Elaine T

Politics, environment, social care, technology, Learning Disabilities, Gardening, bit of a foodie
All views personal

[LabourWomen’sDeclaration @LabWomenDec]

The @UKLabour party declined to properly brief either its 2024 GE candidates or, subsequently, its new MPs about the law on sex and gender. Nor were the new intake adequately briefed about the party's 2023 policy pivot against self-ID and in support of single-sex meaning biological sex.
This mistaken "say nothing, avoid this topic" approach has contributed to the current muddle and misapprehensions. However, these ill-informed EDM signatories who still cling to the policy of self-ID are not a majority within the PLP & they absolutely do not reflect the majority of Labour voters & members - who support the SC ruling.
Our work to educate all our party's parliamentarians continues...
And we also point out - SoS @bphillipsonMP & @10DowningStreet have approved & laid the @EHRC code to enter the statute book in July, after the current 40 day period.
#TheLawIsTheLaw

[LabourWomen’sDeclaration @LabWomenDec]

Calm & authoritative responses by @EHRC chair to @CommonsWEC include ⬇️on #Stonewall's 'No Debate':
“I think one of the reasons why discussion has become so unpleasant in this area is because for such a long time that dialogue was prevented from happening”
https://t.co/VwO4Sj0gNu

[Kirsteen Sullivan MP @kittysull1]

I’m old enough to remember when robust debate was part and parcel of university life, then we would all go off to the student union.

Neither students nor staff should face abuse or aggression for engaging in debate, or listening to ideas with which others disagree.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

I've written about the dishonesty of the MPs opposing the EHRC's Code of Practice on single-sex services

https://t.co/0dDN04Fx1e

[Elaine T @ETAberdeen]

BETRAYAL BY MOTION: PARLIAMENT MOVES TO KILL WOMEN’S RIGHTS CODE https://t.co/8B6ONsiKod via @Labourheartland

[Professor Alice Sullivan @ProfAliceS]

The story of the disappearance of sex continues. Will the Scottish Parliament now pretend that the sex of MSPs who don't respond to a survey is unknowable?

https://t.co/Opv7BxQBTk

[Win C @UKScotBrit]

This is a good comment on this article:-

"Douglas Chapman the SNP Treasurer resigns because Murrell
refused to let him see the SNP accounts.

The SNP Audit Committee resigned (3 of them) because Murrell
refused to let them see the SNP accounts.

The SNP auditors, Carmichael Johnston, withdraw their services.
The new Auditors, AMS, issued ‘qualified’ status because they, according to the accounts, couldn’t satisfy themselves with sufficient evidence.

The Chair of the SNP NEC berates NEC members for daring to raise their concerns about the lack of transparency and evidence of the
whereabouts of that £667k at the March 2021 meeting.

Yet Sturgeon and Swinney, plus Yousaf, saw nothing, heard nothing and did nothing"

@JohnSwinney Are you really telling us you had no idea what your boyhood bestie was up too?

https://t.co/sI4CfITE8Y

[Kirsteen Sullivan MP @kittysull1]

@tracygilbert72 is 💯

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

A lot of people have struggled to believe me when I say that the Australian Human Rights Commission is giving pregnancy protections in law to men who claim to be woman, because it’s so stupid it’s hard to believe anyone would say it.

Enjoy:

[LWD Cymru @LWDCymru23]

Excellent journalism by @nickwallis revealing the extent of activity by Welsh Gender Services.

Nick found that
Wales reportedly has ‘between 3 and 4 times the number of people for irreversible gender services than the UK average’.

At the same time, data collection was found to be unreliable.

Perhaps the newly elected @WelshGovernment should focus on why Welsh young people are so disproportionately represented in pathways to irreversible body-changing treatment?

[LabourWomen’sDeclaration @LabWomenDec]

"The report noted her failure to deal with one of the most effective Republican ads:
'Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you'...
If the vice-president would not change her position — & she did not — then there was nothing which would have worked as a response"
https://t.co/RjRjmAj1Sp

[🟥Hackney Dr. of Terfery @NoShirleyNo]

Join us at Australia House tomorrow.

Or post a pic with a sign #FixTheSDA #IStandWithSallGrover

[Susan Dalgety @DalgetySusan]

WOMEN COUNT! If we can’t count the number of women MSPs for fear of offence, what is to stop society counting the female survivors of abuse. Me in @TheScotsman (link in replies)

[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.

[LabourWomen’sDeclaration @LabWomenDec]

"The “no debate” stance of Stonewall... demonised anyone who sought to discuss them.
It was only when the dangers of such a policy came to light, including biologically male rapists being sent to female prisons, that the public realised its implications"
https://t.co/cMc2qZ5IBU

[Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender]

I've just got my ticket for both days - looks like a fantastic programme! Hope to see lots of you there

[For Women Scotland @ForWomenScot]

Clearly, @S_A_Somerville does NOT accept the law if she is still havering "We note the publication of the Code of Practice and will consider it carefully pending approval by the UK Parliament."

It's the LAW - you didn't need the guidance & don't need to wait on approval.
https://t.co/UXMmpKZb0x

[Elaine T @ETAberdeen]

@BBCNewsnight Keeping the current PM would be a really good idea. Rearranging PMs will improve nothing

[LabourWomen’sDeclaration @LabWomenDec]

"The government is proud of the Equality Act 2010 & will protect and uphold it. The draft Code is an important supplement to ensure organisations across Great Britain have clear & workable guidance on its implementation, to protect people’s rights across our country. It covers all 9 protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010"
https://t.co/fDdvgQTpCX

[LabourWomen’sDeclaration @LabWomenDec]

Our statement welcoming today's publication of the @EHRC Code of Practice.
"The Supreme Court ruling clarified the Equality Act as it has always been; it’s time for the rest of society to catch up"
#NoMoreExcuses
#TheLawIsTheLaw
https://t.co/qpw78GXdPe