Susan Smith complains after judges ordered her four-year-old to stop wearing girls’ clothes

Ashifa Kassam in The Guardian

A Canadian mother has called for lawyers and judges to receive better training on gender identity after two judges in the province of Alberta ordered her four-year-old child to stop wearing girls’ clothing in public.

The order was first issued last year by a family court judge in Medicine Hat, a small city of 63,000. Some three months later, the clothing restriction was upheld by a second judge.

Susan Smith said her child was born male but began identifying as a girl soon after turning two years old. “First I thought it was really cute. It was like ‘oh no no honey, you’re a boy,” said Smith, whose name has been changed in order to protect the child.

But her child only became increasingly insistent. Smith, who is separated from the child’s father but shares custody, struggled with how to respond. “I was kind of questioning, is my kid doing this for attention? What is going on?”

Then one evening, after her child surprised her by asking when their penis would fall off, Smith sat the child down. “I told them sweetheart, you were born with a penis, so you’re a boy. You will always have your penis, therefore you’ll always be a boy.”

A few nights later her child woke her up, visibly upset. “It was along the lines of mom, I don’t want to be a boy,” said Smith. “And then it went to almost shouting. I’m going to cut my penis off, I want my penis off.”

Trans children allowed to express identity 'have good mental health'


Concerned for the safety of the child, she sought professional help and began researching gender dysphoria, a condition that causes a person to experience extreme distress because of a disconnect between their birth sex and gender identity.

Soon after, Smith decided she would acknowledge the child’s choice of gender identity. “I was going to do whatever I could to validate and support them and to be that one person they could go to,” Smith said.

After conferring with the staff and children at her child’s preschool and daycare, she began offering her child the option of wearing either male, female or gender neutral clothing. Her child consistently chose stereotypically female clothing and opted to go by a female name, she said.

According to Smith, her child’s confidence bloomed, while the yelling, screaming and unhappiness disappeared. “Everything was perfect,” she said.

Throughout the process, Smith had kept the father informed. But about one month after she began allowing her child to choose their clothing, Smith was served court documents. The father – who Smith said blamed her for the child’s anxiety and confusion around gender – was seeking full custody of the child.

The first interim order, issued in December 2015, said Smith could continue as the primary caregiver. But the judge said the child would not be permitted to wear clearly female clothing in public. The child could choose to do so in private, the order said.

The ruling came as a shock to Smith. “I’m the person that knows this kid more than anybody in this world,” she said. “It’s like telling your kid who has a huge thing for being Spiderman – and that was allowed to have a Spiderman backpack, a Spiderman shirt, a Spiderman pencil and a Spiderman cup – and all of a sudden you come along and you take all of that away. And you give them a Batman cup.”

In February, a second judge upheld the ruling, and also granted the father primary custody of the child, with Smith allowed limited access.

In September, a third provincial judge overturned the clothing restriction after consulting with a parenting expert. The child, said the judge, must now be provided with male and female clothing options and then can choose from these options.

Smith said the consecutive orders – all issued within a nine-month span – have taken a toll on the child, who is now five. “When my child was removed and placed with Dad, they internalised it and took it like they did something wrong. They were being bad because the judge doesn’t like them to be a girl.”

She plans to file a judicial complaint with the province, demanding that all legal representatives in Alberta – from judges to lawyers – be better trained on gender identity. “If they were properly educated and aware of the severe consequences and the turmoil this has had on my child, they could not ethically say it’s in the best interests of the child.”

Ron Hewitt, the executive director of Alberta’s provincial court system, said judges study and refer to a number of sources of information to keep current on the law and other matters that apply to their role as judges. “Our court carries on extensive professional development for the judges of the court in all areas as appropriate,” he said.

Transgender children: the parents and doctors on the frontline

While Alberta’s justice minister, Kathleen Ganley, could not comment on the specifics of the case, she pointed to an amendment made last autumn to the province’s Human Rights Act, which saw gender identity and gender expression added as prohibited grounds of discrimination. “This is now law, and we expect all Albertans to follow the law,” she said in a statement.

Smith said her complaint – and the remedy she’s demanding – will do little to help her in her ongoing court battle to regain custody of her child. But she hopes it will prevent other families from experiencing what she and her child have been through in the past year. “This has been so hard on my kid,” she said, her voice shaking as she fought back tears.

“My kid then started talking about dying. At four, they didn’t feel that the world wanted them to be a girl. That they were no good,” she said. “My kid was asking me, mom, does it hurt to die, how can I die, where would I go when I die? Mom now that you know, when I die, grow me in your belly but grow me as a girl, not with a penis. Because now you know.”

Beware the politician who thinks a debate about ‘British values’ is the way to voters’ hearts

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

Here we go round the mulberry bush repeating the same old verses – fine when you are a three-year-old, but really not for a PM. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown crusaded for “British values”, and now David Cameron does the same, prompted, I suspect, by the looming Scottish referendum and the disquieting “Trojan Horse” confrontation.

The crisis at some Birmingham schools must be dealt with fairly and robustly. Academies and free schools give parents and governors too much power, and this is the result. The fanatically ideological and thoroughly incompetent Michael Gove created this mess. But, as ever, when in trouble of their own making, British politicians either blame immigrants or evoke Britishness, as if it is a magic spell that will get voters to love them again. It always turns out to be a hex.

Last week, once again, Britishness was talked up by some, knocked about by others and mocked by many. Watch Huffington Post’s Mehdi Hasan speaking for one minute on this – droll, wry and very British. Some nations push patriotism so relentlessly that it becomes oppressive and enforces conformism. I was on Sky News with the Telegraph journalist Andrew Gilligan, who believes we should emulate America’s brand of flag-waving, unexamined patriotism. I really can’t see that happening.

Contrariness is what I most admire about my fellow Brits, plus their instinctive scepticism and questioning of authority, which comes out of a particular history. Of course, the state and establishment know that everyday nonconformity diverts actual revolutionary movements or resistance. At a time of purposely engineered poverty and inequality, even the poor worship the royals and blame fellow citizens rather than their rulers. Yet, still, having lived under the controlling, undemocratic British Empire, one of my biggest and best surprises was to come and settle in this mischievous, quirky and open motherland.

The critical mind and voice should indeed be promoted among the young of all backgrounds. And personal autonomy, too. I was on the advisory group led by Sir Bernard Crick that, after much deliberation, introduced the citizenship curriculum in schools. Children were taught binding values, rights and responsibilities, and it proved a good way to create a sense of common purpose and emphasise commonalities between various peoples of the UK. Taught properly, pupils are enabled to question governmental obsessions, the economic system, ruling elites, each other’s faiths or cultures, and spun histories. Although Gove declared his support for this education in 2013, teachers tell me it is withering on the vine, pushed out by other core subjects.

Politicians don’t want to encourage such dissent, this fundamental enacting of Britishness. Remember the draconian policing of student marches against university fee rises, and UK Uncut and trade union demos. And now Boris Johnson wants water cannon to be part of the arsenal against legitimate protests. Nothing about this is simple.

We should take proper pride in our arts and writers and the beautiful, most amazing language that everyone in the world wants to learn. However, many of the qualities that Cameron listed as British are global. We didn’t invent democracy and, when barely 35 per cent of people turn out to vote here, South Africa can be counted more democratic than us. The rule of law? It’s a universal desire. So, too, a craving for personal and political liberty. Tolerance cannot be owned by any one country, and this latest attempt by British politicians to claim it sounds terribly like propaganda when racism is, once more, stalking us people of colour and migrants.

Whose Britishness shall be deemed exemplary? Those proud brutes Rod Liddle and Richard Littlejohn? Shall we put on to the curriculum their nasty new books, lamenting the white, superior, sexist nation they grew up in? Or do we go for Danny Boyle and Suzanne Moore’s inclusive and ever-transforming, kaleidoscopic Britishness? Then there is Alan Bennett’s lovely, kind, left version. And Shami Chakrabarti’s, based on principles and powerful historical moments when liberty was enshrined in law. You could lock Simon Jenkins, Nigel Farage, Helena Kennedy and Lenny Henry in a castle for a month and still they would not agree on the defining characteristics of our nationhood.

If getting drunk is a typically British thing to do, I want no part of it. Hating incomers seems to be a British pastime. Sorry, can’t join in. And don’t expect me to despise those on benefits either. The Empire was not glorious for the ruled, and you can’t make us celebrate such a complex history. Britain holds itself up as a beacon of human rights and freedoms, but duplicitously undercuts all our basic rights and freedoms. We surely cannot exult Magna Carta when we now have secret courts, the state spying on us all and withholding information from us.

In 2007, when we went through another episode of evangelical, revivalist Britishness, an establishment newspaper asked its readers for a single sentence that defined it. The winning entry was this: “No motto, please, we’re British”. And no enforced patriotism either. Do we want to be like the French?

How can we invest our trust in a government that spies on us?

We should not fear some Orwellian future state where we're subjected to total electronic scrutiny – it's our present reality

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 24 June 2013 20.30 BST

Bob Lambert, an undercover policeman who is alleged to have lied in court and has been accused by an MP of firebombing, was awarded an MBE in 2008 and now teaches at St Andrews University. Photograph: guardian.co.uk

'If you are a law-abiding citizen of this country, going about your business and your personal life, you have nothing to fear." That's how William Hague, the foreign secretary, responded to the revelations of mass surveillance in the US and the UK. Try telling that to Stephen Lawrence's family.

Four police officers were deployed to spy on the family and friends of the black teenager murdered by white racists. The Lawrences and the people who supported their fight for justice were law-abiding citizens going about their business. Yet undercover police were used, one of the spies now tells us, to hunt for "disinformation" and "dirt". Their purpose? "We were trying to stop the campaign in its tracks."

The two unfolding spy stories resonate powerfully with each other. One, gathered by Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, shows how police surveillance has been comprehensively perverted. Instead of defending citizens and the public realm, it has been used to protect the police from democratic scrutiny and stifle attempts to engage in politics.

The other, arising from the documents exposed by Edward Snowden, shows that the US and the UK have been involved in the mass interception of our phone calls and use of the internet. William Hague insists that we should "have confidence in the work of our intelligence agencies, and in their adherence to the law and democratic values". Why?

Here are a few of the things we have learned about undercover policing in Britain. A unit led by a policeman called Bob Lambert deployed officers to spy on peaceful activists. They adopted the identities of dead children and then infiltrated protest groups. Nine of the 11 known spies formed long-term relationships with women in the groups, in some cases (including Lambert's) fathering children with them. Then they made excuses and vanished.

They left a trail of ruined lives, fatherless children and women whose confidence and trust have been wrecked beyond repair. They have also walked away from other kinds of mayhem. On Friday we discovered that Lambert co-wrote the leaflet for which two penniless activists spent three years in the high court defending a libel action brought by McDonald's. The police never saw fit to inform the court that one of their own had been one of the authors.

Bob Lambert has been accused of using a false identity during a criminal trial. And, using parliamentary privilege, the MP Caroline Lucas alleged that he planted an incendiary device in a branch of Debenhams while acting as an agent provocateur. The device exploded, causing £300,000 of damage. Lambert denies the allegation.

Police and prosecutors also failed to disclose, during two trials of climate-change activists, that an undercover cop called Mark Kennedy had secretly taped their meetings, and that his recordings exonerated the protesters. Twenty people were falsely convicted. Those convictions were later overturned.

If the state is prepared to abuse its powers and instruments so widely and gravely in cases such as this, where there is a high risk of detection, and if it is prepared to intrude so far into people's lives that its officers live with activists and father their children, what is it not prepared to do while spying undetectably on our private correspondence?

Already we know that electronic surveillance has been used in this country for purposes other than the perennial justifications of catching terrorists, foiling foreign spies and preventing military attacks. It was deployed, for example, to spy on countries attending the G20 meeting the UK hosted in 2009. If the government does this to other states, which might have the capacity to detect its spying and which certainly have the means to object to it, what is it doing to defenceless citizens?

It looks as if William Hague may have misled parliament a fortnight ago. He claimed that "to intercept the content of any individual's communications in the UK requires a warrant signed personally by me, the home secretary, or by another secretary of state".

We now discover that these ministers can also issue general certificates, renewed every six months, which permit mass interception of the kind that GCHQ has been conducting. Among the certificates issued to GCHQ is a "global" one authorising all its operations, including the trawling of up to 600m phone calls and 39m gigabytes of electronic information a day. A million ministers, signing all day, couldn't keep up with that.

The best test of the good faith of an institution is the way it deals with past abuses. Despite two years of revelations about abusive police spying, the British government has yet to launch a full public inquiry. Bob Lambert, who ran the team, fathered a child by an innocent activist he deceived, co-wrote the McDonald's leaflet, is alleged to have lied in court and has been accused by an MP of firebombing, was awarded an MBE in 2008. He now teaches at St Andrews University, where he claims to have a background in "counter-terrorism".

The home office minister Nick Herbert has stated in parliament that it's acceptable for police officers to have sex with activists, for the sake of their "plausibility". Does this sound to you like a state in which we should invest our trust?

Talking to Sunday's Observer, a senior intelligence source expressed his or her concerns about mass surveillance. "If there was the wrong political change, it could be very dangerous. All you need is to have the wrong government in place." But it seems to me that any government prepared to subject its citizens to mass surveillance is by definition the wrong one. No one can be trusted with powers as wide and inscrutable as these.

In various forms – Conservative, New Labour, the coalition – we have had the wrong government for 30 years. Across that period its undemocratic powers have been consolidated. It has begun to form an elective dictatorship, in which the three major parties are united in their desire to create a security state; to wage unprovoked wars; to defend corporate power against democracy; to act as a doormat for the United States; to fight political dissent all the way to the bedroom and the birthing pool. There's no need to wait for the "wrong" state to arise to conclude that mass surveillance endangers liberty, pluralism and democracy. We're there already

The Left’s Untouchable

Why was Ambedkar’s critique of caste anathema for Indian Marxists?

Manash Bhattacharjee

It’s an abiding mystery of Indian politics: why the Left has consistently shown an uneasy reluctance to seriously engage with B.R. Ambedkar’s thoughts. When Ambedkar pushed for the Poona Pact in 1932, demanding separate electorates for Dalits, the Indian Left kept its distance from the issue. Symptomatically, E.M.S. Namboodiripad wrote: “This was a great blow to the freedom movement. For this led to the diversion of people’s attention from the objective of full independence to the mundane cause of the upliftment of the Harijans.”

EMS’s reaction to the Poona Pact was in consonance with his reading of Indian history in Marxist terms. Borrowing crudely from Marx’s understanding of the history of slavery, EMS found the caste system, despite its exploitative structure, to be “a superior economic organisation”, which facilitated organised production through a systematic allocation of labour. He didn’t note Ambedkar’s sophisticated distinction between “division of labour” and “division of the labourer” (including the hierarchy within that division) in the casteist relations of production. The eternal fixedness of the labourer with regard to his birth (as the “subject” who “will bear its Father’s name”), and the religious sanction behind such an identity, were deemed unimportant. Being mostly from the upper castes, Left scholars avoided examining the assumptions of caste.

Since before Independence, the mainstream Left framed the class question safely within the nationalist question; for EMS and his comrades, this issue was not a diversion.
Ambedkar had the courage to push for a radical division within the framework of nationalist politics, by asking for separate electorates. By calling Ambedkar’s cause “mundane”, EMS drew a specious distinction between the working class and Dalits, holding the former to be “superior”. Through this, EMS betrayed his predominantly upper-caste mindset. He is an exemplar of progressive casteism in the history of Left politics and thinking in India. This led to lower castes and Dalits not finding a place in the party hierarchy.

The most insidious form of caste solidarity ignores and hides the stark fact that caste is part of what Althusser calls the “apparatus” of ideology and is based in material existence. Every form of social practice (and exploitation) in India is contextually casteist. It creates conditions of multiple prejudice between the bourgeois and the working class (where the scavenging class/caste goes unnamed). And this prejudice becomes part of the relations of production as caste introduces elements of segregation and humiliation within those relations. In the case of untouchables, one might in fact call it relations of waste, where the disposing of sewage, etc, is not accorded even the minimum standard of dignified working conditions.

Ambedkar pointed out how the class system had an “open-door character”, whereas castes were “self-enclosed units”. He gave a brilliant explanation of caste’s forced endogamy: “Some closed the door: others found it closed against them.” The image throws up a phenomenon opposite to the Kafkan idea of law: the (Hindu) gatekeeper of law, in Ambedkar’s explanation, is also the lawgiver, and he allows entry by birth, but no exit. Once entry has been secured in Hindu society, as Ambedkar argued, everyone who is not a Brahmin is an other. Hinduism is a uniquely self-othering social system, whose (touchable) norms are secured by declaring a brutal exception: untouchability.

In his comparison of Buddha and Marx, Ambedkar bypasses Marx’s idea of private property and keeps out the question of capital ownership. He also does not complicate the relation between ‘law’ and ‘government’. These appear to be limitations of the historical conjuncture of Dalit politics. But Ambedkar finds the materialist and non-violent character of Buddhism to be evoking another thinkable historical version of a Marxist society.

Some critics in the Indian Left see the Dalit movement as being merely a ‘politics of recognition’ and having no revolutionary potential. It is a shallow view of the movement against segregated exploitation that seeks to penetrate entrenched hegemony. The politics against untouchability demands more than good wages and working conditions: it asks for a reconfiguration of the socio-cultural space and the elimination of a violated and untouchable ‘bare life’.

Ambedkar had warned that the Indian socialist would have to “take account of caste after the revolution, if he does not take account of it before the revolution”.

In a discussion after the screening of his film, Jai Bhim Comrade, Anand Patwardhan said that even though Gandhi erred on the caste system, he did more against untouchability than the Left. Under the stark light of this observation, the Left must rethink its ideological history. Or else, the crisis of its political legitimacy may not outlive the warnings.