Dominique Torode

Arsenal. North London. Mum, wife and solicitor. Born and raised in Africa and the Middle East. speak English, Arabic and French.

[Guido Fawkes @GuidoFawkes]

If Gary wanted to pay more tax he could simply have handed over the £4.9 million that HMRC thought they were owed.

Instead he fought a protracted legal battle to keep it. #Hypocrite #GiveUsTheMoneyGary

[Rob Rinder @RobbieRinder]

Congratulations Argentina. A brilliant football team. Shame they needed so many fouls to get there. Winning matters. So does how you win.

[Francis Hoar @Francis_Hoar]

It is difficult to comprehend the stupidity and recklessness spendthrift attitude of this government.
It makes one think that the sooner this country goes bankrupt and is run by the IMF, with the welfare budget halved, the better.

[Dominique Torode @TorodeDominique]

@DawnNeesom Congratulations

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

Hilariously unlikely cheerleader for the rules based order and the rectitude of football governing bodies. Pure shithousery

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

A heavy weight boxer cannot self identify into the lightweights where he stands a better chance of success, or a mediocre 14 yr old identify as 12 to win the under 12s race. Or even an untalented but enthusiastic able bodied athlete identify as disabled to gain an advantage. It’s the whole reason we have categories in sport, to offer opportunities across society, fairly. Females are worthy of their fair sport. It’s nothing but old fashioned misogyny, a poor understanding of sport & anatomy, or simply virtue signalling attention seeking to suggest men in women’s sport is acceptable.

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

Still the wrong headline!!!!
Trans identified males are banned for womens sports!!!
Get it right for once!

[Dominique Torode @TorodeDominique]

@miriam_cates @GBNEWS Well she didn’t and common sense prevailed 👏

[Dominique Torode @TorodeDominique]

@WilliamClouston Deepest condolences to you and your family

[Dominique Torode @TorodeDominique]

@tomhfh I’m sure your father would have been so proud of both of you. Early loss is tempered with happy moments. This too is life. Love snd congratulations ❤️

[SEEN in Journalism @JournalismSEEN]

Totally fascinating clip. The 👀 that @Jonathan_Hinder gives Derbyshire, as she actively works to get him to describe ‘trans rights’ as a ‘middle class hobby horse’ - which would be quite a gotcha - followed by her disconcerted silence when he just says ‘men’ instead.

She knew exactly what he was thinking of, and he knew exactly what she was doing. But the work on renormalising natural language has paid off. A couple of years ago he would have had to say ‘trans’ in some form, or ‘gender’, to describe events. Now he can just say ‘men’ and the power of that language trickery drains away completely.

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

£1.5m in donations from Ferring Pharmaceuticals, makers of puberty blockers, might provide a clue.

[Dominique Torode @TorodeDominique]

@RobbieRinder Happy birthday you wonderful human being

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

It’s extraordinary that the BBC consistently platforms men upset they have to use gender neutral toilets instead of women’s toilets over the female rape survivors who have been unable to access a female-only support group, in relation to the EHRC guidance. It says it all, really.

[Tina M ♿️ @serenstar4]

Rachel, Im transsexual, Im not banned from any services nor treated abysmally, EA2010 has always excluded me from F spaces, services & sports. Providers who were 'inclusive' were breaking the law, denying all F the right to single sex provision. You wilfully misrepresent the law.

[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.

[Dominique Torode @TorodeDominique]

@TrevorPTweets @ClareCraigPath @EHRC Thank
You for your service iss and measured words as always 🙏

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Some corrections:
You inherited 2% inflation. It doubled in 12 months after you became Chancellor. It is still 50% above the rate you inherited and 50% above target. It should fall to target 2% this summer. So two years to get back to where you started! What’s to boast about that?
Interest rates have been falling everywhere. UK cuts, which you don’t control, have been fewer and smaller because of your inflation record. We still have highest interest rate in G7. The Bank has made some cuts for the simple reason the economy is flat on its back. Well done.
Borrowing is slowly falling from a very high base. Almost six years after the pandemic-induced recession, we’re still borrowing around 4% GDP. And borrowing costs are the highest in the G7.
Retail sales are up in recent months. We’ll see how long that’s sustained. But the hospitality and construction industries are in crisis. Plus our massive services sector is stagnant.
UK fastest G7 economy? That’s simply a bare-faced lie. We grew by 0.1% in Q3 2025; and another 0.1% in Q4. End of.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

‘The country expects us to get on with governing. That is what I am doing.’

[Dominique Torode @TorodeDominique]

@KayBurley Nobody wants his policies that’s why he’s taken such a battering. It’s not that he’s not delivering them quickly enough it’s that we don’t want them.