A Yazidi woman, a Uighur woman and a Rohingya woman go into an emergency medical centre. "Isn't it dreadful about that genocide in the UK?" asks one. "What genocide is that?" "You know, the one involving men having to cycle against other men instead of women".
@HalifaxBank
@WarrenRichman
If you strive for equality and doing what's right, why do you have a pay gap between male and female staff of 27.8%, around twice the national average?
A society where only 2% of rapes are prosecuted but the police will arrest you promptly if a man complains you didn't call him woman on the internet. That's a society based on structural misogyny.
I've seen Owen Jones claim that people only accuse him of being a misogynist because he "supports trans rights". In reality, he only "supports trans rights" because he's a misogynist.
#OwenJonesIsAMisogynist
A national debate about exactly *when* it's OK to punch women in the face, and exactly *which* women it's OK to punch in the face, just about sums up the point the men's rights counter-revolution has reached in 2023.
Dr Hilary Cass, consultant paediatrician and former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, or Billy Bragg, Kajagoogoo-level minor 1980s pop star. Who to believe about puberty blockers?
@WesleyAntonyD
There was plenty of data. Unfortunately the Cass Report discarded huge amounts of medical evidence, both from the UK and across the world. Out of 102 studies into puberty blockers and hormones, only 2 were included by the Cass Review team.
If men aged 18 to 50 were banned from drinking alcohol would the number of lives saved and injuries prevented be greater or smaller than if women aged 18 to 50 were banned from drinking alcohol?
Grim to hear
@BBC6Music
using transphobic terms on the radio this morning. I think we all assumed it was a LGBTQ+ safe haven from the rest of the BBC, turns out not 😢
Who'd have thought that inventing a new movement that encourages angry inadequate men to shout at women while feeling righteous about it would prove so popular?
Today's particular pleasure is having punk youthsplained to me by a parcel of pious conformist newborns who would probably have been Leo Sayer fans if they'd been around in 1977.
I'm 61. 43 years into adulthood, nothing will ever make me believe that standing up for women's rights is right wing. Or that anyone doesn't really know who men or wonen are. Or that the preoccupations of bourgeois youth are anything but the evanescent wank of the privileged.
"No no, don't you see? *Our* vile misogynistic abuse of JK Rowling is good vile misogynistic abuse. The Sun's vile misogynistic abuse of JK Rowling is bad vile misogynistic abuse."
If being within half a mile of a JK Rowling book or people discussing biological sex makes you feel "unsafe", what words do you have left to describe the situation of women and girls in the face of the male violence pandemic?
I have no idea what parenting arrangements Owen Jones has in mind. The reason I'm mocking him is that for years he's argued that being a woman or lesbian is a matter of self-identification. But the minute he needs someone to provide large gametes, he knows exactly who has them.
For
#TransAwarenessWeek
, head to our blog as Dr Clara Barker reflects on the intersection of science, identity, and the influence of anti-science rhetoric on both:
@ClaraMBarker
As a teenager 40 years ago, I regularly got beaten up for wearing make-up and jewelry and dyeing my hair. I didn't realise that was a brilliant result compared with being castrated.
Has anyone seen a coherent argument as to why supporting trans rights activism is left wing and opposing it is right wing? I mean a substantive argument rather than "nazis agree with you" guilt by association bollocks. Because a lifetime on the left tells me the opposite is true.
Imagine joining a protection racket, following the rules slavishly, but finding out that in the end there's no protection, your reputation's trashed, your bank account's empty and the racketeers just walk away saying "nothing to do with us, guv".
#OtD
20 Feb 1988 20k people in Manchester marched against Margaret Thatcher's homophobic section 28 law, which made it illegal for public bodies to "promote" homosexuality, including teaching its "acceptability" in school
In the social justice system, misgendering offences against nonces are considered especially heinous. In the Sussex Police, the dedicated social media interns who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Gaslighting Unit.
Emma Hilton is getting shit from every side at the moment. We owe her so much for the knowledge and rigour she brings. She doesn't need to go through all this. She does so because she believes in science and fairness. Thank you.
With lesbians being denied freedom of association, forced underground and having their sexual orientation virtually criminalised, you'd think one of those large, publicly subsidised "LGBT" charities would be all over it. Yet ...
I'm an oldish bloke living in the UK. Today I walked the dog, cooked a Lancashire hotpot, despised modern football etc ... all the normal stuff. But the brilliant beautiful bravery of Spanish feminists actually brought a tear to my eye. What an inspiration. We can win.
Milk Pours are currently happening across the UK. All are concerned individuals calling on the government to give us a livable future, a
#PlantBasedFuture
Here's the latest milk pour happening in Edinburgh
@waitrose
I think something's changing. By messing so egregiously with JKR the genderterrorists have overplayed their hand. Twitter's full of newly aware people. Even a non-leaguer like me has put on hundreds of followers in a few days. Game on.
It tells you all you need to know that Róisín Murphy's career is threatened because she raised some concerns about children being given inappropriate medication while Billy Bragg gloats over women being harassed and is still the darling of the cloth-eared bien-pensant bourgeoisie
@billybragg
I think Billy is exactly the kind of credulous westerner that Putin was trying to manipulate. You've got to hand it to him, old Vlad's pretty good at this.
A woman was stopped from entering Holyrood for wearing a small Scottish Lesbians badge. I'm wearing that same badge today in solidarity with Scottish Lesbians, an excellent lesbian grassroots collective.
Joanna Cherry KC
#LesbianVisibilityWeek
@ScotLesbians
@joannaccherry
A few months ago, my demented mother asked a care worker whether she was married. When she replied "no", my mum said "I'm not surprised". The carer thought it was funny. Because she understood dementia and put the ill person's welfare first.
Nobody bar a tiny handful of anime-addled teenage eejits actually believes that transwomen are women. But millions are prepared to lie. Is there any precedent outside a theocracy?
As realisation spreads that the Emperor has no clothes, the panic and rage in the Guild of Weavers of Fictitious Fabrics and among Professors of Imaginary Textile Studies as redundancy looms are something to see.
A Nobel Prize-winning biologist having to state clearly that there are only two human sexes is like a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer having to clarify that the earth orbits the sun. It should be unnecessary but we're grateful that she has because we live in the age of unreason.
If I say I'm a woman it doesn't reduce my chances of going bald or getting prostate cancer. But some think it reduces the likelihood I'll engage in sexual violence against women and girls. Magical thinking.
40 years ago I was snorting cocaine from Marc Almond's belly button with Steve Strange holding my pint while Pepsi & Shirlie were slipping into something a little less comfortable in the boudoir. Today I've moved to the seaside and downloaded an app to identify merchant shipping.
When I was an anti-fascist activist, it meant the risk of getting the shit kicked out of you by actual fascists. Now it means pretending some middle-aged women are fascists so you can posture and LARP risk-free while working out your mummy issues.
If you want to know which way the wind is blowing, Wes Streeting is a reliable weathercock. I foresee many more Labour MPs claiming they were principled TERFs all along as they frantically delete.
I'm calling it. We're living through The Great Gaslighting or Misogycene epoch. The period in the early 21st century when the dominant mammalian species became convinced it had more than two sexes while banning one of the two actual sexes from naming itself.
A friend of mine who's a senior public sector trade union official was telling me tonight about how much time and effort they have to spend on appeasing the identity obsessions of younger, graduate members rather than members' jobs, pay and conditions. Luxury beliefs
Certain parties seem to be shitting the bed because the EHRC has disrupted their long-running campaign to obscure the fact that there are nine protected characteristics under the Equality Act and not just one.
Trans right activism UK 2021 in a nutshell (outside
#FiLiA2021
today). This is the bottom line. If you support this you support a violent movement for men's sexual rights.
If there's a zoology department at a university that keeps spiders for research, and knowing this makes arachnophobic students feel unsafe, should the university get rid of the spiders?
A short sport history: Men wouldn't let women play competitive sport. Women set up their own independent competitions and structures, and they thrived. Their organisations were then merged with/subsumed by the men's associations. Now women have to let men into their competitions.
Clue in today's Guardian Sy crossword: "term for people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth". Can anyone help? Only 3 letters so "'gaslighting bollocks" won't fit.
Three-quarters of a century of international human rights law has fought to guarantee us freedom *of* belief. Now a tax lawyer wants to undermine that by protecting people *from* beliefs. Not from their expression but from the beliefs themselves.
When young and in Manchester, things I protested against: the NF; the BM; Section 28; apartheid; the crushing of the miners; police brutality; nuclear weapons; deportations; troops in Ireland. Things I never dreamt I'd protest against: women meeting to discuss their rights.
I had a fairly hectic sex life last century/millennium and the idea of choking women was to the best of my knowledge never even mentioned. Where did this come from?
What?? Louise Distras hates trans people so much that she’s willing to dress in a style acceptable to Daily Mail readers in order to have a go at them. What does this have to do with feminism Louise? Or punk rock?
BBC Newsnight just now: "JK Rowling was attacked for her stance on transgender rights after she published a blog arguing that gender was determined by biology". Our national broadcaster's flagship news analysis programme.
I read an interview with Rev Richard Coles in yesterday's Sunday Times in which he said that transwomen don't menstruate. I was expecting a massive hoo-hah but ... nothing. Is it because he's a man and national treasure?
Rosie Duffield and I get on very well, we discuss a number of issues… No, not that Rosie Duffield, another Rosie Duffield. You wouldn't know her, she goes to a different parliament.