Two and two still equals four

My through-the-looking-glass experience at the Human Rights Review Tribunal

Victoria Casey, KC. Source: Women Lawyers Directory.

There are quite a few trans-identifying men that I wish Victoria Casey, KC, could meet.

They include Barbie Kardashian, a man released from a women’s prison in Ireland at the beginning of October after serving a sentence for violent offenses, including making threats to torture, rape, and murder his mother – and yet Irish newspapers persistently use female pronouns when reporting on his crimes.

Tremaine Carroll is another man I’d like her to meet. He was a star witness in a California case against a group of women who wanted men to be excluded from women’s prisons.

Two days after that case was dismissed by S District Court judge, who claimed the women’s fears about female inmates being raped by trans-identifying men were unfounded, Carroll was charged with two counts of rape committed in the Chowchilla women’s prison where he’d been housed because he claimed to be a woman.

Carroll, who sports a full beard but demands that courts address him with female pronouns, will go on trial for rape in late January next year.

Many people will also have heard of Isla Bryson, the male rapist who indirectly led to the resignation of Scotland’s former first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, whose administration had sent Bryson to a women’s prison.

Thousands of others

There are thousands of other such men from all around the world – check out Lexi Secker, Karen White and Hilary Maloney, a court-imposed pseudonym for a man jailed in a women’s prison in Victoria, Australia.

Maloney raped his five-year-old daughter, filmed it and then sent the video to another pedophile in the US – it was the US authorities that caught him – and who could be out of prison in less than two-and-a-half years because the Australian court found him worthy of pity and lenience because of his declared trans “identity.”

Then there’s the homegrown case of Pierre John Parsons, now a self-declared woman, who raped a 12-year old girl and who subsequently stole her clothes to wear. He failed to get his post-prison supervision order lifted.

A July 2024 Official Information Act request to the Department of Corrections from Speak up for Women elicited the facts that about 14% of trans-identifying males in custody had been charged with or sentenced for sexual assault, about 14% of trans-identifying males in custody were housed in women’s prisons and that about 35 trans-identifying males are in custody at any given time.

And yet Casey told the Human Rights Review Tribunal (HRRT) that there’s no evidence that trans identifying men pose a threat to women.

Why isn’t logic applied?

But logic should have told Casey that most of the violence against women is committed by men – not all men, by any means, but we can’t tell which ones just by looking at them – and that is a major reason why we have separate facilities for women and girls, such as toilets and changing rooms.

There is no evidence showing trans-identifying men are any less of a threat to women than men in general, and mounting evidence that some trans-identifying men are exceedingly dangerous to women, although, again, we can’t tell by looking at them which ones.

It should be obvious to Blind Freddy that a man convicted of rape has massive incentives to declare that he’s a woman – our law has allowed him to do just that since mid-2023.

But Casey insisted to the HRRT that “transwomen” are women, that sex isn’t binary and that sex is “assigned at birth.”

Echoing the demands of trans activists around the world, Casey insisted that the “fact” that “transwomen” are women, is not a matter for debate.

Casey was delivering closing arguments in the case of Lesbian Action for Visibility Aotearoa (Lava) against Wellington Pride, who refused Lava a stall at a 2021 Pride event, essentially because Lava’s members don’t accept lesbians can have penises.

Being “hateful” and excluded

Wellington Pride had deemed Lava’s views hateful and anti-trans and against its policy of being “inclusive,” and so it felt justified in excluding that group of lesbians from a Pride event.

Casey even claimed that there’s biological evidence that sex is wider than male or female and she pooh-poohed the evidence of Emma Hilton, who testified for Lava.

Casey said Hilton wasn’t qualified, even though Hilton is a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester and earned a doctorate in biochemistry.

Casey, of course, used the term “cis women” to describe real women – in my view, that term is hate speech because it pretends real women are only a sub-set of women when we are the only kind of women.

Casey also went there on the subject of the contents of people’s underpants – it is only trans ideology proponents who talk about underpants.

Sex realists know that humans have been recognising the difference between men and women for centuries with no need to inspect anyone’s underpants.

As a woman born with a cleft palate and hair lip, I am particularly offended by trans activists’ use of the term “intersex,” more scientifically known as those born with disorders of sexual development (DSDs) as somehow proving that sex isn’t binary.

Deformities are just deformities

Deformities, malformations or failures of development prove nothing at all about the normal human form. We’ve always known that nature makes mistakes, and by definition, deformities are mistakes.

All those born with DSDs are either male or female, as are all humans, and a simple mouth swab would establish which, because sex isn’t just about genitals, but about our entire bodies.

Casey is wrong on all these matters. Sex is binary in humans, who cannot change sex, and two-and-two still equals four (to borrow from George Orwell and the headline of another recent Substack), no matter the wishful thinking of Casey and those she defends.

One particularly annoying tactic that Casey employed, and which is used by trans activists around the world, has been to twist the views of sex realists (the common term used is “gender critical.”)

She repeated the slur against British women’s rights advocate Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker) that she is allied with pro-Nazi groups – that’s a slur often levelled at us terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a slur that we are reclaiming) but which has no basis in fact.

The fact that a pro-Nazi group turned up at a Posie Parker rally in Melbourne without her consent has been used to metaphorically tar and feather her, and, by extension, the rest of us terfs.

Twisting what women are for

Being for the rights of women, and the rights of lesbians in Lava’s case, is twisted into being anti-trans, and all sorts of heinous views are ascribed to such people, but which are views that such people, me included, do not hold.

Casey and other trans activists claim being pro-women’s rights means terfs such as me want to exterminate all trans-identifying people – that’s simply ridiculously false.

Casey said Lava believes trans-identifying people shouldn’t have the right to live in society as “who they are” or to participate in public affairs.

She’s just wrong. Trans-identifying people manifestly exist and terfs and Lava have no wish to exclude them from public life.

Trans-identifying people have, and should have, the same human rights that every human is entitled to.

What we do say is that trans-identifying people can pretend they’re the opposite sex to their hearts’ content, and we have no wish to stop them.

But trans-identifying men have no right to enter women-only spaces or sports, and such men – or women pretending to be men – also have no right to force others to pretend to believe the fantasy they are living.

That includes our right to be free from forced speech, such as being required to apply any and all outlandish pronouns that trans people wish to apply to themselves.

Casey had to apologise for “misgendering”

One amusing incident during the closing statements was that Casey at one point had to confess to the “crime” of “misgendering” someone who, Casey said, goes by the pronoun “ear” – that’s my phonetic rendering of what I heard and I have no idea of the correct spelling (can a made-up “pronoun” have a correct spelling?) or meaning of that supposed pronoun.

Casey also accused the barrister representing Lava, Nicolette Levy, KC, of deliberately, abusively and offensively “misgendering” people, meaning that Levy was using pronouns accurately – I wasn’t there for much of the hearings, but I’m told Levy did actually try to conform to the pronoun nonsense.

If she failed at times, that’s hardly surprising, since even Casey admitted to being tripped up.

Casey also informed the HRRT that using the term “trans-identifying” is yet another abusive and offensive use of speech. In other words, truth and accuracy are supposedly offensive.

Casey used the term “offensive” extensively, and even credited me with teaching her a new term for trans ideology, “genderwoo,” which she understood to mean that it’s nonsense – she was correct on that point.

So, now let me direct the words offensive and abusive to describe her defence of puberty blockers and her dismissal at the growing global disquiet at their use on children said to be gender dysphoric.

The word dysphoric means feeling uncomfortable or uneasy and trans activists have been promoting the use of puberty blockers, the same drugs used to chemically castrate male sex offenders, and the cutting off of healthy body parts, as the preferred “treatment” of this condition.

Do we treat feelings with drugs and mutilation?

Since when have drugs and surgery ever been the recommended treatment for feelings?

There is extensive historical research showing that most children who experience gender dysphoria grow out of those feelings after going through puberty – in other words, puberty is the “cure” for most such children.

There is scant authoritative evidence that puberty blockers help such children and growing evidence of harms, including that they lead to infertility and sexual dysfunction, so much so that Britain has banned their use entirely, as have 26 states in the US, and a growing number of countries, including Finland, Norway and Sweden, as well as the Australian state of Queensland have restricted their use.

But I marvel at how this “treatment” was ever accepted by supposedly sane adults – how can interfering with a child’s natural development ever be a good idea? (I exclude the treatment of precocious puberty – if a child begins puberty at age eight, delaying it until a more appropriate age is definitely a sensible course of action.)

Even trans activists now acknowledge that the use of puberty blockers is not “fully reversible,” as they previously did claim, in the treatment of gender dysphoria.

Just in case anybody has any doubt, my view of Wellington Pride’s exclusion of Lava is that it was obscene – the Pride movement internationally was about the rights of gays and lesbians and the fact that lesbians are now being so marginalised by their own groups illustrates the extent to which trans activists have hijacked the very organisations created to defend gays and lesbians.

How will HRRT rule?

But how the HRRT rules on this matter is a quite different question.

Evidence during the hearings had described other groups that don’t accept humans can change sex as being “hate groups,” including Genspect, a global organisation begun by psychotherapist Stella O’Malley, and which opposes drugging and mutilating children with gender dysphoria.

Jan Rivers, the local Genspect representative, applied to be allowed to present evidence that Genspect is not a hate group, but the HRRT denied her request.

Three other of HRRT’s actions suggest it is already captured by genderwoo: its suppression order banning reporting on its proceedings, other than by “accredited” journalists, and its refusal to hear from the Free Speech Union on the matter, and its refusal to recognise journalists of long-standing reputation, namely myself and visiting British women’s rights campaigner Helen Joyce, a former senior journalist at The Economist, as “accredited” journalists.

Incidentally, it was an accurate quote from the evidence of Suzanne Manning, president of the National Council of Women, posted on X (Twitter) that sparked the suppression order (see my reporting https://justthebusinessjennyruth.substack.com/p/can-reporting-what-a-witness-says)

I’m told that Manning’s views are apparently not the views of her council and that the X post caused great consternation among the council’s members.

If that’s true, it would make the HRRT’s willingness to acquiesce to the suppression order even more ridiculous.

I’m not hopeful that Lava will win this case, but it’s always possible the HRRT will surprise me.