Marj

Dyke.

[Jill Foster @JournalistJill]

@NadiaWhittomeMP You are fighting for the demands of men like this over the rights of my daughters, nieces and female friends and frankly, it is unforgivable.

[Marj @AnotherMarj]

@francesbarber13 So fabulous!!!

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

The Fire Brigades Union stands ‘firmly in solidarity with trans, non-binary and gender diverse members.’

But not, apparently, with women who wish to undress - or use the toilet - without males present.

This union appears to be unaware that being forced to share facilities with male colleagues may cause ‘fear’ for women.

Or that they also have the right to ‘respect and dignity’ at work. And for their employers to follow the law.

Extraordinary.

[Caroline Farrow @CF_Farrow]

The reaction to my M&S post is a textbook case of DARVO (Denial, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender).

People aren't just disagreeing; they are furious that I dared to speak out loud.

I have four daughters, two of whom have intense sensory issues around clothes.

Shopping is already a massive SEN minefield. For 11 years, my daughter and I have used that exact fitting room without a single problem. There has never previously been a man in charge. But on Saturday, we walked in to find a man supervising it. My daughter became distressed, so we left.

The immediate reaction from critics wasn’t to question the policy, it was to direct pure anger and blame at me.

Suddenly, my daughter's anxiety is my fault. We have men scrambling to portray a completely natural boundary, one women have possessed since the dawn of time the moment they reach puberty, as something "unhealthy" and "worrisome."

To cap off the inversion of reality, I’ve been accused of "failing in my safeguarding duty" for sharing an entirely anonymised story.

But parents of children with SEN talk about difficulties all the time. We openly discuss schools, SEN provision, accessibility, public toilets, and changing rooms. That is how problems become visible. Why is a female-only space the one accommodation we are forbidden from demanding?

Why is a teenage girl's natural desire for privacy being pathologised by a crowd of adults, rather than a corporate policy being questioned?

You shouldn't need a diagnosis, a trauma history, or a legal submission to want privacy from the opposite sex when undressing. A girl does not need to be autistic to want privacy. A woman does not need to be traumatised to want dignity.
M&S needs to change their policy. Women and girls deserve female-only spaces.

And "this happened to my daughter, and it shouldn't have" is something mothers have every right to say.

[Marj @AnotherMarj]

What the fuck have they done to Instagram??? It used to be so easy to use…
#instagram

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I challenge every single person who believes minors should be enabled and even encouraged to transition to read this first person testimony to the end.

1/3

via @IWF https://t.co/3276o4tg8J

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I’ve lost count of the messages I’ve had from detransitioners, mostly girls, detailing outcomes just as bad and sometimes worse. A high proportion are abuse survivors and/or have a history of poor mental health. Now they struggle with physical issues impossible to resolve.

2/3

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

If you’d rather chant slogans and look the other way you are complicit in this appalling scandal. It could never have happened without the support of a cultish culture that has demonised whistleblowers, hounded victims and attempted to scare the rest of us into silence.

3/X

[Marj @AnotherMarj]

@bindelj Blimey. She gets butcher by the day! I always thought the husband was a beard.

[SimmyMc @mc_simmy]

@jk_rowling I will not vote to have my rights and safety undermined or be erased by a men's movement. I will not vote for a party that doesn't put child safeguarding first or one that erases and monsters LGBs.
This issue is first and foremost
#LabourLosingWomen
#SexNotGender
#SexMatrers

[Róisín Michaux @RoisinMichaux]

I had understood from the Charlie Hebdo murders that France has robust freedom of speech/expression laws that protected the cartoonists (legally, if not from religious maniacs).

But Dora Moutot was sanctioned for naming male violence against women despite the fact that she used the approved trans activist language “people with penises”. The judgement said she reduced “trans people” to their biology.

She couldnt say “man” in reference to “Marie” Cau and she couldn’t describe what he is biologically. And she couldn’t even say “trans women” because in the context of the conversation that would have meant she was calling all of these men dangerous. She wanted to describe *all* men (regardless of whether or not they live their sissy fantasies publicly or not).

The court convicted her for this banal observation: “as women we have to be wary of people with penises.” This statement is the basis of every GBV law, policy, funding etc from the French state!

France is utterly fucked. The international TERF community needs to throw our full support behind her against these misogynists. Here’s her PayPal

https://t.co/aUYiHWNrbI

[Marj @AnotherMarj]

Yes. This:

[Rawan Osman روان عثمان @RawaneOsmane]

“Free Palestine.”

I grew up on those words.

In Lebanon, most people around me wanted a free Palestine for a very practical reason — to send the Palestinian refugees back. The civil war that tore my country apart was ignited in no small part by the Palestinian armed factions who turned Lebanon into their launching pad. “Free Palestine” meant: free us from them.

In Damascus, where my father’s family lived, the sentiment was different but equally self-serving. Palestine must be returned to the Arabs, its righteous owners. No one asked follow-up questions. No one was expected to.

Palestine was central to Islam, most Arabs are Muslim, therefore supporting the Palestinian cause was reflexive. A non-brainer in the most literal sense — no brain engaged at all.

Nobody stopped to point out that Palestine is not an Arabic word. Nobody found it strange that Jerusalem, the supposedly third holiest city in Islam, is not mentioned once in the Quran. Not once. Nor is Palestine. The entire theological and political architecture of this cause rests on a foundation that their own scripture doesn’t bother to acknowledge.

What was actually happening was indoctrination. A systematic, generational rejection of Jewish sovereignty — and frankly, of any minority sovereignty. Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis — the Arab world has been remarkably consistent in how it treats people who are different. We just don’t talk about that.

Instead, in the West, we talk about Palestine.

In the West, a civilization that has elevated human rights to its highest moral currency, the Palestinian cause has become the one exception to every rule. In the queue of human suffering, Palestinians cut the line every time. Homosexuals executed in Gaza and hanged from cranes in Iran? Palestine first. Women imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for campaigning for the right to drive — a right they were denied until 2018 — girls sold into marriage in Afghanistan, women erased from public life entirely under the Taliban? After Palestine. Political dissidents ground into dust in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, journalists disappeared in Libya, children starving in Yemen while their rulers wage proxy wars, entire populations hollowed out by hunger in Sudan? All of it waits. Christians ethnically cleansed from Iraq and Syria, the Arab world methodically emptied of every Jewish community it once held — a demographic erasure carried out across a century with surgical patience and near-total Western silence?

Palestine is still first.

So let’s end where we started. Free Palestine. Which Palestine, exactly? The Roman invention? The British administrative line? The British Mandate covered the entire territory of what is today Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. In 1921, 78% of that mandate was handed to the Hashemite family — a dynasty imported from Hijaz in present-day Saudi Arabia — and became the Kingdom of Jordan, which it remains to this day. A foreign royal family, on the majority of historic Palestine, ruling it as a monarchy. Nobody protests that. No flags, no chants, no encampments. The remaining 22% was designated for the Jews, became Israel, and is the only part that any pro-Palestinian activist has ever had a problem with.

So when you say Free Palestine, you mean that 22%. You mean the Jews.

And free it from whom? From a people with a three-thousand-year-old documented presence in that land, to restore the glory of a name coined by Roman colonizers, a name lifted from the Torah, a name that has no roots in Arabic, no mention in the Quran, and no history as a sovereign state?

You are not chanting for liberation. You are chanting for colonialism — the Roman kind, repackaged for social media.

Free Palestine is not a cause. It is a colonial term, coined by invaders, recycled by the indoctrinated. The least you can do is have the intelligence to understand it and the decency to reflect on your position.

📍#Israel

[WomenAreReal @WomenAreReals]

Hey, @elonmusk, @KDansky's account has been mass reported by trans activists. She’s locked & suspended. Please look into this and help her get her account back.

Terven, one of our fearless leaders needs us. Please help Kara and spread this post far & wide!

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

I’m sick to death of language describing women, girls & mothers being removed, when this doesn’t happen to men’s language. I’m sick to death of women’s sport being wrecked when it doesn’t happen to men’s. I’m sick to death of men validating their delusion in women’s intimate spaces, making women & girls extremely uncomfortable & intimidated. I loath this latest version of misogyny, and I despise the women who give away our hard won rights, safeguards & opportunities. Today was a good day!

[Trevor Phillips @TrevorPTweets]

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.

[Homely Woman Kenobi @Homely_1_Kenobi]

@GriftReport In which part of the mosque do troons pray?
Those two ideologies are incompatible.

[Olive Oil (MERF) @sinton_alison]

@GriftReport Burnham needs to wake up to the "tiny minority" who are now the majority and realise that there's a law saying that men are men and women are women and men going into women's toilets and the rest of it is now not a culture war but a major issue on which he will be judged.

[michael harman @ColourBuddy369]

@GriftReport When, as a man, you start placing men first in women's safe spaces, you know there is something seriously wrong with the wealthy elite parasites. How dare some men and women decide what is right and wrong when it comes to women's safety and personal space

https://t.co/ZiJyk2ehsL

[Ultra Agent 6189-Cathy Mudge @cathy_mudge]

@GriftReport How many tiny, tiny, tiny sexual assaults, rapes, intimidation, flashing, hidden cameras is an acceptable number @AndyBurnhamGM ?
Asking for the 'minority' of women and girls?