Dr Ailsa Hollinshead

Excellent explainer of the new IOC eligibility rules. You can’t get clearer than this: ‘Transgender athletes are not excluded from IOC events, including the Olympic Games. Like all other athletes, they are eligible to compete in the category that aligns with their biological sex.’ And we are pleased that the IOC has made clear that women who ‘identify as males’ cannot compete if they have used testosterone or other androgens - doping is doping. ‘Transgender athletes who are biologically female – as per the scientific eligibility requirement – and who meet qualification standards may compete in the female category as long as they have not used testosterone or other androgens.’ We’re liking the new broom at the IOC. olympics.com/ioc/athletes/m…

Unbelievable. This girl has been banned from the University of Guelph campus FOR LIFE due to being in the vicinity of her family members conversation with a group of people. The Campus Safety Office felt that what they were talking about was sufficient enough to ban her & her family member from being anywhere on University of Guelph property forever. Canada is in trouble.

Can someone please explain, in very simple language, how growing almonds in a Californian desert, draining the local aquifer until the ground subsides, spraying the entire crop with fungicides because almonds can't survive without them, killing off the commercial bee population in the process, then refrigerating the harvest and shipping it six thousand miles to Britain is environmentally friendly, but buying a piece of beef from a farmer twelve miles down the road, whose cattle eat the grass that grows in the rain that falls on the hills that have been there since before anyone had opinions about this, is a planetary emergency? Asking for the cow.

Hi @campbellclaret - in your latest clip - doing the rounds on X - you suggest the women in the first picture are the ones causing toxicity in the gender debate but the individuals in the other three pix are ‘marginalised and put upon’ Do you realise what this makes you?

#OneYearLater #ForWomenScotlandDay

A Times headline tells us that Bridget Phillipson, our hyper diligent Education Secretary, "calls for single-sex spaces to be more inclusive". If report is accurate, Phillipson means "inclusive" of blokes, which would mean single-sex spaces would not be single-sex spaces. Doh.

@staylorish And wasn’t a great MSP when we lived in her constituency. Only seemed to be interested in snp stuff.

Deidre Brock’s lame response to her ludicrous remark about “not subscribing to” reading, writing, and arithmetic in education.

@nopejpg4 @avid_reader9 @staylorish Back in my day it was about who/how many you had sex with and when e.g. before marriage or with a same sex partner. It meant choosing how to dress. Where to walk. To refuse rape. It’s not the distortion it’s become nowadays.

@avid_reader9 @staylorish My body my choice is more like 3rd wave

Alan Cumming on how women have ruined feminism for him.

@KevinFrench63 @avid_reader9 @staylorish As a second wave UK feminist I assure you it was about equality AND the right to bodily autonomy. Proper sex education (Marie Stopes) & contraception were part of 1st wave feminism. 2nd wave included abortion rights in UK. Also Reclaim the Night re rape. Not just equality.

@avid_reader9 @staylorish That's American 2nd Wave Feminist. In the UK it was equal pay for equal work. The 1st and the 3rd are the same.

@staylorish We're the ones on the left and center. Your contingent is on the right. Have fun!

This is such a nonsense and it’s a pity that the journalist interviewing him doesn’t challenge him. Trans people have equal rights under the law across the UK. They just don’t have the right to self identify into the opposite sex. That’s not a right that anyone has.

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary We couldn't have known how important the 16th of April would become when we formed Women Won't Wheesht. It's been a full 12 months since For Women Scotland's monumental win in the Supreme Court. We owe those tenacious, brave women such a debt of gratitude.

Judge Nigel Peters KC told Rumis that if he'd been younger, he'd have been sent to prison. Absolute crap. They ALL walk free, all ages, with pathetic sob stories - every excuse going. This horrific crime has been decriminalised by stealth. Sickening.

➡️ I live in a country where a woman was jailed for tweeting her upset and outrage about the barbaric murder of little girls.. Yet a man who downloaded and "enjoyed" 75,000 sickening images and videos of babies being r-ped and tortured walks free. There is no justice in the UK

Wtaf????

@WWWheesht @CallieMac009 😂😂 armoured owl? 🦉 😂👍🏼

@WWWheesht @CallieMac009 Golden toblerone? Delivered in one of those hessian sacks I see mention of 😉👍🏼🙏🙏🙏

Just a quick note. If you haven't been "payed" for Saturday, please drop us a note. We were using the same delivery service that Terf HQ use for the monthly gold bullion & cheques from Russia, but we believe there may be some transportation delays due to the issues with the Strait of Hormuz. Just a reminder of the pay scales: £1,000 - Walk by & look interested £2,000 - Stay for >10 mins £3,000 - Stay for an hour £4,000 - Stay for an hour & hold banner £5,000 - Stay for an hour, hold banner, clap at the end of, at least, 2 speeches. £10,000 - Top Terf Package Stay for an hour Hold banner Clap at the end of each speech Whoop at least once Sing along to For Women's Rights Thank Police for their assistance Dispose of any litter Come to pub

Never before have I devoted two consecutive days to one Woman of the Day, but Josephine Butler, born 198 years ago yesterday in Milfield, Northumberland, is an honourable exception. Even this, my second post about her, doesn’t touch on her tireless campaigning for women’s suffrage and for better education for girls. Today is about the widespread scandal that confronted her when she was trying to extricate women from the steel jaws of steel rape. Child prostitution. In the 1870s and 1880s, there was a lucrative and lively trade to the Continent in the trafficking of British girls as young as 12 to European brothels. There was no point in appealing to the police over there. They were part of the problem. In fact, Josephine was instrumental in securing the removal from office of a Belgian chief of police. She filed a deposition and sent it to both the Procureur du Roi (Chief Prosecutor) and the British Home Secretary. As a result, the deputy police chief and twelve brothel owners complicit in a conspiracy of kidnapping, trafficking and child rape, were tried and imprisoned — but the practice still flourished. “Economics lie at the very root of practical morality." For ten years, Josephine had relentlessly campaigned for the age of consent to be raised from 13, to no avail. There were too many men far too keenly interested in young girls held in brothels — virgins attracted a special premium — for the lethargic government to act. It was time to go public. “We all feel now that the time is come when we must appeal to the judgement of the public, so as to bring the condemnation of public opinion to bear upon these men, seeing that our laws give us no hold whatever upon them, and are not likely to do, so long as our legislators continue to refuse us the small boon we ask.” Josephine enlisted the help of William Stead, influential crusading editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead, whose own mother had campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Acts. He ran a series of highly controversial articles about child prostitution — an early form of investigative journalism — and to illustrate his point, purchased a 13 year old girl named Eliza Armstrong from her mother for £5 on 3 June 1885. Eliza was taken to a London brothel. chloroformed, examined by a midwife to confirm her virginity, examined by a doctor — I know, I know. It was all part of a staged demonstration — and spirited away to a safe foster home in France with the help of Florence Booth of the Salvation Army. The newspaper articles threw Victorians into a state of moral panic. They pulled no punches, none at all. Copies changed hands for twenty times their original value and the office was besieged by 10,000 members of the public. Public demand was so great that the Gazette's supply of paper ran out and had to be replenished with supplies from the rival Globe. On 16 July 1885, shortly after the articles appeared, Josephine capitalised on the public outrage by delivering a major speech at Exeter Hall in London, and calling once again for greater protection for young girls, and the raising of the age of consent. This helped to sustain public pressure on Parliament, which had little choice but to revisit a stalled bill. On 14 August 1885, Parliament bowed to pressure and passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. It raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16; criminalised the procurement of girls for prostitution via threats, fraud, or drugs; outlawed the abduction of girls under 18 for carnal knowledge; strengthened measures against brothels; and allowed greater police and court intervention to protect minors. What happened to Stead? He was tried at the Old Bailey. Eliza’s father objected to the £5 being handed to his wife, when in law, both mother and daughter were HIS property. The judge and jury agreed and sentenced Stead to three months for abduction on technical grounds. And how about Eliza? She was provided with education and training in domestic service, and some years later, wrote to Stead to thank him for saving her from her certain fate. She was the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, by the way. Josephine turned her attention to the next big scandal: India, where a British Major-General had issued standing orders for local girls — some as young as 11 — to be kept in special accommodation near Army camps, examined regularly (steel rape again) and for local commanders to ensure “the provision of a sufficient number of women, [and] to take care that they are sufficiently attractive” for the comfort of soldiers. She compared the girls to slaves and raised such a stink about it that public outrage forced the House of Commons to pass a unanimous resolution repealing the legislation and order the Indian government to stop the practice. During the course of her activism, Josephine Butler wrote more than 90 books and pamphlets, travelled countless miles around Britain and the world, changed the way feminists and suffragists conducted future struggles, and brought into the political fray groups of people that had never been active before. That’s why she was hailed by Millicent Fawcett as "the most distinguished Englishwoman of the nineteenth century". I think it’s about time a statue of Josephine Butler adorned the empty plinth in Parliament Square, along with her inspiring quote: “God and one woman make a majority".