Stephanie Callaghan

[EHRC @EHRC]

Our draft Code of Practice helps providers of services, public functions and associations apply the Equality Act 2010. It doesn't apply to workplaces; employers should consult the Workplace (Health, Safety & Welfare) Regs 1992, the Equality Act, and seek independent legal advice.

[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.

[The SNP @theSNP]

Wow! Last night’s Question Time audience were on fire. 🔥🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[Allan petrie @Allanpetrie91]

1/2

Sex, Law and the Rule of Law in Scotland

The decision by the Scottish Parliament to remove the “gender filter” from its website is not a minor technical alteration, it is part of a wider political and institutional confusion between the legal meaning of sex and the ideological concept of gender identity, that confusion now stands directly against the clarity provided by the UK Supreme Court.

In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, within the Equality Act 2010, the protected characteristic of sex refers to biological sex, that judgment was not ambiguous, it was not optional guidance, it was a binding interpretation of the law from the highest court in the land.

Public bodies, governments, local authorities and publicly funded institutions are required to operate within that legal framework.

The importance of that ruling cannot be overstated, sex-based rights exist in law for a reason, they protect women and men as biological classes, they underpin single-sex spaces, safeguarding policies, equal pay monitoring, medical data, crime statistics, prisons, sport and many other areas of public policy.

Once sex is replaced with subjective gender identity in official systems, the law itself becomes impossible to apply consistently,

The Scottish Parliament now claims that the removal of its “gender filter” is part of an “Inclusive Parliament Review” and that the online filter was merely a “legacy system,” but this explanation raises more questions than answers, inclusion cannot come at the expense of legal accuracy, public institutions do not have the authority to rewrite statutory definitions because they find them politically inconvenient.

If MSP records and parliamentary systems stop distinguishing biological sex, then how can the Parliament claim compliance with equality legislation that explicitly recognises sex as a protected characteristic? How can accurate monitoring, reporting or policy analysis take place if the legal category itself is diluted or hidden?

This is not about hostility towards individuals, every person deserves dignity and respect under the law but the law must still remain grounded in objective reality, rights become meaningless if the categories they protect are no longer clearly defined.

The Supreme Court ruling should have been a moment of legal reset, instead, some institutions appear determined to continue operating under ideological assumptions that the courts have now rejected, that creates not only public confusion but also potential legal exposure for the bodies involved.

Public authorities have duties under the Equality Act and under public law principles to act lawfully, rationally and consistently with binding legal judgments, ignoring or circumventing those rulings risks undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the rule of law itself.

There must now be serious scrutiny of any government department, parliamentary body or public authority that continues replacing sex with gender identity in official documentation, data collection or policy frameworks. Where legal duties are breached, appropriate consequences should follow, including investigation, compliance action and where necessary, sanctions against those responsible for knowingly disregarding the law.

The controversy also raises wider constitutional questions about the Gender Recognition Act 2004, for years, politicians and public bodies blurred the distinction between legal sex and gender identity, often presenting the issue as settled when it clearly was not, the Supreme Court has now exposed that confusion.

If institutions continue using the GRA as justification for policies that conflict with the Equality Act and Supreme Court interpretation, then we really need to consider legislative reform or repeal to remove ambiguity entirely and restore legal certainty around sex-based rights.

[Susan Richmond @MPSu61]

@MaeveHalligan My daughter had an appendectomy due to endometriosis. Her URGENT NHS surgery waiting time is 1 year. 2024, the NHS spent £76 million on gender affirming care. Annual budget for endometriosis research, affecting 10% of women? Just £1.3 million.
We need more people like you

[Stephanie Callaghan @StephySNP]

Good to see Australia’s parliament finally taking notice - it’s been a long time coming.
A more accurate headline would be: Two sexes.

@salltweets is an inspiration to women everywhere, showing extraordinary courage and integrity despite the steep personal cost
❤️🙏

[The Daily Telegraph @dailytelegraph]

Proposed laws that define two biological genders and protect single sex spaces will be introduced to federal parliament next month following a High Court ruling on the Giggle for Girls app. SEE MORE: https://t.co/PQInaJmWAi

Get the news first with The Daily Telegraph app: https://t.co/It3JLBNjhC

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

A recent “systematic review” claiming transgender women show no meaningful strength differences from women after hormones went viral in progressive circles, but it should never have been published.

It included studies that didn’t even meet its own criteria, and excluded relevant studies that did but contradicted its preferred conclusion. It made sweeping claims based on limited (and flawed) data, and one outlier study drove the headline result.

This did not pass even basic expectations for scientific rigor, and yet it passed peer review in a top journal.

Exercise scientist @JamesLNuzzo does the rigorous, line-by-line review this paper should have received before publication, breaking down exactly where it went wrong and why the conclusions don’t hold up.

Read the full article below.
🔗https://t.co/M1n7PQ6Q4I

[Scottish Parliament Information Centre @SPICe_Research]

Following Thursday's general election to the Scottish Parliament, we have published a short blog looking at the results. We will publish our full results briefing early next week. 👇https://t.co/5ksDwLdaSg

[Stephanie Callaghan @StephySNP]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Congratulations @StevenBonnarSNP
The closing constituency declaration - last but not least!

[The SNP @theSNP]

🥳 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 SNP WIN!

Congratulations to Steven Bonnar, elected for Uddingston & Bellshill.

[Michelle O’Neill @moneillsf]

I have contacted SNP leader John Swinney and Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth to congratulate them on their enormous mandates.

For the first time ever, there could be three pro-independence First Ministers across these islands.

More and more people are looking towards a future beyond the constraints of the Union.

I look forward to continuing to build the friendship between the people of our nations, and to working closely with both John and Rhun in the time ahead.

[Michelle O’Neill @moneillsf]

Historic change is happening.

For the first time ever, there could be three nationalist, pro-Independence First Ministers across these islands.

The demand for independence is growing.

[Stephanie Callaghan @StephySNP]

@SkyNews highlighting ERROR: Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse

SNP Gain from Labour (not HOLD)
@AlexKerrSNP

[South Lanarkshire Council @SouthLanCouncil]

The B7071 Bothwell Road in Uddingston remains closed due to the fire last night.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

America went to war in the Middle East to secure oil. China just sold everyone the exit.

While Washington burned through alliances and aircraft carriers, Beijing spent a decade quietly monopolizing solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles.

The Iran war didn’t slow that down. It accelerated it.

Oil prices spiked. Clean energy orders went through the roof. Chinese battery exports are up 57% year on year. Solar, batteries and EVs hit $22 billion in a single month.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Lily Craven @TheAttagirls]

Woman of the Day Philippa Garrett Fawcett, born OTD in 1868 in Cambridge, daughter of the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett and niece of Britain’s first female doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who achieved a rare distinction in her own right.

On 7 June 1890 at the age of 22, she took first place in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, the first time a woman had done so. It caused havoc.

The Tripos was famously difficult: 12 papers and 192 progressively more difficult questions over eight days, and for those in contention for the title of Wrangler, a further three days of exams consisting of 63 still more testing problems. Preparation took months.

To attain first prize as Senior Wrangler, Cambridge’s champion mathematician, was regarded as the greatest intellectual distinction of all. No fewer than nine Senior Wranglers including Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.

Philippa rose at 8am and studied for an intense six hours a day, often not retiring until 11pm, but she didn’t go as far as her competitors who worked through the night with wet towels wrapped around their heads. She knew she was being watched. The scandalised Pall Mall Gazette reported that she dared to wear “her thick brown hair down to her shoulders, and has even been known (so I have heard) to ride on top of a bus” but she was determined - according to a contemporary news report - to deny ammunition to those who tried “to make out that the women’s colleges are peopled by eccentrics.”

Women then were considered incapable of mastering maths. Fragile, dependent creatures prone to nerves and possessed of a mind several degrees inferior to a man’s, studying during puberty was tantamount to dicing with death because most Victorian scholars believed that “the brain and ovary could not develop at the same time.”

To take first place was unthinkable. Yet Philippa did. She knocked spots off the second place candidate with a score a full 13% higher than his. Did this accord her the much prized title of Senior Wrangler, First among Cambridge mathematics Firsts? What do you think?

As her cousin Marion reported:

“It was a most exciting scene in the Senate…The gallery was crowded with girls and a few men, and the floor of the building was thronged with undergraduates as tightly packed as they could be. The lists were read out from the gallery and we heard splendidly. All the men’s names were read first, the Senior Wrangler [G.T. Bennett of St John’s College] was much cheered. At last the man who had been reading shouted “Women.” A fearfully agitating moment for Philippa it must have been. He signalled with his hand for the men to keep quiet, but had to wait some time. At last he read Philippa’s name, and announced that she was “Above the Senior Wrangler.”

That’s right. Only a man could be named Senior Wrangler, so the bloke in the No. 2 spot got the title. Philippa was simply listed as “Above the Senior Wrangler” instead.

Despite this grudging nod from the university, Philippa’s achievement attracted media attention internationally, and the Daily Telegraph made this its lead story stating, “Once again has woman demonstrated her superiority in the face of an incredulous and somewhat unsympathetic world... And now the last trench has been carried by Amazonian assault, and the whole citadel of learning lies open and defenceless before the victorious students of Newnham and Girton. There is no longer any field of learning in which the lady student does not excel.”

You’d think that Cambridge would be proud to award a degree to someone of such exceptional ability, wouldn’t you? Nah. Women could attend lectures and take the same exams, but they were denied degrees on the basis of their sex. Instead, they were handed a Certificate of Proficiency, which makes it sound as though they’d mastered making sausage rolls in a Bake-off contest.

Philippa promptly became a “Steamboat Lady”.

Until I read about Phillippa, I’d never heard of “steamboat ladies” but it was the nickname given to women students from Oxbridge who travelled to Trinity College Dublin between 1904 and 1906 to be awarded an ad eundem degree - an academic degree awarded on the grounds of mutual recognition or equivalence. Trinity had long held the view that there was no reason to restrict women students from graduating on the same terms as men if they achieved the same grades, and its Board agreed to recognise eligible female Oxbridge students by awarding a Trinity degree.

The Board anticipated that only small numbers of women would take up the offer to graduate: Irishwomen who had studied at Oxbridge. In fact by 1907, Trinity granted degrees to some 720 "steamboat ladies”, all of whom would have been awarded degrees if they had been men. How much talent and potential was lost?

Philippa became a mathematics lecturer at Newnham College for ten years before going to South Africa to set up teacher training colleges. She died on in June 1948, two months after her 80th birthday, and one month after Cambridge finally conceded that yes, women could be awarded a degree.

[Stephanie Callaghan @StephySNP]

@Womban1972 @CllrGregLennon @HRwritesnews @CammieMcManus97 @CllrAdamSmith @PeterMcDade @PaulDiMasci0 For clarity, I confirmed the accuracy of the comment by @StevenBonnarSNP, since he referred to me.
Without implying this tells the whole story, I can also confirm that Cllr Lennon's comments (here and in council chamber) are also accurate. Hope that helps

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Former Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jim O'Neill exposes the devastating reality of Brexit. He confirms the UK lost massive investment and trade benefits, warning that British universities are now struggling to attract the top global intellectual talent.

[Stephanie Callaghan @StephySNP]

"that the universal credit change will only affect “new” claimants says the quiet part out loud: anyone can become disabled or chronically ill at any point... every time gov slash the safety net, we can’t know if it will be us, a loved one, or a stranger who will fall through it"

[Peter Stefanovic @PeterStefanovi2]

Next week’s disability cuts will make people destitute – and you might not understand how bad they are until it’s too late
https://t.co/OCoqlW7RHU

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

In 1930, rural Virginia, a Black girl born into sharecropping poverty wasn't supposed to leave the tobacco fields.

But Gladys Mae Brown had other plans....

Her hands picked crops. Her mind solved equations no one asked her to solve. Her parents, despite barely scraping by, made a choice that defied every expectation placed on them. They kept her in school.

She became valedictorian at a segregated high school with torn textbooks and broken windows. She earned a scholarship to Virginia State College in an era when being Black, female, and intellectually brilliant meant the world tried to crush you three different ways.

In 1956, she walked through the doors of the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren as the second Black woman they'd ever hired. Four Black employees. Hundreds of white men. Most didn't think she'd survive the week.

They were catastrophically wrong.

Gladys calculated weapons trajectories by hand. Complex differential equations that consumed hours of meticulous work. Her accuracy became legendary. When computers arrived, she didn't resist the future. She learned Fortran. She mastered programming languages. She transformed weeks of calculations into hours.

Then came Seasat in the 1970s. The first satellite studying Earth's oceans from orbit. She became project manager. But her true contribution remained hidden in the mathematics.

For GPS to function, you need Earth's exact shape. Not close. Exact. Earth isn't a smooth sphere. It's an asymmetrical, gravity-distorted, irregular mass of mountains and ocean trenches.

Gladys spent years constructing mathematical models describing every deviation, every curve, every gravitational anomaly of our planet's true form. She analyzed satellite data. She built geoid models. Tedious, invisible, revolutionary work.

That mathematics became the foundation of GPS.

Every navigation app. Every emergency rescue. Every autonomous vehicle. Every precision farming system. Her equations make it possible.

Forty-two years at Dahlgren. Retirement in 1998. GPS fully operational worldwide. Billions of users. Almost nobody knew her name.

She raised three children. Earned her PhD at seventy after surviving a stroke. Lived quietly.

Until 2018, when someone at a sorority event read her biography aloud. The room went silent. The story exploded.

At eighty-eight, Gladys West was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. The world finally learned her name.

She mapped the entire planet. Then everyone forgot. Until they remembered.

Gladys West worked alongside her husband Ira West, who was also a mathematician at the Naval Proving Ground. They met at Dahlgren and built both a family and parallel careers in an environment that actively discriminated against them. After retirement, she didn't stop. She earned her PhD from Virginia Tech at age 70, proving that intellectual curiosity doesn't have an expiration date.

The GPS system relies on something called the geoid, a mathematical model of Earth's shape that accounts for gravitational variations. Gladys West's calculations helped create these models by analyzing millions of data points from satellite altimetry. Without accurate geoid models, GPS coordinates would be off by hundreds of meters, making the technology essentially useless.

Her story remained hidden partly because classified military work doesn't generate headlines. Many pioneers of satellite and navigation technology worked in obscurity for national security reasons. The sorority member who recognized her contribution was reading through Alpha Kappa Alpha biographies when she noticed the GPS connection and brought it to public attention.

© Women Stories

#drthehistories

[Stephanie Callaghan @StephySNP]

@Womban1972 @PaulDiMasci0 @StevenBonnarSNP UB branch is full of decent folk, & the shock of this debacle will stay with us all. Steven & I fully backed branch members coming together to act decisively

My deepest respect to all survivors- and to those who refused 2b cowed. Their courage & tenacity exposed this predator 🕊