Aurora

@AuthorGFAllen Yes but it was The Martian by Andy Weir and he hadn’t written any other books at that point.

Have you ever finished a book and thought, “Okay, I’m reading everything this person writes”?

'This policy will disproportionately impact women from the global South.' Yes it will. Female athletes from the global South will now be able to represent their countries on the world stage. Instead of losing their careers to athletes with male DSDs. time.com/article/2026/0…

@bullrike @GenderRebelsorg @Scienceofsport @ForWomenScot @betsvigi9 @adweeks802 @BrianSuttererMD It does seem very unlikely that Lin has CAIS. If that was the case then why not appeal the IBA ban in 2023?

@GenderRebelsorg @Scienceofsport @ForWomenScot @betsvigi9 @adweeks802 @StuntNun @BrianSuttererMD Lin definitely doesn’t have CAIS, he’s visibly androgenised - unachievable without testosterone response. Most likely his tests are fabricated.

This doctor is seriously pretending that women with 46,XY DSD conditions might not realise they have them. Maybe once upon a time, but it's highly unlikely now, especially in Western countries. DSDs come with major health implications & it would require a lifelong conspiracy by family & medics to hide the fact from the individual. It's not credible & makes one question this man's fitness to practice.

@hecheateddotorg @DearRebelAda And yet, people will still tell women and girls that they should simply refuse to compete with trans women and girls in their competitions. Imagine how the threats might have escalated then. 😡

Per Reduxx, Stratton "Becky" Pepper-Jackson repeatedly harassed female teammates, telling them to "suck my d*ck" two to three times per week. He also allegedly began mocking the girls he was beating in the shot put, saying "You have more testosterone than I do, and I'm still beating you." “B.P.J. made other more explicit sexual statements that felt threatening to me. At times, B.P.J. told me quietly ‘I’m gonna stick my d*ck into your p*ssy.’ And B.P.J. sometimes added ‘and in your *ss,’ as well. These comments were disturbing and caused me deep distress.” - Female teammate Pepper-Jackson stole a 3rd place medal at state from a female athlete last year, as a freshman. He's already taken 1st in both the shot put and discus at his first invitational meet this year.

🧵Happy "Trans" day of visibility! I believe "trans" visibility is very important, as when many people hear the word "transwoman," they don't actually understand that what is being talked about is a man, often fetishistic and violent. Here is a thread of some "trans" athletes I think deserve as much visibility as we can give them. Starting with Cameron Maudlin aka "Hannah Viramontes" Maudlin formerly played on the Rocky Mountain Thunderkatz, a women's tackle football team in the WFA. Maudlin currently faces charges of sexual assault, kidnapping, and false imprisonment after he punched his female roommate in the face, threatened her with a gun, handcuffed her, and then proceeded to sexually and physically assault her over a number of days. Maudlin told the woman he intended to keep her as a "sex slave," strangled her, and beat her with a towel rack.

@GenderRebelsorg @Scienceofsport @ForWomenScot @betsvigi9 @bullrike @adweeks802 @BrianSuttererMD Men can’t have CAIS; it’s a medical condition that only affects women.

@Scienceofsport @ForWomenScot @betsvigi9 @bullrike @adweeks802 @StuntNun @BrianSuttererMD I cannot accept any exception for CAIS, since people/men with CAIS are generally taller. In boxing long arms are a big weapon, as we see with Taiwanese boxer Lin -- who has either CAIS or PAIS.

No male advantage in women's sport. This is central to the IOC's policy to protect female sport. But they make a noted exception - CAIS. Let's look at this exception, why it may create loopholes, & why clear technical standards are crucial to get it right: youtube.com/watch?v=YRUIHC…

@j4ppleby Rude! I prefer to be called a pregnant primate. 😆

'People are offended by the use of "pregnant eukaryote". Is a woman not a eukaryote?'

@HJoyceGender I probably should have read more parenting books (fair critique) but of all the ones i did read, i never once saw “if your kid really really really really wants something that is impossible, you simply make sure the other 8 billion people on the planet pretend its so.”

Girl Guides and the Single Sex Question: What Child Development and Safeguarding Tell Us (longish post) Girl Guides exists as a single sex organisation for a reason grounded not in prejudice but in developmental science. The research on adolescent girls consistently shows that dedicated single sex environments support confidence, risk taking, and identity formation in ways that mixed environments do not, particularly during the years when girls are navigating the social pressures of puberty and early adolescence. Removing the single sex character of those spaces does not leave them neutral. It changes them in ways that the developmental evidence suggests are meaningful. The safeguarding concern is straightforward and does not require any claim about the intentions of individual children. Safeguarding frameworks are designed to manage risk at a population level, not to make judgements about individuals. Single sex overnight environments, changing facilities, and residential trips carry specific safeguarding protocols that depend on the single sex character of the group. When a child who is biologically male is included in those environments on the basis of a self reported gender identity, those protocols are compromised in ways that any competent safeguarding review would flag. The 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling, which confirmed that woman and sex in the Equality Act refer to biological sex, reinforces the legal basis for maintaining those boundaries. The developmental harm to girls at this stage of their lives is not incidental. It goes to the heart of what single sex provision is for. Adolescence is the period in which girls are forming their understanding of themselves as female, navigating the physical changes of puberty, developing the capacity for intimacy and trust with peers of the same sex, and beginning to construct the adult identity that Erikson describes as the central developmental task of this life stage. The research on single sex environments consistently finds that girls in those settings show greater willingness to take intellectual and social risks, report higher levels of comfort with their own developing bodies, and demonstrate stronger peer relationships built on the specific solidarity of shared female experience. Those benefits depend on the space actually being what it presents itself as being. When a biologically male child is present in that space, the girls in it are placed in a position that the developmental literature does not support and that safeguarding guidance does not anticipate. They are asked to manage the presence of a biological male in changing rooms, on overnight trips, and in the intimate social environment of a group that exists precisely to give them respite from mixed sex social pressure. They are asked to do this at the developmental moment when bodily privacy, peer trust, and the consolidation of a female identity are most significant. And they are asked to do it without their consent having been sought, and frequently without their parents having been informed. The schema formation argument drawn from Bem's work is relevant here: girls at this stage are actively constructing their understanding of what it means to be female, and an environment that systematically blurs the boundary between female and male does not loosen those schemas in a liberating way. It introduces confusion into a developmental process that requires clarity and safety to proceed well. There is also a relational dimension that deserves attention. Bowlby and Fonagy establish that the capacity for secure peer attachment depends on environments that are predictable, boundaried, and safe. An environment in which the boundaries of membership are uncertain, in which girls may not know whether a peer is biologically male or female, and in which raising a concern is socially costly, is not an environment that supports secure attachment or genuine peer intimacy. The harm is not dramatic or visible. It is the quieter harm of a developmental environment that has been subtly but significantly altered at a moment when its character matters most. The developmental concern for the boys themselves is less often discussed and deserves equal attention. Erikson and Marcia show that identity formation is a developmental achievement of adolescence requiring a genuine period of exploration and moratorium. A boy who is socially affirmed in a cross sex identity from an early age, placed in environments that reinforce that identity, and supported by institutional structures that treat the identity as settled, is a child whose developmental moratorium has been foreclosed before it properly began. The desistance literature, reporting resolution rates of sixty to ninety percent in pre-affirmation era cohorts depending on cohort and methodology, suggests that the majority of children expressing cross sex identification would, given time and space, arrive at a different understanding of themselves. Institutional social affirmation in single sex spaces of the other sex is not a neutral accommodation. It is an active intervention in a developmental process that the evidence suggests should not be foreclosed. There is also the Winnicottian dimension, and it deserves more than a passing reference. Winnicott's account of the False Self describes a developmental pattern in which a child, faced with an environment that makes belonging conditional on performing a particular identity, learns to present that identity fluently and consistently. The performance does not feel like performance. It feels entirely authentic, because the child has no access to the True Self that the compliance dynamic has suppressed. The False Self is not a mask the child knowingly wears. It is a structure the child has built in order to survive an environment that could not tolerate what lay beneath. The boy who joins Girl Guides as a girl is in precisely that environment. His belonging is conditional. It depends on the sustained presentation of a "female identity", affirmed by the institution, reinforced by every interaction within it, and socially costly to question or relinquish. The longer that environment persists, and the more significant the attachments formed within it, the more firmly the False Self structure is consolidated. The child is not being helped to discover who he is. He is being helped to become more fluent in a presentation that the institution requires. What makes this particularly serious from a developmental perspective is that the harm is invisible from the outside and unfelt from the inside, at least while the compliance dynamic holds. The boy will report that he is comfortable, that he belongs, that the identity is real. That is exactly what Winnicott's model predicts. The False Self is a successful adaptation. It works. The cost is paid later, when the True Self, having been suppressed through the years in which identity formation should have been occurring, eventually reasserts itself, often in the form of the acute distress that characterises detransition accounts. Those accounts, which describe not simply a change of mind but a profound sense of having been absent from one's own development, map with considerable precision onto the clinical picture Winnicott describes. None of this requires hostility toward any individual child. The appropriate response to a boy experiencing gender related distress is compassionate, thorough clinical assessment, careful attention to the possibility of underlying anxiety, attachment difficulties, or social factors, and the kind of watchful, patient support that allows development to proceed at its own pace. Placing that child in a single sex environment organised around an affirmed female identity does not provide that support. It provides the conditions in which a False Self consolidates, development forecloses, and the reckoning is deferred to a point when it will be considerably harder to bear.

@JournalistJill @Women___Exist How many women were saying they were really men so they could complete in men’s sport? I’m guessing the answer is none.

Was doing a bit of research and came across this… Incredible how they just knew who women were when they wouldn’t include them in the Olympics…

@bullrike @adweeks802 @ForWomenScot @betsvigi9 @BrianSuttererMD Ross Tucker has been very clear in this conversation about the current limitations of testing for DSDs, and the need for further, robust research.

@bullrike @adweeks802 @ForWomenScot @betsvigi9 @BrianSuttererMD Tucker and Collins have a paper that mentions it (The Science of Sex Verification and Athletic Performance) but I can’t access it. Women with CAH, PCOS, or asthma are also overrepresented in sports and athletics. And so are white women. How do we decide who to ban? 🤔

@interro_9 @jeronimobiohack @bluewmist Some will hold their edge for a long time. I have a couple of ceramic knives that haven’t needed to be sharpened for years.

@jeronimobiohack @bluewmist you have to sharpen any knife you buy? I dont get it

What is a 'buy it for life' item that is offensively expensive, but the moment you use it, you realize your entire life before that point was a lie?

My favorite part about the “protect the dolls” slogan is that you just have to research the history of it to know that “dolls” were the men who “passed” as women & “bricks” were the men who claim to be women but don’t “pass” as women. There are no “protect the bricks” movements. Their own movement is “twansphobic”. It’s highly amusing.

@sappholives83 What exactly do they see when they look at photos of themselves?

…is this a trick question?

Oxford University researchers have discovered the densest element yet known to science... The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as a critical morass. When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

If you're the mother who was reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone aloud to your child on the LNER train from London to Edinburgh yesterday, one of my grown up children was listening and says you did the voices brilliantly❤️🥹

It’s putting the blame in the wrong place. The blame lies squarely with people who believed they could circumvent the Equality Act and allow males into a female-only organisation. Just because Stonewall thought they would be able to get sex removed as a Protected Characteristic.

@BettsCaro @GBNEWS @Nanaakua1 Cannot there be a wine & pizza Olympics - for all-rounders? 🤔

@AlastairMcA30 Let's start with the fundamental principle: Should women's sport exclude male advantage? Yes or no? If no, then you're on another planet, and actually, quite a misogynist. If yes, then OK, let's think about what needs to excluded - male advantage. Who has that? Trans women. Males