Brett Nicholls💙

CEO Get Berkshire Active. Former Wg Cdr RAF. All views my own (but likely shared by 48% of the population!).

[Brett Nicholls💙 @BrettGBA]

@Baroness_Nichol A fabulous letter. It is staggering just how many people in authority, including many MPs it seems, have no basic idea of the law. Many have been very badly advised. I have always been struck by the phrase ' just because you believe something to be true does not make it true'.

[SEENinSport @SportSEENuk]

68% of school girls want girls-only sport in school - but only 20% of team sports and 7% of individual sports are girls-only

With boys being 6% stronger and faster, girls are set up to fail in mixed-sex sport

No wonder girls walk away from sport in primary school.

Evidence presented to @GOVUK by Lisa West, Head of Policy, Partnerships and Public Affairs at the advocacy charity @Womeninsport_uk 2/

[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.

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

Useful thread regarding recent UK tribunal.

The claimant is a Muslim woman with PTSD (a disability) whose workplace allowed men to use female facilties.

Her claim for discrimination was successful *on the basis of her being a woman.*

Her being Muslim (assumed modesty) and disabled (potential trauma) were unsuccessful claims.

That is (IANAL), neither of those characteristics were judged to have placed her at a specific disadvantage over and above the baseline of *being a woman*.

Many women have been weaponised in the general debate. Women have felt pressured to reveal sexual trauma to justify why they want safe, female-only spaces. Religiously modest women have been held up as rhetorical shields.

No more.

Being a woman is sufficient.

[Brett Nicholls💙 @BrettGBA]

How To Liberate A Captured Organization: Lessons from the IOC's masterclass https://t.co/eyeQbbzehZ

[Brett Nicholls💙 @BrettGBA]

@runthinkwrite @FlipAllison Imagine also running under 2 hrs and not winning!

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

There's a whole heap of ill-informed opposition to the IOC decision. I think its almost entirely without substance. But perhaps it's worth considering what hypothetical events might, in an alternative universe, persuade the IOC to change its policy. ...

[Reem Alsalem UNSR Violence Against Women and Girls @UNSRVAW]

UN expert welcomes International Olympic Committee policy protecting female categories in sport
#ioc @iocmedia

https://t.co/DrlMUCSl0Z

[Brett Nicholls💙 @BrettGBA]

@Scienceofsport And of course somewhere along the line they would have denied a women a place on the team, maybe as far back as junior competition where a girl has been cheated out of a place and demotivated from continuing in that sport.

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

Another small comment: 'It's bleeding obvious, why did they take so long?'
This massively underestimates the influence of (some) sports NGOs and (much of) sports academia who have distorted the policy making processes at the IOC for many years. ...

[Ross Tucker @Scienceofsport]

Couple thoughts: sport as a “stage” for the TW issue is “effective” in the sense that M advantage is SO clear & obvious that a case for a clear boundary that excludes males is VERY strong. But…exactly the same principles support women’s rights to other spaces even more strongly

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

... OK, and maybe the thing before the first thing is a Twitter storm.
There's not really an argument here.
This doesn't stand.
Please RT.
Please voice (politely) your strong disagreement.
@BritAthletics
@Steph_Peacock
@UKLabour

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

... the second thing is that a pro-woman and pro-sport minister @Steph_Peacock a Labour government @UKLabour needs to say: hold on a minute, that's not on. That doesn't happen.

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

... The first thing that needs to happen is that @BritAthletics need, publicly, to withdraw this demand - before they seek out sources of funding.

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

... Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I'm effing furious and effing outraged by this proposal. It cannot possibly stand. I'll remortgage my effing house and pay my effing self (note to partner: this is a rhetorical device, no I won't. Probably) ...

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

... just as no athlete is, or should be required to pay for dope tests, which are required to assure the integrity of results, no female athlete should be require to pay for SRY tests for the same reason. ....

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

... We do need to value, honour and recognise the male record too. In order to do that we need tests, to ensure the eligibility and integrity of the male competition. These are not gene tests; they are dope tests. ...

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

... In order to value, honour, recognise, the female record we need to know that it is set by someone who is actually female. Hence the need for SRY screening. We have no such need for men. But ...

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

... This is the asymmetrical thing that I've been banging on about for years. Women's sport is of equal value to men's sport, because women are of equal value to men. The women's 800m record (Go Keely!!) is of equal value to the male record.

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

Q. Why is SRY (or any other sort of sex) screening required for women's sport and not for male sport?
A. Because it's unfair for males to compete in female sport. It's not unfair for females to compete in male sport. It might be a bit tricky, unsafe, and a bit pointless...