AEConran

Author THE LOST CELT @GoosebottomBook. Book talker @Bookpassage, winner @scbwi Golden Gate MG prize @sweet16s #PitchWars 2017 mentor. Lucky mentee @kappelt 2019

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

How can anyone in their right mind spend more than 10 seconds deciding if a man who’s pretending to be a woman, who has a history of sexual assault against women, should be put in a woman’s prison! This contempt for women is extraordinary

[AEConran @ConranAE]

I’m no longer a resident…I moved into Leicestershire but I wish I could sign…if you can please do!

[Alicia Kearns MP @aliciakearns]

🚨 Petition deadline changed!

The petition to save the Rutland Sea Dragon now closes at midday tomorrow – just 24 hours away.

If you believe, like the Friends of Rutland County Museum and Oakham castle and me, that the Rutland Sea dragon should come home to where it was discovered, please sign our petition urging the Council to reverse its decision.

This 180-million-year-old ichthyosaur is one of Britain's most important fossil discoveries, and we need your voice to help protect it.

👉 You can sign the petition here: https://t.co/2WVGbC6tBc

Together let’s save the Rutland Sea Dragon! 🐉

[ddsnorth ™ @ddsnorth]

Exactly right

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

I’m sick to death of Lib Dem’s in particular saying trans identifying men are no risk to women. Official MOJ statistics show over 60% of trans identifying men in prison are there for sex offences against women or children. In mens prisons is 18%. Yet we understand why we keep men out of private spaces for women. Safeguarding. That’s over 3x times a higher risk. Stats are stats. Even if you don’t like them. Check out this figure yourself. Next time someone spout this nonsense I will endeavour to give the actual official stats. It’s time we work with truths & not fluffy fantasy.

[AEConran @ConranAE]

Sadly it was on a piece of elastic and we are rebounding far faster than it took us the stretch the tethers in the first place.

[Annie Bishop @AnnieBishop123]

We’ve come a long way baby or at least we thought we had. I found this letter in the house that I bought

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Victoria Derbyshire, "Today I spent time with an unbelievably courageous 15 year old girl who was raped by three teenage boys"

"Boys who last week walked free from court"

"The girl, who we're calling Sarah, although it's not her real name, was 14 years old when she was raped last year in Hampshire"

"She told me she's actually scared to go out now in case she bumps into the boys"

"She told me she lost her confidence"

"She has flashbacks"

"She can't get out of bed to go to school"

"Her mum told me her daughter used to be bubbly and happy"

"Her dad said what those boys had done to his daughter will affect her for the rest for her life"

"In their interview with Newsnight the family says the review of their sentences should result in the boys being jailed and going on the sex offenders register for life"

[LBC @LBC]

'You want to give 16-year-olds the vote, but you're saying a 23-year-old was too immature to fully understand what he was doing?'

@aliciakearns challenges the government's logic on an asylum seeker's rape of a 12-year-old girl, adding there is an 'epidemic of misogyny'.

[AEConran @ConranAE]

@aliciakearns Absolutely

[AEConran @ConranAE]

@aliciakearns @ShelaghFogarty It’s the “promising young man” syndrome of misogyny. Clearly this judge cares nothing for the victims at all.

[Alicia Kearns MP @aliciakearns]

It was pre-meditated. They are repeat gang-rapists.

The perpetrators should be named. It is in the public interest.

Speaking to @ShelaghFogarty on why I've referred the sentences of three gang-rapists to the Attorney General as unduly lenient.

[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.

[Alicia Kearns MP @aliciakearns]

🧵Today in Parliament I used privilege to expose @EnoughToEndRape - the company behind self-swab rape kits.

They use lawyers to intimidate rape charities and threaten young women into silence.

Today that stops. #EnoughIsEnough

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In Japan, children clean their own schools.

Every day. After lunch.
About twenty minutes.

Classrooms.
Hallways.
Toilets.

Not because the schools are too poor
to hire someone.

Because in 1947, this country decided
that cleaning your own space
is part of becoming a person.

The cleaning rag
is on the school supply list.
Right next to the pencils.

Egypt teaches it now.
So does Indonesia.
So does Mongolia.

Think about the last time
you watched a seven-year-old
mop a floor without complaining.

Japan does that
in every elementary school
in the country.

Not as punishment.

As education.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

Jeffrey Epstein survivor Miss Rosa, just eviscerated the Trump Administration for releasing her name to the public 500+ times.

"I kept my identity protected as Jane Doe. I Woke up one day with my name mentioned over 500 times,while the rich and powerful remain protected by redactions. My name was exposed to the world. Now reporters from across the globe contact me. I cannot live without looking over my shoulder. I can only imagine the long-term impact this mistake will have on my life."

[Jennifer Sey @JenniferSey]

Adults need to man up and stop saying its the girls who need to solve the problem of boys stealing their opportunities.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

Women who kill their abusers spend more time in prison than men who kill the female partners they’re abusing.

https://t.co/aSQ0Glv8ns

[k @alfkkifine]

Women: I want to go for a run.
Society: You can’t go alone. You’ll get raped.

Women: I want to walk to my car in the parking garage.
Society: Alone? You better get someone to escort you, or you’ll get raped.

Women: I want to live alone.
Society: You need a gun, an alarm system, a dog and probably a gun for the dog too.

Women: What about going to the park?
Society: Dangerous.

Women: Okay, I’ll just go out for a drink then.
Society: Don’t take your eyes off your drink. Watch out for predators spiking your drinks. Stay alert at all times.

Women: I was raped.
Society: Are you sure? That just seems impossible.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Feargal Sharkey, "Water companies... The fines don't work, it's time we actually started upholding the law, and sending some of these executives and directors to jail"

Krishnan Guru-Murthy, "You think we should put them in jail?"

Feargal Sharkey, "If we put one water company boss in jail for six weeks the whole industry would transform itself"