DNAdoesntlie

GC old school feminist, bit cross, rational, evidence based. Healthcare worker. I❤️JKRowling

[Irene BritUSA @irenebritusa]

Those who say we should not exclude anyone from sports are quiet when women and girls are permanently excluded after getting injured by male athletes.

They have no sympathy for women who self-exclude because they don't want to compete against men or share locker rooms with men. Instead, they call them bigots.

They are fine with women being excluded from their own sports.

[WRN Norfolk @WRNNorfolk]

This has happened in Norfolk too, @jk_rowling.
Here's the recent message to all staff in our three hospitals. No mention of the distress and rights of female patients and staff.

The mental health trust NSFT is also in defiance of the law and does not recognise the law. https://t.co/pa0RWcHg0F

[WRN Norfolk @WRNNorfolk]

None of the NHS trusts in Norfolk are operating lawful policies, @YvetteCooperMP @bphillipsonMP @DHSCgovuk @EHRC.

The NNUH hospitals group has told staff this week that they are continuing to flout the law by allowing men who claim to be women into women's staff facilities and women's wards. It is "awaiting further information for the NHS and public sector."

@nnuh, @JamesPagetNHS & @TeamQEH continue to defy the law and continuing to discriminate against the women who work for them, and their female patients, Secretary of State and Minister for Women & Equalities. It is time for action.

@akuareindorf @legalfeminist @WomensRightsNet
@SEENinHealth @SexMattersOrg @ForWomenScot @DarlingtonUnion

[Ali Al Hussein @AliBinAlHussein]

There is no shortage of issues regarding FIFA. Let me start by clarifying what some of these are from an FA perspective, in particular that of Jordan going into a World Cup for the first time.
We are a small country with a minimal budget for our FA and had to deal with enormous hurdles. First, getting our fans into the USA: not all were granted VISAS, even though they had tickets -which we also know were sold at exorbitant prices. Secondly, we are being taxed by the US govt through FIFA for our participation. Money that should go to players and staff. This was not the case for those who played and set up camp in Canada and Mexico. But we happened to be in the USA so now we face these huge costs in taxes for having participated.
Thirdly we have been waiting for reward money for our players since December for the Arab cup in Qatar, which is a FIFA event. The money our team should receive for having reached the final has not been delivered yet, while at the same time FIFA brags about how many billions they have in reserve.
It is clear the problem really is with leadership. For months, FIFA has been refusing to help us on any of these or other matters- until it was verbally communicated to me during the World Cup that if I endorsed Infantino it would go a long way to helping our FA out.
We pride ourselves in Jordan in upholding ethical values. We did not endorse him before and certainly will not now. But the whole situation amounts to blackmail and we refuse to give in to that.

[Mia Hughes @_CryMiaRiver]

Over three years since I wrote this thought experiment and in that time, not one person has been able to find a single flaw in it.

(Calling me a transphobe or a bigot doesn't count)

[Dr Francis Young @DrFrancisYoung]

Let’s not forget that even if England win against Norway on Saturday they will then immediately have to march 200 miles south and play France without so much as a hydration break

[Luke LRPS @LukeLRPS]

When I was 6 years old I realised I was supposed to be born a girl. This belief lasted until I was about 10 or 11. Lots of gay boys experience this. Of course, it turned out just to be my misunderstanding my future homosexuality.

If this bill were law today, and as a 6 year old I expressed to my parents (or anyone) the “realisation” that I was a girl in the wrong body, and if in response they CORRECTLY suggested “that’s just you misunderstanding your future homosexuality” and didn’t affirm my simplistic childish belief, their actions would be illegal. The test being my distress at the conversation (a conversation I most likely wouldn’t understand at 6).

This bill is a homophobic hellscape. It’s just awful.
How can its proponents not see the problem? exact parents they want

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

Here is a list of the trans-identifying men who have made it into the news after sexually assaulting a woman or a girl over the last few years.

Tremaine Carroll
Michael Maria Pentholm
Karen White
Katie Dolatowski
Jessica Winfield
Tara Desousa
Janiah Monroe
Kristen Lukess
Lisa Hauxwell
Laken McKay
Aliea Rose Brown
Paula Witherspoon
Davina Ayrton
Johanna Wolf
Hanna Tubbs
Christopher Hambrook
Dakota Nieves
Tarah Jo Morgan
Marie Dean
Jessica Brennan
Rachel Smith
Marcia Walker
Synthia China Blast
Michelle Winter
Paris Bregazzi
Melissa Wilson
Barbie Kardashian
Jessica Smith
Wolfgang Schmidt
Chloe Thompson
Denen Anderson
Kadence Pinder
Beth Hannan
Leah Harvey
Julie Marshall
Blaine Maney
Amber Thorden
Evi Amat
Babs Longmire
Rachel Fenton
Jorven Seren
Claire Goodier
Kim Marie Johannson
Steven Hayes
Jacinta Brooks
Alexander Eshawn Lions
Ashley Winter
Steph Ricciardi
Vicky Green
Ella Davies
Melissa Addis
Madilyn Harks
Jessica Marie Hann
Michelle Martinez
Nicole Summers
Shauna Patricia Smith
Evelyn Young
Claire Goodier
Allison Woolbert
Nur Ahmed
Vyvyenne Ward
Laura McCann
Lisa Jones
Rayne Aloysius Constantine
Rose Bennett
Louise Ford
Robert Glanowski
Lily Bate
Alyssa Celusta
Sora Kuykendall
Lydia Helena Vision
Ava Jones
Alex Ray Scott
Diego Melendez
Paris Green
Tiffany Scott
Zoe Lynes
Vicky Green
Pauline Long
Chloe Walker
Toni Prince
Lana Laws
Christyl Knight
Carrie Cooper
Jasmine Hill
Diamond Blount
Nicola Florida
Dawn Love
Stacey Pool
Alexis Herschell
Scarlet Shadows
Karen Louise Lawson
Nicola Cope
Gina Owen
Kayleigh Louise Woods
Claire Darbyshire
Kira Leverton
Kathleen Carpenter
Donna Perry
Karen Jones
Carol Lea
Michelle Lewin
Alanna Nicole Partin
Yostin Murillo
Peter Selby
Wendy Jones
Rose Whitby
Daryl Graves
Diana Guevara
Jason Croker
Jody Matthew Burke
Patricia Trimble
Sally Dixon
Milan Wash
Adree Edmo
Jayden Dean
Paul Denyer
Bruno Meirelles
Pandora Electra
Robert Gordon Cummins
Danielle Rose Gemini
Brooke Lyn Sonia
Nonnie Lotusflower
Tianne Miller
Narsimha Bichappa Shirvati
Brandy Wood
Kelly McSean
Michelle Renee Lamb
Andrea Balcer
Ketan Shende
Serenity Alana Mann
Sacho Samson
Harryetta Thompson
Jenna Hansen
Jane Beck
Audrey Robinson
Lexi-Rose Crawford
Carissa Marie Radcliffe
Jolene Charisma Starr
Zara Jade
Rhiley Carlson
Claire Fox
Robert William Perry II
Tanya Howes
Loana Luna
Dwight Chisolm
Amy George
Stuart Bulling
Lorena Santana
Christopher Williams
Alyssa Christine Trenchard
Danielle Edney
Julie Shepherd
Izzabella Raymundo
Stephanie Hayden
Sophie Louise Carter
Autumn Cordellioné
Katana Paris
Shauna Kavanagh
Zera Lola Zombie
Nicole Rose Campbell
April Welsh
Tânia Ferrinho
Scarlet Moon Shadows
Laura Miller
Thorsten Heinz
Tara Pearsall
Adam McDonald
Samantha Norris
Abigail Waller
Rachel Queen Burton
Maria Childers
Xenia Jade Millar
Krystel Lauzon
Amber Faye Fox Kim
Ash Cooper
Natalie Pershall
Kazumi Watanabe
Claire Caballero
Jacqui McWilliams
Sabrina/Morrigan Hetke
Jo White
July Justine Shelby
Joanna Evans
Louise Thomas
Miquel Toni Riera Prats
Emma Davies
Lexi Secker
Pierre Parsons,
Claire Anderson
Michell Silva Perez
Michelle Blessent
Cassidy Honsinger
Elijah Thomas Berryman
Sean Windingland
Duane Owen
Dana Rivers
Alfie Howe
Marceline Harvey
Chloee-Mae Danvers
Jamie Kim Belladonna
Catarina da Lapa,
Renee Mills
Aria Peers
Danielle Marie Whitebird
Makayla Craig
Angel Hill
Farin Kinar
Reiyn Keohane
Michelle Ward
Levana Ballouz
Francesca Bartkus
María López Barrera
Autumn Tulip Harper
Richard Kenneth Cox
Oliver Smith
Rebecca Clark
Dakota Rose Austin
Catherine Lynn
Naomi O’Brien
Nicola Watson
Bunny Autumn Colasimone
Tiffany Aching
Sophie KoKo

Many of these assaults took place in what should have been - and once was - a female-only space.

[Jill Foster @JournalistJill]

One of the ‘trans women’ openly boasting about going to the women’s pond and defying the law last week included Sarah Jane Baker, a man who served 30 years for kidnap and torture.
This is who the GLP fights for…

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

135 British MPs are fighting guidance that would deny ‘Paula’ the right to enter women’s and girls’ changing rooms.

[the other mother @KatyKiernan]

@Transgendertrd I've noticed, as I passed, large groups of boys in the loos, being noisy and a bit rowdy, banging on the door where their mates are etc and girls mostly hovering outside waiting for the male group to leave before they quickly dart in to use the loo.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

In the UK, 11 trans people have been murdered since 2000.

In the same country, from 2009 - 2021, 16 women were murdered by serving or retired police officers. Not killed by officers in the line of duty — flat out murdered.

In 2022 alone, 11 British women were killed by male strangers. 12 were murdered by their own sons; 150 British women have been murdered by their own sons since 2012.

On average, a woman is murdered by a man in the UK once every 72 hours.

Where is the Day of Remembrance for the women murdered by their own sons? By their husbands, their fathers, their brothers? By serving police officers?

In the last 25 years, there have been nearly twice as many trans-identifying murderers than there have been murder victims - 20 murderers, versus 11 victims — and yet we’re told to believe that this is a genocide, while our own dead go ignored and unnamed.

These people are, per capita, the safest demographic in the UK, with a homicide rate of 0.38 per 100k (for women, it’s 0.50 per 100k, and for normal men, it’s 1.23.) but we’re supposed to believe that they’re being physically exterminated? Or is genocide another one of those words that has deliberately been stripped of its meaning, like “woman” and “female”?

Who gains when people are conditioned to roll their eyes at the word “genocide”? When “woman” has no meaning in law or policy? What is the end game here?

[REDUXX @reduxx]

UK: A trans activist has been jailed after issuing threats to slaughter female staff and students at three schools as revenge for the "oppression" of "trans women."

Most British news outlets did not include Darren Rigby's motives in their coverage.

READ: https://t.co/3xZV9ys4LM

[Emma Bateman @EmmaBatemanGPW]

Whilst rape victims usually know their attacker, victims of lesser sexual offences like indecent exposure and voyeurism often don't. These are opportunistic crimes. A 2023 report showed 71% of UK women have been subjected to these kind of crimes. 95% were not reported.

[SEEN in Journalism @JournalismSEEN]

Fascinating and in depth article by @PaulKnaggs for Labour Heartlands on the framing of the ‘trans debate’ around toilets rather than women’s fundamental rights.

It’s an accurate observation of a highly successful PR campaign. Across the media, presenters last week repeatedly asked women if they feel guilty about men who can’t use their toilets, businesses who can’t afford to build more toilets, and disabled people whose toilets are suggested as alternatives.

But most importantly they’ve not bern asking about anything except toilets. Specifically they’ve failed to ask men/trans campaigners why they don’t understand that if they are included in the legal meaning of ‘woman’, women themselves have no rights at all on the basis of sex.

It follows a pattern of successful ‘identity’ media campaigns, with which news outlets collude because 1. their proponents are very top down and powerful and 2. they advance men’s rights. Previous examples include lived experience journalism, no debate, the narrative of victimhood and the infinite necessity of a trans male contributor.

This excellent article also looks at the impact:- ‘The cost has been real and it has fallen on working class women in particular’.

https://t.co/wqaZSkkB52

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Follow the logic.

Women are deluded and naive for thinking predatory and violent men can be kept out of women-only spaces. ‘They can rape you anywhere.’

However, trans-identified men can only be safe in women-only spaces, because no abuser would ever follow them in there.

[Duncan Bannatyne @DuncanBannatyne]

What about the trans women that have refused the third space facility I offered to provide then with?

[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.

[Lily Craven @TheAttagirls]

Woman of the Day prison reformer and philanthropist Elizabeth Fry, born OTD in 1780 in Norwich, the first woman to give evidence to a Select Committee. It was instrumental in the passing of the Gaols Act 1823, which separated the sexes.

Caring responsibilities came early to her. Her mother died when she was 12 — she had twelve siblings — and as a Quaker, she took an interest in the impoverished, the sick and prisoners. A “plain Friend”, she dressed plainly, did not dance or sing, and took philanthropy very seriously.

In 1813 and at the suggestion of another Friend, Elizabeth visited Newgate Prison and found women and children in small overcrowded cells where they had to manage washing, cooking, toilet functions, and sleep on straw. Some hadn’t even been tried at court. She was horrified.

“All I tell thee is a faint picture of reality; the filth, the closeness of the rooms, the furious manner and expressions of the women towards each other, and the abandoned wickedness, which everything bespoke are really indescribable".

She returned the following day with food and clothing, but family finances prevented her from doing more until 1816. At first, she concentrated on the children by funding a school inside the prison for them, but she found it impossible to ignore the plight of the women. They were at the mercy of male inmates who raped and sexually exploited them. On release, the few occupations available to women were beyond their reach. Life was without hope.

Elizabeth founded the Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate and encouraged other affluent women to set up classes for women prisoners, providing them with materials so they could learn to sew and knit. It calmed them — “Already, from being like wild beasts, they appear harmless and kind" — and meant they had employable skills on release.

When she gave evidence to a Select Committee on 27 February 1818, she pulled no punches. She told them in graphic terms of the rapes and sexual exploitation suffered by the women. Her powerful evidence helped to secure the Gaols Act 1823 which required prisons to separate the sexes.

Other provisions of the Act included paying gaolers (to combat corruption), requiring doctors and chaplains to visit prisoners (still an important statutory requirement today), and greater emphasis on reform and rehabilitation.

The Gaols Act was far-seeing and genuinely progressive, but other than separation of the sexes, toothless. Town gaols and debtors prisons were excluded and there was no means of checking that its provisions were being met.

Elizabeth returned once more to give evidence to a Select Committee of the House of Lords in 1835, pointing out that "in many instances their condition is melancholy...they may truly be called schools for crime", that some still had "no instruction, no employment, no classification [of inmates]...and they get into a most low and deplorable state of morals...I would not say that all are in that condition, but I fear many are".

In those days, many prisoners faced transportation to New South Wales even for the most minor of crimes (for more serious offences, hanging was the go-to sanction). They faced eight months in vermin-infested cramped holds, often flooded with bilge-water, and strictly rationed fresh water. The women transported by the First Fleet had only the clothing they were standing up in and when this became infected with lice and had to be burnt, they were given rice sacks to wear. Elizabeth campaigned for better care and provision for them too.

In 1825, she published "Observations of the Siting, Superintendence and Government of Female Prisoners", an influential book that laid out in clear detail how penal regimes should be run.

Somewhere along the way, Elizabeth established a "nightly shelter" for the homeless in London after seeing the body of a boy who had frozen in winter and set up a system of volunteers to visit the poor and homeless and provide help and comfort to them. She campaigned against the slave trade, and in 1840, opened a training school for nurses. Florence Nightingale took a team of Fry nurses to the Crimea.

Her abiding principles of kindness and fairness sprang from her Quaker faith and she was the first woman — other than the late Queen, of course — to be depicted on a British banknote.

Elizabeth Fry died in 1845 at the age of 65. I cannot tell you how much I admire this woman.

Less than a century later, Westminster and Holyrood subsequently ditched Elizabeth’s truly progressive approach to prison as a place for rehabilitation, not punishment, and decided that it would be even more “kind and inclusive” to hold men in women’s prisons, as long as they claimed to be women too.

In wartime and in war zones, that would be regarded as a war crime under the Geneva Convention, and those officials who allowed it would be classed as war criminals.

It’s peacetime, allegedly, but I’d still call it a human rights violation, and I have a few choice words for all of those politicians and civil servants who nodded along with it. I hope their complicity haunts them.

[Women's Rights Network - WRN @WomensRightsNet]

The depressing regularity with which sexual predators use mixed-sex leisure centre changing rooms to access their victims is highlighted by two recent court cases.

In Lancashire, Matthew Gilkes, an IT teacher has been jailed for 16 years after being found guilty of a string of child sex abuse crimes including taking indecent photographs in the changing rooms at the leisure centre in Chorley.

In Southampton, Joshua Vallis has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in the mixed-sex changing rooms at Romsey Rapids swimming pool. Police found thousands of indecent images of children on his computer. He was released on bail and will be sentenced at a later date.

These two men had accrued thousands of indecent images of children. The crimes they committed in swimming pool changing rooms were part of a prolific pattern of offending.

Every woman and child is at risk of sexual predators using mixed-sex changing rooms to commit crimes. What will it take for local authorities, leisure providers and the sports councils to take this seriously?