JFT97

@MiaJaneWest77 @speakoutsister Bab you said "patroising". Sleep it off, tomorrow is another day.

@GoatApocalypse @speakoutsister I suppose you think patroising twaddle is clever? I'm stone cold sober and I really don't need a nap. You might need some help though.

So I'm intrigued as to how the NHS is going to guarantee single sex wards. Are they going to have private rooms set aside to treat trans people? Only they're usually used for people who are seriously ill/dying so family can stay with them.

@MiaJaneWest77 @speakoutsister Mia, you're slurring your words. Maybe have some toast and an early kip.

@speakoutsister @GoatApocalypse For failing to ensure the facilities are only used by women, in accordane with the law.

@MiaJaneWest77 @speakoutsister Right. Volunteer toilet cops. So you spot someone in your bog. Looks a bit shifty. You're going to demand they get their knickers down just to be sure? Because I dunno about you, Mia, that sounds a bit sexually assaulty to me.

@GoatApocalypse @speakoutsister We - women, the users of women's toilets, changing rooms,etc.

@MiaJaneWest77 @speakoutsister Who is "we"? Are you a volunteer toilet cop?

@GoatApocalypse @speakoutsister You know that's not needed. We ca spot the men in frocks!

@MiaJaneWest77 @speakoutsister So, toilet cops. Great. Everyone show your genitals before you can go the bog. No chance of any sexual assault happening there!

@GoatApocalypse @speakoutsister It'll be enforced becaise we have eyes & providers are at risk of large compensaton bills.

@MiaJaneWest77 @speakoutsister Let's try this from another angle. Now this is in place, how specifically will it protect cis women. How will it be policed.

@speakoutsister @GoatApocalypse Actualy it is my strong point - yours not so much.

@MiaJaneWest77 @speakoutsister So I'm once again forced to ask, how does this actually protect women? We were relying on good will before and we're relying on good will now?

@GoatApocalypse @speakoutsister Unfortunately some men need rules so they stay within boundaries. We used to rely on decency but that's gone out the window.If men choose to ignore the rules, one can only assumed they have bad intentions.

@MiaJaneWest77 @speakoutsister If it were that simple to police, wouldn't we just expect men - whether cis or trans - to obey the law at all times and not worry about it? People could then use whatever facilities they wanted.

@GoatApocalypse @speakoutsister So making women safer in toilets, changing rooms, prisons & hospital wards isn't important? And it's easy to police. All that is need is that men obey the law, just as people generally obey drink driving laws. All transwomen were born male, and they all know this. Simple.

@ContorSien1527 @speakoutsister 💯

@GoatApocalypse @speakoutsister It doesn’t make anything safer because the real issue is c!s het men.

@thomasforth Arguably the best we've had is Birmingham Grand Central and... I dunno, is HS2 still happening?

I feel mad for pointing it out. It's obvious isn't it? Andy Burnham's point about the last 40 years being bad for North England isn't shown to be wrong by the success of King's Cross. Andy and I both celebrate that. That there's no Northern equivalent is precisely the problem.

Andy Burnham: "Britain has been on the wrong path for 40 years, a path that has damaged communities across the North."

@TrevorPTweets @EHRC Cool so how does policing who pisses where protect women on the streets In fact how the hell are we meant to police who pisses where

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday: Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer. The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted. Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right. As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces. Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t. In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue. This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls. What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected. But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics. First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life. In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different. Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination. Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage. But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black. I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families. I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box. So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

@Knox_Harrington You're about to embark on a career as a professional wrestler. What's your name and what's your gimmick? I'd be The Professor - a lecturer from a stuffy university - and my finishing move would be called The Lesson

AFQ AFQ AFQ No, seriously AFQ Trad Kearney Walsh K Blundell Get your questions in NOW

@downeytrev I love to hear my computer's thoughts on my favourite subjects

Sure. Why not?

I'm confused, is this anti-Semitism

“Desecrated the Odyssey” Christ what a snivelling little dork

@I_amMukhtar Few of them getting burned later

👀

@87654Ajh @paulmasonnews @robertkapok If you listen very carefully, you can hear Paul's sphincter tightening up

@paulmasonnews @robertkapok “If the global left – which was on a roll during 2011-2013 – is to regain momentum, it needs leaders like Tsipras to find thinkers and doers like Varoufakis, and to nurture them.” @paulmasonnews didn’t you write this?

Down with the bond market! Down with gravity! Why Labour's rebels without a leader need to learn some basic economics: socialism has to be built out of the capitalism that exists, not our imagination... (link in next file, unpaywalled)...

'Starmer can chair a meeting. He can draft a minute. He can lead a team. He can hold a press conference. He can stay calm in an interview. Those skills look simple, but they’re not, and they’re vital.' @gsoh31 on the breadth of Sir Keir Starmer's potential #Echobox=1591719780" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/artic…

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