TabbyTail

So what we are seeing now is not a conflict between the bigoted (or sensible) middle-aged and the progressive (or misguided) young, but between two generations of gender nonconformists whose approaches to resisting gender expectations are difficult to reconcile.

@JennyAscendant That's ironic, given that women have been bullied into giving up our freedom of association and even the words we use to describe our bodies and experiences because some in the trans community have such fragile identities they demand constant validation from everyone else.

“Women as support creatures” is quite revealing. Women are not being asked to act as anyone’s “support creature”—that says more about how you view women than anything else. The legal issue is how service providers lawfully design and deliver services under the Equality Act. That means considering sex-based provision, privacy, dignity, safety, gender reassignment, legitimate aims and proportionality. Turning women into props in a grievance narrative while pretending the Act creates automatic blanket exclusion is not defending women. It is denigrating them as fragile objects whose rights can only exist if another protected group is erased from the analysis.

@ffenics @jk_rowling Even if all that were true, it would have no relevance to the BBC's woeful misreporting.

@jk_rowling The truth is that transgender people exist. The truth is that there is no research that concludes your opinion about trans people, especially trans women, is correct. The truth is you are trying to exclude trans people based on very basic biology and ignoring the nuance.

Essential 🧵on the BBC and the internal battle being waged over truth versus ideology 👇

@JENBROOK8 @ifellonithonest Absolutely. So much time wasted trying to get the whole world to pledge allegiance to a lie. Let's just go back to single-sex spaces being for a single sex and gender-nonconforming children being accepted not medicalised, and let the tiny minority adapt.

@ifellonithonest Vast majority of Brits are far more bothered about the cost of living crisis and the housing crisis than your wierd obssession with the genitals of a tiny minority of the population. Can we just pause and deal with important stuff that affects all our daily lives, thanks.

Can we just pause a minute to consider how utterly bonkers mental it is, that it took 3 private citizens, 3 women, years of stress, fundraising, campaigning AND 3 COURT CASES ONE OF THEM TO THE SUPREME COURT, for the Scottish government to accept that women don’t have cocks

Yesterday the BMA annual conference voted, in effect, against the Leadbeater/Edwards Bill - and against the Parliament Acts plan. The bill is fundamentally flawed. They say assisted dying legislation MUST include at least six safeguards missing from the Bill. 1⃣Specify that assisted dying is not a medical treatment 2⃣Must not alter the fundamental principles of the NHS (Clause 41 explicitly permits this) 3⃣Require an opt-in model for all providers (not in the Bill) 4⃣Requires that resident doctors are to be specifically excluded from formal involvement (not in the Bill) 5⃣Requires that any doctor must undergo specific training and national accreditation (Bill gives ministers close to carte blanche) 6⃣Requires that the “co-ordinating doctor” for patients undertaking assisted dying must be on an assisted dying specialist register (not in the Bill

I am begging critics of the puberty blocker trial to stop getting lost in the weeds arguing about research ethics, Gillick competence, informed consent, fertility preservation and the like. The NHS’s refusal to complete the Data Linkage Study (DLS) before proceeding with a new trial is the ONLY argument worth making on this issue. Everything else is a distraction. The DLS would find out what has happened to all the children who have already taken puberty blockers. There is NO justification for proceeding with a puberty blocker trial before the DLS is complete. The entire programme of future research in this area should be informed by its results. The fact that the NHS is getting ready to run a live experiment on vulnerable children before it has even established the fate of those it has already experimented on is utterly damning. The deeply disappointing Dr Cass should be widely derided for her ridiculous comments on ‘harm reduction’. The DLS IS harm reduction. Critics of the trial must stop fighting on their opponents turf by quibbling over technical details. We need to relentlessly force the DLS onto the agenda and expose the shameful hypocrisy of the NHS. DO THE DLS. #DotheDLS bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Today is a good day to remind our politicians that public want politicians that make their lives better where they live and the politicians might not want to do that because they care about their own pet cause abroad or their narrow identity politic but politicians need to realise they cant blame the public or change them but the public can hold them to account and change them

@zatzi Don't forget the overly pushy staff.

I’m fascinated by how Lush survives. They pump high streets with the most repellent and obnoxious smells that make passersby sneeze and feel sick. The one bath bomb I was once given made the bath look like it was filled with urine from a dehydrated camel (photo). It smelt as bad too. On top of the vile smell and unappealing aesthetics the company has very divisive and overtly biased politics. How is that a successful business model?

@bally968 @francesweetman With Labour's majority, all he needs is the support of enough of the PLP.

@francesweetman The good people of Makerfield voted. And this is parliamentary democracy - a pretty good system that allowed the country to ditch Chamberlain for Churchill when we were really up against it. But Burnham might need a new mandate if he wants to do anything significant.

@WingsScotland !!!

Just had the most *apocalyptic* thunderstorm in Bath (where we do get good ones). Only rained for 10 minutes, but so hard that it did this in a part of town right up the hill that’s never flooded in known history.

@miroirdufou @jk_rowling And we should also let lesbians define themselves as same-sex attracted, and provide single-sex facilities for those who believe sex is defined by biology, right? If not, why is it okay with you to coerce some people and not others?

@jk_rowling And we should let them live as they please, without ridicule, or coercion, and adjust our choices about categorisation, and the language we use, and our social structures, accordingly.

You might find it difficult to do two things at once, Paul, but I find it remarkably easy to enjoy the millions I've made while continuing to care about women's rights.

@miroirdufou @jk_rowling So what does a trans woman have in common with a biological woman that justifies putting them in the same category?

@jk_rowling These assertions reflect choices about categorisation. made for specific uses. We know, so far, relatively little about how brain development (in terms of the structures that create desire, sense of self etc) relates to other sexual development. (cont).

‘My fear is simple: that abused, disabled and vulnerable women — already made to feel like a burden by those who control them — will be coerced into early deaths while the safeguards I fought for are quietly stripped away.’ Labour’s Naz Shah with a deeply moving piece highlighting the profound danger of the assisted dying bill. thetimes.com/comment/column…

@jules20thC @stuey_beef @RosieDuffield1 David Davies was supportive and hosted an 'A Womans Place' event in the Houses of Parliament back in 2018. Kemi has consistently spoken up since meeting Kiera Bell. spectator.com/article/this-m…

@stuey_beef Did any of the Tories care about this stuff when they were in charge? I can only remember @RosieDuffield1 standing up against it back then as well..,

Badenoch has chosen her ground carefully. She’s not trying to re‑write Cass or reopen routine prescribing; she’s going straight at the weakest point: an experimental protocol that makes participation the only NHS route to blockers and which has already been paused once for safety concerns. By forcing a Commons vote, she drags Labour MPs into the open on a question most of them would rather hide from their constituents: are you willing to vote, on the record, for giving puberty‑suppressing drugs to 11‑ to 15‑year‑olds in a trial your own independent reviewer describes as ethically and evidentially fraught? Her rhetoric – “no child is born in the wrong body”, “children must never be used as test subjects due to pressure from trans‑activists and bureaucrats” – is calibrated to align with Cass’s concerns while painting Streeting as captured by a lobby. Labour has left such a vacuum of moral clarity that the Tory leader can now cast herself as the defender of basic medical ethics and childhood, and that will resonate far beyond the traditional Tory base.

@WrathQueenof @jk_rowling @RooneyRachel @miroirdufou Well, they do say 'you could never understand so you just need to believe us'.

@jk_rowling @RooneyRachel @miroirdufou I’m just amazed the gender cultists haven’t followed the example of the Roman Catholic Church & just said ‘it’s an ineffable mystery: pray to accept it’. Yet.

@miroirdufou @jk_rowling @RooneyRachel That would be more believable if the 'small group of vulnerable trans people' condemned the threats of violence, rape and death that trans activists aim at women who want single-sex spaces. At this point only the intentionally ignorant want TW in women's spaces.

@jk_rowling @RooneyRachel FWIW, my best guess is you've dug yourself in very deep constructing an ideological framework that enables you to punish a small group of vulnerable trans people for the very real sins of deceitful and violent cis men. I don't know how you dig yourself out, except like this...

@afternews2 @littelray2 @LibertyLins22 @CommonishGround @LPerrins Maybe they hope that the issues with the parents are temporary and that the baby will be reunited with its birth family? (Not my field though.)

@littelray2 @LibertyLins22 @CommonishGround @LPerrins WHY would that be??? Build bonds to break them???

A very important report on the adoption agency Adoption now. This agency is the one that placed Preston Davey with the gay couple that murdered him within 115 days. It found the agency pledged to focus on “increasing the number of LGBTQ+ applicants” the year after baby Preston was murdered, and to examine “the barriers to single males seeking to adopt”.

@LPerrins "We don’t expect teachers to be paedophiles,”?!! Every year, teachers have to do training on the Keeping Children Safe in Education guidelines, which explicitly warns that no-one is beyond suspicion and gives instructions on who to report to.

However, Prof Selwyn queried the suggestion, raised by baby Preston’s grandmother Debbie Davey, that the couple’s sexuality may have made social workers slower to raise concerns for fear of being accused of homophobia. She said the greater issue was that Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley appeared “very middle class, very professional”, and Varley, a head of year at a high school, was “highly manipulative”. That, she said, may have made social workers and medics less suspicious. “We don’t expect teachers to be paedophiles,” she added.

@jan_murray I wonder if it's intentional that they are advertising something that is more socially acceptable for men than for women - something that women can do if they pretend to be men? This is more than just bodily acceptance.

The LGBT Foundation is also presenting the removal of healthy breasts as something carefree and empowering. This is, of course, a personal decision that adults are entitled to make. But there is a difference between respecting people’s choices and promoting major, irreversible surgery with slogans such as: “Sun out. Top off. No second thoughts.” And given that cosmetic surgery advertising is now tightly regulated, surely responsible organisations should be encouraging careful reflection, rather than slogans like “No second thoughts.”

@echobirdy @jan_murray Why 'uplifted and celebrated'? Accepted is enough, surely? Do you uplift and celebrate people who don't make that choice? If not, you're not being morally neutral.

@jan_murray Again, elective surgery (such as top surgery) is morally neutral, and absolutely an empowering choice to make for people who want it. Those people deserve to be uplifted and celebrated. People who DON'T want it obviously do not have to. I don't see what's so sinister here.

@miroirdufou @jk_rowling Er - YOU were the one making normative claims about language use, when you claimed that the majority of women think 'woman' is a social not biological category.

@jk_rowling Where you state what you think are facts, what you are in fact doing is making normative claims about language use, based on a premise that being trans is a dangerous disorder that needs to be corrected, not a normal variation that should be accommodated, socially & medically.