Joanne

Woman. Teacher. Mother.

[Joanne @ThatTeacher45]

This is my story, my daughter’s school.

The Headteacher and Local Authority to date have refused to explain to me how they ensured my daughter’s safety and dignity.

The safeguarding issues are off the scale.

https://t.co/Jl9NI6RZYd

[Jonny Bell @Jonnywsbell]

Schools have officially become places of indoctrination...

This isn’t education...it’s ideological grooming...

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

It is NOT ok to experiment on kids as young as 11 and make irreversible changes to their bodies.

We must protect children from dangerous ideology.

Conservatives will not just sit back and let this happen. I refuse to believe MPs, if given the chance, would let this continue. That is why we will force a vote, not just to pause this trial but to stop it completely.

[TransgenderTrend @Transgendertrd]

Who shapes children's stories?

Lobbyists have taken over children's publishing to serve a trans activist agenda. Books now play an active role in the social conditioning of the youngest children.

Read the shocking report out today 👇
@SEENPublishing

https://t.co/KkIlhauVIT

[Neil O'Brien @NeilDotObrien]

Unbelievable - the BBC is basically censoring the story here

[Michael Foran @michaelpforan]

The Scottish Court of Session has just ruled that providing multi-user unisex toilets in a primary school amounted to indirect sex discrimination against female pupils.

https://t.co/ulFHKebMK9

[Genevieve Gluck @WomenReadWomen]

.@Guardian has just published an opinion piece written by a trans-identified male arguing for men to be allowed into spaces where women undress.

This man is the author 👇🏻

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

The Guardian has commissioned a man to write about why he should be allowed to use women’s single sex spaces.

‘We need to restore our rights,’ he claims - as if this was ever lawful.

He also claims women ‘welcomed ‘him into their single sex spaces.

Well not this one, Sunshine.
The majority of women and girls want single sex spaces.
And those women who ‘welcomed’ you into their spaces cannot consent on behalf of other women.

So much gaslighting.

Link to read article in comments 👇

[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.

[Joanne @ThatTeacher45]

@RightNUFC @HelenWebberley @Rich_Y_ @AndyBurnhamGM Medically castrates children and still thinks she’s the goody

[Andreia Patiredson @WorldOfOrdinary]

@NadiaWhittomeMP “Without issue” you say?

You don’t care about the women paying an extraordinary and predictable price for your bonkers beliefs.

Disgusting.

[LBC @LBC]

'Why should this always mean women being quieter and smaller?'

Shelagh Fogarty reacts to Andy Burnham's interview with @lewis_goodall last April, where he said the UK needs a 'new sense of consensus' on the trans debate.

[TransgenderTrend @Transgendertrd]

Every school governor in Brighton & Hove has received this letter from PSHE Brighton, reminding them of their statutory legal and safeguarding duties.

Safeguarding, Law, and Governance: An Open Letter to Brighton & Hove School Governors

https://t.co/g5D19nMTYi

[Jakki Ellis @Jakkiell]

The pupil’s parents had two legal options: attend a boys school or attend a co-educational school. Other parents with female children have chosen a single sex education for their children - that choice should not be taken away from them by inserting a boy into a single sex girls school. Females are entitled to single sex spaces by law.

[Joanne @ThatTeacher45]

@GrumpyOW If she feels so strongly about it, Angela should set up her own 72 gender-only schools. Problem solved.

[WomensForumAustralia @WomensForumAust]

💯💯💯 #IStandWithSallGrover

[Joanne @ThatTeacher45]

@HallisseyC @itsafrogslife Anyone who thinks Parkrun isn’t competitive should go stand on the finishing line for half an hour - yesterday I saw a man nearly knock a woman off her feet to finish before her.

[Joanne @ThatTeacher45]

@SarahCactus1 Thank you, I’ve got an amazing legal team now (after a year of trying to get answers on my own) so I’m in good hands ❤️

[Sonya Douglas @SonyaDouglas]

Secretly admitting a trans-identifying boy to a girls-only school is not only a betrayal of the girls’ trust and contrary to the EA, it makes a complete mockery of the notion of safeguarding

Consent was taken by stealth

This is rape culture ideology https://t.co/vCf3pYSBGA

[Laura Trott MP @LauraTrottMP]

This is a safeguarding issue. Places labelled as only for women and girls should only be for women and girls, they should not include men or boys. I can’t believe we are still having to have this fight.

[Graham Stuart MP @grahamstuart]

A boy should not attend an all girls school whether he identifies as a boy or not.