Criminalisation of drug use results in the mass incarceration of people who use drugs. Illicit drug offences represent the second most common offence for custodial sentences in Australia.

TERFs are TERDs

Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists are clearly misnamed.

Trans-Excoriating Reproductive Determinists
is far more accurate.

Written by an amazing Aussie Trans woman High School teacher. She nails this👍
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They don’t merely exclude. They are obsessed with criticising trans people. They are not given true personhood status, they are to be belittled and mocked.
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Trans people don’t even get the respect of their lived reality from TERFs. Apparently it’s completely fine to say that trans people don’t know themselves - that their lived reality is fantasy.
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Despite the phenomenon arising in human beings across thousands of years and in all cultures - they’re ALL making it up.
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Despite the psychology profession recognising it as just a distinct way of being human. Not an illness or syndrome. A way of being. Medical and biological findings back it, but we are dealing with dogmatic thinking.
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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia, suffer grossly disproportionate rates of disadvantage against all measures of socio-economic status.
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State, territory & federal governments have introduced programs, & continue to seek to identify further methods, for redressing this disadvantage.
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A plethora of government programs have proven to be inadequate when considered against the requirement to raise Indigenous People to a position of equality in Australian society.
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The final report card for the 2008-2020 Closing-The-Gap-Program found the program only partially met 2 of the 7 outcome. 12 years on Aboriginal People still have a life expectancy a full decade less than white

Sadly there is little understanding within Australian society of the requirement to and legitimacy of adopting special measures.
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Female athletes are still subjected to the equivalent of a sex test, based on whether they appear feminine.

Dutee Chand in her successful appeal against the validity of the IAAF’s hyperandrogegism regulations, the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) originally began investigating her after complaints that she “ran like a boy”.

Chand was banned in 2014 after the AFI decided that her androgen (testosterone) levels were above the 10 nmol/L permitted by the IAAF’s hyperandrogegism regulations, resulting in her missing the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Androgens, including testosterone, are naturally produced in significant – but varying – levels by both men and women.

Endocrine profiles in 693 elite athletes in the post-competition setting’, found that 16.5% of the ‘male’ athletes had low testosterone levels, and 13.7% of the ‘females’ had high testosterone levels, ‘with complete overlap between the

How long should trans females be made to reduce their levels of circulating testosterone should prior to competing in the women competition?

Gooren found that during the first 12 months muscle mass (area) was decreased by 9.4% & hemoglobin levels by 14% in 20 transwomen (M2F trans) treated with an estrogen-based regimen that reduced circulating T concentrations from the male range to the female range.

Conversely, in 17 transmen (F2M transgender) treated for the first time with testosterone for 12 months (which increased circulating testosterone levels to a mean of 31 nmol/L), muscle mass increased by 19.2% and hemoglobin by

The muscle mass findings remained stable between 1 and 3 years after initiation of treatment, although fat mass continued to change between 1 & 3 years of T treatment. although with disproportionately greater effect on muscle strength than on muscle

This study did not report muscle strength, but other studies of T dose-response relationships for muscle mass and strength show consistently positively correlation,

*Heads-up that this thread will feature some extreme examples of homophobia and transphobia.*

Hey folks, have you ever wondered why trans people face constant accusations of fetishism, sexual predation and child abuse/grooming? Well, today let's talk about stochastic terrorism.

So, first we have to talk about what stochastic terrorism actually is. Remember when there was a conspiracy that there was a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlour basement, and a crazed gunman showed up? It's that sort of incitement that stochastic terrorism describes.

It's the demonisation or incitement against a group of people or individuals with the intent that other, unaffiliated parties will act upon it; it's the releasing doctored footage and a shooter show up at Planned Parenthood as a direct result of what he's been led to believe.

So with that in mind, let's talk about Russia's extreme anti-LGBT laws that banned the "promotion" of LGBT lifestyles to children. A move that specifically marked LGBT people as a threat to children, and resulted in neo-nazis meting out vigilante "justice" against gay men.

Groups such as this would lure unsuspecting gay men via dating sites, and brutalise and humiliate them on camera. They did so under the guise of combating child abusers, one group calling themselves "Occupy

Oh are we talking about Sheryl Sandberg again? Well, your reminder that disabled feminists, LGBQT feminists, and feminists of color criticised her ‘lean in’ deal from day one. Don’t let anyone retcon that out of existence.

Like, a pretty narrow slice of feminists actually endorse and support corporate feminism, they’re just white, nondisabled, straight, cis, and noisy so their voices have a bigger reach.

So if your impression is that ‘feminism’ gave her a ‘free pass’ maybe you should question your overall impression of feminism rather than continuing to centre a handful of people as ‘thought leaders’ or whatever.

Critics within feminism have been doing this work for a long time and have been getting shat on it for about as long and I'm tired of seeing them erased. But what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.

But I WILL say, from my not-a-feminist perspective, that people who aren’t feminists who are criticising feminism should maybe understand the movement more deeply beyond a handful of high profile celebrity feminists.

The numbers on their face for the @FCC RDOF auction are exciting - lots of Gigabit winners. But it’s important to remember the job is just starting. These rural areas don’t magically get Gig today or tomorrow. 1/

The job is only done and the celebration can really only begin once we see that rural Americans are actually going to get the broadband they’ve been promised. 2/

And that’s the rub here - at least from preliminary indications, there are LOTS of question marks clearly hanging out there once you look past the gloss and proclamations. And since we won’t know for maybe 5 years if it worked, due diligence is essential now. 3/

A number of big winners have offered some service but never done Gig. This would be like giving hundreds of millions of $ to firms that have repaved residential streets to now design & build our interstate highway bridges. 4/

A number of big winners are using tech that has done Gig (maybe) only in tightly controlled applications that don’t look anything like rural America. This would be like giving interstate highway $ to firms who’ve built lots of scale models but never actually built a bridge. 5/

As many of you know, I was apart of the white evangelical tradition. I have talked about things I learned about being Black in white spaces. Now I want to say some things about what I learned about once being a Black evangelical returning back to the Black church.

A thread.

Spending years in white evangelical churches and schools, specifically from 2012-2018, shapes Black people in more ways than we would like to admit. It shapes us to diminish Blackness, devalue our people’s story, and always test what we have against the white logic and litmus.

This is particular reality for us Black men in that space. White Christians exploit our vulnerabilities, give us the room to speak, while simultaneously subverting and devaluing Black women and their struggles and their grievances. Opportunities abound for us and we take them.

We are invited into the meetings, we are given the mic, we are asked to lead groups on race, the Black church, etc. We are asked though often we actually haven’t read or thought deeply about each. We become a weapon. Profiting and policing/punishing those who get out of line.

All the while, white Christians feel good about themselves and other Black people are left to clean up the mess we’ve made, the ways we’ve made fools of Black folk, and the harmful ways we’ve learned to think, and to preach, and to be around us. It is profoundly depressing.

THREAD: Almost a year into the launch of Aarogya Setu, there is still little to no public data on its benefits. Yet, many of its flaws are well documented. Now it's going to be used for vaccine rollouts despite meager progress in public

Experts have been warning us about Aarogya Setu's capacity for surveillance. Post integration with COWIN, it will likely become a permanent part of our health data landscape. We've written to the NIC with key concerns, because here's what we've learnt in 1 year:
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To justify violation of privacy, necessity and proportionality have to be proven. Aarogya Setu has disregarded these principles - we know because we analysed its Data Protocol, which MeitY released after public pressure. It fails to satisfy the basic threshold of legality.
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A lack of transparency has pervaded the ecosystem. RTIs on Aarogya Setu failed to receive adequate answers. In fact, we had to send a legal notice because CIC refused to let RTI activist Saurav Das attend his own show cause hearing regarding critical info about Aarogya Setu.
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Issues have been raised about the non open-source nature of the app. Even when the source code was released, it was the code for an earlier version of the app that was made available. The server-side code of the app was not available at all.
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