Chris

Glaswegian, Pharmacologist & Karate black belt. Former academic stroke scientist & Lecturer. RT's & likes don't necessarily mean endorsements.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Trans-identified men in Edinburgh are fortunate enough to be welcome at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, which was headed for a while by a trans-identified man who believed, and said publicly, that women who wanted a female-only service were bigots. That same rape centre admitted a male as a client because he called himself non-binary. The man was subsequently convicted for rape.

Beira’s Place was set up by me to provide women in Edinburgh and the Lothians with the female-only service they were being denied. Internal emails between ERRC staff were revealed during an unrelated court case, which showed them to be angry and dismayed that there was now an alternative service for women. One might have thought, reading those emails, that ERRC staff’s priority was the ideological conversion of rape survivors rather than the provision of a service that traumatised women required to feel safe after rape.

Beira’s Place has been exceptionally busy since it opened. We’ve taken on more staff and are currently looking for larger premises. We’ve helped women who’ve admitted that they didn’t want to use the alternative rape centre because of its very loud and public ‘trans women are women’ stance. We are also open to any and all trans-identified women who need support after rape.

In short, you’ll be relieved to hear that the trans-identified men for whom you feel such empathy and compassion aren’t losing out. It was biological women who were being shamed for their entirely legitimate desire for a male-free space. Apparently you’d have preferred that situation to continue, but I think you’ll find that most people, whether male or female, will see that as evidence of your cruelty, not mine.

[Chris @Chris_Sci2]

@JohnRossBeattie A bit of banter, wearing club shirts at an World Cup, why 🤷‍♂️
plus most Celtic supporters seem to identify /think they are Irish anyway 🤷‍♂️

[Chris @Chris_Sci2]

@CalumAM @TimesRadio Did she never go in the kitchen to make a cup of tea or even perhaps a coffee. She missed out if she didn’t, lots of fancy coffee options for her !

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I challenge every single person who believes minors should be enabled and even encouraged to transition to read this first person testimony to the end.

1/3

via @IWF https://t.co/3276o4tg8J

[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.

[Helen Staniland @helenstaniland]

The trans lobby have had decades to campaign for extra unisex provision. They didn't want to. They very deliberately went after women's toilets instead.

[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.

[Joanna Cherry KC @joannaccherry]

Men who identify as women will no longer be able to disrespect the right of women, including lesbians, to dignity, safety & privacy nor to cheat in women’s sports because that’s the law based on equality legislation & cognisant of everyone’s human rights. There. Fixed that for u.

[Chris @Chris_Sci2]

@MhairiHunter @GeorgeWood72744 You don’t have an opinion though? Should people be able to stand & be elected for parliament without being a citizen of a country? Perhaps on temporary visas as they are students.

[Chris @Chris_Sci2]

@EmmaRoddickSNP @DSanderson_85 Was he transparent with the electorate that he is here on a student visa that is expiring & applying for a new visa. You are elected for a full term & it’s important that you have the right to remain in the country for that term. He will be employing staff.

[Chris @Chris_Sci2]

@ScottishSuffra1 I’m sure the head teacher is terrified 😂😂😂 the replies didn’t quite go as you thought !

[Chris @Chris_Sci2]

@StephenORahilly @theAliceRoberts Seems the Prof of public engagement of science isn’t so interested in public engagement with you. I wonder why!

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

The UK: where a comedy writer is met with armed police because he tweeted that if a man refuses to leave a woman-only space he should get kicked in the balls, and elected politician @IanRBristow is free to publicly tell a woman to shut the fuck up with a picture of a gun.

[Joanna Cherry KC @joannaccherry]

What @BBCr4today & their interviewees have all omitted this morning is reference to the contrast between the police treatment of Graham Linehan’s tweets & their light touch when women face violence threats, harassment & assault by trans activists. This is a big part of the story.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

As another man who once worked with me declares himself saddened by my beliefs on gender and sex, I thought it might be useful to compile a list for handy reference. Which of the following do you imagine makes actors and directors who aren’t involved with the HBO reboot of Harry Potter so miserable?

Is it my belief that women and girls should have their own public changing rooms and bathrooms?

That women should retain female-only rape crisis centres?

That men don’t belong in women’s sport?

That female prisoners shouldn’t be incarcerated with violent men and male sex offenders?

That women should remain a protected class in law, because they have sex-specific needs and issues?

That language should reflect reality rather than ideological jargon, especially in a medical context?

That women shouldn’t be harassed, persecuted or fired for refusing to pretend humans can change sex?

That women should not be threatened with violence and rape when they assert their rights?

That freedom of speech and belief are essential to a pluralistic democratic society?

That troubled minors, especially those who are gay, autistic and trauma-experienced, should be given mental health support instead of irreversible surgeries and drug treatments on non-existent evidence of benefit?

That gay people shouldn’t be pressured to include the opposite sex in their dating pools, nor should they be smeared as ‘genital fetishists’ when they don’t?

That cross-dressing heterosexual male fetishists aren’t actually oppressed, but having the time of their lives piggybacking off gender identity ideology?

That said ideology, and the privileged, blinkered fools pushing it because they suffer zero consequences themselves, have done more damage to the political left’s credibility than Trump and Farage could have achieved in a century?

Let me have your thoughts.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I see Nicola Sturgeon is once again complaining that I posted a picture of myself wearing a T-shirt with her name on it and the legend 'Destroyer of Women's Rights.' Apparently this didn't 'elevate the debate.'

Is there a clinical term for an individual who has extreme thinness of skin when it comes to their own perceived hurts, coupled with a rhino-hide when it comes to the fear and suffering of others?

I'm thinking in particular of the two women Isla Bryson raped, who had to watch their First Minister squirm and smirk on TV as she tried to avoid admitting he was a man; of the five survivors of male violence who were ready to give evidence to Sturgeon's committee on gender self-ID, but were told to put their concerns in writing while seventeen trans-identified people appeared in person; of the mother of a young girl with a learning disability who campaigned against self-ID because she wanted her daughter to be guaranteed same sex intimate care, should she need it (the mother was presumably one of those female opponents Sturgeon calls 'shrill' and 'hysterical' in her memoir); of the ten-year-old girl sexually assaulted in a public bathroom by a 6'5" paedophile who served his jail sentence in a women's prison because he called himself 'Katie'; of Sandie Peggie, forced to discuss her own menstrual history in public to justify not wanting to undress in view of a 6ft straight cross-dresser in the nurses' changing room; of Marion Millar, dragged into court because she tweeted a picture of suffragette ribbons; of the Scottish rape crisis centres reliant on government funding who were pressured to admit trans-identified males into their services if they wanted funding to continue.

When Sturgeon refers to an 'elevated debate', she means a discussion that takes place within a tiny, smug bubble from which regular women suffering real life consequences of her policies are firmly excluded. These faceless ants are loftily dismissed as bigots, or, to be more precise: 'transphobic, misogynistic, homophobic, maybe racist as well.'

Nicola, you hated the T-shirt picture because you couldn't ignore it, as you'd ignored so many other women trying to make you understand their concerns. Appeals to your empathy, your intelligence and your compassion all failed. Apparently the only way to get through to you is through your vanity.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Western society is currently divided between people who know this is a man and are prepared to say so and those who know this is a man but lie out of obedience to an ideology. There is no third option. Literally nobody on earth thinks "Roxanne Tickle" is actually a woman.

[Ellie Wilson @ellieokwilson]

Over the past weeks my rapist’s father, who’s a GP, has subjected me to a campaign of harassment, abuse, and stalking. He’s called me a “slut”, an “escort”, a “hippo”, falsely claimed I had incestuous relationships with family members, and stated he has nude photos of me.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

The Sandie Peggie employment tribunal is currently exposing, as perhaps no court case to date has, the issue of class as it relates to the top-down imposition of gender identity ideology in the workplace.

'Diversity officer' Isla Bumba has now admitted in court that she didn't bother consulting the 1992 regulations guaranteeing single-sex spaces when she told a trans-identified male, Dr Beth Upton, to use the female changing room at the hospital where he was working. Bumba justified this decision with comments that I assume sounded really clever and convincing, inside her own head.

'I don’t know anything about Beth’s body. I didn’t at the time. I don’t now. I don’t need to know. But it wouldn’t be something that I would ever have the information of exactly what she is made of, biologically.'

Kate Searle, a consultant in emergency medicine, backed Bumba up, expressing outrage on the witness stand that anyone would be so insensitive as to ask about Upton's chromosomes.

‘I could only imagine how upsetting and invasive a question that would be for Beth, and also not relevant to a colleague to ask another colleague. Beth identifies as female, and it does not matter what her chromosomes are to her.’

In Bumba and Searle's world, a belief that gender identity trumps biological sex is proof you're intellectually and morally superior to women like Sandie Peggie, so I'd imagine it's come as a shock to discover, in a blaze of public and press scrutiny, just how idiotic and cruel they appear to people outside their dinner party circle.

When Upton, a 6' tall, 28-year-old ex-rugby playing male, claimed that a petite 50-year-old female nurse was making him feel 'unsafe', his word appears to have been taken as gospel. Searle, Bumba and management fell over themselves to coddle the middle-class doctor who shared their voguish post-modern views on gender. What did Sandie matter? She's just one of those ghastly uninformed bigots who still thinks sex is real and important - so embarrassingly gauche and simplistic! Whisper it - she probably drinks red wine with chicken, too.

According to @tribunaltweets, an emotional Searle blurted out on the stand 'I am kind.' This is not something genuinely kind people need to say. Genuinely kind people don't find themselves compelled to explain in court why they helped whip up a witch-hunt against a woman whose only crime was wanting to change her clothes without a man watching.

Well, the nurse who was supposed to shuffle off in disgrace wasn't having it. Sandie Peggie refused to be sacrificed on the altar of elitist ideologues who believe themselves to be higher and better than she is. She fought back, for herself and for every other woman who's currently being silenced, persecuted and punished by a smug management class that preens itself on its virtue while imposing rampantly misogynistic policies on its workforce.

Sandie Peggie is a heroine. The woman NHS Fife thought they could treat abominably without any consequences to themselves has succeeded in shining the brightest spotlight yet upon the brain rot and compassion deficit suffered by supposedly intelligent people when they embrace gender identity ideology. Women everywhere owe her a debt of thanks. Whatever the outcome of this tribunal, Sandie Peggie has already won.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Sex is anatomical. 'Womanhood' and 'femaleness' are not metaphysical or mystical states. I am a woman by virtue of my anatomy.

Clearly, if I woke up tomorrow with a male body, I'd have had atypical experiences for a male, because I'd have experienced what it is to exist in the world as a female. I've given birth three times, a spectacularly life-changing experience no male has ever experienced. I've also been treated in specific, sometimes harmful, ways, because I have female anatomy.

One major difference between trans activists and me is that I believe society needs to change, whereas they believe the individual should alter themselves to fit a societal notion of what men and women are. I don't believe in codifying and reifying gendered expectations, I believe in breaking them. I'm appalled that minors are being medicalised, sterilised and deprived of sexual function because they feel discomfort with the roles they're expected to play as boys/girls.

For centuries, women have fought to be full human beings in societies that demand they demonstrate the behaviours expected of them because of their anatomy. Liberation for women does not lie in saying 'if I don't want to fulfil those expectations, I must be a man.' Liberation lies in saying 'I'm just fine as I am, and fuck your sexist notions of what a woman should be.'