Boudicca's daughter: 🦕 💚🤍💜

Possibly the funniest cartoon The Guardian has ever published.

Everyone agrees there should be gender neutral toilets for those who don't want to use the single sex toilets appropriate to their sex, but they don't want that. They want women to be forced to share with them. This is not a civil rights movement. It's a movement of bullying men.

Nobody much seems to like this.

🧵 I’m thrilled to have signed with @cintopress for my forthcoming book “WOMEN EXIST: how the gender critical movement defeated Stonewall Law” The book will explain how & why UK law has upheld women’s rights against the demands of transactivism…/1 cintopress.co.uk/women-exist.ht…

Yes. I now think we were always wrong to turn that blind eye: other women’s rights were never ours to give away, and we didn’t pay sufficient regard to the absolute entitlement of every woman to privacy without having to explain why it was particularly important to her.

Read this and weep.

@KishwerFalkner @KarrieboKarrie @thetimes I also note that she referred to the attacks on the EHRC’s offices. She knew it was the same men who demand all access passes to spaces where women are vulnerable. 🎁 Equalities watchdog tells trans activists personal attacks ‘have to stop’ telegraph.co.uk/gift/efd7610ab…

@soniasodha @emily4MK Specialist lawyer here Emily. Sonia’s right.

In both cases, police were uncaring, but only in one case does Starmer bend the knee

This story is so devastating to me. So it’s ADHD (formerly autism) & low IQ is it? They had had a high enough IQ to separate one of the girls from her phone/tracker,enough IQ to film it,enough IQ to post it enough IQ to stay calm & well behaved in court. I stand with the girls

Sad to read in @thetimes that Bridget Phillipson is blaming me for delay to EHRC Code. She certainly stoops low. She had Code for 3 months when she sent me this letter last November - no indication of any grandstanding then.

So an improvement on the dead loss you currently are.

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.

@GayGordon84 @Gaynotqueer1 I agree. My father's family are from London Colney and it's just a small village! I live in St. Albans (3 miles from London Colney), and as a lesbian, wouldn't consider attending as too overrun by the TQ+ fetishists.

@Gaynotqueer1 Why the hell would London Colney need a sodding pride? Ridiculous.

London Colney pride cancelled following removal of advertising banners.

This is the fundraiser set up by Henry Nowak's family. All money raised goes to a charity which helps bereaved families who suddenly lose children. 2wish.enthuse.com/pf/henry-nowak

@timespolitics correct ,the law enforced. Took a while but facts are now facts again

@NadiaWhittomeMP Women & girls need female-only single-sex spaces for our dignity, privacy and safety. The general public overwhelmingly agree. We see you (and we vote)...

While it appears that the government has successfully pushed back on some particularly harmful elements in the previous draft, the new Code of Practice will still lead to the exclusion of trans people from services and facilities that they have used without issue for a very long time. This will do nothing to improve women’s lives and the many struggles we face, but it will put trans people (and anyone perceived as trans) at increased risk of discrimination, harassment and violence. The Code unfortunately still represents the culmination of years of anti-trans campaigning from a small, well-funded minority who have had outsized influence in the media and in politics, and have weaponised the courts for their own ends. The legal situation for trans people is now deeply incoherent and means that it is untenable for them to be able live their lives with dignity. This is completely out of line with the values of equality that a Labour government is meant to champion. Instead of making this Code statutory, the government should be legislating to clarify and protect trans people’s rights, privacy and inclusion.

@DreyfusJames We should start a campaign. Make the Gents welcome ALL men...

By Rebecca Heath

This @thetimes article includes a poll: "Should single-sex facilities be provided on the basis of biological sex?" As with all other polling, the answer is a resounding yes. @UKLabour MPs should note this as they respond to publication of @EHRC Code today thetimes.com/article/b0750d…