Professor of Midwifery, Monash University. Director, Transforming Maternity Care Collaborative. Views are my own.

Melbourne, Australia
Joined September 2016
Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
UCL professor Sallie Baxendale, who has faced personal abuse and smear campaigns after she raised concerns over the impact of puberty blockers on young people’s brains, has been shortlisted for the Maddox Prize for “standing up for science”. @jgro_the reports #science #research #MaddoxPrize timeshighereducation.com/new…
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Greenham Common, 1980s UK, 1st peace camp, women-only, active for 19 yrs protesting nuclear weapons. Embrace the Base event-30,000 women held hands around the US airbase fence housing Cruise Missiles, in a 14-mile human chain #WomensArt
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Men who claim to be women in Australia cannot claim to be oppressed, marginalized or discriminated against. In fact, they hold all the power. The group that is being discriminated against is women who want woman only spaces, services, sport & lesbianism. We are being discriminated against on the basis of sex. The judiciary of Australia hasn’t resolved the conflict in law, they have made it blindingly obvious. 50% of the population have been left without legal protections on the basis of sex - the exact thing the sex discrimination act was enacted to uphold.
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I very much regret this decision by the High Court. The ball is firmly in the Parliament of #Australia’s court to correct this historic injustice and affront to the rights of women and girls.
Today the High Court 👨‍⚖️ refused Sall Grover special leave to appeal Giggle for Girls v Tickle. The legal fight is over. 😤 Parliament must now act. ‼️ Giggle was a women only app. @salltweets built it so women could have a female only online space. As the law now stands, a woman can be punished in court for running a female only service without the inclusion of men who identify as women. The courts applied the Gillard government 2013 amendments. They did not invent them. Only Parliament can restore the right of women and girls to single sex spaces, services and sport. @SenKatyG @MGrahMcIntosh WRNA stands with Sall Grover. 💪💜 We call on every MP and Senator to amend the Sex Discrimination Act and put sex based rights back into Australian law.
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
🚨 A critical win for Jasmine Sussex, biological reality and child safeguarding. The former Australian Breastfeeding Association counsellor was taken to QCAT for alleged vilification after raising concerns about a trans-identifying male using drugs and hormones to induce lactation and feed the resulting substance to a newborn baby. As part of her defence, Jasmine sought details about the treatment used, the practitioners involved and the composition of the substance produced - critical information given the lack of evidence supporting its safety or nutritional adequacy. QCAT initially ruled these medical facts irrelevant. The Appeal Tribunal has now overturned that decision, finding errors of law constituting a “substantial miscarriage of justice” and affirming that the information is relevant to whether Jasmine expressed her concerns reasonably, in good faith and in the public interest. The substantive case is yet to be decided. But this is a significant step towards ensuring that legitimate questions about experimental practices involving vulnerable babies cannot simply be dismissed as “vilification”. 🗞️ Read more by @rachelbaxendale in the @australian: archive.md/kckEN #IStandWithJasmineSussex #Auspol #QLDpol
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Very interesting research. My observation is that discourse communicating new motherhood and new fatherhood should be similar is unkind. Similarly, societal and workplace structures constructed under this assumption will disadvantage women and children. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Thea is an extraordinarily brave young woman.
This was a difficult piece to write. It was also necessary. I am one of the 8,711 victims warned that our attackers could be released early under Labour’s scheme. People should know who stands to benefit. Malcolm James, then in his late fifties, kidnapped me in 2019, shortly after my fourteenth birthday. He held me for several hours and repeatedly sexually assaulted me. I remained silent until Sarah Everard disappeared. She was abducted from a road that crosses the one from which I had been taken. I feared that the same men were responsible, and that my silence had allowed it to happen again. James was convicted of five sexual offences against a child. He is a repeat offender with previous convictions, including for violence. I already believed his eight year sentence was inadequate. Now he may be released earlier still. Andy Burnham has promised to review this scheme. He must exclude rapists, child sex offenders and repeat violent criminals. I refuse to have spent longer securing justice than James spends in prison.
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We midwives try to bend ourselves out of shape to fit the system …. It does not work. We need to be architects of maternity services.
What happens when midwives must continually translate their deepest value into a language the system was never designed to understand? 🧵
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
The Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda is of great concern. Consequences for mothers and babies will be significant- yet we know almost nothing about breastfeeding and Ebola viruses. Let this be the outbreak where this issue is taken seriously sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
In this Substack, Clive Hamilton discusses how desexed language in global maternal and child health is a colonial imposition. Gratifyingly, the article draws heavily from our 2022 paper on the importance of sexed language.
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Are newborns blank slates? Does it matter to them from whom the oocyte for their conception came or who gestated and birthed them? Using research from adoption, donor conception and surrogacy, this paper argues for consideration of the child's experience in surrogacy language.
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
As we approach the Giggle v Tickle decision, I’m remembering that • I received an Australian Human Rights Commission complain citing “gender identity discrimination” when I was 14/15 weeks pregnant. • The AHRC was, imo, never neutral. It was gender ideology capture from the very beginning. While they were talking about “assigned sex at birth” and “lived experience”, I was 20 weeks pregnant & found out I was having a girl. • To settle the complaint in the AHRC - and not have it escalate to federal court - I had to • agree to let him on the woman only social networking app I created • a let all men who claim to be women on the app • apologize • attend “sex & gender education classes • pay $20,000 • moderate all content on the woman only platform so men who claim to be women weren’t offended by it. • The AHRC never meaningfully entertained my argument that woman only spaces were lawful. I always felt that their stance was, “you’re guilty, admit it, accept it.” • While contemplating the magnitude of what I had to do, I thought about my daughter & that I would eventually be teaching her to stand up for herself & do what is right. How could I do that if I ran away when something seemed too hard? • I said “NO” to what the AHRC was offering. Tickle filed in federal court 60 days later and “Tickle v Giggle” began. • A federal court case + full appeal & my daughter is about to turn 4 years old. Giggle v Tickle has been in the background of her whole life. Any time the case has been incredibly stressful - and there have been many times, I was losing my hair at one point - I have just focused on my daughter & it instantly became easier. I want her to have rights & will do everything I can to ensure that she does. • I want every woman & girl to be able to say “NO” to a man, no matter how he identifies, and not be punished for it. • At no point in the past 4.5 years have I been even remotely convinced that men can be women. Not once. In fact, I’m more sure than ever that they’re not. • Thank you everyone for the support. It would be impossible to have this fight without it. gigglecrowdfund.com 🩷
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Nobody I know on this side of the fight thinks all men are bad. Nobody I know on this side of the fight thinks all men rape, beat or abuse women and girls. We simply have incontrovertible proof that enough do to make safeguarding necessary - and a lot of men agree with us.
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
This illustrates the reality of lack of sufficient maternity leave and inadequate workplace breastfeeding provisions. The author is incorrect, this is not what being a parent looks like, male parents do not have this experience. This is sexism experienced by women who are mothers
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
And I remain of the view that it is deeply, deeply unethical to create a baby with the express intention of removing it from its birth mother.
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Paul sees injustice but decides he can tolerate it as it doesn’t affect him It affects Mara who finds it intolerable Paul tolerates the injustice, but he just can’t tolerate Mara fighting the injustice Paul fights against Mara Mara still fights against injustice Be more Mara
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Replying to @theglassfish13
Yes, the people who call themselves 'trans' exist and they deserve exactly the same rights as everyone else, which, fortunately, they already have in the UK. It would rightly be considered discrimination if a person was refused employment, housing or the vote because they identified as trans. 'Trans women are women' is a thought-terminating cliché. Men are not women. That doesn't mean they're not allowed to present themselves however they like, call themselves whatever they like and believe whatever they like about themselves. It means they haven't changed sex. If we replace the objective, observable characteristic of sex with the unfalsifiable concept of gender identify, women and girls lose, among other things, their right to fair and safe sport and women-only spaces, including changing rooms, prison cells and rape crisis services. Women and girls are provably more vulnerable to forms of abuse including sexual assault, harassment and voyeurism in mixed-sex spaces. There is no evidence that trans-identified men don't have exactly the same rates of criminal offending as all other men. Trans people exist. I have no desire for them not to exist; indeed, I wish them safety, happiness and health. However, 'existence' does not, and should not, mean the violation of other people's right to privacy, dignity and freedom of speech, or the reconfiguration of society to indulge a fallacy.
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Prof Jenny Gamble retweeted
Replying to @CatherineHume10
UK history has been recorded since before the Domesday Book. Men could be awarded university degrees in 1230. Cambridge finally capitulated and awarded degrees to women in 1948. Men first took seats in Parliament in 1265. Women had to wait till 1918. Men could vote in 1832. Women had to wait till 1918. Men were legally persons in their own right. Women were chattels (the property of fathers or husbands) until coverture was finally knocked on the head in 1991. That’s not a typo. 1991. It is true that one of us is certainly silly and historically illiterate. I leave it to serious historians to decide which…
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