A Bindoff

🎼NOW OUT IN PAPERBACK🎼

@dickydickypand1 You made us laugh in the darkest days so my vote is that you never change.

I can't help noticing that a few GC accounts have obviously got bored of my High Quality Snark & Swearing and blocked me. Do I?

@LittleHardman You just missed one of its greatest controversies (pshaw)

Six years after everyone else, I’ve got into Wordle.

@msjlindsay @Jebadoo2 I may be wrong but I doubt it will be seen by many kids outside a particular London/home counties cohort; and they are already immersed up to their eyeballs, poor kids.

Oh, FFS, of course they did. Whatever progress is made legally, whatever medical scandals continue to be exposed, you can always rely on regressive, bubble-world playwrights, poets, actors, and arts wankers - utterly divorced from reality - to catapult us backwards.

@aytchellesse Interesting that she tries to borrow authority from the book of Proverbs, & how apt a quote, although I’m not sure she does it justice: ‘The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know what they stumble over.’ (4.19). ‘The path of the righteous is like the dawn…’

here's yale philosopher robin dembroff's oxford university press book, pictured with a recent book from the same publisher—and for comparison (next photo) a junior fiction book called "lexie moon and the remote control catastrophe".

Very grateful to Steve Whitaker at The Yorkshire Times for this look at my poem 'Marky'. The Irish proverb epigraph translates as 'It is often a man's mouth broke his nose'.

@peterjukes @AudreySuffolk What rights are granted to the group of humans who are female, collectively known as ‘women’, under the EA?

@AudreySuffolk I don’t doubt that. But those differences are not immutable. The biology doesn’t get the rights. Humans do

A commentator who really needs to attend an Introduction to Equality Act course. He would learn about the 9 protected characteristics; universality; prohibited conduct; exceptions; proportionality; and balancing conflicts of rights by reference to evidence and context.

@MForstater Ironically, isn’t biology the ultimate ‘backstop’?

"Using biology as a backstop" 🤡 It so insulting. As if women don't really experience sex discrimination, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, menopause etc... we are just "using biology as a backstop" when what we should really be focusing on is hair, clothes and makeup.

@sueveneer He hasn’t quite mastered call and response here, has he 😉

Had sleepless night. Struggled to get up this morning and face a day without him. I mean what’s the point of anything now? Going to chain myself to radiator until he returns. 😿

@peterjukes @uppity_witch @ukvillafan ‘If you’d ever paid any attention…’ I can only speak for myself, but when I first encountered your views some years ago on Twitter it was obvious at once that your bog-standard misogyny wasn’t worth my attention. I expect other women rapidly reached the same conclusion.

@uppity_witch @ukvillafan I never said it could if you’d ever paid any attention. But in the clash of rights between people, using our evolving understanding of science as an absolute has a terrifying history. There are other arguments to be made by gender critical feminists

This is the voice, ironically, of left-wing absolutism, of condescending male privilege, of disingenuous anti-feminist propaganda, of the dying, rattling breaths of transgenderism, of the cowardly patriarchy. It’s a lie, of course, that feminism uses biology as any sort of ‘backstop’. Biology is front and centre, the essence of femaleness. Nor does recognising the binary, immutable nature of biological sex in humans logically commit anyone to treating ethnicity the same way. Sex is a reproductive binary defined by anisogamy (small vs large gametes). Human population structure for ethnicity involves ancestry, genetic clusters, and clines with far more gradation. Plenty of people who are strict biological realists on sex reject ethnic essentialism or racial immutability claims. Guilt-by-association via one writer’s broader views is intellectually, logically and philosophically weak. Jukes knows all this, but in true activist fashion, makes a conscious decision to devalue sex as the central component of womanhood so that he can propagandise in favour of men breaching women’s boundaries. It is classic misogyny with no window dressing, propaganda not journalism

I think people who've rocked up ten seconds ago on an issue that stealthily made its way through everyone's workplaces, entire sectors, and - even *if* one used 'preferred pronouns' or whatever - absolutely destroyed some people's lives if they showed an inch of opposition to it, should show more understanding and empathy - particularly of the disparity between the treatment of women vs men who oppose all of this. Not everyone is particularly political; some people were attempting to find a way to oppose this without making it their entire life; some were - rightly - terrified. I know I was. I wasn't wealthy. I didn't have a huge safety net. I was single, solo, and in the sodding arts, which in many ways was ground zero of all of this utter bullshit in Scotland. Some were indeed trying to 'be kind', or just find some way through this, because, prior to this issue entering their lives, they trusted people wouldn't be SO mental to actually believe those who identify as 'trans women' are literally women. And most people really, really just wanted it to goooo awaaaaay. I was one of the latter. I always thought it fucking insane and just really, really wanted it to stop - wrongly assuming our legislators would do that, and wrongly assuming that, as soon as people knew what was happening, there would be so much opposition that it would. I don't recall using 'transwomen,' but I did use 'male bodied' and all the bullshit ways we tried to placate these terrifying activists in our lives (I was in the arts, there were a lot of them, and in my inbox with frequency) and at one point I used some people's preferred pronouns - usually if I'd only ever known that person as being referred to as 'she'. (Meeting trans widows stopped that, and I wouldn't do so now.) We don't need lectures from men on how much these pricks have 'won' from us, and we always knew they were men. They didn't 'win' what they did (temporarily, I wager) because some occasionally called them 'transwomen.' They did so because extremely powerful people LET them, and watched us be hounded to within an inch of our sanity for standing against all of this. Cheers for the belated snide though, sir.

@msjlindsay @AudreySuffolk Nice and safe to speak up now. He’ll have absolutely no clue what things were like at the beginning (by which I mean 2015 ish - I know some brave lesbians spoke out sooner) and by the way many of us understood language was central to the issue from the first.

@RosieDuffield1 @lnmackenzie1 Anything that intensifies visibility is a good thing, I think.

@lnmackenzie1 Nice, but EDMs are ultimately pointless and sadly change nothing, which is why many of us no longer sign them.

Early Day Motion on the Amnesty report, tabled by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi. edm.parliament.uk/early-day-moti…

@LissaKEvans There NEVER WAS

Was there ever such a noble nose?

@SarahCorbe87537 @ForWomenScot @latsot JKR once said in passing, ‘women are very well protected at Beira’s Place’ - that’s all anyone who cares about you needs to know.

@ForWomenScot @latsot A friend recommended Beira's Place to me, as I never really had support. Mixed sex group CBT via NHS for "anxiety" wasn't helpful; the rape crisis local to me accepted -welcomed- men as service users and as staff. Now what do I tell my relatives? I'm going to the "bigot" place?

On the statement by Beira's Place and the letter sent by FWS heraldscotland.com/news/26274915.…

Euan @euanmccolm is right, Amnesty is wrong. The (mainly) women in movement are nothing like passive and indistinguishable bits of snow being rolled into a ball by some external designer. Perhaps the most fundamental failure in all of this has been how powerful organisations have discounted the agency of ordinary women, as they sought to give our rights away.

@jk_rowling @JamesWong66 @JohnJamesNI And the Supreme Court said we were allowed to.

@JamesWong66 @JohnJamesNI We said ‘no’.

The issuer of that vile statement is a man, as anyone with even 1% vision could tell you. Specifically, he’s a man who said he hoped she died handcuffed to a bed and screaming in agony.

@holland_tom That would have been great but some of us will never be happy until you can get Tom Hollandest on too.

I did think it would be fun to have Tom Hollander come on at the end. x.com/JournoStephen/…

@WomensSpaceIre @5uffragette @WomensRightsNet @amnesty You should read what @bindelj has written about them. The other thing to note is that of all the charities and organisations my charity works with in Afghanistan - NOT ONE of them has ever had any help or contact from Amnesty - not so much as a peep

Well said by Kate.