Cherry

Science over religion; sex over gender. Pro-EU; collective capitalist; betrayed by Labour. Reactivated 2nd-wave feminist. #NHS #waspi ♀️☯️🇪🇺
REJOIN THE EU

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

My 'religion' or deeply-held philosophical belief is that humans are mammals with predictable reproductive biology - and a number of further 'beliefs' or observations that come from this. I am not obliged to adopt another's spiritual convictions or to prioritise them over others.

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@Fat_Jacques @1909Truhaven @ForWomenScot @cuelou Totally get what you're saying - but they can't be 'recognised as women' in any meaningful sense, because they're male ... and women aren't!

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

This was in response to the NHS pre-op information sheet someone was given to prepare for her hysterectomy. "If you are female", it said 🤣🧐🙄🙄

[Faith333 @keepthefaithth]

@Mislein @RBGreenwichLond Shock horror - you mean if you are a male about to have a hysterectomy, you won't be asked if you're pregnant? 🤯 Now there's a case for discrimination 🤯

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

Your have to be a fool not to love Mary Beard. I didn't know she'd made a book about the history of misogyny! Ordering a copy now 💚🤍💜

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

Hello all. A quick update from me.

My sex screen assay is progressing well.

I promised rapid: I can detect SRY from a cheek swab in about 30 minutes. I am currently testing whether I can drop it to 10 minutes without compromising reliability.

I promised cheap: The current cost per assay is about £2. I am currently testing whether I can drop this to below the pound line, and it’s very promising.

I promised accessible: The assay could be run by any grassroots sports coach, school nurse, and my Mum.

I promised on-site: This is where my lab efforts are currently focussed. I’ve always held “from the UK to Uganda” as a principle, and ensuring easy deployment is crucial. I’m currently learning a lot of materials science…

The other main push is setting up various blinded, larger-scale tests. This will require lots of form filling.

If anyone wants to help me hit my final budget target, my crowdfunder is here.

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@JaneyPlanet @AskNic Thank you! 😘💪

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

I still get cognitive dissonance that this has been such a fiercely-fought issue for so very long. Women are female, men are male, gender doesn't trump sex.

Thank you so much! xxxxx

[Sex Matters @SexMattersOrg]

Update from Maya!

Today Mr Justice Swift delivered a judgment that comprehensively vindicated the @EHRC’s clear, practical interpretation of the law.

The guidance, which Sex Matters had intervened to defend, states that women's toilets are for women, men's for men, and where mixed facilities exist, sufficient single-sex facilities should also be provided.

The practical guidance the High Court endorses can be boiled down to eight words: “Have clear rules and policies that everyone understands.” This is how institutions keep people safe and respect their rights.

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

Absolute rubbish that she's been through so much - and is still being attacked - for her firmly reasonable defence of sex-based rights, privacy and dignity. Thank you, Ma'am!

[Kishwer Falkner @KishwerFalkner]

I am tweeting for the first time since 2022 because today’s judgment was a personal vindication. I’m absolutely delighted, and grateful to the wonderful team who helped us to get this right.

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@EithanHaim Last I read about this, the idea was to perform parallel surgery with a 'trans man' who was having a hysterectomy.

Don't know where they're thinking to get penises from: I suppose they could discourage 'trans women' from inversion surgery (have a colon 'vagina' instead).

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@237LAC @Oliver_foster_ When the people routinely have guns, so do the criminals. Imagine the carnage one nutcase with a gun would inflict on a busy train.

Ask yourself why the US has 5 times the homicide rate of the UK.

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@tompfoster @ThePosieParker I don't disagree with what I think is your point but fear this intensely misogynistic culture is more than a nation or a religion - I fear it's a sex. Mme Pelicot's rapists were not Pakistani or Muslim. The grooming gangs' customers were of all backgrounds.

[Rev. Martin A. Brooks 🇺🇦 @mart_brooks]

@ThePosieParker Those who don't think rapists can be a large, organised section of one relatively small community need to read up on what happened Gisèle Pelicot.

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

Fantastic clarity!

[East Sussex WRN @WRNEastSussex]

We are proud of the members of @WRNEastSussex who wrote this article and also very appreciative of Hastings Independent Press who published it, despite the very real possibility of a backlash from anti-women activists.
https://t.co/TTQcGBxuve
1/

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

75% of *people* get vaginal thrush 🤣

Even if EVERY woman gets it, that still means half of all men must also suffer yeast infections ... in their vaginas.

Imagine being an Ob-Gyn who's scared of the word 'woman'?!

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@nemesis_online @machealthsci @McMasterOBGYN Well, that's not going great, is it 🤣

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@NewcastleCC The nice group photo of white people really celebrates NCC's commitment to diversity 🤨
Same level of awareness shown by flying the (divisive) Progress flag while mistaking it for an (inclusive) rainbow flag.

Cop yourselves on, you're showing yourselves up as racist homophobes.

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

Stroud Pride 2025: No LGB.

This is so overt, I had to check their website. Yes, they did post this and have doubled down on it. Need any more proof the TQ+ is homophobic?

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@NannaOfDragons

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@NWtoG @macmillancancer Please don't let this put you off asking for the help you need. They still do what MacMillan does, as well as doing some batshit stuff!

You could always gently question this policy ...

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

@HaroldMasters9 It's horrible, isn't it. So many young lives irreversibly changed, in ways they were too young to understand, for reasons they were unable to evaluate.

[Cherry @CherryAnnAustin]

BEING 'TRANS' IS SAFE IN THE UK. Yes, he does use the gents and always has.

Now the Supreme Court's clarified that our laws never did mean TWAW, I bet we'll see a decline in males claiming to be women - because they were only doing it to trample over women's rights & freedoms.

[Kathleen Riot @RocknRoller2019]

I make no apologies from educating people that its safe to use male spaces. I actually got through to one person over the weekend. Even going out dressed like this with Far Left tattoos on show I never got any grief in male spaces or anywhere. Being trans is safe in the UK.