FiLiA

Recording from the Sunday Opening Session at the FiLiA Conference in 2019.

Marie Laguerre - From being catcalled and punched in the street to cyber harassment - a story of sexist violence. 

Jessica Taylor - All the ways we continue to blame women and girls for male violence. 

Miss Yankey - Secret chains and chambers: “Another Woman’s Cry” My story of survival.

"Gay conversion is still thriving in the 21st century. The conversion therapy of today is the prescription of cross-sex hormones, mastectomies, and hysterectomies as treatment for girls and women who do not conform."

This is a recording of the panel on the invention of transgender children from the FiLiA Conference in October 2019. Featuring: Charlie Evans, who founded the Detransition Advocacy Network; a charity to support people who have desisted or reversed gender reassignment.  Susan Matthews, who shows how the new genre of gender identity workbook effectively creates a new consciousness within its readers, creating anxiety and developing an obsession with the concept of gender which is understood as biologically innate. And Heather Brunskell-Evans, who describes how the rationale for ‘transgendering’ children has grown out of the idea that ‘gender identity’ is pre-social. The new proposition (from transgender ideology) that ‘gender identity’ is an inherent, ‘born’ property is not a scientifically established fact but a disputed concept with a political history.

In the UK, as the coronavirus pandemic rages, we are seeing the effects of years of over-medicalisation of birth. The NHS has decided that the best use of its midwives would be to close all midwifery-led units, strip back their home birth services and redeploy all midwives to the obstetric units. This is a huge blow, but it is just the start. This move made it so that healthy women had to scrap their plans for a low/no-intervention natural birth and head to an obstetric unit, where the rates of intervention and caesarean are so much higher. Imagine the anxiety of that woman, being told to go to the hospital that everyone else in the country is being told to stay away from if they are not sick. Pregnancy is not a sickness and more often than not, doesn't need to be a medical event.

LINKS:

Greater Manchester Doulas Website

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Meera Khanna is a feminist, social activist, writer, and poet, and the trustee and executive vice president of Guild for Service, an NGO focused on empowering marginalized women and children across India. She joins FiLiA in conversation as a member of the Every Woman Treaty Working Group, a campaign for a global treaty to end violence against women and girls. She has 20 years of experience working in development, including spearheading projects that build the economic, political, and legal capacities of underprivileged women and conflict-affected women and children in Kashmir. She has served as a consultant to the High Level Committee on the Status of Women, Government of India, and has served on two Expert Committees on Widows, one with the Supreme Court of India, the other with the National Commission for Women. Meera has authored two books on Kashmir, several papers on women’s rights and widows’ rights, and presented papers at both national and international forums and the UN system. She currently serves on the Civil Society Advisory Group for UN Women for India, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bhutan. 

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Susan Bewley is a feminist and Professor Emeritus in Obstetrics & Women’s Health at King’s College London. She qualified as a doctor in 1982 and was the first woman to subspecialise in maternal-fetal medicine in the UK. Susan became consultant & Clinical Director at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals. She was a Sexual Offences Examiner & job-share clinical lead at The Havens Sexual Assault Referral Centres. Susan has published widely on severe maternal morbidity and health aspects of violence against women & girls, and has chaired NICE Guideline Development Groups. She the chair of the charity Healthwatch-UK ‘for science & integrity in healthcare.’

Twitter @susan_bewley

Healthwatch-UK