ScienceVixen 🦊

I was bored before I even began.

[Anna Maria Junus @JunusAnna]

Surprise, surprise, surprise!

[Professor Alice Sullivan @ProfAliceS]

Even among students (exposed to so much propaganda and peer pressure on this issue), a decisive majority disagree with males using women's changing rooms (and vice versa).

Great to see the question asked really clearly by @HEPI_news (so often not the case in polling this topic).

Interesting given that universities' failure to uphold EA2010 seems to be driven by fear of (perceived) student opinion. Yet this polling demonstrates that most students quietly disagree with their activist/NUS peers.

I'd love to see further breakdown of the numbers, e.g. Russell Group vs other students @nickhillman

[💚🤍💜Hoardosaurus 💚🤍💜 @coccinellanovem]

Large drunk man sits next to woman on train, leans all over her, grabs her hair, won’t leave her alone…and this is the headline the @BBCNews chose…

(I can’t believe they’ll keep it so here’s the screenshot)

[ScienceVixen 🦊 @VixenScience]

@creektothewest I can't give individual medical advice, so it's worth reaching out to your doctor. In general though, the symptom I am describing is a one-off, not a regular occurrence. Hope you get it sorted.

[ScienceVixen 🦊 @VixenScience]

A heart attack symptom I've often seen in women (but rarely men) is a feeling of impending doom. It gets dismissed as stress etc but, if you listen to women, they tell you that it's nothing like anything they have ever felt before.
If a patient tells you this, believe her!

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. A 42-year-old mother of two came to my office complaining of jaw pain and crushing fatigue. She ran half-marathons. Her EKG was normal. Another doctor had sent her home with anxiety medication.
When I got her into the cath lab, I found severe microvascular disease — plaque choking the tiniest vessels of her heart, the ones standard angiograms routinely miss.
Her heart had been starving in silence while everyone told her she was stressed.
She is alive today. Too many women like her are not.
Heart disease kills more women than every cancer combined. And medicine is still diagnosing it through a male lens.
84% of cardiologists report having patients in the past year whose heart disease was misdiagnosed by another physician. Women with a STEMI heart attack have a 59% greater chance of being misdiagnosed compared to men. Women with an NSTEMI — 41% greater chance.
The reason is structural. For decades, we screened, tested, and treated women using a template built for men.
Men's heart attacks announce themselves — the crushing chest pain, the clutched fist, the Hollywood collapse. Women's hearts whisper. Crushing fatigue that feels like wearing a lead vest. Jaw pain written off as TMJ. Nausea blamed on a stomach bug. An ache between the shoulder blades blamed on a long week. Shortness of breath blamed on being out of shape.
For years, medicine called these "atypical" symptoms. They are not atypical. They are female-typical. Half of humanity is not a variant.
And the biology runs deeper than symptoms.
Women have smaller hearts and narrower coronary arteries. Plaque doesn't only clog the big highway vessels — it hides in the microvasculature, the tiny branches feeding the heart muscle itself. A woman can have a heart attack with a completely "clean" standard angiogram.
SCAD — spontaneous coronary artery dissection — occurs 90% of the time in women. Often young, fit women with zero traditional risk factors. It's the leading cause of heart attack in women under 50, accounting for roughly one quarter of all cases in that age group. Most doctors have never diagnosed one.
And some of the most dangerous cardiac risk factors are hidden in women's medical histories where no one thinks to look:
Preeclampsia or gestational hypertension doubles to quadruples lifetime heart disease and stroke risk. Pregnancy is the body's first cardiac stress test — and these complications are early warning sirens, not closed chapters.
Autoimmune disease — lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis — far more common in women, turbocharges inflammation and plaque formation at any age.
Cardiovascular disease in women aged 20-44 is projected to surge nearly 50% by 2050.
The youngest patients in my practice keep getting younger.
What every woman should ask her doctor — and what every doctor should be asking:
"Given my pregnancy history, autoimmune status, and family history — what is my full cardiovascular risk?" If they don't ask about preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, volunteer it.
"Should I have an Lp(a) test and a coronary calcium score?" Standard cholesterol panels miss too much. Lp(a) is genetic, one-time, and most women have never been tested.
"My tests came back normal but my symptoms haven't stopped — what's next?" Normal stress tests and angiograms can miss microvascular disease, spasm, and SCAD. Persistent symptoms warrant coronary CT angiography or cardiac MRI.
And if something feels wrong — say these exact words to your doctor: "I am concerned this could be my heart."
That single sentence changes the workup. Do not soften it. Do not apologize for it.
80% of heart disease is preventable. But the playbook has to be built for female biology.
Two decades ago, I wrote one of the first books warning that heart disease was the number one killer of women and that medicine was diagnosing it through a male lens. It was recognized by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House during the early years of the national conversation about women's heart health.
I'm haunted by how much of that book I could republish today unchanged.
The science has advanced. The awareness has grown. But the gap between what we know and what happens in the exam room is still costing women their lives.
Share this with every woman you love — and every doctor who treats them. READ MORE: https://t.co/4LRugiY8q2

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

This is a matter for the Vice chancellor of @UniofOxford Prof Irene Tracey, but also for the Chancellor @WilliamJHague. You were elected on an academic freedom platform: let's see some action, Lord Hague.

[ScienceVixen 🦊 @VixenScience]

@TheAttagirls @socksknitter It’s refreshing to hear of the support from her male contemporaries- definitely not the experience of many other female pioneer academics.

[Lily Craven @TheAttagirls]

Woman of the Day mathematician Charlotte Angas Scott, born OTD in 1858 in Lincoln, the first woman in Britain to achieve a doctorate in mathematics and the one whose success in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos caused the University to relent…a little.

Her father and grandfather were Congregational Church ministers, one of the very few churches to support equality for women. When her father became headmaster of an independent school, he provided a tutor for his seven year old daughter.

Charlotte thrived and won a scholarship in 1876 to Girton College. Accommodation was basic.

“When retiring for study after an extremely simple 'tea' in the Common Room, they would pick up three things en route to their rooms…two candles, a bucket of coals, and a chamber pot.”

The standard of education however was first class. Emily Davies, founder of Girton, ignored Cambridge’s refusal to recognise women candidates for the famously demanding Mathematical Tripos exams and trained Girton students from the beginning.

In 1880, Charlotte was given special permission to sit the Tripos. She came eighth but was not accorded the title of Eighth Wrangler. Of course she wasn’t. Mastery of the Tripos exams accorded a bachelor's degree with honours, but Cambridge refused to award women degrees. Eighth Wrangler went to the man who came ninth. Charlotte was barred from the graduation ceremony and her name was cancelled from the list.

Male students at Cambridge were aware of the injustice and made their point. “The man read out the names and when he came to 'eighth', before he could say the name, all the undergraduates called out 'Scott of Girton', and cheered tremendously, shouting her name over and over again with tremendous cheers and raising of hats.”

The women of Girton went one better. One of Charlotte’s contemporaries wrote: “At dinner we clapped and cheered her…Then we told her there would be College Songs in Hall at 9. She was led in by Miss Welsh up an avenue of students to the top of the hall, while 'See the conquering hero comes' was played on the piano and sung by us all. At the top Miss Herschel was standing on a sort of dais, and when we had finished singing she recited an ode to Miss Scott, composed by Miss Welsh for the occasion, and then crowned her with laurels, while we clapped and applauded with all our might.”

Within three months, a petition to Cambridge to allow women to sit exams as a right and to graduate gathered over 8,000 signatures.

You have no idea how radical this was. Cambridge was so repressive that its Proctors threw unaccompanied women (such a corrupting influence on its highly suggestible male students!) into the Spinning House, a workhouse for prostitutes and suspected prostitutes. Even accompanied women were not spared. In 1891, 17-year-old Daisy Hopkins was arrested for the crime of "walking with a member of the university". She sued, but the trial ripped her reputation to shreds and prompted public outrage. In the end, Parliament had to intervene and remove the Proctors’ power of arrest in such instances. But I digress.

The University relented a smidgen. The following year, in 1881, women were allowed to sit the Tripos but placed on a separate list — well, we can’t have them showing up the men, you know — and instead of a degree, they were awarded a Certificate of Proficiency, which makes it sound as though they’d passed their basic road safety and cycling test.

Undeterred, Charlotte was appointed by Girton in 1880 as a lecturer in mathematics and gave lectures at Newnham College from 1880 to 1883. As if that didn’t keep her busy enough, she took an external University of London degree (it didn’t discriminate against women) and was awarded BSc with First Class honours in Mathematics in 1882. She received her doctorate in mathematics in 1885, the first woman to do so.

When Bryn Mawr College opened in Pennsylvania in 1885, the first higher education institution in the US to offer graduate training for women, Charlotte was the natural choice as the first head of its mathematics department. She expected rigour, once rebuking the Principal of the College:

“I am most disturbed and disappointed at present to find you taking the position that intellectual pursuits must be "watered down" to make them suitable for women, and that a lower standard must be adopted at a woman's college than in a man's. I do not expect any of the other members of the faculty to feel this way about it; they, like nearly all men that I have known, doubtless take an attitude of toleration, half amused and half kindly, on the whole question; for even where men are willing to help in women's education, it is with an inward reserve of condescension.”

Does that strike a chord?

Charlotte rolled up her sleeves, urged other American colleges to set up joint exam boards for secondary school students, acted as chief mathematics examiner for the new College Board, set up the Bryn Mawr College Mathematics Journal Club to mentor women students and supervised seven Ph.D students. Oh, and published textbooks, edited the American Journal of Mathematics, authored over thirty papers published in journals all around the world, and was a founder member of the American Mathematical Society and its first woman vice-president.

Charlotte returned to England soon after she retired. She died in 1931, 17 years before Cambridge finally admitted women as full students, but she did everything in her power to open doors for women in mathematics in the UK and the USA.

[marion scott @ladymcbeth2]

Domestic abuser drugged and sexually assaulted wife and filmed the attacks but Police Scotland refused to act as they could see no sign of criminality. https://t.co/KG7Y1Ai4VT via @Sunday_Post

[Gerald Posner @geraldposner]

Three years ago today, the Wall Street Journal published my piece, “The Truth About Puberty Blockers.” It drew on my reporting from PHARMA to document the serious, hidden adverse effects of drugs that gender activists falsely pushed as “harmless” and “reversible” for children.

For those who haven’t read it, here’s a paywall-free link via the Congressional Record, where it was entered shortly after publication:
https://t.co/OlPCr5U9YO

In the three years since, I’ve weathered the reflexive “transphobic” label from gender zealots. I’ve also built meaningful connections on X with colleagues who have been on the front lines for many years protecting children from the pediatric gender industry. The effort to roll back the ideological capture of America’s leading medical institutions remains on ongoing battle.

[Anna Maria Junus @JunusAnna]

"Where should we put the rapists and pedophiles? The men will hurt them."

"I know! Let's put them in with the women!"

"But won't they rape the women?"

"Who cares?"

[ScienceVixen 🦊 @VixenScience]

@podsavetheuk Maybe next you could have 2 white dudes opining on why black people are wrong to fear racism? Or straight dudes on why homophobia is all in gay people's minds?

Your misogyny is off the scale. Men do not get to tell women how to live.

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

Hello Stella.

(Labour Party member here, if that makes a difference)

IMO, it’s remarkable that you are co-sponsoring an EDM to reject guidance on established law, and extensively engaging/justifying this action because you think the guidance “is wrong”, yet decline to explain why you think the guidance is wrong.

You are an elected official with a national platform and accountability. Being coy about your rationale for attempting to prevent guidance on such a hotly-contested issue being approved really isn’t on.

I expect more of our parliamentarians, frankly.

Don’t you think constituents, including both the broader party constituency and non-constituents who, nonetheless, live in a country where you belong to the party in power are worthy of explanation?

You’re talking to the expert, advocates and representatives of this guidance. Maybe an actual discussion would be fruitful?

Is the guidance wring but you think the law OK?
Is the guidance wrong because you think the law is wrong?

If you think the solution is legislation, that means you wish to change the Equality Act - I don’t see another interpretation.

Your voters deserve to know how you are planning to do this. Don’t we LP members deserve to know how our party is approaching this (including the range of views on offer)?

No Debate is over.

[MJ Murphy @hothingsgirlsay]

I’d be happy to show up and have this conversation with anyone in New York arguing that gender identity should override biological sex.

I have been assaulted in a bathroom in New York City.

I have had a man take my top female bowling title.

In another state, I lost a top female comedy award to a male.

I spend thousands of dollars so my daughter can compete in sports, only to find that some opposing teams include males whose sex is concealed, while parents and athletes are told they’re not allowed to ask questions, object, or contest it.

These are not abstract theories to me. They are real experiences with real consequences.

If biological sex doesn’t matter, why do women’s sports, women’s prisons, women’s shelters, women’s locker rooms, and women’s bathrooms exist in the first place?

No one has been able to defeat me in this debate because no one has been able to answer that question without contradicting themselves.

I’m happy to have the conversation with anyone, anytime.

Please check out my videos.

[Robert Jessel @robjessel16]

Today I learned about Cathleen Quinn, who had to serve an extra 5 years in prison because she complained about a trans-identifying male inmate perving on her.

https://t.co/6GlPTHRbNa

[ripx4nutmeg @ripx4nutmeg]

#HIGNFY starts with a 'non-binary' telling a trans activist who publicly wished Kemi Badenoch was dead that he's her hero, 40 seconds is spent on the main story of the week (and it's entirely about Reform), & JK Rowling, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Trump & Elon Musk are all mocked

[ScienceVixen 🦊 @VixenScience]

@James_West_PhD @CathyYoung63 @Gurdur @CamCavendish @DrCalumMiller I do acknowledge that certainty is impossible. But we should be wary of telling his family that he might have survived when statistically this was v unlikely at the point the police arrived. It’s so rare that some argue it’s unethical even to attempt CPR -https://t.co/yQAYsN2yVC

[ScienceVixen 🦊 @VixenScience]

@James_West_PhD @CathyYoung63 @Gurdur @CamCavendish @DrCalumMiller He might have survived if he’d been taken there immediately after the stabbing. But when the police arrived, he was close to hypovolaemic cardiac arrest. Survival rate is 2-5% *even if you’re already in hospital*. Out of hospital = vanishingly low esp with multiple injuries

[ScienceVixen 🦊 @VixenScience]

@Bitchard11 @podsavetheuk @IndiaWilloughby Denigrating women for wanting their legal rights. How very original

[ScienceVixen 🦊 @VixenScience]

@CathyYoung63 @Gurdur @CamCavendish @James_West_PhD @DrCalumMiller I’m an ER dr. The honest answer is we can never know for sure. However his chances of surviving this type of injury were already very low at the time the police arrived- this is apparent from the speed of subsequent deterioration.
Ofc, that in no way excuses the police.