Joanne

This is my story, my daughter’s school. The Headteacher and Local Authority to date have refused to explain to me how they ensured my daughter’s safety and dignity. The safeguarding issues are off the scale. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/0…

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.

@RightNUFC @HelenWebberley @Rich_Y_ @AndyBurnhamGM Medically castrates children and still thinks she’s the goody

@HelenWebberley @Rich_Y_ @AndyBurnhamGM You’re genuinely just becoming a parody now. Ridiculous woman.

I can see a lot of the pearl necklace crew twisting and pulling and twiddling. Ladies, it's very simple……… @AndyBurnhamGM

@NadiaWhittomeMP “Without issue” you say? You don’t care about the women paying an extraordinary and predictable price for your bonkers beliefs. Disgusting.

'Why should this always mean women being quieter and smaller?' Shelagh Fogarty reacts to Andy Burnham's interview with @lewis_goodall last April, where he said the UK needs a 'new sense of consensus' on the trans debate.

Every school governor in Brighton & Hove has received this letter from PSHE Brighton, reminding them of their statutory legal and safeguarding duties. Safeguarding, Law, and Governance: An Open Letter to Brighton & Hove School Governors pshebrighton.org/2026/05/18/saf…

The pupil’s parents had two legal options: attend a boys school or attend a co-educational school. Other parents with female children have chosen a single sex education for their children - that choice should not be taken away from them by inserting a boy into a single sex girls school. Females are entitled to single sex spaces by law.

@GrumpyOW If she feels so strongly about it, Angela should set up her own 72 gender-only schools. Problem solved.

I am creasing up reading some of the comments under this post on Facebook. Angela is 'educating' everyone about 'gender'. Initially, she told us there were 57 genders. Then she provides an update and says that there are "Actually now 72". And provides a list of some of them. I haven't had such a good laugh in a long time. My favourite is "Schrodigender: A gender identity that feels both present and absent at the same time" 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣

💯💯💯 #IStandWithSallGrover

@HallisseyC @itsafrogslife Anyone who thinks Parkrun isn’t competitive should go stand on the finishing line for half an hour - yesterday I saw a man nearly knock a woman off her feet to finish before her.

For anyone who is still uncertain about the competitive nature of parkrun, @itsafrogslife kindly provided this great summary from Grok yesterday. Most people know that parkrun classes itself as non-competitive, but many of its key components do create a competitive environment.

@SarahCactus1 Thank you, I’ve got an amazing legal team now (after a year of trying to get answers on my own) so I’m in good hands ❤️

@ThatTeacher45 this might be useful for your case, if you haven't seen it. Basically, organisations cannot call themselves single sex if they admit trans women or girls. The school must legally describe itself truthfully. Apologies if you've already seen it. Solidarity ❤️

Secretly admitting a trans-identifying boy to a girls-only school is not only a betrayal of the girls’ trust and contrary to the EA, it makes a complete mockery of the notion of safeguarding Consent was taken by stealth This is rape culture ideology apple.news/A7k9ykvBHRoqPR…

This is a safeguarding issue. Places labelled as only for women and girls should only be for women and girls, they should not include men or boys. I can’t believe we are still having to have this fight.

A boy should not attend an all girls school whether he identifies as a boy or not.

A mother has instructed lawyers to send a pre-action letter threatening to lodge a claim for judicial review against East Riding of Yorkshire council, after a boy who identified as female was secretly allowed entry to her daughter's all-girls school. thetimes.com/article/bff0c6…

An update from me: archive.is/2026.05.15-114…

#IStandWithSallGrover #TickleVGiggle

What happens when a girls school secretly admits a boy? "This is Stonewall’s mantra “Trans women are women. Get over it” in action, in the real world, carried out experimentally on children and their parents." transgendertrend.com/girls-school-s…

@NadiaWhittomeMP 6 Associations are different. No-one wants to stop anyone associating with anyone. If women want to associate with transwomen they can (with a bit of legal wriggling – the Act is badly drafted here). Just don’t advertise an association as a women’s group when it includes men /END

@AnneBevan1 Indeed. I would love the share the emails where she lies and gaslights me. Awful.

@TerfTeach Thanks. So the head feels she is not answerable to the parents.

This is my story, my daughter’s school. The Headteacher and Local Authority to date have refused to explain to me how they ensured my daughter’s safety and dignity. The safeguarding issues are off the scale. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/0…

@AnneBevan1 It’s a state school

@TerfTeach If it's a fee-paying school they must have committed an offence under the Trade Description Act. Consumer Protection laws also. Years of fees.