I think someone may have posted a link to this earlier, but there are some good sections I'd like to draw your attention to: Back in 2018, guide leaders Katie Alcock and Helen Watts were thrown out of Girlguiding after a four month investigation into their social media posts after they raised safeguarding concerns. The women objected to a policy admitting male children and adults on the basis of a declared female gender identity. Watts had volunteered for 15 years when the unit she ran for girls between the ages of five and seven was closed. Alcock, who later reached a financial settlement with Girlguiding, said the investigation felt like being interrogated by “the secret police in some totalitarian state… I was treated no differently from a child abuser. Yet all I’d done was say safeguarding should come before anything else.” Then in 2022, four years after Alcock and Watts were purged, Girlguiding bosses were forced to investigate one of their Commissioners, Nottinghamshire bus driver Monica Sulley, who oversaw Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers. Sulley had posted Instagram photos in fetish gear with the caption: “Now behave yourselves or Mistress will have to punish you #mistress.” Another picture showed him in a tight black top posing with what appeared to be a fake assault rifle, a holstered handgun at his waist. A third had him standing with a sword; and a fourth displayed his moobs alongside the question “did you want to see more?” On the ground, women quietly drifted off. Sarah, a former WI member, told me she joined hoping to meet local women, only to find a man “wearing a dress and lipstick” already installed in the group. “I felt uncomfortable,” she recalls. “Conversation did not flow as well as it usually would in a group of women.” Ultimately she did not return because, “There is only so long I can spend talking about clothes and make–up.” Like so many women, she kept her misgivings to herself: “It felt embarrassing to admit how uncomfortable he made me feel… I knew everyone was meant to believe ‘trans women are women’, but it had not impacted my life before.” According to WI chief executive Melissa Green, as a whole the organisation still believes that “transwomen are women”.Yet polls show Green’s view is now in the minority. She told Woman’s Hour that only 67 emails had been received since the ruling in April, as if this proved the issue was a fringe belief rather than that scores of individuals felt strongly enough to write in. What Green cannot grasp is that after nearly a decade of pushing out any woman who voiced concerns, silence was simply preservation, not consent. Under her tenure, the WI placed Petra Wenham, a 74 year old man, on the cover of the magazine WI Life under the headline “I was welcomed to the sisterhood.” Of course he was — anyone inclined to object had already been taught to keep schtum or risk accusations of bigotry.

The Critic Magazine

A good week for girls and women | Josephine Bartosch | The Critic Magazine

All the clocks have been stopped, the telephone cut off and the intern is currently prising a juicy bone from the dog’s jaws. On Tuesday, a p...

Today’s Ahnaleigh Wilson, a 15-year-old track and field athlete in Washington state who is taking a strong stand (and all the risks that come with doing so!). She is not alone, though. Several girls have been joining her recently. Ahnaleigh recently spoke at a school event and...This is what she said: "We were called 'hateful, transphobic, and bigots.' Adults have called me stupid, and adults have told my parents that they should be ashamed of me for being so hateful. I’m often told that I’m just a sore loser, and that if I wanted to win, I should train harder and just not suck. My family has been threatened with losses. We’ve lost friendships, and someone even said that we better hope that I have a body guard because I’m so hateful." Can you imagine saying this to a 15-year-old girl?? This is utterly shameful. Ahnaleigh, I am so sorry you have been put through this. It is terrible that the adults in your state have been allowing male athletes to compete in track and field, or any sport, meant for girls. It is horrific that they have allowed males (some of them adult men) into your locker rooms. They are all lying to you by making you think that if a boy says he is a girl, then he is one. This is one of the biggest scandals I have ever known. It should not take young women such as yourself to have to stand up for yourself and your teammates. They should have protected you. However, I am very glad you are taking a stand and speaking out. Today’s FFS Friday is for you.

FFS Friday: Ahnaleigh Wilson and all the girls in Washington state who are speaking out

December 5, 2025

>For years, young girls have been forced to advocate for female-only sports and spaces—both of which should be a basic right—because of radical gender ideology. Where too many adults have failed them, middle and high schoolers have had to make their voices heard. But in Maine, fathers are stepping up to defend their daughters. >“Paternal not political” is the motto of Maine Girl Dads, and the group’s mission is to protect young women in the state by ensuring they have the right to fair play, equal protection under the law, and safe single-sex places. >“We’re making the kids themselves that are victims of this issue stand up and be the ones to speak, and that’s really terrible,” Leyland Streiff, who leads the Maine Girl Dads petition, told IW Features. “As parents, we shouldn’t be doing that.” >Maine Girl Dads hopes to put the issue directly before voters. Their ballot initiative would recognize sex-based definitions for athletic categories and private spaces such as locker rooms or bathrooms. To put the measure on the November 2026 ballot, Maine Girl Dads needs to collect 70,000 signatures. >“A boy walked in on my [15-year-old] daughter’s restroom [in Michigan],” Tabor told IW Features. His daughter was so uncomfortable that she had to leave the bathroom, Tabor said. Now, Tabor said his daughter avoids using the bathroom at school because she does not want to share a private space with a male...Streiff and Tabor also heard stories from women and girls personally impacted by Maine’s current laws. One girl said her lacrosse team lost two games last year to schools with males on their teams, according to Streiff, and one college student told Streiff that she is forced to share a locker room with six-foot-tall, fully intact males. >“This is an 80/20 issue across the country, and it continues to be an 80/20 issue in Maine,” Streiff said. “Over 60% of Democrats that have been polled in Maine agree that males and females should be separated in sports and sports facilities, and it’s about 90% of Republicans, from what I understand.” >“All we want is the ability to be fathers for our kids and to be able to have common sense reign when it comes to how we protect them,” Streiff said.

IWFeatures

These Dads Are Standing Up for Girls’ Sports

Maine Girl Dads is a coalition of fathers coming together for one mission: to ensure their daughters have a future with female sports.

Emily Kam Kngwarray #WomensArt #WomensCreativity

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Aboriginal artist and Anmatyerre elder #WomensArt #WomensCreativity

The SCORE Act is flawed because… It fails to require Title IX compliance, thus undermining federal and state laws that require equitable treatment of female athletes. Few institutions—especially low-resourced Division I schools—will have sufficient funds to support pay-for-play revenue sports, gender equity, and Olympic or other low-revenue-producing teams. Instead, they’re likely to prioritize revenue sports (football, men’s basketball). It gives the NCAA almost total control of college athletics in perpetuity in return for college athletes giving up employee rights, receiving limited economic benefits, and getting insufficient health, athletic injury, transfer rights, and other protections. It establishes a pay-for-play college sports system that will result in academic institutions treating players as expendable employees as opposed to students seeking educational degrees. If their playing performance falters, cash payments will not be renewed if more talented prospects are available in the transfer portal. The College Athletics Reform Act (CARA) is a better alternative because… It addresses the most pressing athlete protection issues in college sports: the regulation of sports agents, the assurance of athletes’ NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) rights, and an enforcement system more likely to protect all athletes, including women, rather than the commercial interests of a few. It provides a blueprint for moving forward with a bipartisan Congressional Commission that will have the time and information needed to develop solutions to those issues that have created the current legislative stalemate. It will allow Democrats and Republicans to address what all can agree to now in the spirit of nonpartisan support and then move forward together over the next two years, assisted by experts who understand the complex issues involved, so that college sports will better serve our athletes and higher education institutions.

Call to Action: SCORE Act Undermines Female Athletes and Title IX

Make one call to Congress to speak up for women athletes -- and pass it along

These testimonies of surrogate mothers are truly cautionary tales! In Paris, France, and Brighton, UK, women committed to fighting violence against women listened attentively and empathetically to the testimonies of former surrogate mothers. Both conferences concluded with a standing ovation, reflecting a firm and collective commitment to protecting all women from surrogacy. Yes, surrogacy must be abolished everywhere in the world.

Surrogacy: Hear The Voices Of Those On The Frontline - Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood

When it comes to surrogacy, the so-called ‘intended parents’ take centre stage. The women who give birth to the children are either sil...

Now here's a guest post, by Ian David, on Jennifer Bilek's Substack guaranteed to give most of us the creeps... This is why the ‘culture war’ isn’t really about culture anymore. It’s become a stress test on every human boundary - biological, symbolic, reproductive, and economic. All these fronts are now interconnected, each one flowing into the others through feedback loops no one has charted and no one realistically could. Nothing happens in isolation anymore. Meanwhile - and this is where most gender-critical discourse seems fatally behind the curve - the categories they claim to be fighting so hard to defend are being liquefied in real time. CRISPR-derived gametes, uterine transplants, brain-organoid puberty models, LLM-driven identity simulators, neurofeedback ‘gender journey’ apps. None of this is sci-fi; all of it is funded, peer-reviewed, and accelerating. Ignore the techno-science layer - Haraway, Plant, Preciado, even Firestone, plus the whole xenofeminist/biohacking stack -, and you cede the actual battlefield to those explicitly aligned with queer/trans ontology. You can yell at clouds all you like, but the real struggle over bodies, data, and reproductive futures is happening in clean rooms and server farms. Almost nobody is talking about that. Which is why Cass and the puberty-blocker trials it gave birth to should be seen as mere skirmishes. The real contest - over who defines the next iteration of the human - is unfolding upstream, in biotechnology, computation, and the philosophical frameworks that legitimise them. Treating brief moments as equilibrium-restoring ‘wins’ is precisely how you get blindsided.

Emerging From the Ooze: Sex Identities Driven by Capital and Technology

by Ian David

This piece is very, very good. Here are my favorite tidbits, but there are other excellent points as well. Before you make any remarks about radical feminism, you need to actually read radical feminist literature. Not Instagram infographics. Not reels. Not “threads.” Actual books, essays, texts. You can’t critique something you haven’t read. (Well, you can, but then you’re just shouting garbage into the void.) Us women need to do better at disagreeing with each other and critiquing each other. I don’t believe in a blind sisterhood in the sense that if a woman is doing harmful, anti-woman things, I’ll let it slide because she’s a woman. BUT what I won’t do is go feral on her, publicly shame, attack, or immediately ascribe malice to her; what I will do is talk to her, explain why she’s wrong, disagree, even critique, but I won’t go down the route of being downright fucking nasty. Andrea Dworkin’s "Right-Wing Women" is a perfect example of this. Although she heavily critiques right-wing women, and there’s a lot to critique, because right-wing women have done some really fucked up shit, which hurts more because they’re women, Andrea tactfully, empathically, assertively and passionately critiques and analyses them. She doesn’t resort to insults, slurs, or shaming, nor does she go easy on them or try to diminish the harm they cause. She shows them “love” in a way, tough love. We can do the same. And let’s direct some of the aggressive-ass smoke we spew towards women towards the men who actually hurt us. When you start ascribing arbitrary things like clothing, cosmetics, personality, hobbies, hairstyles, names, and appearance to a specific “gender” or “sex”, you are doing sooo much damage. It is straight-up sexism and misogyny. To suggest that being a woman or man is anything other than XX and XY, larger gametes, smaller gametes, is insanity. A female is still a woman if she doesn’t have breasts, a uterus, or has short hair, facial hair, you misogynistic prick. We need to abolish gender.

The Boogeyman of Feminism: Radical Feminism

What radical feminism has taught me (so far)

Over the past 20 years, the oyster population in Mississippi’s Gulf waters has been devastated by natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina as well as manmade disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. These tragic events devasted the oyster environment in Mississippi. One of the key contributing factors helping to restore the oyster population is the work of Demi Johnson, an African American teenager who resides in Mississippi. Demi’s conservation efforts started when she was a mere seventh grader. Her initial interest started when she was searching for a project to earn her Girl Scout badge. Demi stated in an interview with reporter John Yang, “So I found out about this from my Girl Scout leader. So, there’s a thing called a Silver Award, and you have to do a project for your community, something community based, and she kind of put it up in the air. She was like, ‘hey you can do oyster gardening at my pier.’ And I was like, okay, ‘I’ll do it. Like, it doesn’t sound too bad. And you know, it’s something easy for me to do.’” No one could imagine at the time this would become a life changing endeavor for all involved – Demi, Mississippi and the greater community. Demi’s oyster conservation efforts have had a major significant ecological impact on Mississippi’s Gulf waters. Her project, centered on the cultivation of oysters at Schooner Pier in Biloxi, has contributed to the restoration of oyster reefs, which play an essential role in the marine ecosystem. The restoration of oyster reefs is vital as they serve as natural water filters, removing pollutants from the water, and as protective barriers against storm surges. Moreover, oyster reefs provide habitat for a variety of marine life, thus supporting biodiversity. Demi’s project has directly contributed to these ecological benefits by producing 1,000 oysters which are expected to spawn millions more, enhancing the sustainability and health of the local marine environment. Demi traveled to Washington, D.C. as one of the top 15 finalists for the Slingshot Challenge for her Mississippi Oyster Gardening Project. She became one of the award recipients. The top 15 were selected out of 2,100 submissions. Demi created a video titled “Off Bottom Oysters” and was up for the People’s Choice Award. She won the 2025 Significant Achievement Award for “Off Bottom Oysters” and won a $1,000 scholarship. She donated her winnings back to the Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program.

The Birmingham Times

Women’s History Special: Demi Johnson, Teenage Oyster Farmer

March is Women’s History Month, a time when we honor and celebrate the extraordinary contributions women have made and continue to make toward ma...