Victoria Keilthy

Director of Service Transformation and Women’s Network lead at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust. All tweets in personal capacity.

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

Proud to run at Exmouth today as a member of @RRRunnersUK. @parkrunUK’s female category should be female only for fairness, and because it’s the law.
@WomensRightsNet
#RealityRulesRunnersUK
#FairFemaleSports

[Jordan @Jordan370462593]

Two grocery workers recreated The Prodigy’s “ Firestarter”
WTF did I just watch 😧😳🫣😂

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

@gingerneilnc @JoggingJeff5k @jan_murray I’m not sure what bit of ‘women want toilet provision that meets their needs’ you’re not getting or why you think this is anti-man.

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

Of course men have it better. Most of the time men can use a urinal and are happy to do so. Meanwhile the long queues for the portaloos mostly consist of women. I’m not anti-man and people on X don’t have me think anything @gingerneilnc. I’ve just spent a long time queuing for loos when the provision for women is poor and there is no excuse for organisers not getting it right.

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

I’m not a great runner nor a seasoned competitor but that’s not the point. Women shouldn’t have to put up with poorer provision compared to men. Long queues of women for portaloos (because they don’t want to use a peequal) shows the organisers aren’t sufficiently attentive to the needs of a large number of participants.

[WRN Scotland @WRNScotland]

Our FOIs to Police Scotland, published today in @Sunday_Post, show almost 100 sexual crimes at swimming pools and leisure centres — including rape, sexual assault and 51 voyeurism offences.

81 female victims. 57 male perpetrators. Zero offences attributed to male staff.
11 offences involved girls under 13. More girls under 13 were among the additional victims.

Every recorded offence was at a venue with mixed-sex, village-style shared changing. Not one was recorded at a centre with single-sex facilities.

Councils cannot keep calling these spaces “safe” while girls are being filmed, and sexually assaulted in them.
Local authorities must provide single-sex changing, designated family spaces, proper risk assessments, and stop treating women’s and girls’ safety as secondary.
Changing areas have to change.

#ItsTime
Thank you @ladymcbeth2

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

@gingerneilnc @jan_murray Yes, mixed sex use is a problem. Women - quite reasonbly - don’t want to expose their bottom half in close proximity to men. But even if the ‘peequals’ were female only, no toilet paper is provided, which I and many other women are not up for when we pee.

[SEEN in Health @SEENinHealth]

⚖️Today it's 512 days since the For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers ruling that clarified the protected characteristic of SEX in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex ♂️♀️

It's also
⏰️277 days since the Peggie vs NHS Fife ruling;
⏰️237 days since the Hutchinson & others vs County Durham & Darlington NHS Trust ruling
and it's
⏰️120 days since the LS vs NHS England ruling

🛑We are still awaiting lawfully compliant national & local policies that affect patient accommodation & employee toilet, showering & changing facilities

⁉️Why?
⛔️What is the delay? @NHSUK
@NHSEngland

💸Do @NHSResolution have infinite funds for fighting additional unecessary legal cases & employment tribunals ?

🧮Does public liability insurance cover known unlawful policies that increases risk & have not been acted upon

👀SEEN in Health are watching closely, we are expecting action 🎬
@YvetteCooper
@KarinSmyth

[Women's Rights Network - WRN @WomensRightsNet]

The removal of women from public life as somehow ‘offensive’ to any man or group of men, is not acceptable.

The demands of these men should not have been capitulated to. Far from it. This just validates a view that women are lesser humans.

https://t.co/uBzn3vpLpE

[Professor Michael Flood @MichaelGLFlood]

The Bedroom's Moral Exception
A 16-year-old girl was strangled to death in Sydney. We seem to think the room changes what happened.
By Grant Wyeth
https://t.co/08KguvuFhN
1/2

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Economists ran an experiment where a group had to produce one volunteer for a job nobody wanted. Everybody in the group did better if somebody stepped up, and whoever stepped up did worse than everyone else.

In mixed groups, women volunteered far more often than men.

Then the researchers changed one thing. They ran the same experiment with groups of women only, and groups of men only. In the single-sex groups the difference vanished. Women in all-female groups volunteered no more than men in all-male groups did.

That result kills the obvious explanation. Women are not more agreeable by nature or more eager to help. In a room of men, somebody always eventually raises a hand, and it turns out to be whoever is expected to.

Because the expectation is the mechanism. When the researchers let people ask a specific person, managers of both sexes asked the woman. And the women said yes more often, because both sides had learned she would.

The tasks in question have a name now. Non-promotable tasks. Taking the notes, organising the leaving present, sitting on the committee, interviewing the interns. Work the place cannot run without, which counts for nothing at review time.

Over a career the arithmetic is brutal. Hours spent on work that does not get you promoted are hours not spent on work that does, so she works longer to stay level.

The economists who did this founded a group in Pittsburgh to help each other refuse things. They called it the No Club.

The advice given to women is to say no more. One of the researchers pointed out the flaw in it. The tasks do not disappear when she declines, they move to the next woman.

https://t.co/tDFISM6sLh

[Dolly Parton @DollyParton]

A message from the family of Dolly Parton.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There are about fifty bulls at Chillingham and between them they manage roughly ten calves a year.

Fifty. Ten. Nobody has ever sat them down about it.

They are the last wild cattle in Britain, shut in the same Northumberland park since the Middle Ages, and the first surprise is the size. You picture wild cattle, you picture something the size of a shed.

A Chillingham bull is 300 kilos. A large pony with a grudge. A Charolais bull goes past a tonne and would look at one of these the way a docker looks at a whippet.

Nothing has ever selected them for anything. Not milk, not meat, not size, not temper. Seven centuries of breeding for one criterion, which is still being here in March.

Half the herd is bulls, because individually they are not much cop. The population grows at under four per cent a year. Slower than bison. Slower than wisent. A fifth of the rate the Heck cattle managed in the Netherlands before that project collapsed in on itself.

Seven hundred years at a pace a spreadsheet would file as a crisis.

They do not do the king-of-the-herd thing either, which everyone assumed and nobody checked. They spread out. Each bull takes a corner of the park, stands in it, and bellows at the next one over. Nobody moves. Nobody wins. This goes on for years.

Someone eventually recorded the noises and found a vocabulary in there. Different calls for different situations, cattle saying specific things to each other across four hundred yards of Northumberland. We bred that out of every other cow on earth before anyone thought to listen, and the last fluent speakers are in a field outside Alnwick, insulting each other's postcodes.

The cows hide their calves. Newborn goes down in the bracken and lies flat on its own for days while the mother grazes off and comes back to feed it. Every deer in Britain does this. No farm cow does it any more. It was in there the whole time.

The winter of 1947 took the herd down to five bulls and eight cows. Everything alive in that park descends from those thirteen animals. Take blood from any of them and it matches all the others, and matches no other breed on earth.

By every rule in the genetics textbook they should have folded four times over. They are instead notably healthy, and have never been tuberculin tested. Not once. Not in the entire history of the place.

There is a reserve herd of about twenty of them at an undisclosed location in Scotland, which is the only sentence about cattle that has ever needed the phrase undisclosed location.

And they garden, brilliantly, by accident. Somebody has counted the wildflowers in that park in the same marked squares since 1979. The count dipped, the sheep came off in 2004, and it has climbed ever since. Over that same stretch the cattle went from sixty-four to a hundred and eleven.

Herd nearly doubles. Flowers come back with it. Grazed harder by cattle now than at any point anyone has measured, and there is more growing in it.

They do get hay in a hard winter. The charity says so cheerfully, and they had to change how they put it out because the big ones kept elbowing the calves off the pile, which is the least wild behaviour available and the most cow behaviour there has ever been.

Fifty bulls, one per corner, roaring at each other about nothing.

Ten calves.

Standing in the same field since before the Wars of the Roses, achieving very little, indefinitely.

[Committee for Academic Freedom @ComAcFreedom]

STATEMENT: The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) is deeply concerned by Ghent University’s (@ugent’s) suspension of Dr Nathan Cofnas. While we take no view on the merits of Dr Cofnas’s — or any other scholar’s — views beyond the question of whether they are lawful, the reasons now given for his suspension raise grave questions of academic freedom and set a potentially dangerous precedent for its restriction.

Ghent’s suspension letter, which we have seen in full, relies extensively not on alleged misconduct by Dr Cofnas, but on the reactions of others to his appointment and public activity. It repeatedly converts the scale of that opposition into evidence supporting disciplinary intervention: a student campaign established specifically to oppose his appointment, a petition signed by more than 2,000 students, complaints from staff, more than 100 emails to the University, the withdrawal of a guest lecturer and the prospect of an academic boycott.

That is perilously close to an institutionalised heckler’s veto: the greater the hostility generated by protected speech, the stronger the case for restricting the speaker.

The perverse incentive this creates should be obvious. If opponents of an academic know that mobilising sufficient complaints, petitions, boycotts and disruption can itself become evidence that the academic’s continued employment is causing unacceptable “unrest”, an institution effectively provides a roadmap for getting controversial scholars suspended.

Former ACLU director Ira Glasser once compared speech restrictions to poison gas: attractive when the weapon is in your hands and your opponent is in your sights, but rather less so when the political wind changes direction. The same warning applies when a heckler’s veto is allowed, almost by default, to become part of an institution’s disciplinary reasoning. Once the threshold for intervention is lowered in this way, the principle becomes available for use against academics of every political and intellectual persuasion, depending only on who happens to be holding the institutional levers.

The protection of #academicfreedom cannot depend on how successfully an academic’s opponents are able to mobilise pressure against them. CAF therefore urges Ghent University to correct course. If it believes Dr Cofnas has committed misconduct, it should specify that misconduct and assess it on its merits. But opposition, outrage and reputational pressure generated by lawful academic expression cannot properly substitute for a disciplinary case.

[Khalilur Rahman @UN_PGA]

“Give us time,” they said.
It has now been five years.
Five years of women and girls denied education and the chance to serve their communities.
The Taliban’s decrees violate their rights, weaken Afghanistan’s economy and security, and obstruct humanitarian work. Five years is five years too many.

#HumanRights  #LetGirlsLearn #SDG5

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

@WomensRightsNet @ProfAliceS @CanSG_org @SEENinHealth

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

A nerdy but very important change has been made to NHS data standards. Shockingly the NHS previously did not require a patient’s sex to be recorded in their patient records but it did require their stated gender to be recorded.

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

But the latest iteration (version 2.01) now recognises the importance of sex to safe care and makes sex a mandatory item (‘M’). https://t.co/V5JWvSJOR6

[Victoria Keilthy @VikkiKeilthy]

@HairyLeggdHarpy @ProfAliceS Sex wasn’t always mandatory. Version 2.0 of the core information standard was silent about the conformance of the sex field.

[Helen Nettleship @Nettleshippy]

There are hundreds of Pelicots

Hundreds join global support group for survivors of drug-facilitated rape https://t.co/jIz3pJpu4k