deedee

education’s what you need! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺

[Audrey Ludwig MBE @AudreySuffolk]

I just supported this case! https://t.co/9FvnyR56Fz via @CrowdJustice

[Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles]

Hello all. A quick update from me.

My sex screen assay is progressing well.

I promised rapid: I can detect SRY from a cheek swab in about 30 minutes. I am currently testing whether I can drop it to 10 minutes without compromising reliability.

I promised cheap: The current cost per assay is about £2. I am currently testing whether I can drop this to below the pound line, and it’s very promising.

I promised accessible: The assay could be run by any grassroots sports coach, school nurse, and my Mum.

I promised on-site: This is where my lab efforts are currently focussed. I’ve always held “from the UK to Uganda” as a principle, and ensuring easy deployment is crucial. I’m currently learning a lot of materials science…

The other main push is setting up various blinded, larger-scale tests. This will require lots of form filling.

If anyone wants to help me hit my final budget target, my crowdfunder is here.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

This is a shocking medical scandal. Thank goodness for those like @scotbythesea who’ve fought to bring it into the light.

Dozens of children put at risk after gender care failures at GP clinic, inquiry finds - BBC News https://t.co/XYWmhdcxAP

[SEEN in Journalism @JournalismSEEN]

‘Darren Rigby, who sent hoax death threats to schools is jailed’

All girls’ schools were specifically targeted. Rigby ‘threatened to carry out deadly attacks supposedly in response to the treatment of ‘transwomen’’. None of this features in the coverage across outlets, despite the evidence emerging in email evidence and in court, neither does it feature in the Merseyside Police report.

‘I’m going to kill every girl and woman staff member I come across’

‘I'm going to shoot and stab all your girls’

It’s a crime of extreme misogyny in the cause of ‘fighting trans oppression’ but any mention of ‘trans’ has been erased by the police, PA and all news outlets. In addition the BBC report hides the fact that it was a crime against women and girls.

https://t.co/mEtjqOXI7D

https://t.co/MjqUMeGDGa

[deedee @deeiawn]

@RoseWorthesee @craftysan34 @JocastaMoney @amscanlon Agree 🙏

[UnHerd @unherd]

JK Rowling mansplained, by Sarah Ditum (@sarahditum)

What happened to JK Rowling? If only there were some kind of primary source that could tell us why she became interested in the clash between trans activism and women’s rights — say, a first-person essay.

But alas, the archive is silent. It must be, because why else would two male podcasters have taken it upon themselves to solve this supposed mystery?

This week, the ‘Origin Story’ podcast, hosted by indistinguishable journalists Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, bravely shouldered the burden of analysing Rowling over the course of two episodes.

Do they succeed? Not remotely. But they do offer a fascinating insight into what happens when a certain kind of progressive man becomes radicalised by Bluesky.

Read more below ⬇️

https://t.co/FQG6I59mww

[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.

[TransgenderTrend @Transgendertrd]

The 'tomboy' characters in Enid Blyton books were important role models for girls who didn't conform to 'girly' stereotypes. These characters told them 'you're fine as you are.'

Now girls are given the opposite message. Now they have to turn into boys to be okay.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

I regret to inform you that we will be publishing a detailed analysis this week of the £5m payment to Nigel Farage, and whether it's taxable. It is likely to annoy *everybody*.

(except tax advisers, which is all that matters)

[Kathleen Stock @Docstockk]

People worried about assisted death services should sign this. People who strongly desire assisted death services should also sign this. Everybody should sign this.

Petition: Fully fund Specialist Palliative Care provided by hospices https://t.co/q9q2bHve0G

[Julie Bindel @bindelj]

First time I interviewed the hideous Barry Drewitt-Barlow, in 2010, he told me he commands the "surrogates" having "his" children to have C-sections, because he found it "repulsive" to think of the babies coming out of a vagina.

[Robin Hawkes @robhawkes]

This is my grandad, he built the original R2-D2 for the first Star Wars film…

Jack was a master sheet metal worker, and was roped into using his skills on an obscure project to turn the sketches for the droid into something that could be constructed out of aluminium sheets.

I always knew he'd helped make part of R2-D2. However I only found this photo in recent years and have since learned that he was actually instrumental to the construction of the entire droid, particularly with working out how to machine the complex shapes like the dome and legs out of single sheets of aluminium.

He didn't just build one either, he ended up constructing a handful of the droids for various uses in the film. I still have no idea how he did it, especially without modern software and computer-controlled machining.

Unfortunately I never got to know him as he died when I was a baby, though I have a feeling we share a lot in common.

I also have his old Dragon 32 computer that he was using to learn programming in the 1980s, with reams of hand-written code that still works on the computer.

#MayThe4th #maythefouthbewithyou #StarWars

[Karen Lee @Karen_karenelee]

I am utterly fed-up of seeing comments about the failure of the assisted suicide Bill. As a nurse of 20+ years & a Mum whose daughter died of cancer I opposed it & would fight it with every breath in my body should it ever reappear. Focus instead on improving Palliative care.

[Jill Foster @JournalistJill]

Let us not forget that the women called ‘ugly/old freaks’ today include Sandie Peggie, the Darlington nurses and Jennifer Melle, hardworking women who wipe up the piss and shit of people like Grace Campbell and Charlie Craggs every damn day.

[NASA @NASA]

As communities gather this weekend, @AstroVicGlover reflects on the shared spaceship we all call home: Earth.

[Lisa Mckenzie @redrumlisa]

We have hundreds of these private 'care homes' where the owners are becoming millionaires from tax payers money. We need a proper overview of all of these private for profit 'social services' - the drawbridge of free money from the State needs pulling up. Idiots crying about pensions while scum landlords, refugee industry, Serco & for profit children's homes is bleeding the tax payer of billions

[Pulp Librarian @PulpLibrarian]

Jean Shrimpton in a spacesuit. Photograph by Richard Avedon for Harper's Bazaar (April 1965)

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

🎯

[surreyspinster @surreyspinster]

@ZARA - I just queried the presence of a hulking great man in the ladies changing room in your Kingston branch and staff told me it’s policy to let them in. Can you confirm?