Karen Brown

[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.

[Nancy Hogshead, JD, Oly @Hogshead3Au]

California’s idea of “compromise” is cowardice. The “compromise” is unfair to girls. @CIFState

[Maya Forstater @MForstater]

📣 @FayeRCTribunal who has won her case against NHS England!

Congratulations to Naomi Cunningham and Liz McGlone representing 👏👏👏

Tribunal finds the policy of permitting "trans women" to use female facilities was harassment in relation to sex & GC belief and its trans equality proceedure was harassment in relation to GC belief.

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

This is worrying. Beth Upton, who tormented a UK nurse because she didn't want to see her knackers in her NHS changing room, has relocated to Australia and is saying on the Ahpra register of practitioners that he's female. He's working in the Port Macquarie/Kempsie district hospitals

[James Dreyfus @DreyfusJames]

Excellent to see this masterclass doing the rounds again…

[Emma 💛💙🇩🇰🇬🇧🇪🇺 @MonkEmma]

Did you see this headline?

Did you feel the requisite anger and rage at asylum seekers that The Sun was asking of you?

Did you maybe blame Starmer because.... um... it was probably his fault🤷‍♀️

Would you like to know the reality behind the headline?

Course you would!😜

Let's take a look

🧵

1/25

[SEENinSport @SportSEENuk]

A brilliant World Record @keelyhodgkinson

A brilliant role model for girls

#DreamBig

[Karen Brown @Monstray]

@CarlBovisNature Wow

[Karen Brown @Monstray]

@DuncanHenry78 Wow, is this all it takes …

[SOS Whitstable @SOSWhitstable]

They've released millions of poisonous biobeads onto the beach in Camber Sands ☣️

They've also released hundreds of hours of sewage into seas and rivers across the entire south-east 💩

Why exactly should we continue to pay you @SouthernWater?

[Green Women's Declaration @GWDeclaration]

“Denying a platform to the Green Women’s Declaration looks undemocratic and discriminatory, as well as being anti-women. These people urgently need to get their house in order.” - Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters

https://t.co/ELu7QnhTc1

[Emma 💛💙🇩🇰🇬🇧🇪🇺 @MonkEmma]

It was suggested I took a look at this tweet.

Then we all got sidetracked by 🦢s🤷🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

So, a couple of days late, here you go!

🧵1/25

[Karen Brown @Monstray]

Petition: Inquiry into sexual violence in NHS hospitals https://t.co/0k8hpUROVG

[Karen Brown @Monstray]

Bring back Eurostar train services to Kent https://t.co/NZ42VKW9qD via @UKChange

[Karen Brown @Monstray]

@JournalistJill Yup, me too

[Karen Brown @Monstray]

@StandingforXX Pathetic

[Karen Brown @Monstray]

@CraigMurrayOrg @AnayaKh79843612 No, it would not.

[Anon Opin. @anon_opin]

Americans don't understand that the rest of the world just laughs when they claim to be the country of 'freedom'. They get about 4 days off work a year, no maternity or sick leave, no free healthcare, democracy is owned by billionaires, you arent even free to cross a street.

[Karen Brown @Monstray]

@ThePosieParker Totally .,.,