Helen Tissington

Biological reality AND let's all be fabulously non-conforming.

"All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility."

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

Stunning bravery. Women's sports have a long and regrettable history of policing black and brown women's bodies rooted in Western, hegemonic, colonial, heteronormative notions of femininity.

Enes is a woman with more masculine features due to naturally higher levels of testosterone. But she is still 100% woman.

[Jennifer 🟥🔴🧙‍♀️🦉🐈‍⬛ 🦖 @babybeginner]

She does it again!! Brilliant examination of the gish gallop you’re likely to run into. So well done!! She’s amazing!

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

Rape is a grave, systematic, and widespread human rights violations in international, regional and national law, that could also amount to torture.

While victims of rape can be of any sex or age, rape continues to be committed on an wide scale against women and girls, and is therefore also a specific form of sex and gender based violence against them.

There is no doubt that allegations of rape should be investigated swiftly and impartially to determine if rape has occurred; and that victims should be provided with access to effective, trauma-informed and victim centered reporting, assistance and justice mechanisms.

However, that most certainly does NOT turn rape into a spectrum nor should it ever be spoken of in those terms.

ّInsinuations that acts of rape could fall on a spectrum, risk undermining the important progress we have made around the globe in criminalizing rape, which - as my mandate has argued- should cover rape against all persons, including marital rape and all acts of penetration of a sexual nature, with the lack of consent at its center. (which should include a rigorous analysis of the context in which consent may have been given or withheld).

My predecessor dedicated a whole stand-alone report to examining the issue of rape, which I share here again for those interested:
https://t.co/v2ieKi6oY1

[spiked @spikedonline]

Enes Kanter Freedom – the 6’10” male basketball player – is eligible to play in the WNBA under its gender self-ID rules. Trans ideology makes a total mockery of women’s sports, says Jo Bartosch
https://t.co/C0sb0TW5Hj

[Kara Dansky @KDansky]

Go @RoarWomenNYC!

To think the @WNBA needs a freaking committee to work out what a woman is!

[Professor Alice Sullivan @ProfAliceS]

Jason Arday and his co-author Chantelle Lewis gave a keynote at the 2024 European Sociological Association conference.

It is embarrassing to listen to.

It's easy for serious social scientists to protest that we have no connection with this kind of thing. But isn't it time to start talking about what we can do about standards in sociology?

https://t.co/h2WoLO9khp

[ScienceGuardians @SciGuardians]

🚨 How Fraudulent Actors Are Created and Curated in Academia

“Did Jason Arday’s PhD examiners actually read his thesis? And did the electors who appointed him to a Cambridge professorship read his work?”
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins)

⚠️ The answer points to a deeper systemic failure. Fraudsters such as Jason Arday, Elisabeth M. Bik, Theo Baker, and others do not rise and remain protected by accident. They climb the ladder for far too long because reckless, compromised journalism creates a powerful conformity, which in turn produces a protective layer of complicit academics.

📌 This is precisely what the classic Asch conformity experiments (1951–1956) demonstrated.

In those studies, ordinary people abandoned clear evidence and conformed to a false majority view simply to fit in. The same psychological mechanism now operates in academia. Despite layers of evidence documenting fraud, lies, deception, hypocrisy and conflicts of interest involving figures such as Jason Arday, Elisabeth M. Bik (@MicrobiomDigest), Lonni Besançon (@lonnibesancon), Ivan Oransky (@ivanoransky), Theo Baker (@tab_delete), and Holden Thorp (@hholdenthorp), most of them continue to survive serious scrutiny — while even the partial consequences faced by Arday came only after prolonged institutional resistance.

Academics become complicit for two main reasons:

1. They want to fit in with the mainstream narrative manufactured by reckless, compromised journalists.

2. They overestimate how informed those journalists actually are, and therefore refuse to question the approved story.

The result is a self-reinforcing system in which clear evidence is ignored, whistleblowers are attacked, and fraudulent actors are protected and elevated. Until this conformity is broken, the cycle will continue.

@SciGuardians
🔱 Empowering the Academic Community 🔱

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

NHS trust tells trans staff they can use women’s toilets. It cost NHS Fife a fortune in tax payers money to be made to follow the law. Why aren’t heads of trusts being sacked for opening their trusts up to legal action, potentially costing the tax payer? https://t.co/jkOgzlLwqq

[Susan Dalgety @DalgetySusan]

Polanski: claimed he could increase the size of a women’s breast through hypnotism; Chapman: children as young as 8 should be supported to “change” their sex; Manivannan: rape is on a spectrum; there are “modes” of consent. Creepy people; creepy party.

[Mark Higgie @MarkHiggie2]

Cambridge’s vice-chancellor has been in crisis talks after the Jason Arday affair. Very funny.

[TERFTimes @TERF_Times]

Presenting TERF Times!
For hags, harridans and harpies everywhere.
News from TERF Island, plus views, reviews and interviews.
https://t.co/gwJNKdjSEW

[Genspect @genspect]

Well played by Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White. They didn’t argue against gender ideology, they just accepted its claims and took them to their logical extreme.

The WNBA must now either accept self-ID or acknowledge that biological sex matters.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

The meeting is happening because under New York City law, where the league is headquartered, these men really can sue if they are excluded. If these exact same men had grown their hair out and begun demanding to be called women two years ago, every trans activist and ally attacking them today would be cheering them on. The law makes no distinction.

[Claire Coutinho @ClaireCoutinho]

Not too long ago, stating that biological sex was real was a career-ending act of bravery.

Kathleen Stock was hounded out of her university job. Maya Forstater had to take her former employer to a landmark tribunal.

Kemi Badenoch and Rosie Duffield were told they were on the wrong side of history.

Our public bodies, charities, political figures, and sections of the media all lined up to condemn these women as bigots.

That establishment was wrong. The Supreme Court settled it beyond doubt: when the Equality Act says woman, it means a biological woman.

Every woman who was targeted for saying that sex means biological sex has since been vindicated. An apology is owed to each and every one of them, although I won’t hold my breath.

The EHRC's Code of Practice, which took effect this week, provides clear guidance to organisations on how single-sex spaces and services, like changing rooms, should operate on the basis of biological sex.

This is hugely welcome, particularly for the countless women and girls who have been denied their legal rights for so long. It is a tribute to the tireless campaigners who fought for years to get here, despite the Labour Government’s delays and attempts to water it down.

However, we should be clear that the Code does not change the law. All the Code does is provide guidance on how to follow the law.

Those who try to block the Code will not block the law that sits behind it. The Green, Lib Dem and Labour MPs who are pretending otherwise should know better.

Yet more than a year after the Supreme Court ruling, compliance is still falling short and there has been no accountability for the many institutions who have put women at risk of harm because they misunderstood the law.

Take the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

Even after the ruling, they continued disciplinary investigations against the Darlington Nurses, who did nothing more than ask for single-sex changing rooms.

They have not issued an apology for getting things so badly wrong.

Then there's NHS England, which has still not updated guidance that allows men to be placed on female hospital wards simply because they identify as women.

That policy is unlawful, yet it remains in force today - putting the safety, privacy and dignity of female patients at risk.

Things are no better in the prison system, where violent male inmates are still being housed in women’s prisons, where they share communal spaces with vulnerable women.

It has been a legal requirement to house male and female prisoners separately since 1823, but apparently that doesn’t apply if the man says he is a woman.

For too long our public institutions treated radical gender ideology as if it were gospel and treated women's rights as something to be tossed aside in the face of this new religion.

The Code of Practice is an important tool in reversing the spread of that ideology, but alone it is not enough.

Bridget Phillipson needs to get a grip and hold government bodies to account if they refuse to uphold the law.

Our institutions must establish why they were so vulnerable to being misled and how they will prevent the next faddish ideology that comes along from taking root.

We need institutions that we can trust, not ones that are so quick to abandon common sense and the law.

That is the least that women and the wider public deserve.

[Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender]

This is very funny

[Alex Byrne @byrne_a]

Sociologists' biophobia, as documented by @ashleytrubin.

[Women's Sports Union @wsusportsunion]

Good to see men exposing the absurdity of allowing males into female sport. @Highway_30 @EnesFreedom 👏

But it shouldn’t take men making a mockery of the rules for sporting authorities to listen to women and take women’s sport seriously. @WNBA

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

Now that @EnesFreedom announced he’s a woman & entering the draft @wnba has three options, all bad for them. 1. Deny he’s a woman. (Which means they know what a woman is.) 2. Admit men to league. 3. Announce only those born as women are eligible. Which path? Checkmate.

[Polly Clark @MsPollyClark]

This is a fascinating analysis. The very different treatments of Arday and Jennifer Melle reveal what we in the gender trenches have always known: ideological conformity is all.
The James Baldwin frame of reference is brilliant.
Strong recommend 👇

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

Good men stand up for women.