Robert Stuart-Hudson

Actor, improviser, life model, storyteller, idiot.
Contributer to The Late Show Social, BBC Radio Manchester.

Agent: @DanielleAgency

[Akua Reindorf KC @akuareindorf]

🧵 Why is @unisontheunion campaigning against the @EHRC's Code of Practice on Services, Public Functions and Associations?

[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.

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

@BenMclaine @ModernShy The main paper you need to read and cite is Hilton and Lundberg, also in SM, 5 years later, which completely superceded the one you cite. Joanna Harper looked at the same data sets and came to the same conclusion that GAHT does *not* remove male advantage ...

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

@BenMclaine @ModernShy ... I am sick of you charlatans, posing as the Left, who are, in fact anti-science sexist bigots, who express contempt for women. You haven't got a clue what you are talking about. Fortunately those in positions of responsibility in sport ...

[Robert Stuart-Hudson @RobStuartHudson]

👍👍👍

[Akua Reindorf KC @akuareindorf]

This is untrue.

[Robert Stuart-Hudson @RobStuartHudson]

🤣🤣🤣👍👍👍

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

NARRATOR: JK Rowling had never met Jolyon Maugham. They were never friends. Her close friends remained her close friends. Jolyon Maugham remained a fixated loon.

[Cathy Devine @cathydevine56]

'This policy will disproportionately impact women from the global South.'
Yes it will.
Female athletes from the global South will now be able to represent their countries on the world stage.
Instead of losing their careers to athletes with male DSDs. https://t.co/Bps96522mp

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

I wholeheartedly welcome the new IOC guidelines that secure a safe and fair female category that excludes male athletes.

SRY screening is a simple, non-invasive, once-in-a-lifetime check that returns female sport to female athletes.

Laurel Hubbard should not have been allowed to lift weights against women.

Caster Semenya should not have been allowed to run against women.

Imane Khelif should not have been allowed to punch women in the face.

This is a vindication for all the brilliant women who have fought for fairness and safety for all women in sport.

Thank you to Kirsty Coventry, Jane Thornton and all those in the working group for a clear, evidence based policy.

@iocmedia

[IOC MEDIA @iocmedia]

The International Olympic Committee announces new Policy on the Protection of the Female (Women’s) Category in Olympic Sport.

Read: https://t.co/QcU5IVxyTi

[Robert Stuart-Hudson @RobStuartHudson]

👏👏👏

[Marlon Solomon @supergutman]

The highest break ever made in a competitive match.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Strike fans public service announcement: having just met @CormStrikeFan and friends in person at last and told them the title of Strike #9, it seems right to tell you too…

Sleep Tight, Evangeline

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Yes.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

‘Puberty blockers were developed for end-stage prostate cancer and are used to chemically castrate sex offenders. Side effects include bone density loss, impacted fertility and lowered IQ. Despite this, they were widely prescribed to children off-label.’ https://t.co/XfthLWoY09

[Alan M @Heavy_Boab]

Here’s John’s post.

A man with Tourette’s thanking people for their support after a week of global humiliation. A man apologising for hurt he never intended, while refusing to apologise for having a neurological condition he cannot control.

The continued harassment of him by Hollywood for his condition is sickening.

These are the same multimillionaires who scream about inclusion from red carpets and podiums, who clap for the sanitised movie version of disability, but recoil when confronted with the real, involuntary reality of it. They invited a man with Tourette’s into the room and then acted shocked when Tourette’s did what Tourette’s does.

That’s not inclusivity. That’s hypocrisy.

Johnny has shown more integrity and decency in one Facebook post than that entire virtue soaked industry managed all week.

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

“Only an industry located so firmly up its own backside could gather to honour a film illustrating the grim realities facing someone living with Tourette’s and then be so publicly aggrieved when the actuality of that illness – and the involuntary nature of its effects on those suffering from it – reveals itself in their midst.”

[Robert Stuart-Hudson @RobStuartHudson]

Woooooo!

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Strike fans public service announcement: having just met @CormStrikeFan and friends in person at last and told them the title of Strike #9, it seems right to tell you too…

Sleep Tight, Evangeline

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

An absolute savage review of that terrible BJSM paper trying desperately to show no fitness differences between trans-identifying males and females.

Well worth the read. https://t.co/rBgelcYth8

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I never said and never believed Khelif was trans. I knew* he was a man. The gender activists who created a political climate in which sex testing was seen as 'bigoted' are as culpable as the IOC for the travesty that ensued.

*via a highly credible source who saw his test results

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

What an insane bunch of cherry-picked metrics, cobbled together to try and argue that trans-identifying males should be in female sport.

https://t.co/5VVqzsw8mK

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

Here is my longest interview about Imane Khelif (and other similar athletes like Semenya).

Two points here (discussed in the interview):
1. It is entirely possible to have deep sympathy for people who believe they are girls then find out they are male, and to understand the trauma involved here.
2. The type of DSD Khelif has makes itself known at puberty, and cynicism that this goes unnoticed is reasonable.

@AndrewGold_ok

https://t.co/wE8xuKXCah