MAurelius

The BBC’s failure to cover the GIDS scandal has been a serious dereliction of its public duty. After resigning as a governor of the Tavistock, I was involved behind the scenes in the 2019 Panorama programme on GIDS. The producer warned me I might be disappointed the programme would expose only one part of the scandal, not the whole story. That warning told me everything I needed to know about the BBC’s problem with impartiality on this issue. When Sue Evans and Keira Bell won the first judicial review, there was no serious follow-up from the BBC News, Woman’s Hour, or other major outlets. Nor was there adequate coverage of one of the most important findings of the Cass Review: the poor quality of the evidence base behind medical interventions for children and adolescents with gender distress. Instead, the BBC repeatedly broadcast positive stories about transition while failing to investigate the harms, uncertainties, and institutional failures surrounding this field. Sue and I have seen some of the casualties. Parents have been badly let down by professional bodies that lacked the courage or independence to challenge the affirmative model none of which received the scrutiny a public broadcaster exists to provide. With honourable exceptions in Newsnight and the Today programme, the BBC has failed young people, failed parents, and failed in its most basic public duty.

Women shouldn't need to fear male violence to 'deserve' spaces of our own. But the fact that we do should be a cause for men to look at their own behaviour, not to question whether our fear is 'proportionate' the moment it stops some man, somewhere, doing what he wants

‘Understanding why young women support the gender affirmative framework requires understanding this mechanism clearly. It is empathy being weaponised against the very people whose empathy makes them most responsive to it.’

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.

@soniasodha The Transmaiden conjugation: I am a principled advocate You are a frothing culture warrior She is punching down on a vulnerable minority

@nickwallis @amolrajan How do you think women kept men out of their services, changing areas, loos in the past 100-odd years, without a security guard at each door? Social conformity and norms. It’s only been upended in the last 10-15 years. And let’s be honest, no one wants ‘unisex’ facilities.

There are ongoing cases around the country all the time, largely under the media radar, crowdfunded by small donations from women. Speak to @nickwallis, who covers some of these. @amolrajan R4today

Enforcement of the equality act, @amolrajan , is like enforcement of any laws. In the case of loos, society largely complies, and exceptions are ‘called out’ or reported. Some services will be taken to court by individual who feel they face discrimination. R4today

As a man, a dad, and someone who actually gives a damn about protecting women and girls , I’m done watching politicians like @AndyBurnhamGM play Russian roulette with female safety for the sake of self-ID ideology. Andy: How many women and girls have to be assaulted, raped, flashed, filmed, or intimidated in toilets, changing rooms, prisons, sports, or refuges before you stop prioritising men in dresses over actual women? Male pattern crime doesn’t disappear because a bloke says he’s a woman. Ministry of Justice stats prove it: 70% of trans women (biological males) in prison have sexual offence convictions that’s 20 times higher than female prisoners. Yet you’ve backed self-ID, opposed the Supreme Court’s clear ruling on biological sex, and dismissed women’s safety concerns as “culture wars.” This isn’t “inclusion.” It’s betrayal. Women aren’t “bigots” for wanting single-sex spaces. They’re just trying to stay safe. And every time you let a male-bodied offender into female only areas, you’re telling half the population their safety is negotiable. I stand with women. Real women. Biological women. No more sacrificing girls’ safety for feelings. Women and girls first. Always.

@BradfemlyWalsh ‘Incorrectly’

If you think this is pretentious, you should see how angry I get when someone pronounced stroopwafel wrong...

@Glinner @AlisonThisTime1 Richard seems to know what women want Richard is wrong

The NHS put a mentally ill woman in a men’s psychiatric ward and she was raped within ONE HOUR. Do you understand now what a woman is and why that matters, Health Secretary @jamesmurray_ldn??

Women’s rights are #NotACultureWar. All the polling shows most people want single-sex provision, and don’t think that men who identify as women should be allowed into women-only spaces – this is not a “minority view”. @AndyBurnhamGM must now state clearly whether or not he supports the Equality Act and accepts that when it comes to women-only spaces and services, men who identify as women are not women, and don't have the right to enter.

Single sex spaces have kept women and girls safe for over a century. Andy Burnham‘s idiot kids/spads have somehow managed to convince him that the concept is somehow flawed. The UK cannot afford to have another prime minister who is a slave to fads.

The Maudsley psychiatric hospital is well-known within gender-critical circles for having a rabid LGBT staff network, intransigent on the supremacy of gender identity over sex, and quick to call out "transphobia". Quotes from Maudsley webpages (still up): - On gender identity. "For some people, treatment may just involve acceptance and affirmation or confirmation of their identity." slam.nhs.uk/gender-dysphor… On the importance of Pride: it is "the right to be seen and accepted as the person you truly are." slam.nhs.uk/blog/why-do-we… In 2024, I wrote in an Unherd investigation on the capture of the NHS by gender ideology: "one Pride post on the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust  website  ... talks about “the fight for LGBT rights” as something “to be won against your family or your neighbours or whoever is directly around you”.' unherd.com/2024/04/the-li… That is the fantasy. You, a staff member, are a freedom fighter. You are a hero, saving vulnerable people from the urgent threat of misgendering or being put in sex-appropriate facilities. I'm sure it made staff feel very noble at the time. The reality: today we learn that in 2022, a 5ft 3 female who said/believed she was a man was put on male psychiatric ward, and raped within hours. Inmates chanted "No adam's apple". A man with a history of sex offending was in there, and he stood lookout. It was then covered up by staff. thetimes.com/uk/crime/artic…

‘How could the staff and managers have not known this was inevitable? This is an abject failure on every level.’

NHS trust’s cover-up put innocent patient on trial for rape Trust deliberately obstructed a police investigation into the rape of a transgender patient on an all-male secure psychiatric ward. thetimes.com/article/84d12e…

“The duty of care, the obligation to keep a vulnerable female safe has been overriden by self-identification and a desire not to offend. And then once that did happen, it seems as though the staff conspired to cover up the shocking details of the case...

‘Professor Jo Phoenix, @JoPublications , an expert in women, crime and justice, called for a formal inquiry, saying a biological woman being raped on an all-male ward “should have been an impossibility”.’

‘The 5ft 3in biological female arrived on the ward and within an hour was raped in a cupboard. MPs, academics and campaigners have called for an inquiry into how the hospital admitted a vulnerable woman onto a ward made up entirely of men sectioned under the Mental Health Act.’