ResistanceIsUtile

Reality-based feminist

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@jan_murray Bragging about breaking the law? Not very bright is he?

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@GreenFemsUK @jo_bartosch @BristolCouncil @lambeth_council Not very bright to brag about planning to break the law is it?

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@Alecaticus Absolutely no-one sees her as a man of any kind!

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@MinnOrchia @MaryMorrisey14 @DeeR528863 @veritasalways1 @jk_rowling @lemondropsicle I've always felt that I should have been a millionaire but feelings don't make it so!

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@Alecaticus What a pile of self-indulgent drivel.

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@HelenWebberley You're a lunatic.

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@Conviction19c @DreyfusJames I've seen some of her stuff on Facebook - she's Farrel Hegarty and is very funny 😀

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@LvivNightingale @jk_rowling @AvaLovelaceX Society does no such thing!

[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.

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

Roxy Tickle is a man.

#IStandWithSallGrover
#GigglevTickle

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@JerseyNoahx Being a man is entirely about biology nothing else. Which means that you will never be a man, despite what people might tell you, unless you were born male.

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@Queenshandbag1 @jk_rowling A woman is not a man without a penis.

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@cavakaggyreborn And some poor buggers are going to get her as their lawyer!

[Dr. Dr. P: "I said what I said". @Psychgirl211]

Dear X

I need your help.

As you may know, I was doxed by Fred Wallace who posted my name, picture and partial home address here on X.

I made a complaint to the @metpoliceuk and today I was called back by one of their officers.

Name: Pc/Officer Humphreys.

Badge No. 2417.

Based at Lewisham Police Station. @MPSLewisham

Officer Humphreys asked what had given rise to the doxing and I told him that I hold the position that men cannot become women.

He immediately, without taking a breath said "well, that's transphobic".

Officer Humphries then proceeded to harangue me about my 'transphobia' and 'homophobia'.

I told him that I was not confident in the way he responded and that I would be reporting him to his superiors.

He said "well you won't get anywhere".

I then tried to explain to him that being 'transphobic' is not a crime and that gender critical beliefs are protected under the Forstater Ruling.

I also told him about the Supreme Court ruling that sex, in law, means biology and not identity.

At this point in the conversation, PC Humphreys put the phone down on me.

PC Humphreys seemed to have no understanding of his responsibility to act as an impartial public servant.

He also seemed unconcerned that I felt threatened and that I and my family could be put at risk by the doxing.

His only interest was in berating me for my beliefs.

I have made an in-person complaint at Lewisham Police Station and I will be making an appointment to discuss this incident with my MP @JanetDaby

We are being failed by a captured police force.

@SexMattersOrg
@SpeechUnion

Please can you Rx this.

Thank you.

Dr P.

[SheffGCNetwork @SheffGCNetwork]

Evidence of yet another LGBT/Pride charity lacking financial management skills and possibly worse. @LGBTSheffield has over the years provided Pride events and LGBT network/drop-ins with an annual Pinknic, its flagship event.

1/7

[Don Keith @RealDonKeith]

Bill Maher nailed this segment about the oppression of women in Muslim countries.

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@RoisinMichaux @autogampegg I admired him for saying "They're not women's clothes, they're my clothes." Now he makes my skin crawl.

[Róisín Michaux @RoisinMichaux]

Izzard is a perfect example of an autogynephile who went from self-aware to eventually giving in to his overwhelming delusion. He fought back against the delusion successfully for years. As they get older it gets harder. Nobody is sure why. But he might have kept it at bay until he died except that society changed, not realising men like him are deeply mentally ill. Notice how his entire personality shifted. That’s what the lie does.

Izzard’s fantasy is NOT about being accepted as a funky dresser or a gender bender or a half man half woman or whatever. He needs to believe that he is actually a woman and that you believe it too. Nothing less will suffice.

He’s a very visible embodiment of the transvestite who scratched the itch so hard that he bled.

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

Perfectly put!

[James Dreyfus @DreyfusJames]

@TheAdvocateMag “Worldwide tennis champion & lesbian legend, who’s done more for gay rights than most people could dream of disagrees with Harry Potter star, who got lucky very young, thanks to JKR.”

There. Fixed it.

[ResistanceIsUtile @IsUtile]

@Glinner You tease!