Jo-Anne Pugh

I don’t doubt the humane motives of #AssistedDying campaigners. Or that public opinion is sympathetic. So why did the Bill fail? Short 🧵

Changed times. Scottish Labour chose GRR rebel @CMochan to launch their women's manifesto. Good to see. (Will post it once I can find it online.) scotsman.com/news/politics/…

Make sure you read the election manifestos Make your vote an informed one We know we want candidates to commit to prioritising single sex spaces and implementation of the Supreme Court ruling Women and girls deserve clear lawful protections

Please apologise to Andrew Baxter. I was all set to vote tactically for him until your complete failure tonight to condemn putting trans-identifying men in women’s prisons. It really wasn’t difficult. It’s the law, it’s the majority view, it’s sensible - but you couldn’t do it.

I'm proud and grateful to have been named as author of one of the Times' 25 best non-fiction books of the 21st century.

The menu ( in Welsh ) of Caffi Spam at Colwyn Bay for the unveiling of the Terry Jones statue this afternoon. #montypython

How or why a charity like @scope could do this is beyond me. The cowardliness, cruelty, stupidity, straight up discriminatory unlawfulness and the uninclusive unkindness of it is genuinely mystifying.

This is bonkers 👇

Guardian US opinion columnist on left; Guardian UK sports writer on right. Both articles published on the same day, three hours apart. Never seen the schism within the organisation laid out so clearly. (A number of UK staff think some US staff are bonkers.)

1. Here is Alistair Campbell’s daughter showing us just how much of a trans maiden she is & how much she hates women, especially the women who spoke up at the Supreme Court. I think it’s pretty obvious who is helping AC’s form his opinions. Full video in part 2.

So, so good by @glosswitch

NHS Doctor Attacks Videographer genderblog.net/nhs-doctor-att…

This picture says so much. "The future is inclusive" ....says a man who served 30 years for first kidnapping and torture and then attempted murder. I hope @Girlguiding is paying attention to who is protesting against it following the law and getting back to safeguarding.

@VoteGreen29 @Ross_Greer @scottishgreens @BBCScotland @Gillian_Mackay1 @as_penarth @ZackPolanski Can you run me through the numbers please? What is your definition of super-rich, how many are there are in Scotland now, how you would structure the tax/what would it raise and what is your estimate for how many there would be resident after 12 months? Bit vague on the leaflet.

Watch @Ross_Greer of @scottishgreens on Scottish Election Debate Night Leaders Special right now on @BBCScotland #bbcdn #Holyrood #ScottishElection #MayElections @Gillian_Mackay1 @as_penarth @ZackPolanski

@JournoStephen It’s being so cheery that keeps you going, isn’t it? (Made me laugh, mind you)

And now on BBC One Scotland, John Swinney, who will be Scottish first minister on May 8, and some other people, who won’t.

SG funded charities Equality Network & LGBTYS organised an LGBTQIA+ hustings attended by a government minister & several MSPs. The Herald was told it could not report or attend & was initially asked to leave. Serious questions about political gatekeeping & transparency here.

There is no Woman of the Day today. Instead, I want to explain why I do what I do. No one really knows who first said, “History is written by the victors” but I’d bet you any odds it was a man. Think of your schooldays and count the number of times you learned about the roles played by women in shaping history, other than regnant Queens and perhaps Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale. Yet women lived, worked, networked, debated, campaigned, organised, invented things and built them too - but you’d never know this if your lessons, like mine, were confined to history books. For a practical example, just look around you. Fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, ironing board, home security system, call waiting system, car heater and windscreen wipers, even the very first computer algorithm: all invented by women. Are you surprised? Confined to the house, denied access to higher education, barred from engineering, denied entry to all branches of science and the professions for centuries, those bright analytical minds turned their attention to their immediate surroundings and saw what was needed to free them from domestic drudgery. In return, history ignored women’s achievements, glossed over them or consigned them to dusty footnotes. If all else failed, their work was credited to - or stolen by - men, the phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect, first identified by feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1870. In 1993, it was named for her by historian Margaret Rossiter who said, “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place’ in science was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.” Once you see it, you cannot unsee it - the Matilda Effect is everywhere - but now substitute ‘history’ for ‘science’. The proposition still stands. What I try to do is to pierce holes in that camouflage by writing about the almost-invisible women of history who overcame manmade barriers and changed the world. As a Second Wave feminist, I thought we’d won all the big battles, that it was just a matter of mopping up the resisters and dragging them into the 20th century. I did my bit to redress the balance in an overwhelmingly male environment, but how had I managed to miss the barefaced theft of our words, our spaces and services, our sports? How had we suddenly been reduced to a walking collection of body parts? It was a wake-up call. Once I saw, I couldn’t unsee the terrible damage being done to girls and young women who did not conform to the offensive sexist stereotypes being imposed on them by men who mimic women and their inane female cheerleaders. It made me fearful for non-conforming girls: tomboys. They need to see strong women as role models, women who don’t care about performing femininity, women who defy convention and do things their way. If you can see it, you can be it. So I went digging around in those dusty footnotes, found a little gold and started from there. I found thrilling tales of women who were inventive, resourceful and brave. Then I started sharing what I found more widely, tied to the calendar as Women of the Day. How do I find them? Often by pure chance. I go looking for one woman, spot a couple more names along the way - women whose stories really resonate with me - and file them away for the right time. Women’s history had been right under my nose the whole time. I just hadn’t realised that you needed to dig a little. The rather unexpected bonus was that in giving them a voice, I found mine. I am a conspicuously law-abiding woman, a former prison governor, and if you had told me when I retired that one day, I’d be standing outside a police station in protest at the hounding of gender critical women and singing “Go catch some rapists” to the tune of Guantanamera, I’d have advised you to seek immediate medical attention for the effects of the bump to your head. But here I am, telling women’s stories, and behind the scenes, pursuing a second career as a women’s rights activist. I won’t ever fall asleep at the wheel again. Tomorrow, I’m off to Cardiff with my Women of Wessex sisters, to protest about @bphillipsonmp’s inexplicable decision to delay laying the EHRC Code of Practice before Parliament — and make no mistake about it. It IS a decision; one that is causing real harm and damage to the rights of women and the protection of children. Some of you come for the occasional stories of women in history hiding in plain sight, but I hope you stay because you care about fairness and safety for women. For now, I leave you with this thought from the 1949 memoirs of Somerset suffragette Nelly Crocker (1872-1962): “Modern young women seem unaware of the price paid for their political and social emancipation, and modern historians have greatly ignored the struggle”.

So having been compared to a holocaust denier by a local cllr (who was once a friend) Stroud Brewery and Taproom have cancelled the event organised by GlosWomen. @robjessel16 & I will be taking advice.

The class war is alive and well, particularly in the trenches where privately educated middle class journos dismiss the genuine concerns of shop workers who have to face this behaviour regularly.

I wonder where Kate suggests we put the Ian Huntley or Levi Bellfields of this world?