell to Thompson's. Of all the restaurants that refused to serve African Americans, the committee targeted Thompson’s cafeteria because it was right next to the offices of the lawyers who would be taking the case to court, according to a 1985 Washington Post article.
But that first lunch in late February proved unsuccessful. After Terrell, Elmes, Thompson and Scull took their case to court the municipal court judge dismissed it, under the reasoning that the lost laws were “repealed by implication.” For technical reasons, the committee could not repeal that decision, so instead, they were forced to create another new case.
So, once again, Terrell found herself picking up a tray in Thompson’s in July. She was joined by Elmes and also was accompanied by a woman named Jean Joan Williams. Once again, the manager denied them service based on Terrell and Elmes’ skin color. However, this time, the municipal judge didn’t hold another full trial. That allowed the corporation council of the District of Columbia representing Terrell and company to appeal the decision. From there, the case moved to the Municipal Court of Appeals, which declared the lost laws valid. In a 5-4 decision, the Federal District Court, however, ruled the lost laws invalid. Then, the Supreme Court picked up the case.
The court had yet to overturn the “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy, but Terrell’s case, formally titled District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Inc., relied only on jurisdiction in the district, which meant it did not touch Plessy. Due to its narrow scope, the court was able to issue an unanimous 8-0 decision in 1953, historically ending segregation in all Washington, D.C., establishments.
In an interview with Ethel Payne for the New York Age, Terrell said that after the verdict she called up the other defendants and invited them to lunch once more at Thompson’s. “We went and we had a glorious time. I took a tray and got in line and received my food. When I got to the end of the line, a gentleman walked up to me, took my tray and escorted me to a table and asked me, ‘Mrs. Terrell, is there anything else I can do for you?' And who do you think that man was? Why, it was the manager of the Thompson restaurants!”
Never one to stop her advocacy work, Terrell spent her 90th birthday that year testing Washington, D.C.’s segregated theater policy. She and her three guests were all admitted to see The Actress at the Capitol Theater without any trouble. Washington’s movie theater managers, unwilling to have their own Supreme Court case on their hands, had gotten the message. As Dennis and Judith Fradin wrote in Fight On!: Mary Church Terrell’s Battle for Integration, within the next few weeks “virtually all of Washington’s movie houses had opened their doors for everyone.”
Terrell would live to see the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision on May 17, 1954, which ended racial segregation in public schools. She died just a couple months later on July 24, 1954.
Today, while 14th Street NW bears no physical trace of Thompson’s history or the work of the coordinating committee, the site can be found on D.C.’s African American Heritage Trail, which gives a deserving nod to the location's importance in breaking down discrimination by breaking bread.
Editor's note, March 20, 2019: Due to an error in source material, an earlier version of this story referred to Mary Church Terrell being thought of as the "female Booker T. Washington," when in fact that label was used instead for Nannie Helen Burroughs, another prominent activist in Washington, D.C. The reference has been removed from the story.
Aimee Challenor and the danger of transgender politics
Image:
Publishing date:
August 30th, 2018
Author:
Melanie McDonagh
Website published:
spectator.com
Allsides bias rating is Right.
Article length:
864 words
~ 3 minute read time
Aimee Challenor – in case you haven’t heard – has just stepped down as equalities spokesperson for the Green Party. I say Aimee – he was, until the age of 16, Ashley, whereupon he decided to challenge his gender by going to the school prom in a dress. From this point his career took a dynamic turn, as he became a Green Party candidate (spurned, alas, by the electorate), a runner for deputy leadership of the party, a member of Stonewall’s Trans Advisory Group, leader of Coventry Pride and subject of upbeat pieces in the Guardian as the fresh face of transgenderism. ‘Yes, I’m trans, but I’m a Green Party politician and proud of it’, was the headline of one such profile.
That inexorable upward trajectory has come to an unfortunate halt with Aimee’s withdrawal from the deputy leadership contest because of his father’s conviction for the rape and torture of a 10 year old child in the family’s attic. Unfortunately, even after her father’s arrest, Aimee made the baffling decision to nominate him as her election agent. Her father’s previous record was such that not only his children but the family pets were removed from him at one point.
The details of the case are hideous – he abused the child, suspended from the beams of the attic of the family home, while dressed in a baby doll dress and nappies. Aimee released a statement in which he denied any knowledge of all this and declared:
‘But I cannot be held responsible for the actions of my father. I am not to blame for his behaviour. Yes, he was my election agent. This was one of a number of ways I was seeking to reconcile my relationship with my father after coming out of care. On reflection, I can understand that it was unacceptable for me to appoint my dad as my election agent when he had been arrested.’
The statement is masterly as an exercise in contemporary exculpation – ‘I am a trans woman and this is my personal journey’ – and interestingly declares that, ‘I did not go into the attic during my adult life – it was considered ‘dad’s space’’. Belatedly, the Guardian reported on the story.
The natural response to this house of horrors is to move rapidly on. But that would be a mistake. Because the case of Aimee Challenor tells us something about where transgender politics can lead, especially its insistence that if I say I am a woman, I jolly well am. For one thing, the Challenors, father and son, allegedly carried out an internet campaign against those who took exception to Aimee’s notion of self-assumed womanhood through something called Terfblocker. Terfblocker (terfs being trans-exclusionary radical feminists) allows Twitter users to automatically block all of those users deemed ‘transphobic’ (ironically, feminists on the receiving end of the tool adopt similar tactics when it suits them, as in the Irish abortion referendum).
But it also tells us much about contemporary politics, and the way transgenderism has established itself as the new embodiment of inclusion. Once Aimee had decided on the dress and female identity, his trajectory into the contemporary establishment – the Greens, Stonewall, the Pride movement and the embrace of the Guardian – was swift and unproblematic. The notion of scrutinising his behaviour towards actual women, let alone his background, was out of bounds. So, while the Greens have disciplined a party activist, Olivia Palmer, for allegedly heckling a trans woman on television, they’ve been oddly equivocal about Aimee.
It’s not just Aimee Challenor who has benefited from this unquestioning inclusivity. Jess Bradley, 29, who self identifies as a ‘non-binary trans woman’ has been suspended from his post as the National Union of Students’ official trans students officer – the first person to be paid for the job – after allegations that he posted explicit images on his online blog – flashing his bits in the NUS offices, apparently (so much for safe spaces).
And then there’s Liam/Lily Madigan, Labour’s women’s officer for Rochester and Strood, whose references to rape on a former social media account have led some to suggest he’s a fan of rape jokes.
More seriously, there’s also been cases of male prisoners self identifying as women being admitted to female prisons. That would, then, be the likes of Karen White, a trans woman, who’s been accused of groping women prisoners.
So it goes on. It’s tempting to laugh, and not in a nice way, at the way identity politics is tearing itself apart, with feminists pitched against the radical trans lobby. But beneath all this there’s an actual issue, viz, the Government’s consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act, which will look at allowing individuals to enjoy full legal recognition of their chosen gender (access to single-sex refuges or prisons, for example) without any formalities like a doctor’s certificate. At one meeting of a mainstream Tory think tank I was at a few weeks ago, a Cabinet minister you wouldn’t ever call a liberal declared their determination to advance the measure. In short, what you thought was the self-destructive politics of a Left that’s lost its purpose is now an establishment project.
Woman Raped in Bathroom of Gramercy Bar, Police Say
Image:
Publishing date:
April 14th, 2015
Author:
Trevor Kapp and Aidan Gardiner
Website published:
dnainfo.com
Article length:
255 words
~ 1 minute read time
Suspect in Gramercy Rape
NYPD
GRAMERCY — A man grabbed a woman by the throat and raped her in the woman's restroom of a Gramercy bar Saturday, police said.
The man, who can be seen in surveillance footage released by police, entered the restroom of Turnmill at 119 E. 27th St., near Park Avenue South, about 7:45 p.m. and attacked the 23-year-old woman, NYPD officials said.
She was treated at Lenox Hill HealthPlex at the former St. Vincent's hospital site, police said.
The attacker, who staff said they didn't recognize, didn't buy anything and didn't linger in the bar, a source said.
The suspect is about 50, 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds with brown hair, police said.
He was wearing blue jeans, a black shirt with a strike down the sleeves and black frame glasses, police said.
He attacked her inside Turnmill bar on East 27th Street, police said.
DNAinfo/Trevor Kapp
Neighbors were shocked to learn about the rape.
"It's usually a really nice bar, usually a good crowd. I've never been worried about my safety," said Lindsay Gray, 25, who lives and works in the area.
"This is frightening. I've never heard of anything like this happening in this neighborhood."
Others agreed and said the attack could be bad for future business at the bar.
"It's a little dark inside, but I've never felt unsafe. It's sad. I probably won't go back there now," said Yvette Burgos, 34, who works in the area.
Anyone with information should contact Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS (8477).
On the 30th of May, What The Trans?! has been told by Sarah Jane Baker and her partner Anita that Sarah has now been freed from HM Prison of Isle of Wight following a probation hearing in March this year.
This was following news back in November that Sarah’s Oestrogen treatment had been fully halted. The prison reported that it was “a temporary measure while the healthcare team fulfils their duty of care to ensure that the benefits of any drugs we prescribe outweigh any risks”.
The recall to prison was after an incident on the 8th July 2023 at London Trans Pride where Sarah was filmed saying “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. After a meeting with the probation office, it was decided that Sarah would not be taken into custody. Following the incident, the then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman tweeted: “I’m sure the police will consider the evidence carefully”. Sarah was then arrested at her home on July 12th and imprisoned.
After almost a year, a nearly £7000 crowdfunder for legal fees and multiple protests and court appearances from the Free Sarah Jane Baker campaign, it has now been announced that Sarah is to be freed.
