Wendy Jotcham

At least 14 males ran in the Female category in UK parkrun today. One got 1st Female. He’s now amassed 101 1st Female finishes - 100 more than the 1st Male he got once in nearly 5 years running in the Male category. Another was Labour councillor Kaz Self who famously tried…

@millihill It was a climate scientist (or doctor?) talking about which groups were most at risk in very hot weather. Between 8 and 9. Sounded perfectly reasonable otherwise.

@wendy2345 Who was that do you know?

Have their been any examples of the erasure of women from language recently eg birthing people, nursing parents and similar? As some may know, I document them on my substack but they seem to be slowing down...? Cheers all xx

72 years ago today, Diane Leather became the first woman to run a sub 5 minute mile. Sadly, she gets almost no recognition compared to Roger Bannister’s sub 4 minute mile. Women deserve much better then this. Women’s sporting achievements must be celebrated as much as the men’s.

These are questions that should be answered. The EHRC is the *independent* regulator of the Equality Act.

Sport England are still giving tax payers money to sports that do not protect the female categories inside their sports! Which is law. This IS sex discrimination. And absolutely not what the general public wants either. Sort it out @Sport_England

Sunderland Minister posting on FB that they know & understand the law on provision of single sex spaces & are chosing to ignore it. Religious buildings are not above the law. Is this acceptable to you @bphillipsonMP @churchofengland?

With this result, this man has now got 100 1st Female finishes. This thread I did when he was on nearly 60 1st Female finishes gives some facts about the women who’ve been robbed of 1st Female by this man.👇 I thought this man would now have 99 1st F finishes. But towards…

I completely disagree with this comment. He’s a public servant, doing his job. You may disagree with him, and he may have made a mistake (who doesn’t) but he should not be pilloried in this way. Otherwise, who would wish to be a judge?

"Gender war is over, now we need leadership" This excellent article by Janice Turner @VictoriaPeckham says it all.... thetimes.com/comment/column…

@SonyaDouglas Even by other women! Eg Bridget Phillipson, with her shameful remarks.

‘Whiny’ ‘Frothing’ ‘Shrill’ I’m sensing a pattern in the way women’s voices get dismissed

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.

There's a serious lack of judgment here, and even worse, a clear lack of comprehension by (many) judges of how dangerous teenage rapists are. It sends a terrible message to every other would-be offender, and in the age of drink spiking and planned sexual assault, this is more relevant than ever. But the victim WILL serve a life sentence. That rape will play on a loop behind her eyes, often when she least expects, it until the day she dies. The sentence must be reviewed, HHJ Nick Rowland needs to be educated, and generally sentences across the board for SA and rape should be increased.

Someone should ask @bphillipsonMP if when she referred to "frothing" activists on both sides of single-sex spaces debate, she was thinking of the transactivists who left bottles of piss outside @KishwerFalkner @EHRC offices (link follows for anyone who missed this)

@eelemsti @soniasodha @matt_tennant @RichParkerLab Yes, but don’t include entering spaces reserved for women.

@soniasodha @matt_tennant @RichParkerLab But Sonia, you fail to understand that the majority of women - including many, many lesbians - are inclusive and welcoming to trans women and trans men. Trans people have rights too. And those are enshrined in law.

West Midlands emergency services have confirmed they won’t be participating in Birmingham Pride this weekend, citing legal uncertainty following a High Court ruling on uniformed attendance at Pride events. I want to be clear about where I stand.

@JamesMelville Not taken us into an American war.

Name one notable achievement by Keir Starmer since he has become Prime Minister?

"Sport can be inclusive. . .sport can be competitive. . .you can have both" Very sensible words from Sophie Power here! 💪🏃‍♀️ #makeparkrunfairforall

Fantastic from @ShelaghFogarty

There's something incredibly callous about Burnham's casual reference to women's experience of male violence as a reason why they might want spaces of their own ("maybe that's what makes these women so difficult") >

Just leaving this here...